It’s a bit disjointed, but we discuss the future of print publishing, left regroupment, electoral politics, among other topics. Damn, look at all that foreshadowing.

Bhaskar Sunkara: What’s going on with New York’s home for 9/11 conspiracy theories and alternative medicine [and thankfully Behind the News with Doug Henwood], WBAI?

Doug Henwood: A mixed bag. It was very nice to get rid of the toxic regime led by program director Bernard White, who presided over a long decline in the station’s quality, audience, and finances. But aside from that sense of relief, there’s no real new direction. The finances have stabilized, but by hysterically pitching some dubious health quackery and conspiracy premiums. We’re not able to ask for money in a dignified fashion on the strength of our own programming. And while the chemtrails and cure-your-diabetes-in-a-week stuff can make the phones ring, the fulfillment rate on the pledges is alarmingly low. Our fundamental problem is that we’ve lost too many sane and/or solvent listeners. I don’t buy the idea that terrestrial radio is dying, but we’ve largely been unable to take advantage of the potential global audience reachable through the Internet. We need more professional, serious, intelligent programming to attract listeners who are put off by the empty corporate slickness of NPR, but it’s hard to know where to start even.

BKS: What electoral policies should the U.S. left be pursuing? Or are we already focused too much on electoral efforts?

DH: I’d say we’re focused too much on electoral efforts. To me, the most promising thing would be to organize around very specific issues, like living wage or single-payer campaigns – things that have great potential appeal and can unite a lot of constituencies in a common struggle. I wouldn’t rule out electoral politics, of course – you don’t want to give up on the state. But nothing higher than the House. When you get to the Senate, and especially the presidential level, you’re on the bourgeoisie’s terrain. None of the third-party or insurgent Dem campaigns – Jackson, Nader, Kucinich, McKinney, whatever – has ever broken away from the cult of personality trap and become an occasion for a real national organizing effort. A presidential campaign just isn’t the place to do that sort of thing, something that the last 20 or 30 years has pretty conclusively proved. It’s best to organize independent movements and parties that might, if we’re lucky, force the higher-ups to take notice.

I was impressed, in reading that debased bit of political gossip Game Change, to learn how bent out of shape Hillary Clinton was by the complaints of the antiwar movement. She was really concerned, and her husband spent hours in the King David Hotel, of all places, writing a devious letter on her behalf, meant to defuse the opposition’s threat. It was all bullshit, of course, but it shows that an active left can have an influence even on the most centrist of Dems. That lesson seems to have been lost, at least until now, in relation to the Obama administration, whose various offenses have been denied, excused, or indulged by unions, peaceniks, greens, and other people who should be behaving better.

BKS: You’ve been publishing your quasi-monthly Left Business Observer for more than 23 years. Do you have any insights on the viability of traditional print publication versus online-only models for the Left?

DH: Actually monthly, now, please! Thanks to my wonderful wife and counseling editrix, Liza Featherstone. And LBO comes out via Acrobat as well as on paper. As for medium, I haven’t solved the problem that plagues everyone in the media these days: how to deal with an audience that now expects to get everything for free, even though it costs more than nothing to produce serious news and analysis. LBO is doing pretty well, but the circulation is still small. While there are some good online outlets, too many of them are just parasites on the newsgathering efforts of the old media, and when those old media die, it could devolve into a giant circle jerk. We all have to figure out how to sustain professional journalism in a post-print world.

BKS: Accumulation and its discontents: is there a specifically Marxist understanding of the current economic crisis that you subscribe to?

DH: Mine, of course, which is that the bourgeoisie launched a successful war on a troublesome working class in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That assault – wage-cutting, speedup, deregulation, outsourcing, union-busting, cutbacks in the welfare state, all the familiar stuff gathered under the name of neoliberalism – created a problem for a system dependent on high levels of mass consumption both to maintain aggregate demand and to secure its political legitimacy. Why put up with the volatility and tsurris of American life if there’s no promise of plentiful gadgetry and upward mobility? So the answer was to counter the downdraft of falling wages with rising borrowing, via credit cards and mortgages. That model seemed to hit a wall in the recent economic crisis, but there’s no real recognition of that fact, and no new model for accumulation.

In orthodox terms, the U.S. would be ready for a serious austerity program, but our ruling class is afraid to push too hard on that, at least for now. So I think we’re going to stumble along for some time until some new economic and political model emerges. Or if one doesn’t emerge, maybe we’ll just fall apart.

BKS: Is the U.S. economy in permanent decline? What of “late” capitalism in general? Can leftists even make such pronouncements anymore?

DH: I always thought “late” capitalism was an overly optimistic term. The system is remarkably resilient. But I do think that the U.S. is somewhere along a long decline, at least relative to the outside world. It’s something that’s going to play out over decades, however, and there doesn’t yet look to be a plausible heir to the hegemon position. China’s still too poor, not to mention politically, militarily, and culturally weak. And the Greek crisis has shown that the EU isn’t really ready for prime time either. It’s been amazing to watch Germany being unable to step up to the role of imperial leadership in Europe, much less on a world scale. To be dominant, a power has to spend, and Germany is too anally retentive to do that.

BKS: The populist Main Street, Wall Street dichotomy is all the rage these days. What to make of it?

DH: Mixed bag. There is an opposition between the masses and the financial elite, of course, but there are many complicating factors. First, as the excellent Sam Gindin likes to point out, a crucial part of neoliberalism has been bringing the working class into the circuits of financial capital, through increased reliance on things like 401(k)’s and other defined-contribution retirement schemes, replacing the traditional defined-benefit kind. (If you’re lucky – about half of American workers have no retirement plan at all.) And second, that dichotomy has no room for real “productive” capital, the economy of goods and services, like office work, manufacturing, or retail. Because workers are paid less than the value of what they produce, that kind of labor generates profits for capital that are the ultimate roots of the games that finance plays.

I’m old-fashioned enough to call it exploitation. Since populism depends on a bogus notion of a “fair” profit, and just disdains unfairly high (measured how, I don’t know) returns, there’s little room for a class-based understanding of accumulation through unpaid labor.

BKS: Your take on Walter Benn Michaels’ controversial critique of identity politics and the erstwhile anti-discriminatory spirit of neoliberalism?

DH: I think that Walter Benn Michaels doesn’t always phrase things to his advantage – he aims to provoke, which is an impulse I deeply understand, but he may end up putting people off who should really listen to what he has to say. The valuable core of it, to me, is that capitalism need not be racist or sexist – equal-opportunity exploitation is theoretically possible, and even a reality in some instances.

