People Before Profit blog

From the Big Screen to Real Life: A Review Essay on Environmentalism in Popular Culture

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 10:27:00 +0000

Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural
by Noël Sturgeon
Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009

Despite being widely, but unjustifiably panned by critics, M. Knight Shyamalan's The Last Airbender (a remake of the Nickelodeon cartoon series) managed a solid second place in its first week of box office sales behind the latest Twilight flick and ahead of Toy Story 3. In what promises to be the first of three films, the story follows the adventures of three young people seeking to restore balance to the earth from the ravages of a renegade nation of militarists and exploiters. The movie and the cartoon, in some important ways, exemplify some of the basic themes of a recent book titled Environmentalism in Popular Culture: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Natural, by Noël Sturgeon.

In the story, human life on earth is divided into four nations based on the ancient "four elements" once thought to make up all of nature: earth, air, fire, and water. In normal times, the four nations are in a balance and are overseen by a spiritual and magical creature known as the Avatar. The Avatar is randomly chosen by nature from one of the nations, and the job lasts a lifetime. Within a week of the Avatar's death, a new one is selected from another nation; the job rotates from nation to nation with each Avatar. In addition, the knowledge and power of past Avatar's are handed down, but the new Avatar must learn the special powers of each of the nations.

Certain members of each nation possess the power to "bend" the element that belongs to that nation. A water nation bender, for example, can manipulate water in rivers, oceans, even in human bodies to use it as a protective force, a weapon, or in ordinary tasks. While the power to do this is in-born, the bender must learn to develop the skill through a process of learning to build a connection with nature that allows them to use the power. Bending powers come from spirits that reside in some natural element, such as the moon or animals.

The Avatar learns the ultimate power of all four elements and through this maintains the balance of the natural world and its human components.

But something has gone wrong. When Aang, the latest Avatar, learned as a child (about 100 years before the action of the story) that he would have to sacrifice the pleasures of childhood to take on this awesome responsibility, he ran away and became frozen in a ball of ice. In the intervening period, with nature and human society out of balance, the fire nation has run amok. They have invented machines and have used their fire-bending power to conquer and exploit the other nations. Many people have been rounded up, imprisoned, and even killed in the process. The remaining people live in fear of conquest or have submitted to the power of the fire nation. In addition, the acts of conquest result in massive environmental damage, from devastating air and water pollution to deforestation and land erosion.

Though the people in the cartoon version of the story aren't identified explicitly by race, there are certain markers that indicate the presence of race, ethnicity, and nationality, but with a twist. Water nation members dress and live in communities similar to popular images of Inuit communities and live in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Two of the major protagonists, Sokka and Katara come from the Southern Water Tribe. They find the frozen Avatar, Aang. Aang comes from the air nation. They are referred to as nomads and dress similar to Buddhist monks. Meditation and a closeness to nature are important training elements for young airbenders like Aang. Fire nation members resemble stereotypical images of Japanese samurai characters. Earth nation people dress like and live in peasant communities. None seem to bear markers that identify them as explicitly white or American or western, however. (The movie works to maintain these themes and emphasizes racial, ethnic, and national ambiguities.)

Together Sokka, Katara, and Aang travel the world promoting alliances of different groups of people in a general rebellion against the fire nation. In the end, however, it is up to the Avatar to use his special power, known as the Avatar state, which is a combination of all the power of all the previous Avatars, to restore balance and defeat the aggressive fire nation forces.

The story adopts what I think author Noël Sturgeon would describe as an environmentalist narrative, though she doesn't discuss the cartoon. The Last Airbender links a notion of the needs of nature, its balance, to human activities and motives. Without a meaningful connection to nature and its inherent spirituality, people are prone to turn to militarism, violence, exploitation, and conquest. Using Sturgeon's analytical framework from her book, Environmentalism in Popular Culture, one might say that she would view much of The Last Airbender story positively, especially for its explicit linkage of exploitation with environmental destruction. She might also praise it for its refusal to link progress and power and redemption with overtly white or American characters, a recurring theme of American pop culture. That the most competent and powerful leaders of the resistance to fire nation abuses are women (from various nations), other than the Avatar himself, may also be seen by Sturgeon as a positive. In fact, as Sturgeon notes, most environmentalists in the real world are women.

She might, however, express concerns over the story's reliance on a hero and its romanticization of nature and violence for conflict resolution. While real racial formations are altered and subverted in the story, one underlying theme is that members of nations possess particular traits and powers and habits that are naturally determined, suggesting "racial"/biological explanations and motives for culture and group and individual actions. In addition, as Sturgeon asserts in the book, solutions and change in real human society and the natural world will come through mass action of non-supernatural humans with conflicted interests, alignments, and orientations that require complex coalition politics and negotiated cultural practices to build meaningful and effective local and global alliances.

In her book, Sturgeon traces the origins of environmentalism in American movies, TV shows, popular music and music videos, advertising, as well as political activism since the 1980s. Her argument, however, takes a critical stance, urging the creation of environmentalist narratives that challenge received values on race, gender, imperialism, capitalism, and other systems that produce and reproduce social inequalities. She writes, "If we want to create a truly sustainable future, we must think about social inequalities as much as we think about environmental problems, and we must understand their interrelations." Often, however, environmentalist narratives, whether consciously or not, reproduce the idealized notions of nature, racist views of indigenous peoples and other communities of color, sexist notions of masculinity and sexuality, and fail to focus meaningful attention on the system of capitalism and imperialism that cause or legitimize environmental degradation.

Sturgeon adds, "[I]f social inequalities and environmental problems are connected such that we cannot solve one set of problems without solving the other, environmentalists need to be more careful about using popular narratives uncritically, not simply because they are wrong or not politically strategic, but because they may prevent us from fully understanding the causes of and solutions to environmental problems." For example, if the urge is to simply "reduce, reuse, and recycle," we may be advancing individualist solutions to a social and global problem whose causes lie in systemic issues such as environmental racism and capitalism itself. Though, social movements that promote individual and collective action shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.

Scientific and technological developments go a long way to protect humans from natural disasters. Sometimes we view this power – the possession of which has also been determined by the struggle over and control of global resources – as the only way to resolve global problems. But it alone cannot reverse environmental damage or save lives. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina revealed important truths about this point, she writes. "Both of these 'natural' disasters are environmental justice issues because, on this actual Earth, how badly someone is hurt by a disaster depends on how many resources he or she has and whether those in power value that particular life." Resources are historically and socially determined by capitalism and imperialism and, thus, thinking about how these systems work and enforce inequalities cannot be separated from our thinking about "natural" disasters and the political and social movements to make meaningful change, Sturgeon forcefully argues.

Popular culture is an important arena because it is where ideological messages about racism, sexism, individualism and so on are presented and contested, according to Sturgeon. Viewpoints that sustain the status quo are presented as "natural" or "common sense" and are used to build some sort of an emotional connection between consumers and a particular "brand," she points out. For example, when the war was popular, Boeing used images of patriotism and the "protection" of US troops in harm's way in Iraq to build public appeal for its "brand," i.e. its corporate goals: promoting massive military spending and global conflict in order to increase its profits. Such emotional connections serve to erase the historical and social context in which commodities are produced, distributed, and the waste products discarded, or simply to hide the fact, for example, that the war in Iraq was an aggressive war of choice by the Bush administration. These ideological messages are also designed to win support not just for corporations trying to sell products but for the basic ideas that prop up a capitalist society.

This is an important book and deserves wide readership. It should serve to metaphorically give us new lenses to view the popular culture we consume or participate in. The book's one drawback, which Sturgeon admits to in her closing pages, is that it doesn't focus on how activists and artists have produced alternative, potentially more liberating narratives. Popular culture isn't only about the dissemination of ideas and images by powerful corporations, it is about negotiated and oppositional meanings made by individuals and movements and communities that differ and challenge dominant ideas, a fact that is only hinted in this volume. In addition, people frequently contest the meanings imparted to symbols, images, and objects. This struggle over meaning often reflects political struggles over equality, liberation, and social justice. Does this unaddressed dimension mean we might look forward to a second book from Sturgeon that examines this side of the issue?

Podcast #119 - Property, Nation, and Citizen in Creek Society, an Interview with David Chang

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 10:59:00 +0000

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Podcast #119 - Property, Nation, and Citizen in Creek Society, an Interview with David Chang

August 5th, 2010. On this episode we play the first of a two-part interview with historian David Chang, author of The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929. Democratic ideas about property and multiculturalism have indigenous roots.

Download the mp3 version of episode #119 here

Podcast #120 - U.S. Colonial Policies and Native Americans, Int. with David Chang

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 10:57:00 +0000

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Podcast #120 - U.S. Colonial Policies and Native Americans, Int. with David Chang

On this episode we play the second of a two-part interview with historian David Chang, author of The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929. Some democratic ideas about property and multiculturalism have indigenous roots.

Download the mp3 version of episode #120 here

Engels on the Subject Matter and Method of Political Economy and the Coming Revolution

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 10:55:00 +0000

What is the subject matter and method of political economy according to Engels? First, though, what is political economy? Today we tend to teach economics as a special discipline and political science as another separate subject. This is an attempt by the bourgeoisie to keep politics and economics independent of one another. Marx and Engels, as did most nineteenth century thinkers, thought they were closely interrelated.

Political economy for Engels was the study of the laws governing the PRODUCTION and EXCHANGE “of the material means of subsistence in human society." While production and exchange are human functions they are intimately related to each other and have a reciprocal causative relationship.

However, there are many different ways to carry out production and exchange and they vary from society to society and culture to culture. Thus: “Political economy is therefore essentially a HISTORICAL science.” By which Engels means its laws are not like those of physics – the same for all – but conditioned by historical circumstances.

Nevertheless there are some general statements that can made. For example, Engels thinks it doesn’t matter what society you are dealing with the modes of production and exchange will CONDITION the way the society distributes its social product.

He says large and small scale farming always have very different distribution patterns. This is because the former is associated with class struggle (masters and slaves, lords and serfs, capitalists and wage slaves) while the latter can exist without class struggle (i.e., without classes).

Modern large scale industry can be contrasted with medieval local handicraft production controlled by guilds. The latter lacks large capitalists and permanent wage slaves and the former is, along with the modern credit system and "free competition" (the exchange form of modern industry and credit) responsible for both these new classes.

Differences in distribution leads to CLASS DIFFERENCES and the development of the STATE which originally came about to defend small groups from external aggression and to protect the common interests (irrigation systems in the East according to Engels). As classes begin to develop the state takes on another function, that "of maintaining by force the conditions of existence and domination of the ruling class against the subject class."

New forms of distribution are not simply neutral developments of the interaction of the MODE OF PRODUCTION and the FORM OF EXCHANGE. In fact as new modes of production and exchange develop the old forms of distribution, the state, and the laws act as drags trying to maintain the older forms of distribution. The new mode production and exchange faces a long struggle before it can cast off the older forms of distribution.

Engels thought that capitalism, in his time about three hundred years old, was undergoing just such an antithesis in its forms of distribution which was leading to its downfall. He described the antithesis as follows: on the one hand CONCENTRATION OF CAPITAL at one pole of society (that of the bourgeoisie) and at the other pole CONCENTRATION OF THE PROPERTYLESS MASSES without much capital into cities and towns. He thought that as far a capitalism goes this double concentration "must of necessity bring about its downfall."

Well, Engels' timing was a bit off and the development of monopoly capitalism (modern imperialism), two world wars, premature revolutions in underdeveloped regions of the world, and the development of vast new markets in the third world have postponed the day of reckoning.

Capitalism is now over 450 years old and the CONCENTRATIONS Engels spoke of are even greater and more unstable. Capitalism has, in fact, run out of places to go and can no longer rely on the expansion of new markets to pull it out of the disruptions and market collapse caused by cyclical overproduction. The DOWNFALL expected by Engels is once again on the agenda and the current inability of the US, Europe, Japan, and much of the rest of the world to overcome the present world wide capitalist crisis means that the final conflict may be closer than any of us thinks.

