Anti Racist Struggle and Socialism

Metro DC DSA’s Socialist Night School presented by Bill Fletcher.

Social Reproduction and Struggle

To organize at the workplace alone leaves out half the worker‘s own experience of exploitation–speaking as it does of the cash wage but not of prices or of the social wage. More important, it excludes all wageless people from organization. Pensioners, women doing unpaid domestic work, students at school and college, the unemployed and the invalid collecting state benefit–such people are a political resource, needed in struggle and needing it too. Reproduction, whether it be the practical reproduction of labour power or the ideological reproduction of our class system, our relationship to capital, is something in which everyone is involved.

The Local State: Management of Cities and People by Cynthia Cockburn

Not Everyone Must Work

Everyone must work. So they say.

Here’s André Gorz, in Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society:

The imperative need for a sufficient, regular income is one thing. The need to act, to strive, to test oneself against others and be appreciated by others is quite another. Capitalism systemically links the two, conflates them, and upon that conflation establishes capital’s power and its ideological hold on people’s minds. It admits no activity which is not ‘work’, done to order and paid for by those ordering it. It admits no regular income that is not earned from ‘work’. The imperative need for a regular income is used to persuade people of their ‘imperative need to work’. The need to act, to strive, to be appreciated is used to persuade people that they need to be paid for whatever they do.

And here is Kathi Weeks, in The Problem With Work:

Disciplining the poor through the market

Anonymous Guest Post

One of the most striking features about the way the poor are disciplined in the United States is the total banality of it all. For an example, let’s take a look at the 2014 Farm Bill and regulations proposed in February 2016 by the USDA for the implementation thereof.

Prior to the 2014 Farm Bill, in order to qualify as a SNAP retailer, a merchant needed to carry three varieties of each of four categories of staple foods: meat, fish, and poultry; bread and cereals; fruits and vegetables; and dairy products. The February regulations define these as “foods used primarily for home preparation and consumption that provide the main sources of nutrition intake for households.” Retailers also needed to carry perishable foodstuffs in two of these categories.

The 2014 Farm Bill amended these requirements to from three to seven varieties of each type of staple food, as well as increasing the categories where perishables were required from two to three. The rules further require a minimum stock of six of each variety. This amendment was presented as making a larger stock of fresh food, particularly fruits and vegetables, a requirement for a store to accept SNAP benefits.

The Donald Sterling Supremacism No One’s Talking About

Guest post by Jesse Myerson

Amid the great trove of unattractive qualities revealed to be possessed by L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling in a recently-released tape of a conversation between him and his then-girlfriend V. Stiviano, it is understandable that one should have gone underappreciated. But without taking into account his grotesque economic ideology, Sterling’s segregationist Instagram doctrine and less-than-enchanting romantic life lack crucial context.

When Stiviano asks, sensibly, whether he is aware that the athletes to whom people refer when they speak of “the Clippers” are black, Sterling goes full capitalist:

I support them and give them food, and clothes, and cars, and houses. Who gives it to them? Does someone else give it to them?.. Do I make the game, or do they make the game? Is there 30 owners, that created the league?

What he has articulated is capital supremacy, the position that capital is prior to and independent of labor. In a for-profit operation like the L.A. Clippers, the guy who owns the capital and extracts the surplus is the one really pulling the heavy weight, and it’s the athletes he employs who are living high off the league that he and his buddies created. Capitalists, far from being parasitic, are “job creators.”

Five Economic Reforms Americans are Open To

Last week, Jesse Myerson caused a major stir with a Rolling Stone piece, Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For. It’s a great piece, and we should all be fighting for them.

It’s a new year, but one thing hasn’t changed: The economy still blows. Five years after Wall Street crashed, America’s banker-gamblers have only gotten richer, while huge swaths of the country are still drowning in personal debt, tens of millions of Americans remain unemployed – and the new jobs being created are largely low-wage, sub-contracted, part-time grunt work.

Millennials have been especially hard-hit by the downturn, which is probably why so many people in this generation (like myself) regard capitalism with a level of suspicion that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. But that egalitarian impulse isn’t often accompanied by concrete proposals about how to get out of this catastrophe. Here are a few things we might want to start fighting for, pronto, if we want to grow old in a just, fair society, rather than the economic hellhole our parents have handed us.

The piece did two things. First, it drove conservatives absolutely insane, and second, it led to a serious discussion of these policies that previously were largely at the margins of the agenda.

Who knew the reason libertarianism was so noxious was plagiarism?

For reasons that are somewhat baffling, the coverage of Senator Rand Paul’s plagiarism in speeches and writings got wall-to-wall coverage for some time, although it has now died down. I’m not a fan of Paul, and I don’t think this sort of rampant taking of other people’s words and passing them off as his own is acceptable. Yet I find the whole episode strange. Now that it’s over, I wanted to step back to ruminate on the reaction to this and what it means for the left.

Two claims, largely implicit, have become quite common in Democratic-leaning circles, which are in tension.  First, is the idea that libertarians pose an existential threat to the country. Often, libertarian here is used interchangeably for ‘Tea Party,” and while that doesn’t always make sense, it might when it comes to Paul. And while some would make this same claim about the GOP as a whole, libertarians are singled out for particular scorn. Paul, then, is treated as far more threatening that the senior senator from Kentucky, Mitch McConnell. 

Now, I’m not sure how I would rate the two senators from Kentucky.  I’m sure one could make a case here. But it strikes me that the case is generally presumed, and the differences in terms of whose worse are generally presumed to be really large. This is even more troublesome give that, as minority leader, McConnell likely has a great deal more power in the Senate, regardless of what the comparison might tell us in the abstract.

Economic Myths and Other Possible Worlds

Harold Meyerson has a really good piece on “The Failures of Shareholder Capitalism.” I like this for a number of reasons, including that the idea that having socialized ownership (by numerous individuals or more often, institutions) isn’t really the same as 1) the way the economic system was ordered when the economy was far healthier, i.e. in the 50s and 60s, or 2) as the idea of capitalism, which focuses more on individual ownership. (Ok, that bit about stock holding as a form of socialism is my gloss, but it’s a good point whether it gets that label or not).

The whole thing is great but this is especially important.

Still, the myth of shareholder power, and especially individual shareholder power, is continually attested to by corporate managers and their apologists because it legitimates the current system of corporate governance and the division of corporate riches. CEOs don’t acknowledge that the system is rigged in their favor. But the rise of shareholder capitalism — the doctrine that has dominated corporate conduct since the early ’80s, as corporations’ raison d’etre has been reduced to maximizing shareholder value — has been a boon to top executives. They have been able to tie their compensation packages to rising share value (and untie it when share value falls).

The transformation of the shareholder from an individual with a long-term interest in the company to an institutional short-timer with myriad other investments raises a deeper question about corporate governance: Why is it that shareholders, at least theoretically, are entrusted with electing corporate boards? Why aren’t more long-term stakeholders with a genuine interest in the company’s success — say, their employees — also represented on corporate boards, as they are required to be in Germany? German corporations are thriving, even though (or more likely, because) their CEOs are paid radically less than ours and their workers command a higher share of gross domestic product than ours.

I’ve long thought we do ourselves a disservice by simply adopting terms developed long ago to describe very different economies that today serve mostly to legitimate the rule of the powerful and which are not generally taken very seriously by their proponents.  (James Galbraith makes this point is his excellent book The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too.)  The legal realists* did this once before in the lead up to and wake of the Great Depression.  In the aftermath of the Great Recession, brought on by a second resurgence of market fundamentalism, we need to recover that past and extend it.

*Agnostic Liberal had a good post the other day discussing this that’s also worth a read.