Big capital usually supports affirmative action and is deeply committed to workplace diversity. Neoliberalism prides itself on at least a verbal commitment to an economically borderless world, and the free flow of people and ideas as well as capital. What capitalism can’t live with is an end to class exploitation. So you could have half the CEOs of the Fortune 500 be female, 12% or so black, etc., and you’d still have a massively lopsided distribution of income and power. That’s not to say that racism and sexism don’t exist, far from it, but it is to say that they’re not capitalism’s fault in any profound sense.

BKS: Any prospect for a revitalized, not-awful-politically, domestic left? Or are we to just watch the Empire collapse without any force capable of rebuilding something in it’s wake? Objective reality seems to lend itself to cynicism nowadays.

DH: I can’t say there’s a lot of inspiring stuff going on. The Left, such as it is, is divided and weak. Having Obama in the White House has, if anything, made things worse, as otherwise decent people twist themselves into apologetic postures. Maybe this kind of weakness and confusion are symptoms of a society that’s falling apart and there’s not much we can do about it. I hope not. Now that I’ve got a kid – something I came to fairly late in life – I take it more personally now.

BKS: Put much stock into the notion of left regroupment?

DH: I’m not really sure what it means. I know what the words mean, of course, but I don’t see how anything in the present terrain could be improved by better mixing and matching.

BKS: You mean unify the sects and you just end up with a slightly bigger sect, the size of like the SWP in the United Kingdom, the same problems and not a truly “revived” left?

DH: Yes. Exactly that. That whole party model still seems stuck on trying to replicate the success of the Bolsheviks, which is a doomed cause in a rich country in 2010. I’m not at all opposed to building left parties – quite the contrary – but the very word “regroupment” suggests an unhealthy allegiance to a dead model.

BKS: Back to the Obama-era’s effect on the Left. Has it been good for shattering illusions and politicizing young people, or generally corrosive?

DH: I’d hoped that the shattering of illusions would be productive, but it’s happening rather slowly, and maybe causing people just to give up. All the energy, at least for now, is coming from the right. It’s like all the crazy paranoid shit that Hofstadter wrote about is coming back to life with more numbers and force than in a few decades. It’s amazing that a neoliberal president who subsidizes nuclear power, bails out Wall Street, and escalates imperial war is somehow seen as a treasonous socialist. But those loons make the liberals more inclined to defend Obama, to preserve us from the fascist threat they love to invoke. I can hear my inner Trot saying, “Break with the Dems, people!”

BKS: It’s been years since you, Liza Featherstone and Christian Parenti teamed up to write the excellent “Action Will Be Taken,” which critiqued what you called “activistism,” reminiscent of Adorno’s critique of “actionism” in the New Left. Have we progressed any since then?

DH: No, not much. The intellectual level, if anything, is devolving. I hate sounding like an old fart, but all the new media gadgets are now almost serving as a substitute for activistism — now all you need is to broadcast banalities in 140-character servings to think you’re building a movement. Fewer people than ever seem to be interested in thinking about how things work and how to go about changing them for the better.

Dubstep, the social glue responsible for connecting an entire subculture of kids whose common interest is often just partying, has provided a unifying thread an unlikely place: it’s on the soundtracks to both Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Harmony Korine’s recent Spring Breakers. Though the connection may seem at first superficial — Luhrmann’s, after all, resurrects the classic 1920s tale of a self-made man in vain pursuit of past glory, while Korine’s follows four young girls on a spring break bender that turns violent — they actually raise similar questions of the American Dream.

Or, at least, one of them does: Luhrmann’s indulgent, over-the-top adaptation misreads Fitzgerald’s novel, whereas Korine’s self-aware, sexed-up critique of a generation is, while unrelated plot-wise, a more faithful extension of the spirit of Gatsby.

You’d only have to ask a high-schooler, or even a precocious middle-schooler, to appreciate the basics of the The Great Gatsby’s thematics. It is at its core a study of people who want: Jay Gatsby yearns for his former love Daisy Buchanan; Daisy is in turn taken with the conspicuous consumption of Long Island, along with the hordes of New Yorkers who attend Gatsby’s legendary social gatherings. Gatsby and Daisy’s emotional desires are masked by materialism, and the veneer of wealth eclipses all.

Luhrmann confuses that veneer with something of real substance, fundamentally misinterpreting the novel. His airbrushed aesthetic, bright lights, and rowdy soundtrack serve more to romanticize glamor than to question it. The difference between the two films, then, comes down to how they present the pursuit of glitzy revelry, and then how thoroughly (or flimsily) they ironize it.

Luhrmann’s approach to filmmaking resembles a carousal. Gatsby was made in the absence of inhibition, with every impulse indulged. Should we gratuitously use massive, swooping shots to set every scene? Let’s do it. Should we depict the death of Myrtle Wilson, in all of its slow-motion, 30-feet-in-the-air glory, not once, but twice? I can’t see why we wouldn’t. Oh, and can we just take all of that and, you know, make it 3-D? I’m one step ahead of you.

Luhrmann’s childlike inability to draw the line somewhere — anywhere — becomes apparent throughout the movie. When Fitzgerald writes, “A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling,” Luhrmann represents it in a way that is meant to fascinate rather than reconstruct; his curtains, at least 25 feet in length, billow so thoroughly that the room turns into a white kelp forest. And that says nothing of his depictions of Gatsby’s parties, which tend to look like gin commercials. When Jay Gatsby first speaks his name to Nick Carraway at one such event, fireworks explode behind him and an orchestra beings to play.

All this would be artistically sensible if Luhrmann only included an asterisk — some sort of acknowledgement that these parties are not the sort of fulfillment humans should strive for. But instead, he presents glitz without irony, and in doing so curiously allows his movie to endorse the same hedonistic tendencies to which Fitzgerald seemed to be reacting in the first place. The film’s lighting is, shot-for-shot, perfect. But just as an airbrushed supermodel might make for a poor life partner, Luhrmann’s overly-polished aesthetic leaves little room for substantive characters. Even after we learn that Gatsby has been throwing parties in hopes that Daisy comes to one of them, the glamor of Luhrmann’s revelry shots — and the dubstep that accompanies them — continues to uphold the idea that the parties were worth attending.

Spring Breakers is grounded in a similar yearning, as its main characters — Faith, Brit, Candy, and Cotty — descend on St. Petersburg, attempting to vitalize their stagnant lifestyle by exposing it to sunlight and shorelines. Without the money they need to make the trip to Florida, they decide to rob a local restaurant at gunpoint, which allows them eventually to speed on down the Eastern seaboard, toward the trimmings of American spring break culture. Even though their search for meaning involves more cocaine and pistols than most, it’s still a search for meaning.