As long as capitalist production is on the rise everyone, Engels says, welcomes it, even the victims of its way of distributing its products. Capitalism just seems to be the way economics works. The first hints that something is wrong with the system does NOT come from "the exploited masses themselves" – it comes from "within the ruling class itself." Engels gives as examples the great utopians Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen.

The appearance of these early objectors indicates that the system has reached the top of its curve and is just beginning to decline. The utopians became aware of the horrible conditions of living the system was forcing upon its wage slaves and were full of moral indignation. But, Engels says, "moral indignation, however justifiable, cannot serve economic science as an argument, but only as a symptom."

If capitalist horrors became more and more manifest in Engels' day just think what they are like today. Millions around the world are unemployed or living in poverty and even slavery (or should I say billions) – armed conflicts on every continent save Australia and Antarctica over resources and land, and the very oceans as well as the atmosphere, is in the process of being destroyed in the pursuit of capitalist profits.

The duty of economists is to explain how all of this is the consequence of the capitalist mode of production (although many economists prostitute themselves in the service of the system for the rewards of position and money at the cost of truth) and beyond that "to reveal, within the already dissolving economic form of motion, the elements of the future new organisation of production and exchange which will put an end to those abuses." Today only the communist, socialist, and workers parties are able to do this on a grand scale.

In his day, Engels pointed out that political economy had concentrated on the analysis of the capitalist system and had not yet described other modes of production from the past. In the century or so since his death this has been remedied by Marxist historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, linguists and others.

In the meantime capitalism has developed even greater productive capacities than Engels imagined – but these "colossal productive forces" the capitalists can no longer control – they can't control their exploitation of the earth without destroying it – Exxon Mobil, BP and other giant oil companies, they can't mine it with polluting its water and air, blowing off the tops of its mountains, creating huge rivers of toxic sludge, cutting down it rain forests and melting its glaciers and driving thousands of species toward extinction.

It only remains for us to show that all the vast powers of production the capitalists can no longer control "are only waiting to be taken possession of by a society organized for co-operative work on a planned basis to ensure to all members of society the means of existence and the free development of their capacities and indeed in constantly increasing measure." We should be yelling this from the roof tops: "We're mad as Hell and we're not going to take it anymore!" Put that in your tea bag and brew it. If the BP oil "spill" in the Gulf of Mexico doesn't convince you that the power of modern industry cannot be safely left in the control of for profit corporations, I'm afraid nothing will.

The science of political economy can be traced back to the beginnings of capitalism. Its most famous proponent was Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations) but it was also advanced by the great French thinkers of the Enlightenment. However, Engels points out, these thinkers thought they were dealing with universal laws of economics, just as physical scientists propose universal laws of nature.

"To them," Engels says, "the new science was not the expression of the conditions and requirements of their epoch, but the expression of eternal reason; the laws of production and exchange discovered by this science were not the laws of a historically determined form of those activities, but eternal laws of nature; they were deduced from the nature of man."

It was the work of Marx, and Engels, that really matured this science and saw that rather than eternal laws of nature economic laws of production and distribution were relative to economic systems – feudalism, capitalism, etc. This is one reason Engels, in his book Anti-Dühring, could hold Dühring in such disdain who could write, after Das Capital, that he would, in his own words, explain "the most general LAWS OF NATURE governing all economics...."

There are a few more ideas exposited by Herr Dühring that Engels wants to correct. First Dühring thinks that capitalists, for instance, use FORCE as a means to exploit working people. Engels says this is wrong. Engels maintains that EVERY socialist worker KNOWS that force does not cause exploitation it only PROTECTS it: "the relation between capital and wage –labour is the basis of" exploitation and this relation is an economic one not one based on force.

Engels says Dühring also confounds the difference between PRODUCTION and CIRCULATION (i.e., exchange) by lumping them together under and heading of production and then adds DISTRIBUTION as a second and INDEPENDENT department of the economy. Far from this being the case, Engels tells us, distribution is in fact DEPENDENT on the production and exchange relations of any given society. In fact, if we know these two relations for any given historical society we can "infer the mode of distribution" in it.

So, Engels' point is that, after a rough start in the seventeenth century and blooming forth in the Enlightenment, the science of political economy became fully scientific in the last half of the 19th century with the theories of Marx and the work of those economists who were influenced by him. Through their work working people the world over slowly became aware of their true role in production and distribution (the creation of surplus value) and how it is the exploitation of their labor power that is the basis of the capitalist system.

It is important to note that, for Marxists, it is not the idea that capitalism is somehow unjust and immoral (a la Dühring) that is the key point. Engels writes: "If for the impending overthrow of the present mode of distribution of the products of labour, with its crying contrasts of want and luxury, starvation and surfeit, we had no better guarantee than the consciousness that this mode of distribution is unjust, and that justice must eventually triumph, we should be in a pretty bad way, and we might have a long time to wait."

Engels appears to be a bit too optimistic. We are still waiting for the "impending overthrow" of capitalism. It has been overthrown in a few places but it has also been restored in large areas where it was previously overthrown. So, I think we are still waiting for a general overthrow – which is long overdue. We should be impatient, but not unduly so. We have been waiting a hundred years or so while many of our fellows have been waiting over two thousand years for the overthrow of this earthly order with even less likelihood of being gratified. But we still "might have a long time to wait."

Well, just why did Engels think we would have a short wait? The reason was that unlike previous centuries when the only forces opposed to the exploitation of the masses of people by the few were based on appeals to morality or ethics, the nineteenth century saw the creation of a MATERIAL FORCE, not an ideal or religious one, that could actually contest and overthrow the existing economic order based on exploitation.

Two great revolutions had recently created movements calling for the end of class exploitation and for the equality of the people – the English and French bourgeois revolutions. But these movements, Engels says "up to 1830 had left the working and suffering classes cold." But in Engels' day this call and this movement has in one generation "gained a strength that enables it to defy all the forces combined against it and to be confident of victory in the near future."

What made Engels so confident? There were two factors. First, modern industrial capitalism had created a working class ("called into being" a proletariat) that not only had the power to overthrow class privilege but the class system itself and further this is something it must do "on pain of sinking to the level of the Chinese coolie." Second, the bourgeoisie "has become incapable of any longer controlling the productive forces" created by modern industry. The bourgeoisie is "a class under whose leadership society is racing to ruin like a locomotive whose jammed safety-valve the driver is to weak to open."

History has a way of sometimes frustrating our expectations. To the working people of the generation following that of Engels, Lenin and the Russian Revolution represented the promise of the socialist victory. The bourgeois locomotive went off the rails and the resulting crash created two world wars and brought down the colonial empires of the Western Powers (at least de jure.)

However, unbeknownst to Engels, another engine was waiting in the roundhouse. This was the engine of US imperialism which reconstructed the failed bourgeois system after the Second World War and brought about the downfall of the Russian Revolution. For a generation the call for the abolition of the classes left the workers of the US and it allies once again cold.

Meanwhile, against all expectations, the "Chinese coolies" had liberated themselves and created their own working class and are now creating a modern society based on a mixed economy. However, Engels was not too far off the mark. The advanced workers (in terms of pay scales) of the West are seeing their incomes sinking to the level of the Chinese. This will continue unless they "warm up" to the idea of socialism.

What are the future chances of socialism? Engels two factors are still at work. Capitalism is ripe for overthrow. As far as factor one is concerned. The class consciousness of the workers directed towards this end does not seem to be as developed as in Engels day. This is due to the massive pro capitalist propaganda both in the educational system and the mass media. But this hold is weakening and working people around the world are slowly beginning to wake up from their long sleep and see capitalism for what it really is. A naked system of human exploitation that can and must be replaced.

As for the second factor. The bourgeoisie is out of control! The rain forests, the oceans and the atmosphere are being destroyed by their run away system. These words of Engels are absolutely true today: "both the productive forces created by the modern capitalist mode of production and the system of distribution of goods established buy it have come into crying contradiction with that mode of production itself, and in fact to such a degree that, if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place, a revolution that will put an end to all class distinctions."

Unfortunately, I cannot agree with Engels that these two factors give me confidence that the Revolution will soon arrive. But that our society will perish if it doesn't seems all too apparent.

Book Review: Slavery by Another Name

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 10:53:00 +0000

Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
by Douglas A. Blackmon
New York, Anchor Books, 2009

Slavery didn't end with the surrender of Confederate forces in 1865. In his recent Pullitzer Prize-winning book, Wall Street Journal reporter Douglas A. Blackmon writes, "the great record of forced labor across the South [after the Civil War] demands that any consideration of the progress of civil rights remedy in the United States must acknowledge that slavery, real slavery, didn't end until 1945." In his readable, well-researched, and ground-breaking book, Blackmon shows how practices that let local police to arrest, imprison and sell African Americans into forced labor allowed manufacturing, mining, railroad, agribusiness, and financial corporations to reap tremendous profits between the close of the Civil War and World War II.

This regime of forced labor arose in the context following the Civil War and Reconstruction. The Radical Republicans, as they were known, held leadership in Congress immediately following the war and passed a civil rights agenda that included the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, forbidding slavery, providing citizenship and equal protection, and voting rights for African American men. They passed the Civil Rights Act of 1870 that allocated federal resources to the enforcement of these laws. They moved millions of dollars into building public schools and universities for "freedmen." In some places African Americans gained land ownership. African Americans were elected to local, state, and federal offices in the hundreds. For a brief historical moment it appeared as though the seeds of equality could be planted for African Americans who comprised approximately 40 percent of the former Confederacy, but who had been excluded from political representation or economic power.

Reaction to these positive developments set in swiftly, however. Terrorist violence organized and directed by white elites ended most vestiges of Black political power. White landowners regained the upper hand and forced African Americans into a system of debt peonage, whereby most Black tenant farmers worked for years without seeing much income, any savings or prospects for social mobility. By 1910, Blackmon records, "fewer than one-third of nearly 900,000 farms operated by African Americans were owned by the black men who tilled the land." A system of police control was developed, one that resembled that under the slave system, in order to ensure that cheap Black labor stayed put. Indebted African American farmers could leave only at the risk of long-term imprisonment. Laws resembling the "slave codes" of the past were put in place to regulate the activities and movement of African Americans.

As Blackmon reveals, vagrancy laws passed under the restored white supremacist governments were typically used to force Black men and women into penal institutions where they would be sold to work in coal mines, on big plantations, or for railroads for no wages. Sheriffs and local courts developed lucrative deals with companies like the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, which sought to exploit Alabama's booming coal fields. Individuals like former Confederate landowner James M. Smith backed KKK violence that toppled Georgia's Reconstruction government and swiftly moved to force thousnads of African American debt farmers into captivity while expanding his profit-making ventures to include the buying and selling of convict laborers.

Railroads in Georgia, levees in Louisiana, coal mines in Alabama were built or worked by thousands of African American men who were imprisoned for invented crimes and unpaid for grueling work. Former Confederate and Georgia native Joseph E. Brown built much of his fortune on the the use of unpaid convict laborers to exploit his coal mines. John T. Grant and his son William Grant used hundreds of unpaid African American workers to build the Grant, Alexander and Company railroad. Reports of abuse and high mortality did not stop them from coming to control much of Georgia's convict labor system, earning them enormous profits.

Blackmon documents how capitalists such as Joel Hurt, owner of Georgia Iron and Coal Company, James W. English, owner of Atlanta's Chattahoochie Brick Co., John T. Milner, owner of Milner Coal and Railway Co. in Alabama, Alabama plantation owner and convict labor trader John W. Pace, Alabama-based U.S. Steel executive George G. Crawford, and William D. McCurdy, co-owner of Pratt Mines, were among those who established, exploited and profited immensely from the re-enslavement of African Americans after the Civil War.