Whatever it is the girls are looking for in Florida, they find it. One girl calls home and leaves a message on the phone for her grandmother: “I’m starting to think this is the most spiritual place I’ve ever been. I think we found ourselves here. It’s way more than just having a good time. It’s so nice to get a break from reality for a little while.” Another one of Korine’s characters, the cornrowed, metal-toothed rapper Alien, has a proclivity for showing off his belongings. “I’m all about making that money, always and forever,” he likes to say. In one scene, he walks the girls through his weapons collection in the way that Gatsby tries to impress Daisy with his wardrobe.

But what Korine makes clear is that his protagonists have quixotically chosen to conduct their quest for something more in a land of excess, where the beer bongs overflow and the neon burns a little too brightly. Korine’s interstitial shots of parties on the beach, which appear periodically throughout the movie, make it clear that partying may not be the answer; the images portray undulating bodies in oversaturated colors as dubstep music writhes and twists in the background. Shots of colorful lights at parties weave seamlessly into shots of the blue-and-red of cop cars.

It becomes clear that there is such a thing as too much — too much skin, too much alcohol, too much pleasure. Breasts appear so often in the movie that they become props. Luhrmann’s party sequences can be alluring because they remain tasteful, but Korine lets his party scenes surge far beyond desirability. That the film’s hedonistic scenes are punctuated with moments of real tension and grit — at one point, Alien tends one girl’s gunshot wound — only further suggests that Korine is aware of what he’s doing.

Spring Breakers is about a generation whose every need can be catered to with the right mix of drugs and technology. Today, filmmakers have similarly helpful technologies at their disposal — they can use CGI to make characters where there were none, or 3-D to make movies seem larger than larger-than-life. The human tendency to always want more suggests not just that filmmakers could abuse these technologies, but that they will. As Luhrmann filmed and edited The Great Gatsby, it seems that he, along with Faith, Brit, Candy, and Cotty, still didn’t know when enough was enough.

Matt Bruenig objects to Konczal’s characterization of the basic income as “utopian,” on the grounds that it is not something that “proposes to dramatically overhaul society into an entirely unprecedented structure that will usher in a nearly perfect world.” It is only utopian in the very weak sense that it is not currently on the political agenda as something that is likely to be enacted.

It’s certainly true that basic income is hardly utopian in its etymological sense of meaning “nowhere.” A recent article in Le Monde Diplomatique describes an experiment with UBI in an Indian village. The experiment is run by a trade union called the Self Employed Women’s Association, and it found that with just an extra $3.65 per month, “people spent more on eggs, meat and fish, and on healthcare. Children’s school marks improved in 68% of families, and the time they spent at school nearly tripled. Saving also tripled, and twice as many people were able to start a new business.” This is consistent with the results found in basic income experiments in Namibia and in 1970s Canada.

Meanwhile, there have long been critics on the Left who criticize basic income proposals precisely for their perceived lack of utopianism. As Konczal notes, Barbara Bergmann argues that it is more important to secure broader access to specific goods like child care, health care, and education: “The fully developed welfare state deserves priority over Basic Income because it accomplishes what Basic Income does not: it guarantees that certain specific human needs will be met.” In a New Left Review essay, Göran Therborn strikes a similar tone, referring to the basic income as a “curious utopia of resignation” arising in response to welfare state retrenchment and diminished prospects for working class control over the workplace or the means of production.

From the perspective of the basic income’s leftist advocates, however, there is another way in which it can be considered a deeply utopian project. Fredric Jameson discusses two different meanings of utopia in his study of utopian politics and science fiction, Archaeologies of the Future. The first is utopia as a fully-elaborated program for the future society, which is close to Bruenig’s sense of the proposal to dramatically overhaul society. But the second is the utopian impulse, which appears across much broader domains of everyday life and politics, including even “piecemeal social democratic and ‘liberal’ reforms.” Such impulses may not themselves be the program for a utopian society, but they can point in the direction of future programmatic realizations.

The French writer André Gorz was a longtime proponent of the basic income, and is also responsible for a well-known theorization of its utopian transformative potential. In one of his early works, Strategy for Labor, he attempted to do away with the tired Left debate over “reform or revolution” and replace it with a new distinction:

Is it possible from within—that is to say, without having previously destroyed capitalism—to impose anti-capitalist solutions which will not immediately be incorporated into and subordinated to the system? This is the old question of “reform or revolution.” This was (or is) a paramount question when the movement had (or has) the choice between a struggle for reforms and armed insurrection. Such is no longer the case in Western Europe; here there is no longer an alternative. The question here revolves around the possibility of “revolutionary reforms,” that is to say, of reforms which advance toward a radical transformation of society. Is this possible?

Gorz goes on to distinguish “reformist reforms,” which subordinate themselves to the need to preserve the functioning of the existing system, from the radical alternative:

A non-reformist reform is determined not in terms of what can be, but what should be. And finally, it bases the possibility of attaining its objective on the implementation of fundamental political and economic changes. These changes can be sudden, just as they can be gradual. But in any case they assume a modification of the relations of power; they assume that the workers will take over powers or assert a force (that is to say, a non-institutionalized force) strong enough to establish, maintain, and expand those tendencies within the system which serve to weaken capitalism and to shake its joints. They assume structural reforms.

One criticism of the basic income is that it will not be systemically viable over the long run, as people increasingly drop out of paid labor and undermine the tax base that funds the basic income in the first place. But from another point of view, this prospect is precisely what makes basic income a non-reformist reform. Thus one can sketch out a more programmatic kind of utopianism that uses the basic income as its point of departure. One of my favorite gestures in this direction is Robert van der Veen and Philippe van Parijs’ 1986 essay, “A Capitalist Road to Communism.”

The essay begins from the proposition that Marxism’s ultimate end is not socialism, but rather a communist society that abolishes not merely exploitation (the unjust distribution of the social product relative to work performed) but also alienation: “productive activities need no longer be prompted by external rewards.”

They then go on to sketch out a scenario in which a reform instituted under capitalism leads to communism without the intermediary stage of socialist construction. This thought experiment revolves around the achievement of an unconditional, universal basic income. Suppose, they say, “that it is possible to provide everyone with a universal grant sufficient to cover his or her ‘fundamental needs’ without this involving the economy in a downward spiral. How does the economy evolve once such a universal grant is introduced?”

Their answer is that the basic income would “twist” the capitalist drive to increase productivity, such that:

Entitlement to a substantial universal grant will simultaneously push up the wage rate for unattractive, unrewarding work (which no one is now forced to accept in order to survive) and bring down the average wage rate for attractive, intrinsically rewarding work (because fundamental needs are covered anyway, people can now accept a high-quality job paid far below the guaranteed income level). Consequently, the capitalist logic of profit will, much more than previously, foster technical innovation and organizational change that improve the quality of work and thereby reduce the drudgery required per unit of product.

If you extrapolate this trend forward, you reach a situation where all wage labor is gradually eliminated. Undesirable work is fully automated, as employers feel increasing pressure to automate because labor is no longer too cheap. Meanwhile, the wage for desirable work eventually falls to zero, because people are both willing to do it for free, and able to do so due to the existence of a basic income to supply their essential needs. As Gorz puts it in a later work, the Critique of Economic Reason, certain activities “may be partially repatriated into the sphere of autonomous activities and reduce the demand for these things to be provided by external services, whether public or commercial.”

The long-run trajectory, therefore, is one in which people come to depend less and less on the basic income, because the things they want and need do not have to be purchased for money. Some things can be produced costlessly and automatically, as 3-D printing and digital copying technologies evolve into something like Star Trek’s replicator. Other things have become the product of voluntary co-operative activity, rather than waged work. It therefore comes to pass that the tax base for the basic income is undermined—but rather than a crisis, as in the hands of basic income critics, this becomes the path to utopia.

Consider, for example, a basic income that was linked to the size of Gross Domestic Product. We are used to a capitalist world in which the increase in material prosperity corresponds to a rise in GDP, the measured value of economic activity in money. But as wage labor comes to be replaced either by automation or voluntary activity, GDP would begin to fall, and the basic income with it. This would not lead to lowered standards of living, because the falling GDP here also denotes a decline in the cost of living. Just like the socialist state in certain versions of traditional Marxism, the basic income withers away. As van der Veen and van Parijs put it, “capitalist societies will smoothly move toward full communism.”

The capitalist road to communism is truly a utopia. Not only in the colloquial sense of a total transformation of a society, but also in its overly simplified and rationalistic picture of social evolution. As Jameson notes, utopias are defined as much by their closures and exclusions as their positive programs, as much by what they cannot say as what they can. A utopia often says more about the present in which it was written than it does about the future it depicts.

In the case of the capitalist road to communism, the things left out include the political struggles that would ensue if social development threatened to evolve the capitalist class out of existence, gradually sapping their profits and their social power. This began to manifest itself even under the meager basic income in the Namibian experiment: white landlords were deeply hostile to the basic income and denied the evidence of its benefits, perhaps because they are “afraid that the poor will gain some influence and deprive the rich, white 20 percent of the population of some of their power.” Also brushed aside are the ecological limits that might make true abundance elusive. Both of these are themes I attempted to flesh out in “Four Futures.” A third issue, which I’ve discussed a bit elsewhere, is the ingrained gender norms that may be reinforced by expanding the domain of “voluntary” labor, which often amounts the imposition of unpaid work on women. But the conceptual clarity of van der Veen and van Parijs’ rendition is enlightening in its very implausibility and incompleteness, a demonstration of the utopian impulse contained in an apparently timid policy proposal.

Richard Epstein, the libertarian legal scholar and author of such classics as The Case Against the Employee Free Choice Act and Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws, has helpfully chimed into the discussion about the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed over 1100 people so far by zeroing in on who’s really to blame: the workers.

Specifically, those workers who have been pushing for better conditions at factories such as Rana Plaza:

Ironically, that labor agitation was itself one of the contributing causes to the collapse at Rana Plaza. Quite simply, the occurrence of such disruptions—and the threat of future ones—places enormous strains on the firms that have to deliver goods to foreign purchasers in order to remain in business. The threat of a repeat protest has led many firm bosses to step up the pace of work in the factories, which in turn means longer shifts, more workers, more extensive use of heavy equipment in order to make up for lost production, and stockpiling goods. That maneuver turned into a fatal insurance policy against future labor disruptions.

Writing as a member of the Hoover Institution’s “Property Rights, Freedom and Prosperity Task Force,” Epstein conjures up images of a kind of libertarian commando unit parachuting into disaster zones, ready to inform victims of their culpability in their own deaths at a moment’s notice. Thus Epstein adds to the literature of Western commentators warning Bangladeshi workers and their sympathizers not to take the wrong lesson from this (yes yes, very unfortunate event) by getting too uppity. Slate’s Matt Yglesias was one of the quickest to respond to the deadliest industrial disaster in recent history, taking it as an opportunity to wax about the virtues of lax safety standards for poor countries, while the Spectator’s Alex Massie reassured us that “industrial accidents – even tragedies, are…a price the Bangladeshis themselves are prepared to pay” to be included in the global supply chain.

Of course, in their rush to pontificate, Yglesias and Massie never bothered to check if Rana Plaza was legally abiding by Bangladesh’s building codes (it wasn’t) or if Bangladeshis really are content paying such a price (judging by the subsequent demonstrations, it seems not). Yglesias, to his credit, offered a feeble half-apology after, by his account, maturely getting over his initial reaction to the outrage his shoulder-shrugging provoked, which was mild annoyance.

Epstein at least waited for the dust to settle, and thus avoided making the sort of basic factual errors (like Yglesias who said the deaths were caused by a fire, not building collapse) that might lead more annoying readers to conclude such pundits don’t think very hard about impoverished workers dying horrifying and preventable deaths halfway across the world. He does make his own dubious presumptions, however, about the tradeoff between wages and safety standards: that, in Epstein’s mind, Bangladesh’s factory owners gave workers a choice between better pay and not having roofs collapse on their heads, and they chose the former. Or that, were it not for periodic wage hikes imposed on them by unions, the factory owners surely would have invested the money they saved into workplace safety rather than offering even more competitive prices to Benneton, or, say, keeping it for themselves.

In practice, wages and safety standards tend to rise together through collective bargaining, as employers are generally loath to improving either except under worker pressure, and workers do not see them as an either/or proposition. Epstein has a hard time believing this is possible, at least without the heavy hand of government intervention. Unions and the nanny state are peas in a pod, because unions can only set wage standards in an industry “if they induce the government to take measures to restrict the entry of non-union firms that could underbid them.”

Epstein has evidently never heard of trigger agreements. But as one of the leading crusaders against the Employee Free Choice Act, he is certainly familiar with the rise of private election agreements (“card check” being the most famous type) between unions and employers which bypass the government entirely. In reality, workers can and do set wage and safety standards without government assistance in regimes that are hostile to organizing, such as “right-to-work” states. Here, the increasing adoption of such private agreements and abandonment of the National Labor Relations Board election process is precisely a reaction by American unions to the perceived toothlessness of that agency, and a general inability of the government to enforce existing labor laws.