Northern investors, Southern plantation owners, and corporations like Pratt Mines or Sloss-Sheffield worked in conjunction with local law enforcement and the courts to get thousands of unpaid Black prisoners into their operations. Blackmon points out that after the Civil War, the South underwent an economic transformation in which industry could have provided an economic basis for social progress. Industrial jobs in railroads, iron and steel manufacture, mining, and more could have provided well-paying jobs for southern Blacks and whites. Industrialization with a well-paid workforce could have transformed the South from a racially divided, economically backward region to an advanced one.

Northern investors and capitalists, southern corporations and white elites and policymakers chose a different path, however. They opted for the path of creating the highest profits for themselves through super-exploitation and re-enslavement of Black labor. As one official of the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Co. wrote to U.S. Steel owner Henry Clay Frick, a major investor in these Southern operations, "The operations of the convict mines has been very remunerative." U.S. Steel would come to own a number of prison camps that saw tens of thousands of unpaid prison slaves work to extract coal to manufacture the steel that made that mammoth corporation one of the largest corporations in the world.

The conditions of the labor camps were atrocious. Workers were typically forced to work from sun-up to sun-down. They were fed poorly, received little or no healthcare, and were typically physically beaten for failing to show up for work due to illnesses or injuries. An untold number of enslaved workers died in the camps, buried in unmarked graves. Many were killed under these conditions after having been imprisoned for crimes as meager and doubtful as vagrancy or owing money. Blackmon documents incidents where judges knowingly imprisoned innocent men simply to earn their share of a financial kickback from the corporations to whom these men were sold.

Hundreds of requests from African Americans poured into the Department of Justice for relief and investigations about their loved ones trapped in this prison slavery. Many of these letters are still held in government archives. Very few saw serious action on the part of the government. In cases in which investigators were actually sent to follow up, Blackmon uncovered chilling tales. One John S. Williams, a plantation owner from Jasper County, Georgia purchased prisoners to work his land. After torturing and murdering one prisoner for failing to work as hard as Williams expected, another prisoner by the name of Gus Chapman escaped and told the story to federal officials. When they came to investigate, they decided that Williams had violated federal peonage laws, but noted that he probably wouldn't face prosecution. Panicked by the visit, Williams helped his overseer kill every prison laborer and dump their bodies in a nearby river. When the bodies surfaced, federal agents returned. Williams was convicted of murder as the bad publicity threatened to expose the nature of the prison labor system and ruin it for everyone. It turns out, Williams was the only white person ever found guilty of this crime.

If protests by African Americans fell on deaf ears, concerns among whites about the growing publicity about the violence and brutality of the system could not. By the 1920s, civil rights groups and labor unions increasingly demanded the prison labor system be ended. Newspapers began to expose the story as a matter of public corruption, revealing that local law enforcement officials raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars in kick backs for turning prisoners over to the slave labor camps. Soon state politicians bent to the bad publicity and implemented reforms, first for better treatment of the prisoners, then for abolition of the prison labor system altogether. Not until 1948, however, with executive orders from President Harry Truman did federal officials act to finally close down the last prison labor camps.

Blackmon's book provides an important historical basis for an open and honest dialogue about reparations for slavery. Many whites who want to avoid such a discussion dismiss it with a comment like, "I shouldn't have to pay because what do I have to do with happened in the past" – as if the slavery system, capitalism and white supremacy, stopped benefiting them and their families once its most inhumane forms were ended. Moreover, the evidence in the book links corporate agendas to the practice of using the enslaved labor of African Americans. Families, individuals, and companies are identified as perpetrators. If this book makes part of the case for reparations, and it does, a great deal of the financial burden must be carried by corporations who profited from forced labor and the local, state, and federal officials and entities who also earned huge incomes by active participation or turning a bind eye.

Book Review: Labor’s Canvas: American Working Class History and the WPA Art of the 1930s

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 10:50:00 +0000

Labor’s Canvas: American Working Class History and the WPA Art of the 1930s
By Laura Hapke
Newcastle, UK, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008

Editor’s note: Originally published in the June 2009 issue of American Communist History.

Issues of enduring historical import embodied in the Great Depression are reflected in the enormous quantity of art generated by the Works Project Administration’s Federal Arts Project (WPA/FAP), the largest and longest lasting of the Federal arts projects. For one abbreviated decade (from 1935, when Harry Hopkins, the Director of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, realized artists “had to eat like anyone else,” until 1943, when the exigencies of the war effort curtailed its last programs), the FAP hired unemployed artists to create (and teach) an art that was as politically progressive as the New Deal itself, and especially in its best representations was far more advanced. Laura Hapke’s Labor’s Canvas convincingly shows that this subject deserves, and in this book receives, careful consideration by all those interested in WPA art and its intersection with progressive politics and the labor movement.

Over the lifetime of the Federal Arts Project, ten thousand artists produced 340,000 works. Within this wide context, Hapke’s subject is “labor”—how workers were represented, which kinds of workers were depicted, and how these subjects were connected to the contemporaneous Left movements, especially the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). As a consequence of the author’s concerns, she excluded murals (most of which depicted historical subjects) and nonrepresentational WPA artists, such as Stuart Davis and Arshile Gorky. The printmakers and easel artists that she studied include many who occupy pedestals in the pantheon of the great social realist WPA artists: Ben Shahn, Alice Neel, Jacob Lawrence, Louis Lozawick, the twin brothers Raphael and Moses Soyer, Reginald Marsh, Elizabeth Olds, William Gropper, Charles White, and Hugo Gellert; as well as some outstanding but less-well-remembered artists such as Louis Ribak, Jacob Burck, and Maurice Kish. These and hundreds of other artists produced what Hapke notes is an “almost instantly recognizable ... labor iconography [that] both chronicles and reframes working class history” (p. 2); it is the very best of these drawings and paintings that she brings to the readers’ attention.

Hapke explicitly affiliates with those art historians of the period who recognize the inherently leftist quality of the WPA’s art depicting workers. Nonetheless, she acknowledges the limitations placed on artists by government (even when led by a progressive administration), especially when the works were to be displayed in public venues—hospitals, schools, and government bureaus. The tension between these conflicting requirements caused, “WPA’s labor canvases to acquire multiple and contradictory meanings.” (p. 270) Nonetheless, she realizes that the major message implicit in this art—at least in its totality—was to “illuminated contradictions between labor’s importance to the nation and America’s belief in an officially classless society.” (p. 15) Labor’s Canvas reminds the reader that these artists were dedicated to portraying workers as entitled to employment, recognition, attention, and honor. They conveyed the latent ability of the workers—as “empowered labor” as well as “debilitated labor” (p. 56)—to effect change in the system.

It was not only the extremely hard times that gave rise to this outpouring of socially conscious, socially engaged art, but also the economic and social status of the artists themselves, who had been devastated by the unprecedented economic collapse. (One criterion for acceptance by the Federal Arts Project was evidence of the artists’ eligibility for Home Relief.) When food, clothing, and shelter became barely attainable for millions, private purchase of art dramatically decreased. More than the workers themselves, the artists quickly imbibed a heady brew of socialist politics melded with artistic theory. Their own condition of life motivated them to “valorize working people” in an art that placed them in situations where “community progress trumped individual achievement.” (p. 15)

In addition to its excellent Introduction, Hapke’s book consists of seven chapters on topics about the Federal Arts Project ranging from women, African Americans, to the depiction of masses of workers—listening to speakers, marching, or purposelessly milling about. Some chapters feature reproductions of aptly chosen representative works. While all of the essays could stand alone as publishable essays, each enriches the others; and all succeed in responding to the stated thesis of the book.

Labor’s Canvas begins with a study of two pre-Depression era artists—Thomas Anshutz and Joseph Stella—who Hapke sees as presaging and influencing the WPA artists’ choice of aesthetics and subjects. Hapke presents a detailed and convincing reading of Anshutz’s most famous painting, The Ironworkers’ Noontime (1880), and Stella’s series of drawings of the socio-economic condition of the Pittsburgh’s predominantly foreign-born working class, that he produced between 1907 and 1914 for the six-volume study Pittsburgh Survey. Hapke uses these works to illustrate a major theme she argues entered into WPA art: the tension between the representation of the native-born craftsmen and the foreign-born industrial proletariat. While this hypothesis bears reflection, the number of artists (John Sloan, Van Gogh, Goya) whose work influenced the WPA artists is long. In the decade prior to the inauguration of the FAP, over half the artists cited in Labor’s Canvas had begun creating socially engaged works, in most instances as illustrations accompanying articles in The New Masses and other publications allied to the Communist Party and displayed at shows sponsored by organizations it inspired. One could argue that “WPA Art” had already been created before the inauguration of the WPA.

Hapke takes up the still-open question of the distinctions between the social art of the twenties and WPA art. Perhaps the difference was not so much in the art as in the artists. To this observer, this important distinction was an unintended the WPA accomplishment. The WPA brought together literally thousands of artists so that they could think and act in concert; it created a context where this most individualistically oriented endeavor became collectivized. Through their involvement in the WPA, artists could now reasonably see themselves as cultural workers, highly skilled workers allied with the working class as a whole. Their organizations, such as the Artists’ Union and the American Artists Congress, depended upon the existence of the WPA; all of them “encouraged the artists to see themselves as part of the new, interethnic, cross-trade, militant rank-and-file they so often pictured.” (p. 249) The seed was planted for something hitherto unimaginable, a union for artists! Organizing around its slogan “For a Permanent Art Project; For Democratic Culture” (p. 263), the Artists’ Union and its publication Art Front (and to a lesser extent, the American Artists Congress) accomplished something hitherto inconceivable. This critical part of the story of WPA art is included in this study, but the author’s hand is a little less steady here than in her insightful and illuminating readings of the individual works she presents to make her arguments for the WPA as integral to the history of the American working class.

Unlike some other scholars of the period, Hapke acknowledges the strong influence of the Communist Party in encouraging this art and helping these artists find audiences (and presumably some small income) as illustrators for magazine and newspaper articles, book covers, pamphlets, etc., all of which provided access to working class audiences. Hapke accurately places within the ambit of the Communist Party a long list of the most important WPA artists, including Hugo Gellert, William Gropper, Alice Neel, Rockwell Kent, Raphael and Moses Soyer; however, Hapke carelessly dismisses as a “cartoonist” Charles Keller, who was a member of a still larger group of second-rank artists connected to the Communist Party. (p. 260) In Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926-1956, which in so many ways is a companion book to Labor’s Canvas, Andrew Hemingway notes—but provides no explanation for—the far larger number of artists, when compared to writers, who remained loyal to the Communist Party. The answer may lie in the inability of the Federal Writers’ Project to give rise to a Writers’ Union. The American Writers’ Congress annual conference could not, at least to anything nearing the same extent as the Artists’ Union, spawn the sense of solidarity with the subjects of their writing and the political movements that arose to empower and provide leadership for them as had occurred among social realist artists.

One outstanding chapter in Labor’s Canvas analyzes the work of three WPA portraitists—Raphael Soyer, Alice Neel, and Elizabeth Olds. Their work undercuts the assumption of some that portraiture is an art form intended to flatter the privileged. Their subjects run the gamut. Neel’s portrait of Pat Whalen—a union militant whose clenched hands rest on a copy of the Daily Worker, whose headline blared the news of labor uprisings in the coal and steel industries could have been used for the cover of Hapke’s book had it not already been put to that use for Hemingway’s study of Communist artists during the Depression. Hapke effectively relates Neel’s conviction that the portrait could fulfill both aesthetic and political goals by citing the artist’s oft-quoted phrase that she “painted my time using people as evidence.” (p. 109) Soyer’s portraits confront the viewer with the depredations of a system that beats down its workers. They do not convince the viewer of the capability of the subject to struggle on his own behalf as much as they demand that the viewers take action to prevent the degradation and demoralization of members of a class for whom, Soyer assumes, they feel a sense of concern and loyalty. Olds’ portraits introduced ethnicity and race into a remarkably white palette: even for white Communist artists, the “nascent socialist man” was generally presumed to be white, male heterosexual. (Here Hapke might have noted Alice Neel’s extraordinary outpouring of exquisite portraits of Puerto Rican and American-Americans, and later in her career, gays and lesbians.)