It is likely this specter that informs Epstein’s circular logic and which worries him the most: not the unlikely resurgence of labor market regulation but the more likely resurgence of labor militancy as a result. People who dislike business regulations tend to also dislike unions and trial lawyers, but like to think they can somehow have none of the above. But slash safety protections, and you get accidents resulting in angry workers, lawsuits, or both. Epstein is smart enough to see the connection, so it leads him to the prima facie un-libertarian conclusion that what we need to prevent private wage agreements between workers and employers is, yes, an activist state:

The threat of massive labor market turmoil strengthens the case for the effective public enforcement of state building codes. These codes are directed only toward safety issues, and do not touch the hot-button topics of wages and working conditions. Yet, if Bangladesh could only make good on this one public commitment, it would take the safety issue off the table, which would in turn remove from local unions the one key issue that makes their activist campaign so credible in the eyes of workers.

In other words, the danger of Bangladesh’s negligent safety enforcement isn’t just the massive loss of human life, it’s a far graver threat: the impulse to take collective action, which must be squelched to save Bangladeshis from their own reckless desires for better pay and treatment on the job.

What is most surprising about Epstein’s argument is that, between the typical union-bashing and griping about minimum wage laws, it contains a rather robust defense of workplace safety protections. When forced to choose between greater state intervention in the form of stricter safety regulations, and greater worker agency in the form of unions, he goes with the former. Epstein would probably prefer neither, but it’s notable which he considers the greater evil.

As libertarian arguments for big government go, Epstein’s is comparatively benign. “Give me five years of despotism, and France shall be free,” proposed Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot. “Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism,” said Friedrich Hayek. Turgot may have been kidding; Hayek, a defender of Chile’s Pinochet dictatorship, clearly was not. Epstein isn’t arguing for despotism, just proper enforcement of safety laws. Insofar as he calls for regulation in the public sphere to forestall collective bargaining agreements in the private sphere, however, the lesson is the same: when it comes to keeping a thumb on uppity workers, sometimes a little nanny state isn’t such a bad thing.

“It’s the Hotel Altamont,” according to a New York Post article detailing one Bushwick landlord’s efforts to evict his tenants. Forward thinking rentier Andy Chau apparently hired the Forbidden Ones Motorcycle Club to “terrorize the residents” of two buildings on Thames Street in Bushwick — a well-known “hipster” enclave — who are living in illegally converted industrial spaces under the protection of the 1982 New York City loft law.

Two gang members assaulted the woman who was later evicted by Chau in order to make way for the Forbidden Ones and their biker parties. Although the building once housed an Occupy Wall Street film collective who documented the Zuccotti Park evictions, the Post’s two writers reassure their readership that all of this is simply the latest chapter in the place’s “colorful history.”

The OWS-affiliated livestream group Global Revolution was evicted from 13 Thames St in early January 2012 by the Department of Buildings, who went to some lengths in order to show that the building was “imminently perilous to life.”

The confluence of heavy-handed tactics and the seeming collaboration between landlords, city agencies, and a violent Hell’s Angel-like gang is telling and in many ways typical. A year before their biker piece, the New York Post ran an article entitled “W’burg has art attack: Hipsters facing boot” which covered the final stage in the long battle between long-time residents of the 338 Berry Street Lofts — artists who had moved into and transformed both building and neighborhood during the mid-1990s — and their landlord. This is the now familiar story of gentrification in New York City.

According to late Marxist geographer Neil Smith:

The central mechanism behind gentrification can be thought of as a ‘rent gap.’ When neighbourhoods experience disinvestment, the ground rent that can be extracted from the area declines, which means lower land prices. As this disinvestment continues, the gap between the actual ground rent in the area and the ground rent that could be extracted were the area to undergo reinvestment becomes wide enough to allow that reinvestment to take place. This rent gap may arise largely through the operation of markets, most notably in the United States, but state policies can also be central in encouraging disinvestment and reinvestment associated with gentrification. But only wealthier people are able to afford the costs of this renewed investment. Integral with these economic shifts are social and cultural shifts that change the kinds of shops, facilities and public spaces in a neighbourhood.

Smith offers a dry, but emphatically structural account of this process, which he first theorized in the late eighties with Soho and the Lower East Side in mind. Gentrification has since become central to neoliberal urbanization generally, and New York City in particular, under the developer-driven Bloomberg administration.

But why bother with “dry” and “structural” when you can tune-in to the “fucking hipster” show?

Unlike Smith’s rigorous Marxian analysis, most popular accounts from the spurious creative class mystifications of Richard Florida to standard issue conservative populist diatribes forget the larger forces and primary movers in this process, which is instead reduced, metonymically, to the catchall figure of the hipster.

Surveying the last thirteen years’ worth of New York Times’ articles — the length of time when, according to a recent Gawker compilation of New York Times hipster ethnographies, our paper of record has been shocked by and enamored with the H-word — this capacious figure encompasses both the ironic and the sincere. The cynical and the committed. Professional artists and trustafarian dilettantes. Studiously cool fashionistas and earthy, backward-looking community gardeners raising chickens. Apolitical trend-mongers and, in the wake of Occupy, radical anarchists — presumably like the ones who resided at 13 Thames Street.

But why worry about these people, when the Times has a tattooed and mustachioed dummy and its writers know how to make him speak? And speak he does, on a regular basis, about small batch pickle making, DIY literary history, and the new unicycling purists. Better to focus on the kinds of things that suggest effete privilege — all their free time frivolously spent and with whose money? — than offer a critique of the truly privileged and the socioeconomic system which sustains their privilege.

On topics ranging from the capitalist dynamics of gentrification to the casualization of employment among ostensibly middle class Millennials, the “fucking hipster” show beats staid structural analysis every time — even for many members of the self-identified Left.

And what is the hipster anyway? This perennial, and now largely meaningless question animates n+1’s What Was The Hipster? Highlights of this essay collection include Mark Greif’s useful genealogy of hipsterdom’s long reign in which he connects the post-war “white negro” to the more recent, although now dated, trucker cap and mustachioed fetishists of seventies-era white ethnicity in addition to several other methodologically diverse case studies like the “hipster primitive.”

What unites these sometimes compelling, and frequently self-loathing, essays is dissatisfaction with actually existing bohemia. The pamphlet would have been more accurately titled “Who Took the Counter- out of the Counterculture?” One can recognize in these sociological investigations a more sympathetic version of that broadly left-wing critique of US bohemian life and its cooptation best exemplified by the nineties-era Baffler, when founding editors Thomas Frank and Chis Lehmann mercilessly skewered the subversive postures of both grunge and the dot.com era’s cyber-libertarians — avatars all of what Frank called “the commodification of dissent.”

Yet the n+1 project is also an emphatically retrospective account of a phenomenon that had, apparently, passed by the end of the aughts into a set of predigested styles available at malls across America. It’s a verdict ratified by the Occupy encampments of 2011, when the ostensibly apolitical demographic under examination experienced their Damascus moment and found a semi-coherent but recognizably oppositional politics.

Even as the New York Times and its ilk now use hipster-bashing to delegitimize the new political awareness among the same un- and underemployed twenty- and thirty-somethings — previously taken to task for their avoidance of politics — the same bashers employ this all-purpose dummy to ventriloquize their own refined and slightly ridiculous consumption habits.

And while Rupert Murdoch’s reactionary gazetteers at least acknowledge the ongoing, and (in the case of 13 Thames Street) partly political character of the evictions in which they delight, the enlightened New York Times will always opt for the “fucking hipster” show — the 21st century bourgeois liberal’s preferred flavor of minstrelsy — over any ‘hard times’ depiction of downward mobility among artists, anarchists and other riffraff.

That, after all, could depress today’s gentrifiers or tomorrow’s property values.

But it all came to a head last week when the newspaper of record ran a revealing, if typically clueless, piece by humorist Henry Alford in this vein entitled “How I Became A Hipster.” As with most Times lifestyle pieces, one realizes upon completion that the title tells you all you need to know.

In this case, a middle-aged Manhattanite explores the wild precincts of North Williamsburg in an attempt to remake himself “hipster”: “So I decided to embed myself among the rooftop gardeners and the sustainability consultants and the chickeneers. I wanted to see what the demographic behind nanobatched chervil and the continually cited show ‘Girls’ could teach me about life and craft cocktails. I wanted to see what sullen 25-year-old men had to tell me beyond ‘Leave me alone during this awkward period of beard growth.”

While Alford’s tongue-in-cheek ethnography strives for laughter, the author makes his purpose clear with the next sentence as he describes his visits to several, by-and-large recently opened, shops where he tries on a $225 plaid shirt or gets a straight razor shave at an expensive barber shop, while spewing one-liners about the facial hair that distinguish the hipsters who serve him. Alford implicitly offers his readers a functional definition of the hipster at the very least: a service sector employee who entertains — if only in providing the materials for droll condescension — while he caters to your needs.

The entire piece is little more than an advertisement aimed at the adventurous city shopper on the hunt for high-end quirk. Here is a brave, new subgenre of copy meant to reassure the iconoclastic investment banker that the new North Brooklyn is there for the taking, as one recent review of a Greenpoint eatery more ably conveys: “the wind whips in off the East River there sharp as razors, and old women squabble in Polish on the street. You will need your adventure boots to get there, perhaps.”

Alford’s piece, like the Greenpoint restaurant review, is aimed at the latest residents of Williamsburg’s luxury towers and loft conversions, now cleansed of the actual artists whose rebel ambience nonetheless commands top dollar from the professionals who displaced them.

In 2013, the Williamsburg waterfront which Alford surreptitiously trolls in assembling his hipster drag is now chock full of the same finance, media and high-end business types who inhabit Michael Bloomberg’s luxury city across the river. And with not insignificant help from the Times. In this essay, Alford himself serves as class proxy, buying several flavors of social distinction from the hipsters who work in a neighborhood increasingly indistinguishable from Battery Park City, or in the case of the Edge — a waterfront condo development — a Houston office park.

According to the canons of a more populist antihipsterism, this turn of events represents a kind of poetic justice as the first wave of predominantly white and middle class artists, bohemians, and poseurs are displaced by their wealthier peers, such as Alford, in the same way these neighborhoods’ long time residents — working class and minority — were displaced.

While this reaction is an understandable one, why settle for poetic justice in lieu of the real thing, especially when most of those inhabitants remember the bad old days of disinvestment and urban decay? And who benefits from what is, in the end, a misleading brand of moral denunciation rather than structural analysis?

The choice between a carcinogenic and garbage-strewn Williamsburg that is still economically available to the working class or an environmentally sound and “green” North Brooklyn predicated on city subsidized luxury development and working class displacement is a specifically capitalist dichotomy, which has nothing to do with the artists and wannabes who, through no fault of their own, are the first to go once they’ve provided a wedge for developers.

Smith is again instructive in this regard, since he does indeed note that, at least initially, “students, artists, and many other parts of the populace are part of the process of ‘cracking’ neighbourhoods that many other professionals may be unwilling to colonise.” But as Smith discerned in the “antigentrification” campaigns on the Lower East Side,

“Die Yuppie Scum” isn’t a very good analysis of gentrification. Even yuppies have very limited choices in the housing market, albeit far more choices than the poor. By contrast, the owners of capital intent on gentrifying and developing a neighbourhood have a lot more “consumer choice” about which neighbourhoods they want to devour, and the kind of housing and other facilities they produce for the rest of us to consume. There is a huge asymmetry between the power of multi-millionaire capitalist corporations in the market and the “power” of someone trying to rent a flat on an average city income. So while the question of consumption and the availability of consumers is by no means irrelevant, it is secondary to the far greater power of capital.

We should retire “hipster” as a term without referent or political salience. Its zombie-like persistence in anti-hipster discourse must be recognized for what it is: an urbane, and socially acceptable, form of ideologically inflected shaming on the part of American elites who must delegitimize those segments of a largely white, college educated population who didn’t do the “acceptable thing.”

The anti-hipster censure here includes a healthy dose of typically American anti-intellectualism, decked out in liberal bunting, subtle homophobia, and recognizably manipulative appeals to white, middle class resentment, now aimed at the lazy hipster, who either lives on his trust fund or, more perniciously, abuses public assistance, proving how racist templates are multi-use tools.

Our power elites’ rhetorical police action becomes increasingly necessary as large swaths of the people lumped under the hipster taxon slip into the ranks of the long-term un- and underemployed. Once innocuous alternative lifestyles could potentially metamorphosize into something else altogether. Better to frame “alternative lifestyle” in terms of avant-garde trend setting without remainder, providing suitably rarefied consumption options for Bloomberg’s new bourgeoisie, as they buy locally sourced creativity on Bedford Ave.

But consumption doesn’t end with urban gardening or artisanal mayonnaise emporia. From a 2002 New York Times piece entitled “Where the Girls Are, and the Commute’s Easy:

“If I want to go out and meet a 24-year-old girl, I can’t imagine meeting one in Manhattan,” said Andrew Bradfield, 35, a real estate developer who lives in TriBeCa. ”They want Mr. Big. They like bankers. They want to be taken shopping at Barneys. But Williamsburg is packed with 21- to 24-year-olds having a great time with no pretense.’’

Although other readers expressed disgust, I admired our developer’s candor. It gives me a vision of tomorrow’s red blockbuster, in which grindhouse cinema meets agitprop. Picture the scene: a hipster girl lures our enterprising rentier back to the loft space she shares with seven other precariously employed twenty-somethings, promising sex. Once there, he strips down, only to find himself ambushed by his date and her roommates, who tear him limb from limb.