Hapke’s chapter on African-American artists and the WPA identifies significant distinctions between their work and that of white WPA artists, who as often as not, shared with them membership in the Communist Party. The African-American laborers had been largely excluded from working in the basic industries; and as a consequence blacks could not significantly participate in the great industrial uprisings that punctuated the decade of the thirties. Hence, these African American social realists’ works rarely depicted “images of monumental workers.” Moreover, instead of the confident determined glare of Neel’s portrait of Pat Whalen, for example, African-American artists most often painted their fellows with “enigmatic or pained expressions.” Perhaps because of their better grounding in the racial reality of America in the thirties, the African-American artists much less frequently painted or drew workers in integrated settings than did their white comrades. Hapke has important things to say about Charles White, who continued to contribute work to Communist publications as late as the 1970s. White and Richard Wright, both of whom traveled in the same Communist Party circles in Chicago, shared an approach to the African-American masses, which, in Wright’s words, viewed the fate of many of its males as resulting from “the necessity of learning survival techniques [which] stunt black psyches.” (p. 189) Hapke focuses much attention on White’s Native Son #2, a drawing inspired by Wright’s Native Son. She notes in this work, White created a “proletarian grotesque,” which simultaneously conveys a sense of dignity and dehumanization. His subject, a muscular, troubled man, like Bigger Thomas, evokes both pity and fear.

Hapke discusses the paintings of Jacob Lawrence, perhaps the most famous of the African-American WPA painters, in her chapter on women. Here she recognizes his unique contributions in bringing women workers to the fore in his works.

Though primarily a work of art history, which significantly contributes to an important period in American art, Labor’s Canvas also sheds a broader light. This valuable book adds further weight to the arguments that the New Deal was a phenomenon much further Left that previously believed and that the influence and scope of the Communist Party was greater than the conventional literature asserts.

You Might Be a Marxist If ... You Want to End the Exploitation of Workers (Part 2)

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 10:47:00 +0000

Last month’s article discussed the exploitation of workers under capitalism, so let’s briefly review the main points of that discussion, and then we’ll consider some objections to the view that capitalism exploits workers.

Capitalists want to maximize profits, and they do this by exploiting the working class. The basic method of capitalist exploitation is to pay workers the lowest wage they can get away with (as close to mere survival as possible) while forcing their employees to do the maximum amount of work. More specifically, capitalists try to maximize the value they get out of you, in the form of the product or service that you produce, by increasing the period of time that you have to work beyond the time it takes you to produce enough to cover your wage or salary.

For example, last month we looked at an auto parts worker who was paid $50 per 8-hour day. That worker was able to produce $50 worth of product in approximately 3 minutes. Thus it took the worker an insignificant amount of time to produce enough value to cover the day’s wage. If you consider only those 3 minutes, it looks like an even exchange between the worker and the capitalist. The worker produced $50 worth of product and will be paid $50 in return. But don’t forget, our factory worker has to stay on the production line for a much longer time—another 7 hours and 57 minutes— just to get the $50. If this had been an even exchange, in which the wage equals exactly what the worker produces, the workday would have ended after those 3 minutes. But if that happened the capitalist wouldn’t make any profit, and maximizing profit is the whole point of capitalist production. Nearly $10,000 worth of surplus value was produced during the additional 7-plus hours that the worker was forced to remain at work. The capitalist steals this value from the worker; the worker is never paid for producing it. This theft of surplus value is what is meant by the term “capitalist exploitation.”

In Marxist theory, the amount of time you must work to cover your wage or salary is called necessary labor time. The time beyond that, during which you are forced to continue working in order to receive your wage, is called surplus labor time, and the value produced during that time is called surplus value. During surplus labor time you are working for free because the capitalist steals the time and the resulting product from you without paying for it. In order to maximize profit, capitalists try to minimize the amount of necessary labor time and maximize the amount of surplus labor time, so they can profit from the surplus value that results. That is why capitalists are always trying to keep wages as low as possible, extend the length of the workday, and increase through speedup the amount of work that you have to do in any given period of time. This intensification of work is what capitalists really mean when they speak so benignly about “improving productivity.”

The idea that workers are exploited and are literally victims of theft on the job gives rise to many questions and possible objections. Let’s look at a few of the most common ones.

“Exploitation does not apply to me because I don’t work in a factory.”

If you are one of the many workers who don’t labor on a production line, you might think that you are not being exploited. Does the Marxist view of exploitation apply only to factory workers? Consider a cashier in a supermarket, a clerk or secretary in an office, or a waiter or waitress in a restaurant or bar. It might not seem like it at first, but when you think about it, stores, offices, and restaurants are just like factories in the sense that they are business enterprises that produce and sell a physical product or a service—often both—in order to maximize capitalist profit. The type of business doesn’t really matter. In order to maximize profit, all businesses must exploit the ability of their workers to produce surplus value.

For example, a supermarket provides access to a large number of food products at one location, and it produces some products on-site such as specific cuts of meat, baked goods, and prepared dishes. It also provides customer service and an overall “shopping experience.” The produce department, meat department, canned goods, bakery, deli, and checkout lines are all stations on the supermarket “assembly line” that produces the shopping experience for the customer and the cart full of merchandise that rolls out the door at the end of the process. The cashier’s job is to complete the final step in the production process, which is a quick and accurate exchange of the customer’s money for the purchased goods.

Now if you’ve ever worked as a cashier you’ve probably noticed that the manager constantly adjusts the work schedule so that at any given time there are as few cashiers on duty as possible and everyone has to work at maximum speed just to keep up with the number of customers. Have you noticed that your workplace always seems understaffed and too hectic even though increasing the number of staff and slowing down the pace a bit would actually improve service? Ever notice that your manager gets very nervous whenever things slow down a little and the cashiers have a few minutes at their stations with nothing to do? That’s because the manager has to keep you working constantly and quickly for your entire shift. Don’t forget, management’s job is to minimize necessary labor time, the amount of time it takes you to produce enough value to cover your wage, and maximize surplus labor time, which is the amount of time you spend working for free in order to produce the profit that goes straight into the pocket of the capitalist. The period of surplus labor time get longer the faster you work, and the amount of surplus value you produce grows larger.

It makes no difference whether you work in a factory, office, supermarket, or restaurant. Capitalist exploitation happens in the same way and it happens to you just as much as any other worker. Think about this when you are at work and how it applies to your particular job. And remember it the next time your boss starts giving out prizes for “most items scanned per hour,” “most customers served per shift,” or “fastest typist.” Once you understand what’s really going on at your job, you will never look at work the same way again.

“None of this applies to me because I’m a college-educated white-collar worker earning a salary, not an hourly wage.”

It makes no difference whether you’re hourly or salaried, educated or uneducated. Here’s an example of how exploitation works in the white-collar world. I have a relative who’s employed as a social worker in a dialysis clinic that is owned by a transnational for-profit corporation that has clinics all over the globe. She has a master’s degree; she’s required to work 40 hours per week, and she makes $40,000 per year (about $19 per hour). According to the U.S. Census Bureau, per capita personal income in this country is around $39,750 per year. So she is making an average income, not great, but not terrible either.

How does that big corporation extract maximum surplus value from their white-collar employees? It’s very simple, they turn that average salary into a below average wage by bullying their workers and imposing enormous workloads that result in brutal speedup.

When our social worker started the job she was given a 40-hour workweek, but if you’ve ever worked in a salaried position that’s exempt from overtime pay, you know that you’re expected to work as many hours as it takes to get the job done. She soon found out that it was physically impossible to do all of the assessments, surveys, counseling sessions, applications for medical treatments and financial assistance, record keeping, data entry, transportation arrangements, and so on, in 40 hours. She’s been on the job less than a year and she started with 92 patients; that number quickly rose to 110, leaving her with less than 22 minutes per week to spend on each patient—and they keep adding patients and job requirements. She and her co-workers, the dieticians, social workers, and even the lower level managers, all find themselves in the same situation, and all are subject to constant threats and bullying from the bosses to keep up with their impossible workloads.

And here are the results of that exploitation. My relative routinely puts in 55 hours or more per week for the $40,000 salary for which she was supposed to work 40 hours per week. This lowers her hourly pay from $19 to about $14.55 per hour. This is well below the average hourly wage in the U.S., which according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics just happens to be $19 per hour. So much for that cushy white-collar job.

“I’m not exploited because I work in the public sector.”

Consider the public schools. As non-profit public institutions they do not have to extract profits from their employees or distribute profits back to capitalist owners. In that sense, there is no capitalist exploitation going on in the public school system. But we live in a capitalist society with a capitalist culture. Like islands in a capitalist sea, non-capitalist institutions are subject to capitalism’s attitudes and methods, and they must fight to survive in capitalist society. The capitalists would like nothing better than to privatize all public institutions so they can begin extracting all that untapped surplus value. Imagine how much profit they could make if teachers could be treated just like factory workers and students like customers.

That is why our public institutions are under constant attack from the capitalists who run our society. They hollow out our schools by imposing austerity budgets, and then they smear the schools in the media for the inevitable failures, failures that the capitalists engineered in the first place. And yes, you guessed it, their solution to these manufactured crises in public education and other sectors is always the same—privatization.

The pressure to privatize and to behave like capitalist enterprises permeates our public institutions. If you’ve ever worked in the public sector you’ve probably wondered why your bosses are always ranting that “If this place was a business it would go under!” or “We need to start running this place like a business!” And if you’re a public school teacher you’re probably wondering why classes are always too big, salaries are frozen, programs are being eliminated, and staff members cut—not just during economic crises, but always. Part of it is the influence of capitalist propaganda on ignorant and spineless administrators who can think of no better way to do things, and the other part arises from the pressing need to stretch the austerity budgets imposed by the capitalist society. So even though public institutions are not capitalist enterprises, they are increasingly run as if they are. Technically that’s not capitalist exploitation, but it sure feels like it to the worker.

“None of this applies to me because I belong to a union.”

Unions do not eliminate exploitation, but they do lessen its intensity and severity. By fighting for higher wages, better benefits, and more humane working conditions, they put some limits on the amount the capitalists can steal and they mitigate some of the more brutal methods of exploitation. But again, they do not end exploitation. The key to abolishing exploitation is to eliminate entirely the capitalists’ ability to steal the wealth that is created by workers. This will not be accomplished until our productive enterprises are taken away from capitalists and placed under a form of public ownership and control that distributes wealth through a democratic process designed to maximize the well being of the entire society. This form of society is called socialism, and unions will play a major role in achieving it. Socialism will be discussed in a future article.

“Exploitation is prevented by minimum wage laws and the 8-hour day.”

Like unions, such laws and regulations throw up obstacles to capitalist exploitation, but they do not put an end to it. Capitalists continue to exploit workers by packing more and more work into the 8-hour day, sometimes through sheer bullying and slave driving and sometimes with the help of computers, automated production lines, and other types of machinery. They also skirt wage and hours laws to such an extent that there are currently many millions of workers in our country who work for less than the minimum wage and for more than 8 hours a day.

“How can you say that I’m exploited when my boss doesn’t know a thing about necessary labor time, surplus value, or any of this theoretical stuff?”

The bosses don’t need to know a thing about Marxist economics, or even capitalist economics, in order to extract surplus value. All they have to do is keep you working hard all the time and keep finding ways to make you work even harder. That’s just the ingrained way of doing things in our capitalist society. Most of the time they don’t even have to think about it. But I guarantee you that somewhere back at corporate headquarters there’s an army of economists and accountants who know exactly what’s going on. They may not think about it in Marxist terms, but they know that the whole point of work is to keep you working for as long and as fast as possible for the lowest wage they can get you to take. They have it all down to a science. They know down to the second how fast to work you and down to the penny how little to pay you in order to maximize the surplus value that is extracted from your labor.

“How can you say we are exploited when people in other countries are so much worse off than us?”

In advanced capitalist countries such as the U.S. one can find broad swaths of poverty, despair, violence, exploitation, and human degradation that are as bad as anything in the world, but at the same time it is true that on average workers in advanced countries have higher material standards of living than workers in the less developed countries. Workers in the advanced countries are the most productive in the world, so the intensity their exploitation (the amount of surplus value that they produce per hour worked) is actually far greater than in most countries. But wages are higher in the developed world and methods of exploitation are not as physically harsh. This is due in large part to decades of struggles by organized labor and other progressive forces to lessen the brutality of exploitation and improve the living conditions of the working class. But the game is not up. Capitalists in the advanced countries are trying harder than ever to push living standards down as low as they can go. They’ve been very successful at this over the past 30 to 40 years. In the U.S., for example, they’ve gutted the labor movement, devastated the public schools, virtually eliminated job security and retirement pensions, rolled back government regulations, and kept real wages stagnant for the past 30 years. They still haven’t gotten us down to second and third world levels on the whole, but they’re working at it.

The other, uglier side to the relative but fragile affluence of workers in the developed countries is that capitalism is a global system designed to extract wealth from the rest of the world and put it in the pockets of capitalists in the advanced countries. Whereas workers in the developed countries suffer from exploitation, workers in the rest of the world are subject to super-exploitation. Capitalists in the developed countries have stolen such staggering amounts of wealth from workers in the rest of the world—through naked aggression backed by military force and other forms of exploitation too barbaric to attempt in their native lands—that they can afford to throw a few more crumbs to workers at home while they pillage workers abroad.

This brings us to the subject of imperialism, which will be discussed in next month’s article.

Photo: At a memorial service for lost loved ones, union families urge passage of stronger safety laws in mines. (Photo by Julie Hunter/AFL-CIO, courtesy Flickr)

When Will America be Ripe for Socialism?

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 10:45:00 +0000

Many Americans have an aversion to socialism because they are influenced by a lifetime's exposure to capitalist-sponsored propaganda. It does not help that many socialist movements succeeded in economically less advanced areas of the globe. Capitalists and their spin doctors easily confuse people into associating underdevelopment with socialism. They attribute the particulars of a people's historical development with the progressive path of socialism. For example, Russian history is colored by underdevelopment and autarky. Russian Bolsheviks, who faced two world wars against enemies much superior in military capability, a bloody civil war against capitalists and aristocrats, and hostility from liberal democracies abroad, relied on the Russian cultural tradition of a strong state to organize victories against their enemies. While capitalists were eager to support the repressive measures of the tsarist regime, for selfish reasons they loathed the first workers' government in history, criticizing any centralizing tendency that was often the norm in Russian development. From Ivan the Terrible to Nicholas II, from Lenin to Gorbachev, and from Yeltsin to Putin, centralized power is a common thread in Russian history. Some leaders were good, some were mediocre, and some were simply bad. To malign socialism because its Russian form and the peculiarities of historical conditions constrained its capability is misleading but useful to capitalism's cause of justifying an overwhelming preponderance of wealth and power in the hands of capitalists.

Socialism in an economically developed country is a progression of freedom and equality. It means greater justice and higher living standards for more citizens than capitalism can offer, much like liberal society was progressive vis a vis feudalism. The political economy of capitalism clearly cannot produce economic or political justice. Unfettered by democratic tendencies, neoclassical economic policies (i.e., pure capitalism) produce greater inequality, economic instability, and misery on a global scale for those required to serve the interest of capitalists. The history of capitalism demonstrates its shortcomings and why it should eventually be overcome through enlightened democratic action.

Understanding that capitalism cannot bring the greatest freedom for all is not sufficient cause for determining the optimal timing of its demise, however. For underdeveloped societies, capitalism is the only proven path to economic growth. One may conjecture that with assistance from a fully developed socialist society, less-developed countries could strike a different path to progress, but until socialism is achieved in the more advanced countries, this remains pure theoretical speculation. The benefits promised by socialist theoreticians and supporters must await the right time for socialism in the most advanced countries. The point in time possible for implementing socialism draws nearer with each decade of economic and technological advance, but until socialism is successfully pursued in the countries of the world most likely to promise it success, socialism can only offer the hope of freedom from tyranny to the toilers who unjustly serve capitalism's interests.

The correct timing of socialism is critical to its historical success if there is to be permanent progression rather than retrogression. If socialism's supporters find themselves in power at a time inauspicious to its success, failure will occur, followed by capitalist reaction. Wishing that the time is right for socialism is not sufficient cause for its success. At a minimum, the political and economic conditions in a country pursuing socialism must both be favorable. Even when these conditions could suggest success, other external factors still could snuff it out (e.g., an international coalition of powers hostile to it.)

Because historical conditions must be right for socialism's eventual success, it is important to understand what these conditions might be that would promise a high probability of success. Below are some political and economic conditions that would increase the chances of socialism's success, but until socialism is ultimately successful, the necessary conditions will remain unknown. America will be used as an example, but the analysis is applicable to any country, most readily to the most advanced countries economically.

In terms of politics, it is paramount to keep in mind that no faction will surrender power freely or willingly. Capitalists control economic resources in the American economy and use that control to command political power. They are able to manipulate the ostensibly democratic system to protect their interests. The democratic system in America does provide the means to remove capitalists from power, but only if the vast majority who vote understand that they are manipulated to strengthen capitalist power. Socialism's success hinges politically on utter bankruptcy in liberal political thought. Only if Americans understood at a fundamental level that American political history is the history of abuse of power by capitalists can they support socialism for the necessarily extended period required to guarantee its success. Marginal support for a minimal socialist agenda will not meet this condition.

Capitalists have the political advantage of fully understanding their interests – to hold onto power at all costs. Through this clarity and control of the levers of power, they can perpetuate their tyranny of a minority. Never for a minute do they suffer from moral doubt when it comes to keeping power. They will use racism, sexism, religious intolerance, or any other malevolent means to confuse and divide the majority about their most fulfilling interest: taking power from this aggrandizing minority.

The majority of non-capitalists in America is split through the tactic of divide and conquer. Large numbers of the middle classes are co-opted into serving the interests of capitalists through trickle-down economics; immigrants are targeted by capitalists because capitalists can rely on a common feeling of chauvinism; the evil fruits of poverty are held up to condemn those who suffer most unjustly from capitalism's tyranny as a means to scare the rest of America; the sick are kept quiet by blackmail over access to health care; and fear is generated among white Americans about blacks and other ethnic minorities. By perpetuating division among the majority, capitalism keeps Americans from building a consensus that is truly in the majority's interest: ending capitalist tyranny.

To overcome such tactics pursued by a tyrannical minority, an unshakable conviction is required among the majority that tyranny must be replaced by freedom. Because socialism will mean ending the tyranny of capitalists, capitalists will resort to any means in order to hold onto power, including treason and terrorism. The majority must be steadfast in its desire for socialism in order to guarantee success. Sufficient surrender or desertion among the majority would doom socialism to failure, resulting in political reaction. The political condition for success is therefore a moment when no one believes any more in the disinterested capitalist stewardship of our economy and government, when Americans learn to scorn the vast wealth and power that the minority commands to further its selfish interests. Only then will the chance of socialism's success be possible.

Even an unshakable conviction by Americans to remove tyranny does not guarantee socialism's ultimate success. A treasonous flood of paper economic wealth and a trickle of Americans who control that wealth would exit the country if the majority broke the chains of oppression. American capitalists could bribe into existence a piratical coalition of the willing with these assets to restore themselves to power, with chances of success closer to what the French émigrés during the French revolution achieved than to what was achieved by Russian émigrés at the time of the Bolshevik revolution. If somehow they were successful in restoring capitalism to power through military action in a socialist America, most Americans would be personally confronted by ruin, rape and murder. The international situation would be a major factor in determining the success or failure of socialism in America, even if outright military action against us was excluded from consideration by socialism's enemies because of our nuclear arsenal. Economic warfare against a socialist America and support of terrorists inside America would be options to use against us if we pursued a socialist course alone. Because America is the most advanced economy in the world and it is larger than the other advanced economies, its chances of success are higher than for other countries when trying to be the first to steer successfully a course to socialism alone. Success would be far from certain, however. Economic integration across the world means interdependence, so enemies of socialism acting in other countries could harm a socialist economy.

Internal and external existential threats to American socialism would require strong central control for a time in order to defeat these threats. The stronger these threats, the longer the period of necessary control by the center to organize victory would be. Unfortunately, the longer the period of strong central control, the greater is the possibility that corruption would sap the vital energy from the forces of progress. The enemies of socialism do not have to win a single battle to win the war against socialism; they only have to create conditions which make socialism's success difficult or impossible. The political requirements of a long period of fighting both internal and external enemies are not conducive to democracy. It would be necessary to achieve success within a relatively short period to demonstrate the benefits of socialism to the world and to allow for devolution of power from the center to local levels. Ten years is probably the longest period such control could remain at the center and success still be achieved before corruption eroded socialism's chances of success. All but the most morally upright in character could remain uncontaminated by the influences of political corruption.

There are two economic conditions important for socialism's eventual success: some level of economic development and a terrible cyclical collapse of the capitalist economy. Both are promised by capitalism's historic development, so ultimately they will occur. Whether or not socialism will be implemented is not known, however. Economics cannot promise an eventual socialist victory, only auspicious conditions for socialism's success will occur. The political conditions above address why economic conditions alone will not deliver the triumph of socialism.

The first economic condition of reaching some threshold of development probably occurred in the advanced economies before World War I, but no later in America than by World War II. A close look at the ability of the German High Command to control tightly its economy in the First World War demonstrated that the necessary conditions for centralized planning existed to a degree unforeseen by contemporaries. What America achieved in the Second World War was even more striking; by taking an economy on its knees in the Great Depression and achieving war production that was undreamed of by even the most firm believers in economic planning, America demonstrated that planning could deliver production on a scale greater than anything promised by capitalism. Capitalism had created the knowledge and institutions necessary for this production, but now acted as a barrier to the production potential demonstrated by the American war economy. Americans of this era endured some important but painful lessons that until recently were forgotten.

Important to achieving socialism is high labor productivity (i.e., a high level of technology.) This allows for a surplus large enough to be created from each person's work that can be easily shared. If technology is limited and the economic surplus is therefore low, any extraction of surplus from each individual laborer for use by others requires tyranny. When economic surpluses in the ancient world were very small, the tyranny of slavery was required to extract a surplus from people living at no better than subsistence level. As science and technology grew during the late Middle Ages and early modern era, the tyranny of feudalism could be thrown off for a freer system of capitalism. Likewise, as technology has grown in the late modern and early post-modern times, the tyranny of capitalism becomes unnecessary to extract a surplus from workers. Once economic conditions progress to a point where people can freely share their surplus without fearing starvation, the system for expropriating that surplus becomes no longer beneficial, only tyrannical. That condition has been reached today in the advanced economies of the world.

The other economic condition that will increase the chances of socialism's success is widespread and deep cyclical depression. No economic or political system is discarded successfully without some crisis to focus people's interests towards removing the existing system's barrier to prosperity and freedom. The supporters of a system that delivers marginal improvement year after year without the concrete example of a better alternative have nothing to fear from theoretical claims to a better world. The most intolerably oppressive measures can be scaled back through reform, removing for many the impetus to change the system. Only economic calamity can bring about the strong political conviction that change must come. This condition is more probable in America through neoclassical, laissez-faire economic policies than through reformist policies that curb the excesses of capitalism. Callous as it may seem, the economic development delivered by neoconservatives in the past thirty years has been more auspicious to the success of socialism than the development that Keynesian policies delivered in the immediate post-war era. Through the natural development of capitalism we will most likely see the ripe conditions for socialism, rather than through some middle way that seeks to ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism. In the short term it is better to let the tyrannical minority overplay its hand than to advise it on how better to govern in the majority's interests while still holding onto power.