The girls hit the streets, brandishing those recently liberated bourgeois body parts. A crowd gathers around them across the divide. The underemployed hipsters and unemployed longtime residents of Bushwick, Williamsburg, and Greenpoint unite and lay siege to Manhattan in a climax that will finally satisfy those moviegoers who really wanted more Bane and less Batshit last summer.

Full Communism. Scored by Animal Collective, of course.

When I’m feeling mischievous, I think of using that line as an epigraph for an essay on Nietzsche and libertarianism. How many teenage boys, after all, have found their way into the free market via Nietzsche? None, one insider tells me; a lot, says another. My impression is that the latter is right, but good data is hard to come by.

Every ten years, Liberty Magazine polls its readers about their intellectual influences. The magazine draws up a list of candidates to vote on. Nietzsche is never on it. Even so, he gets written in each time by the readers. So much so that the editors have been forced to acknowledge on more than one occasion that should they put his name on the pre-approved list of possible influences he might draw more votes than some if not many of the others.

Ask any scholar about this connection between Nietzsche and libertarianism and she’ll tell you those teenage boys don’t know what they’re talking about. Nietzsche loathed capitalism almost as much as he loathed capitalists, whom he loathed almost as much as he loathed economists. Still I’ve wondered: Might there not be more than the misguided enthusiasm of adolescents connecting Nietzsche to the modern movement for free markets?

Today The Nation is publishing an essay by me — “Nietzsche’s Marginal Children” — that attempts to provide an answer. It’s long; I’ve been working on it for more than a year. But it’s my best guess as to what the connection might be.

As I make clear in the piece, it’s not a connection of influence: Though there’s been some claim that Friedrich von Wieser, who taught Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, was taken by Nietzsche — and though Schumpeter, who plays an interesting supporting role in this story, was influenced by Nietzsche and Nietzschean theorists of elite politics — the evidence for claims of direct influence are thin.

No, the connection between Nietzsche and the free-market movement is one of elective affinity, at the level of deep grammar rather than public policy. It will not be found at the surface of their arguments but in the lower registers: in the startling symmetry between Nietzsche and marginal theories of value; in the hostility to labor as the source or measure of value; in the insistence that morals be forged in a crucible of constraint; in the vision of an idle class of taste-makers creating new values and beliefs.

Along the way, “Nietzsche’s Marginal Children” makes a number of other claims.

First, ever since Walter Kaufmann, writers and readers have been convinced that Nietzsche is an apolitical or anti-political thinker. Four decades of postmodern and post-structural Nietzsches have done little to dislodge this belief; indeed, in a curious way, they have only amplified it. As this piece makes clear, I don’t think that position tells the whole story. The Nietzsche that emerges in this essay cares much about the fate of high culture, absolutely, but he’s also attuned to need for creating a polity or politics that might protect high culture from the masses, who’d been growing increasingly agitated over the labor or the social question, as it was variously called. (The fear and loathing of various working-class movements is a critical point of contact between Nietzsche and the economists who helped inspire libertarianism.) As Don Dombowsky has argued, if there is one consistent political position in Nietzsche’s thought, it is his hostility to socialism. Far from being a simple knee-jerk reaction or peripheral concern, Nietzsche’s antipathy to socialism was symptomatic of — and grew out of — a range of ideas about value, work, appearance, and caste that were central to his cultural and political vision.

Second, it’s long been noted that fin-de-siècle Vienna was a crucible of modernism in the arts and humanities as well as in politics, on the left and the right. The dying Habsburg Empire gave us Wittgenstein, Hitler, and Freud. But while there is now an academic cottage industry devoted to this notion, few have noted that fin-de-siècle Vienna also gave us the Austrian School of economics — Wieser, Böhm-Bawerk, Mises, Hayek, Schumpeter (ish), and more — and that the Austrian economists have as much a claim to the modernist inheritance as Schoenberg or Klimt. “Nietzsche’s Marginal Children” seeks to put the Austrians back in Vienna, where Nietzsche was a presiding influence, and to read them as contemporaries of fascism and Freud. If nothing else, I hope my reading of the Austrians restores them to their rightful place in the modernist pantheon, and reveals the philosophical range and cultural significance of the questions they were raising. For the economic questions the Austrians were raising were are also very much cultural and philosophical questions of the sort that Nietzsche and his successors wrestled with.

Third, speaking of the F word, we know that many fascist intellectuals read or were influenced by Nietzsche. And while my piece takes that connection as a given — which is not the same, it should be noted, as saying that the fascist interpretation of Nietzsche is the only or correct one or that all of Nietzsche’s roads lead to fascism; empirically, we know, that’s not the case — it seeks to parse a different connection. Where one road from Nietzsche (I’m speaking figuratively) led to the fascist notion that heroic or high politics could be recreated in the modern world, another led down a different path: to the notion that heroic or high politics could not (and perhaps should not) be recreated but that it could be sublimated in the free market. Fascism and the free market, in other words, offered two distinctive answers to the labor question Nietzsche so acutely diagnosed. And while one answer would have a remarkably short shelf life, the other, well, we’re still living it.

Which brings me to the final point. While the disparity between the free-wheeling philosophy of the market and the reality of coercive capitalism has long been known, the last four decades have sharpened it. Partly because of the rise of an aggressive defense of untrammeled markets, partly because of the assault on the welfare state and social democracy. For some on the left, today’s disparity between libertarian theories of the market and the reality of capitalism proves that the idea of the free market is a simple ideological mystification. “Nietzsche’s Marginal Children” takes a different tack: it tries to show that the practice is built into the theory, that it is not elided there but embraced.

In writing this piece, I hope  to begin — and this is really just the beginning of a long-term project on the political theory and cultural history of the free market — to make good on a promissory note in The Reactionary Mind, which is now available in paperback. There I briefly noted that the libertarian defense of the market — while often treated as a source of tension on the right because it conflicts with the conservative commitment to stability and tradition, virtue and glory — is in fact consistent with the right’s reactionary project of defending private hierarchies against democratic movements from below. But with the exception of a chapter on Ayn Rand, I didn’t really develop that argument. So I was often asked how Hayek and Mises and other libertarian thinkers fit in. Particularly since these thinkers seemed to voice a commitment to liberty that was out of synch with my portrait of the right’s commitment to domination and hierarchy, coercion and rule. So I’ve tried to show in “Nietzsche’s Marginal Children” what liberty means for the libertarian right, particularly for Hayek, and how consistent that vision is with a notion of aristocratic politics and rule.