Concluding, there are some conditions that would likely increase the chances of a successful transition from capitalism to socialism. These listed here are political and economic. There are undoubtedly many others, including some that are political and/or economic in nature and that were overlooked here. Most important to understand is that these conditions will affect the outcome of a struggle to achieve socialism, limiting or increasing the possibilities of success. Also, nothing achieved by mankind is determined beforehand. Rather, the conditions for attaining progress must exist, but do not make it necessary for progress to occur. To those living in the less developed world, caution is necessary when confronted by dreamers, charlatans, or worse, who promise a short circuit to historically proven paths of development. Americans must examine their conscience when conditions seem favorable to socialism's success. Will you cower before the whip? Or stand up to be counted among the heroes of progress? The capitalists also face a moral challenge, one issued millennia ago by a man who was murdered for opposing the tyrannical minority of his day: Repent, for the end is near.

Kyara's New Deal

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 10:43:00 +0000

Kyara strides across the campus mall hugging her sheet of dark glass close to her chest like someone might try to take it. She wants to pump her fist in the air because it has finally happened: an interview. With one week left before graduation, it had seemed there was no chance at graduating with employment. But this morning, the same sheet of electronic glass that had been pestering her with messages from her creditors, told her to come to the career office, and now it contains directions to a company that's hiring.

Her frustration highlights the parts of her life when she became bound--oh, how they happily handed out Buck cards to broke freshmen, explaining that they could cover expenses for two, maybe all four years if managed carefully. She wasn’t careful; the credit barely lasted one. No problem. Her "saviors and friends", her creditors, helped her during times of need by refinancing old debt into new loan programs.

Yesterday, the slice of dark glass strobed a blue color, signaling that a message waited. It was from the credit bureau and displayed a contract that she had signed four years ago, but this time a section of the fine print was blinking: applicants not employed within a week of graduation will be categorized as high risk. She had tried to break the glass by pressing it over her knee, but all it would do was bend and only barely.

She watches students rush to their morning classes: surf shirts, shorts, Birkenstocks, and the occasional show-off with clothing that shimmers with metaphysical illusions. The crowds pass by squat, two-story buildings that make up campus. The buildings are of steel and concrete wrapped in smoked glass, all cast by the same cookie cutter; The remains of a manufacturing company that had become too far in debt. It was purchased by a multinational, the jobs outsourced to Mexico, and the corporate campus sold and turned into a college.

It’s fitting that the college grew from the burial grounds of the bankrupt. Now freshmen arrive to start a life of building debt to became seniors who give hordes of creditors the legal right to go after their parents if the payments should stop.

A group of high school seniors pass by, staying clear of everyone else as if afraid of being sucked into the stream of students going to classes. They look around at everything, their eyes wide and innocent while a student on work-study from Admissions talks to them. Kyara tenses with the urge to scream: Don’t be like me. Eat boring, cheap dorm food. Stay out of the malls. Filter ad content from your glass. Don’t spend so much at parties. Four years isn’t a long time.

Kyara sighs, letting thoughts of messianic messages escape. Hell, four years IS a long time. A five hundred grand long time. A hundred year lifespan won’t be enough if she gets categorized as high risk. It’s her typical bad luck to graduate during a depressed economy.

She watches a Japanese man leaning against an announcements board writhing with metaphysical illusions. One ephect catches her eye, a dragon that emerges from a poster to peek over his shoulder. It's unclear if he knows what's happening behind his back because he's focused on watching the crowd. He’s a merchant looking for customers, and like other merchants he advertises, never forcing anyone to buy. And like the merchants of credit, once a customer starts, it’s hard not to return for more. While creditors have lawyers that politely point at five page contracts that were signed unread, this one--Hira--flexes his biceps and uses threats. Where creditors could legally garnish wages, or repossess everything she owns, Hira uses his fists to take back the chemical feel-good that his product allows.

Maybe his product is a better way to go? After graduation, with the last of her credit, she could purchase something that would make her enjoy graduation no matter her mood. If she can’t land a job, Hira would end things quickly instead of a long-drawn-out servitude to debt.

Stop thinking like that, she decides. She'll go to the interview. It’s face to face, not virtual. Travel arrangements need to be made.

Kyara walks past Hira making sure she doesn't look anywhere near his direction.

“Kara!”

She walks faster. Maybe he mispronounced her name, or maybe he’s looking for someone else.

A hand grabs her shoulder. “Kara.”

She stops, hugging her glass to her chest so hard it flattens her front.

Hira holds out a slip of dark glass. It activates and animated lights border what appears to be his business card. Her eyes gaze past the card to his wrist, around which is a tattoo of a shark, its teeth-lined jaws open, like Hira's arm is reaching out of its mouth. She takes the slip of glass, holding it by her fingertips as if the tattoo had salivated over it.

“See number?” He points to an account number in flashing text beneath his name and family affiliation.

Kyara nods.

“Roommate better pay up now or I take out on her hide.”

She nods again.

“Have a nice day,” he says, and then shouts a greeting at another student.

Kyara turns and walks double time, realizing that her roommate is in more trouble than she is.

She keeps checking over her shoulder until she reaches a two story building identical to the others. Lights glow dimly through the walls of smoked glass, emanating from the lamps of the lucky few dorm residents with rooms on the perimeter.

She rushes into the lobby. Cliff is on duty in the dorm's security station. She musters a smile at the overweight fifty year-old. Per the running dorm-wide joke, she pauses in the lobby to strike a sexy pose for the millimeter-wave radar embedded in the building entrance. Cliff smiles and waves her in without glancing at the radar screen.

Kyara takes the elevator to the second floor, and then exits into a large room with florescent lights humming from the ceiling.

She weaves through a forest of thin cubical-walls, constantly stepping over duct taped network and power cables until she arrives at her cubicle door. She slides the door open and steps into a three meter by three meter area, and something jumps out at her. Kyara twists to face her attacker but crashes into her cot, and falls, landing on her stomach. She reaches and grabs a bat she keeps near her cot and rolls onto her back, facing the figure standing above.

“Kyara! I didn’t know it was you,” Windy says.

Kyara stands, hanging onto the bat, and then she notices the glint of scissors in Windy’s hand, held at ready for stabbing.

“What the fuck?” Kyara says. "You tried to kill me!"

Windy stands, looking shocked. So Kyara adds, "And I was on my own side."

“Sorry. I didn’t know it was you.” Windy takes a step into her half of the room and sits on her own cot, her hands with the scissors in her lap. She doesn't smile at Kyara's joke; instead she stares at the scissors, her short red hair hanging forward, covering her face.

“You know about this?” Kyara says and tosses the slip of glass at her roommate. When it lands on the bed, the black glass glows, displaying Hira's card.

“I’m so red.”

“Windy! . . ." Kyara feels a lecture building up.

“Yeah, yeah, don’t start on me Officer Friendly.”

Stuffing the talk, Kyara stows the bat under the cot. “If you stab your roommate, who's going to help you when your friendly neighborhood Yakuza dealer shows up?”

Windy takes a deep breath and then exhales, lying back on her cot. “Thanks Kyara. With you, everything'll be green.”

Kyara sits at the desk crammed between their cots and activates the holoterminal built into its tabletop. She beams the latest copy of her resume into her glass. “Would it help if we called security?”

“No,” Windy says. “Hira always finds someone to let him in for a free sample. Hell, even I've let him in through the back.”

Kyara rummages through a two drawer dresser beneath her cot and pulls out a bunch of designer labels, things she bought when she thought four years would take forever.

When Kyara starts to put together different outfits, Windy sits up and says, “You got a break!”

“Yeah, I just got back from job services. I've an interview in three hours with some company called I-Action.”

"I knew you would do it! Metaphysics is the hot thing. I'd have gone into it but I could never focus like you do. Stop what you're doing! That shirt does not go with that skirt."

Windy kneels on the floor and sorts through the clothes stored beneath her cot. As she adds garments to Kyara's pile, she says, "No matter what, don't take the first offer. Just act chill and don't agree right away. They always lowball the first offer."

"But I'm so desperate," Kyara says, looking at the designer labels that helped her become this way.

"Think if it as part of the interview. A test to see if you're a sucker. Focus on how much debt you have. You want to get started on the right foot."

Kyara nods but isn't sure she can play that tough. In thirty minutes, with Windy's help, Kyara has a killer, guaranteed-to-get-the-job outfit and pretends that she's ready to play hardball.

###

Using the directions beamed into her glass, she spends the next two hours waiting at bus stops and keeping out of reach of street freaks. She reaches her destination, a cluster of thirty story buildings, within which nest a bunch of small to medium companies. Judging by the luxury SUVs parked in compact parking spots, the money pumping through their veins hasn’t diminished in the downturn.

Good, thinks Kyara, hoping that the next bus she takes will be to an auto dealer. She can't wait to go through the delicious hassle of trying to fit a luxury SUV into a parking spot.

I-Action isn't on the business center directory. Maybe the company is new. She taps her glass, and it lightens up from sleep mode so she can view the map in her interview packet. Soon she spots their sign hanging on a door, the sign looking disappointingly temporary.

She approaches until she sees herself in the building's mirrored wall. She stops and pulls her shoulders back into a confident posture and checks that her short bottle blonde hair looks perfect, and she adjusts her outfit so the skirt and jacket line up in the right places. The door slides open and she continues inside, the tapping of her high heels against the floor announces her arrival to a receptionist behind the lobby desk.

“Here for an interview?” the receptionist says, as if the word is tattooed across Kyara’s forehead.

“Yes.”

The receptionist hands her a glass. “Please sign here for the Emen-dee-ay.”

The sheet is filled with English-legalese; the page counter at the bottom reads 1 out of 30.

“Emen-dee-ay?" Kyara says, hating the clueless sound in her voice.

The receptionist pauses long enough to make Kyara feel self conscious, and then points to the title of the document. “MNDA, Metaphysical Non-Disclosure Agreement. After you sign, the MNDA ephect will be caused before the interview.” She points at a stainless steel door on the other side of the lobby. "But I can't let you start the interview until you sign."

“That’s green,” says Kyara feeling more yellow or red about why she's here. They wanted someone who could cause metaphysical ephects, not work in a vault.

The receptionist points at a holographic clock on the wall and says, “You have ten minutes to decide before you're late, and being late is never a good impression.” Her lips bend into a meaningless, polite smile.

Kyara sinks into the leather sofa, frantically skimming through the text, not understanding anything but ‘and’s, ‘therefore’s and ‘the subject’ while her mind races through her options. This is the first interview she’s locked down. Maybe this is something all of them do. Scratch that. Out of the handful of entry level job postings, only one or two mention signing a NDA. But an ‘M’NDA? Seems like overkill for a job interview.

Feeling filled with nerves, she takes a deep breath and tries to read. But her nervousness has her eyes darting through the paragraphs. After a few minutes, she gets the gist. ‘Yamaguchi Corporation’ shows up a bunch of times. The metaphysical and contractual binding is for six years, during which she is forbidden to sell any information gained in her interview; or in any way to compete, hinder, publicize information related to I-Action, its parent company Yamaguchi, or subsidiaries of Yamaguchi.

Kyara thinks: What kind of paranoid world do these people live in? What kind of interview is this?

Maybe companies under financial difficulty do this to prevent job candidates from spreading rumors. She glances at the hologram clock which shows sixty seconds left. If she doesn’t get a job soon, she’s going to need two full time jobs just to pay the interest on her ‘high risk’ credit rate.

Twenty seconds. What the hell. Never heard of anyone getting sued over a non-disclosure agreement, but lots of college students get screwed by high interest rates.

She signs at the bottom of the glass and rushes it to the lobby desk. Because the receptionist is engrossed in another glass, Kyara flicks the contract so it spins on the countertop. The receptionist glares and then stabs her finger down, stopping the sheet to check that it's signed.

“Good luck on your interview,” the woman says, giving her the polite smile. “Mr. Jones will apply the MNDA.”

She makes a call and before Kyara sits down, the stainless steel door clicks opens and a man in a black suit strides to the counter and takes the contract.

“Please follow me,” he says and pivots on one foot and strides back through the door.

Kyara rushes to keep up, striding so her footsteps don't sound rushed. Mr. Jones continues down the hallway and then opens a door and leads her into a room that's bare except for a chair surrounded by circles of glowing runes.

"Have you been placed under a MNDA before?"

She almost says ‘yes’ so he’ll think she’s a hot commodity, but then decides to play it straight and shakes her head. He sits her in the chair, mentioning that the high cost of MNDAs is offset by litigation savings. He asks her to hold out her hands, palms up, and then he sets the contract on them. He closes his eyes and sets his palms on the glass, above hers, and then he starts vocalizing standard anchoring tonals. The vein running down his forehead seems to enlarge while he focuses, and then it happens and she feels differently but can't say why.

"Your first interview is this way,” he says and starts out of the room, gesturing for her to follow.

Crap, she realizes, if there's a first then there's more than just one.

She catches up and follows him into an office.

"Your interview is here, Mr. Sill," Mr. Jones says and then leaves.

Mr. Sill spends an hour probing what she knows about finding Leigh lines and where they are in the nearby region--basic stuff.

Afterwards, Mr. Sill leads her down the hallway and leaves her with an ancient looking lady who asks her to paint rune circles with a lizard-hair brush. Kyara requests an air brush, but after listening to the old bag rant about how a lizard’s hair brush is mythologically, theologically, and spiritually superior for rune creation, she spends the next hour dipping and stroking with the tiny brush. She could finish in half the time with an airbrush and the lines aren’t as clean, but the lady is happy and leads her to her next interviewer.

This one is a short man with a desk statue of Napoleon riding a horse. As soon as she sits, he stands and starts pacing, grilling her on power symbols and how to blend them together to cause different ephects. When she handles the questions, he leans over his desk and asks her to cause a simple ephect.

Kyara decides to use one she's seen her favorite band use: confetti that flashes to the beat of music. While focusing to cause it, he snaps his fingers near her head at random times but she gets it snowing confetti, strobing as he snaps his fingers.

She decides to shows off and keep it sustained, letting confetti build up on his floor. As he returns to his seat, he ‘accidentally’ knocks the statue over, but she keeps it raining flashing paper.

Satisfied, he takes her to an empty office, waving away all her questions. He gestures her to sit in the executive chair behind the desk. Kyara's heart thuds as she sinks into the leather and she can hear the old bat complaining to Mr. Sill and Mr. Jones about Kyara requesting an airbrush and how that's just another example of how the universities are taking the mysticism out of metaphysics.

As soon as everyone is in the room, the finger-snapper says, “We would like to offer you a job."

Kyara fights the urge to pump her fist in the air and scream out ‘YES!’ Just like Windy had suggested, she just looks at them and dares to rock the chair back, acting very chill, scoping the office with her peripheral vision. The furniture looks new except for a sticker on the side of a file cabinet. The holoterminal built into the desk looks cutting edge. She aches to check out the view but the window is behind her.

Then Mr. Jones pushes a dark glass toward her and tells her to tap it.

She does and when it lights up, the figure is too high--too good to be true high. With the current economy, she expects to start at about a quarter as much, assuming she got a job at all. She looks at the sticker on the cabinet; it’s of an altered state band--Flying with Blue Jiggy, one of her favs which uses ephects to bring their listeners on a hallucinatory trip.

“What do you think?” says the old bat.

Kyara blinks. She’s crazy if she doesn’t just say yes. She should say yes before she wakes up and finds out it's a dream, but she doesn’t know anything about the company and hears herself ask, “What does I-Action do?”

Finger-snapper looks at the view over her shoulder.

“We’re in the insurance business,” says Mr. Jones, walking over to the window and looking out. The view must kick ass. “We used to be called InsuraDyne until we were bought by another company last month.” Mr. Jones adjusts his tie.

She’s heard of insurance companies hiring metaphysicists to read the auras of clients with big insurance claims. If 90% of communication is non-verbal, that 90% is easily observed in auras, which most can't see since metaphysicists are rare.

“We dropped the ‘insura’ part. The new owners wanted us to diversify,” Finger-snapper says.

He isn’t looking her in the eye, in fact, none of them are. She wants to be rude enough to commit the faux pas of aura voyeurism, but she can tell by how the vein in Mr. Jone's forehead is throbbing that their auras would be violet.

“So what else do you do?” she asks.

They look at each other like they’re trying to figure out how much to tell her. She notices scuff marks on the wall next to the Blue Jiggy sticker and a black smudge on the desk from a shoe.

"I don't know why you're hesitating. You won't find a better offer," the old bat says.

Kyara opens her mouth, but then just closes it.

Mr. Jones says, “Our clientele has changed. Instead of insuring homeowners and drivers, we insure small businesses.”

That sounds innocent enough. “Why do you have so many physicists on staff?” she asks, gesturing at them. It’s unusually to have four decent physicists at such a small company.

“We incur high overhead, but have high profit margarines. Our clientele usually tries to cheat us,” says Finger-snapper. “We visit all of our clients each month to collect what they owe.”

The old bat says, “Sometimes, the cheap bastards need their heads knocked together. When that happens, you call your big brother Sake to take care of it.”

A picture renders in Kyara’s mind--a smaller business gets bought out by a group of organized criminals that are trying to look legitimate.

The salary digits glow back at her from the sheet. The Blue Jiggy sticker, the scuffs, they’re all wear marks of a living, breathing person who used to sit in this very desk. She gets the creepy feeling that there's a name plate in the desk, maybe even a drawer full. “Whose shoes am I filling? What happened to them?”

All of them look over her shoulder at the glorious view. The old bat says, “He didn’t measure up."

The office feels wrong, like moving into a missing sibling's bedroom. The pay is good but not that good. Kyara stands and says, “No thanks."

None of them move and she gets the feeling they might try something.

"My roommate and friends know I'm here for this interview.”

They shift around uncomfortably. Finger-snapper grabs the glass and scribbles on it with his finger, and then he slides it back. “We’re prepared to offer you a generous signing bonus.”

She doesn’t pick it up, thinking that Windy would be proud, she broke through their low-ball. Though she doesn't want to look her eyes are greedy, and in a glance she knows there are enough zeros to take a big chunk out of her twenty year loan. She’d be solvent in a year.

Kyara stares out the window to see what's so wondrous:shiny cars twinkle in the parking lot, buildings with mirrored walls hide what's inside and reflect only what's outside--more mirrored buildings that reflect the same. Like a roomful of people that are afraid that others will see their inner-selves, and so they steer the conversation away from themselves and onto the other.

Kyara says, “Sorry, I’d like to go now.”

Finger-snapper just walks out. The old bat, Mr. Sill follow, the old bat complaining about how ungrateful today's kids are. Mr. Jones shakes his head and starts to say more.

"Really. I've had enough," Kyara says.

Mr. Jones takes her to the stainless steel door and opens it. The door and jamb are thick, bombproof thick. Kyara leaves the office, walking between the mirrored buildings. The sun beats on her with waves of heat. She walks between rows of luxury cars, their grills and chromed bumpers seem to be shaped like they are jeering at her.

Her high heels are cutting deeply into her feet by the time she catches a bus. She rides with her eyes closed, feeling her seat vibrate as the bus climbs a hill. She feels like she's floating, nothing solid to cling to, at the mercy of any jetty or puff of air that can push her up, down, left or right.

Crap. She’s graduating and the only interview she got was some underworld job. Maybe she should have taken it. At least she wouldn’t have to ride the bus before she gets switched off. At least there's one positive--the interviewing practice will help if she ever gets another break. The first interview with . . . painting . . . the guy did something with his hands. . . . There was something about painting, and something about a bat.

Kyara struggles as memories of the I-Action people scatter in her head like pieces on a game board knocked awry. Trying to remember how she got to their office, she attempts to access the map in her glass but accidentally fingers the ‘clear’ icon, and the information is gone.

By the time she’s walking through the manufacturing building turned dormitory, she can’t remember why she turned down the job. She follows the maze of cube walls back to her room in a daze while mixed up feelings of the interview stumble through faded memories. It all stops at the sound of a scream.

Windy!--Kyara thinks and slips off her high heels. She runs to their room and standing above their busted door is Windy yelling at Hira who is pressing himself against her, her back to the wall.

Kyara says, “Leave her alone!”

Hira slaps Windy hard enough to spin her head sideways, her hair flaring away from her head.

“She doesn’t have any money!” Kyara pulls on Hira's arm.

“How about her roommate, huh?” Hira leaves Windy and catches Kyara’s hand and squeezes. Her finger bones feel like they're being crushed.

“Stop,” Kyara screams.

Hira releases her and she backs into a wall. The Yakuza puts his hands on each side of her and leans close, his nose nearly touching hers, and the only thing she can breathe is the same air. She stares back, fighting to concentrate, trying to cause an ephect--catch his hair on fire, make his skin itch, something! His hand moves, reaching down, brushing her breast, and then flicks his hand back in front of her face. Between his fingers is a small dark glass. It activates, showing his business card.

“I want my money!” he says, and presses the corner of the glass into her neck. Its beveled edge digs into a muscle.

It happens automatically, a natural reaction to having someone jab anything into her body: she knees him in the groin. Hira staggers back, his eyes rolling back. With some kind of reflex reaction, he holds a switch blade in his hand and then collapses, moaning.

Kyara pulls Windy out of the cubicle and they stumble down one path, turn and move along another, hiding in the aluminum and plastic forest.

“You shouldn’t have hurt him,” Windy hisses.

A yell echoes out: “I’ll fucking cut you both!”

Kyara drags Windy further, stepping over and around duct taped cables and floor lamps. Like a wilderness that turns silent when a predator hunts, the indigenous sounds of radios and people talking have stopped. Kyara hears the snick of a flimsy door being locked near them and the soft susurrations of a desk being pushed over carpet to barricade the entrance of another.

Windy tries a door at random. It opens, and the cubical is empty. “We should hide.”

Kyara shakes her head. "We need to keep moving. We're dead if we get cornered. The elevators are that way." She points down an aisle. “Let's get security up here and arrest that asshole.”

“No, I’m hiding here. Security has never done shit to Hira.”

Kyara decides she has a point. But it’s one thing to let in a known dealer; it’s another to let students get killed. “Stay. I’ll get help.”

Windy nods, and then closes and locks the thin door.

While Kyara runs through the aisles, she hears Hira smashing into cubes and yelling in Japanese. She enters the elevator and hits the lobby button. As the doors close and the elevator moves down, she glances at what she has clenched in her hand. It’s Hira’s card, and beneath his name it says ‘a proud brother in the Yamaguchi family.’ The elevator opens to the lobby. She steps out of the elevator, blinking in the bright lobby light, watching a group of students pass by and enter the lounge.

Kyara stops and looks around. She hates it when this happens--standing like an oaf and trying to remember why she came down here. Maybe she was going to check for a package?

Cliff looks up from watching a movie on his station monitor and waves. Kyara waves back and goes to a bank of mailboxes, guessing that maybe she came down to check if she has any packages, but the glass on her mailbox drawer says 'empty.'

She decides to hang in the lounge instead of returning to her room just yet, hoping that why she came down here will come to her. On the way there, another group of students pile out of the elevator. One guy shakes his head and says, “Diss, Hira is sure switched at someone.”

A woman says, "Some junky isn't keeping up the payments.”

A mental picture of Hira slapping Windy flicks through Kyara’s mind. Kyara stops, wondering where that image came from. The security station is vacant and the dorm doors are locked. Cliff's probably taking a bio-break. Something feels wrong. She needs to check on Windy.

She concentrates, holding the mental image and runs to the elevator punching the button for the second floor. Pins and needles flow through her body, jabbing at her concentration, poking and prodding for a weakness, knocking at her mind to think of something else and forget. But she locks the picture of Hira and Windy in her head, and runs back to their cube. Hira and Windy aren’t there. She stands there, feeling confused. . . . What was she doing?

An angry voice shouts something about ‘Kara’ and ‘Windy’ in Japanese and broken English. Kyara’s feelings untangle and her anger flares, illuminating a memory of Windy's hair flying as her head spins from the impact of the slap, and then Hira's face, so close to Kyara's face all she can breathe is what he exhales. She gets the bat from under her cot. Concentrating on her visualization of Hira slapping Windy, she edits out Windy like she's creating a new ephect power symbol, until only Hira's in her mind, his back to her.

Kyara follows an aisle, blending into the visual of Hira a picture of her smacking the bat into the side of his head.

Pins and needles seem to circulate trough her body, becoming larger and fiercer, poking through her veins. Her head pounds while she holds that picture and concentrates on finding her target.

She trips over an electronic cord, uprooting it from the floor; she becomes dizzy, her vision spins as needles crawl up her arm to her shoulders and then spill into her chest, hurting her lungs with each breath.

There's more shouting in Japanese, sounding closer. She keeps focusing; Kyara stumbles into a cube wall and turns up another path until Hira's in front of her. But the picture is all wrong--he’s facing her and someone else is standing next to him. She updates the picture in her head, and screams, charging him, swinging the bat. Something gives within herself--the needles flow through her head and into her eyes. Splotches of light color pain as needles tumble into her retinas and force themselves through her eyelids. But she keeps the picture in her mind and swings again. The bat strikes something so hard it jolts out of her hands. She collapses to the floor, trying not to move while the pins shrink away.

“Kyara, Kyara, . . . Kyara!”

Kyara only sees yellow splotches and then Windy’s face. A hand tugs at Kyara's arm, pulling her upright.

“You kicked Hira’s ass! I can’t believe it!” Windy says.

Kyara stands, fighting for balance of self and mind. “What happened?”

“You clobbered him!”

Swaying on her feet, the yellow splotches evaporate. Windy keeps shaking her. "You really did it to him. I tell you--I tell you, I'm quitting that shit."

Kyara knocks Windy's hands away and says “Stop it. Where is he?”

Windy leads her to the elevator. “Cliff came up to scan what the yelling was about and drug Hira off. He wants us to make a statement.”

Windy's shaking so much it takes her a few tries to press the button for the lobby. As the elevator moves, she leans her forehead against the wall and says, "I'm so done with him. It only feels good for a moment and then this kind of shit always happens."

Kyara holds still until the elevator door opens.

They walk to the security station. Cliff is gazing at the top of his security station, looking lost in thought.

Windy leans over his desk like Hira might be lying on the floor. “Where’s Hira?” says Windy.

Cliff still stares at the desktop as if trying to remember something.

“Hey!" Windy waves her hand in front of his face. Cliff jerks, surprised by Windy's hand. A dark glass falls from his hand and onto the table.

Windy says, “Shouldn’t the police be here? Where's Hira?”

He stands. “Police? Is something wrong?”

Windy says, “You’re damn right something’s wrong.”

Kyara picks up the glass. It's Hira’s business card.

"What's wrong with you?” shouts Windy. “I get it! You took a payoff!”

Kyara pushes her roommate away from Cliff. She takes one of Cliff's cards from the top of his desk, and then she pulls her roommate into the elevator and sends it to their floor. On the way up, she looks at Cliff's card.

SecurT

hotline: msg:securUSA/terminal5

Subsidiary of Yamaguchi

As usual, it’s the fine print that says it all. At the bottom of Hira's card it says he's a subsidiary of Yamaguchi too.

###

It’s a few months after graduation when Kyara drives her new ‘I’ve landed a job’ car back to drop in on Windy. The car's brand new and Asian; she couldn't afford European. It took a few months to find a job--months of high interest and not being able to make the payments. So as soon as she landed a job doing special ephects for a party planning company, she transferred her debt to a hungry new finance company and got the credit to purchase the car. Money’s tight so eating out is verboten, and her apartment is a shoebox. But the simulated leather steering wheel and how the seat presses against her during acceleration is so worth it.

Feeling like a big shot, she parks her red SUV at the dorm and hops out, wondering what Windy will say when Kyara surprises her. Outside of quick messages, they haven't talked in months.

Cliff waves her through the lobby and soon Kyara is knocking on the door of her old cube. Her new job keeps her busy but today she was able to leave early when the traffic was light and drive to the University. Windy hadn't responded to her message about dropping in, so hopefully she's around.

Windy’s new roommate, Sarh, lets her in. Windy’s on her cot, hidden beneath covers to block out the overhead fluorescent’s simulated afternoon light. Sarh says that Windy's only gotten up to use the bathroom.

Kyara flips the covers off Windy’s head. Electrodes are pasted over each temple. A cord twisted into the first button of her pajamas connects the trodes to something beneath the covers.

Windy, explains Sarh, is into a new product since Hira cut her off. A new dealer is pushing something called mind’gasm. Windy's getting all the free samples she can before the dealer discovers that she’s broke.

After gently shaking Windy's arm, her eyes open.

"Kyara," Windy says slowly, talking as if her mind is occupied with something else. "How are you?"

"You said you were finished with this shit," Kyara says.

"Oh . . . Don't lecture me now Officer Friendly, I'm feeling so good."

"Dammit," Kyara says, and then holds back the rest of what she wants to say. Windy's eyes close again and she frowns whenever Kyara tries to disturb her. Kyara gives up and flips the covers over Windy's head and leaves. Walking back to her car, in the sunlight it shines like a gem. Before she gets on the freeway, she pulls into a gas station and buys some gas. She has nothing in her bank account so she gets it on credit. She knows she shouldn't, but she goes to a burger joint across the street because she isn't really interested in the leftovers in the fridge. Her Buck card is almost maxed out, but when she gets home, she'll shop for a new one with a higher limit.

She knows she shouldn't. But if she acts fast, she can lock in a new deal before they find out she's over extended. She knows she shouldn't, but does because it'll make her feel good.

And life continues--She goes home and makes it happen, hoping she can stay one step ahead.

The end.

Book Review: Containing (un)American Bodies

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 10:41:00 +0000

Containing (un)American Bodies: Race, Sexuality, and Post-9/11 Constructions of Citizenship
by Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen Lugo-Lugo
New York, Rodopi, 2010

Words matter. Especially when a U.S. president utters them, the corporate media echoes them, and other ideological institutions put them into practice as "official discursive tools," as Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen Lugo-Lugo argue succinctly in their new book Containing (un)American Bodies: Race, Sexuality, and Post-9/11 Constructions of Citizenship. After 9/11 Bush used his immense social, cultural, and political power to promote a dangerous dichotomy between "true Americans" and those whom he decided posed a threat to America – not just to its physical security but also to what he and much of the political far right saw as its cultural norms and values. This book will help contemporary readers and future students of this era make sense of the U.S. political and cultural landscape since September 11, 2001.

As is well known, Bush gave voice to and legitimized anti-Muslim, anti-Arab sentiments which led easily and deliberately to an atmosphere of hate toward and fear of all "brown" bodies (to use the books term) suspected of being un-American and/or anti-American. As Bloodsworth and Lugo explain, this official arousal of fear was aimed at expanding the notion of anti-American not just to those who supported terrorism but those who opposed the war in Iraq and questioned blind patriotism, to immigrants, LGBT people and their allies, and even to the incoming President.

While the reader may initially view this subject matter as far too diverse to draw such connections, Bloodsworth and Lugo succinctly and convincingly make their case. Bush successfully used the September 11th terrorist attacks to amplify an existing dichotomy of good and evil as American and un-American that included a notion of "heterosexuality (articulated as 'family values') – associated with what is patriotic and American, and homosexuality (articulated as 'anti-family values') – associated with that is threatening and un-American." This rhetoric translated into official government action, reflected unquestioningly by the mass media, as well as well-funded, highly-motivated right-wing political action. It is no accident that subsequent to Bush's promotion of this rhetoric, right-wing backed groups in numerous states succeeded in banning same-sex marriage (despite existing federal laws on the matter). Bloodsworth and Lugo successfully demonstrate how this rush to contain sexual difference flowed almost naturally from the same rhetoric that promoted fear and the need to contain anti-American threats at home and abroad.

While it is evident that Bush and the Republicans hyped fear and anger about same-sex marriage and terrorism as a means to energize their political base and attack their opponents as "un-American" in the 2004 election, Bloodsworth and Lugo do not reduce this political strategy simply to the use of "wedge issues." The political right's main aim was to transform legal structures to further entrench inequalities as part of an anti-LGBT agenda. Even as public support for the Iraq war collapsed in 2004, Bush and the Republicans easily shifted their anti-terrorism rhetoric to anti-gay rhetoric, and some analysts attributed Bush's slim victory in 2004 to his reclamation of "moral issues" (meaning anti-LGBT policies and rhetoric).

The chapter on immigration is a crucial historical study that is also particularly relevant for today's political landscape. As right-wing moralizers identified LGBT activists with terrorist threats, anti-immigrant activists worked to construct immigrants as a similar threat. In addition to the typical (though false) charge that immigrants "steal" jobs, xenophobic voices characterized them as criminal and illegal. Groups like the Minutemen, with extremist ties to skinhead and neo-Nazi groups, sprang up and threatened violence against immigrants – especially along the border with Mexico. FOX News commentators waged a ceaseless rhetorical war on immigrant communities, especially those from Arabic-speaking and predominantly Muslim countries and Latin America.

Republicans viciously attacked the candidacy of Barack Obama in 2008 by mobilizing this same rhetoric and fear-mongering. Republican Party operatives, as well as the mainstream media, located Obama within the same field of understanding about what constitutes a "real" American that was operative under Bush post 9/11. As Bloodsworth and Lugo state, his attackers sought "to render the body of Barack Obama as threatening and in need of containment" in the same manner as LGBT people, terrorists, and immigrants. In fact, it is no accident that right-wing pundits continued to identify President Obama with each of these categories, e.g., the "birther conspiracy" and repeated claims that Obama is a Muslim who supports terrorists and seeks to undermine America as a "Christian nation."

President Obama's election marked an important turning point away from the manufactured climate of fear and hate that Bush and the Republicans utilized to advance their pro-corporate, pro-war, and anti-democratic agenda. For its cataloguing of hundreds of statements from right-wing sources that created this atmosphere and mobilized this agenda, as well as the careful analysis that links the confluence of these incendiary "wedge" issues in the post 9/11 period, Containing (un)American Bodies deserves wide readership and discussion.

The immediacy of the historical lessons in this book provides are starkly apparent. In today's wave of anti-immigrant threats and rhetoric surrounding Arizona's anti-immigrant law, Republicans are seeking to revitalize stereotypes of immigrants as dangerous and potentially terroristic. However, more and more Americans are strongly resisting this new tide of hate, however. People in all walks of life, from the labor and civil rights movements, religious organizations, artists, activists, and sports figures have stood up against reactionary laws like Arizona's SB 1070. Notably, even prominent police officials in Arizona and elsewhere have resisted these moves, pointing to the fact that communities with large immigrant populations have not seen rising crime rates, and charactering anti-immigrant laws like SB 1070 as potentially dangerous for communities, where cooperation between the immigrant residents and the police has succeeded in preventing crime.

In addition, the need to end the military occupation of Iraq quickly and to pursue non-military alternatives to the current war in Afghanistan are today majority points of view, on which few pro-Republican pundits now waste time characterizing as "un-American." Increasing social movement pressure on the government to reverse or alter key government policies that impact LGBT people, such as the military's "don't ask, don't tell" rule, laws that allow job discrimination against LGBT workers, and unjust and irresponsible limits on marriage, civil unions, and domestic partnership rights, may see positive results soon – with favorable election results for the Democrats. While none of these changes alone will bring about a fully just and equal society, the vocal and active movement for this change signals that a new political terrain, far different from that of the Bush years, is steadily taking shape.