I’m writing this post in Luxembourg, where I’m presenting at a conference in honor of European historian Arno Mayer. I’ve known Arno and his work since I was an undergraduate history major at Princeton. As I said in The Reactionary Mind, Arno (along with UCLA political scientist Karen Orren) was one of the two most important influences on my thinking about the right. And it was from Arno’s Persistence of the Old Regime that I first stumbled upon a way of thinking about Nietzscheanism as something more than the philosophy of and for apolitical aesthetes. So it’s fitting that I write this post here. For in Arno’s vision of an aristocracy that manages to persist long past its shelf date, in part through it capacity for reinvention, particularly in the economic realm, we see a glimpse of Nietzsche von Hayek and Mises von Nietzsche, the Leopold and Loeb of modern libertarianism.

(ASIF HASSAN / Getty Images)

Five tumultuous years of governance by the Pakistan People’s Party have paid off with the start of a historic election season in Pakistan. These elections, scheduled to take place in less than a week, will mark the first democratic handover of power from one elected government to another in 66 years of independence.

But what was supposed to be a rare feel-good moment for a beleaguered nation has in recent weeks acquired an additional perverse significance: with 100 people already killed, the 2013 elections will go down as the bloodiest in Pakistani history. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), more commonly known as the Pakistani Taliban, has for the last decade agitated against the previous two governments of Pakistan for their role, however tepid, in attacking militant havens in the country. The wrath of the TTP, previously reserved for government installations and security forces, has now descended upon the general public — the political candidates and voters participating in the 2013 elections, especially those belonging to the three main secular parties of Pakistan.

This particular crescendo of pre-election bloodshed is different from the usual sort of cannibalistic violence that commonly rages in the country, the kind which occurs when one segment of society feels justified in deeming another segment ‘wajib-ul-qatl’ — worthy of death — for believing in the wrong prophet or praying the wrong way. This election season has changed everything; even the right kind of Muslim is no longer safe from being targeted. Nor has the integrity of this pro-West citadel in Asia ever been so precarious or under assault. According to Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud, the TTP is embarking on a concerted campaign to “end the democratic system” in Pakistan and bring errant political parties in line with Taliban demands, especially regarding Pakistan’s stand with the West in the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The secular parties of Pakistan, which at the start of elections were castigated as representing the status quo of corrupt, inefficient politics, have now recast themselves as heroic, pro-democracy forces, particularly the Awami National Party which is the last line of Pashtun resistance to Taliban control in the northwest. The parties and their supporters are hastening to give meaning to the senseless deaths, particularly of the numerous children that have died despite having nothing to do with the electoral process.

At times like these, when martyrs for democracy are being readily supplied in the fight against the Taliban, it is critical to examine the rhetoric around the survival of democracy in Pakistan which anti-Taliban forces have rallied around. Simply by virtue of taking place these elections will not signify the growth of true democracy to Pakistan or the end of the Taliban threat.

Beyond simply outlasting a bloody election showdown against the TTP, the future leaders of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan will have to drastically reform an extractive and unaccountable state apparatus in order for the democratic project to have a chance of succeeding against the violent and ideological onslaught of anti-government militants.

With 180 million people, 100 nuclear warheads and nearly 50 banned terrorist outfits, Pakistan has always been too strategic for the politics of the country to be swayed by what its people want. As the unwanted stepchild of the anti-colonial South Asian independence struggle, Pakistan came out of the partition of the subcontinent with an ignominious legacy as Britain’s military buffer zone against threats from the west. Though the British kept all of India under a firm paternalistic rule, the provinces that make up present-day Pakistan were deliberately denied political development because of their utility as a recruiting ground for soldiers and landowning elite collaborators. Though constitutional reforms came towards the tail end of British rule to give greater political representation to locals, they were little more than a cosmetic attempt to put an Indian face onto autocratic rule.

To this day, the country functions according to the structure developed over two centuries under the British Raj; the Civil Services of Pakistan, the backbone of government, traces its lineage to the colonial era Indian Civil Services — the elite English bastion of political power in India. The acknowledged expertise of bureaucrats, combined with their high-class social background, has vested them with veto power over the demands of ‘inept’ politicians in the formation of state policy. This has resulted in a modern Pakistani state that is not run by politicians but rather said to run in spite of them.

The travails of a historically autocratic state have been intensified by the curse of geography. If it were located anywhere else, Pakistan would be dismissed as irrelevant — and might then enjoy greater control over its domestic policy. Instead, it is surrounded by Afghanistan, a hotbed of dysfunction where the War on Terror was inaugurated, Iran, a declared rogue state attempting to develop nuclear capabilities, and China and India, the two major emergent threats to American economic might. Before 1989, Pakistan was also neighbor to the Soviet Union. With such borders, Pakistan has traditionally served as a critical outpost of support to Western interests in a hostile region.

In light of this, it is understandable why the governors of Pakistan, civilian and military, failed to establish accountable and responsive institutions of political economy. It also explains why the country is held hostage to the neoliberal economic program and security paradigm. Since 1948 when the Pakistani army leveraged the country’s location vis a vis Soviet Russia for a lucrative position as a US proxy in South Asia, global stakeholders have jumped at the chance to pay for the privilege of maintaining some form of control over Pakistan’s goings on. Presiding over a resource rich but economically weak nation, the country’s leaders have been unable to fight the impulse to accept. This has encouraged outward-looking politicians to mortgage Pakistan’s foreign policy and loot as much as they can from state coffers before they are inevitably and unceremoniously thrown out of power. The free flow of money has disincentivized military governments — for military governments are the disproportionate beneficiaries of Western aid — from doing the hard work of creating a sustainable tax infrastructure in the country, one that would push the people of Pakistan to invest in their own country, or financial regulatory bodies which would require the government to show returns on that investment.

The most fundamental obstacle, however, to the implementation of democratic governance in Pakistan has been ideological. As control over people has become territorialized by the borders of an ever-shrinking state, ideologies particularly pan-Islamist ones have found themselves competing for limited territory and votes — and therefore power. In such an environment, the atmosphere of tolerance has been shattered by the arrival of an exclusivist religious ideology from the Persian Gulf. Seeking regional proxies in South Asia to counter Shiite Iran, the Gulf States and particularly Saudi Arabia have invested a large amount of capital in the Pakistani state while promoting the development of a strict and doctrinaire Wahhabi Islam. It has penetrated the country via new Saudi-funded madrassas, or religious schools, that are blossoming across the country, some of which have subsequently been implicated in training terrorists. These institutions have made a home in the absence of a state that long ago abdicated responsibility for responding to demands for public education and welfare.

While military governments have often been responsible for subjugating the country to foreign national interests, it has been democratic governments that have presided over a steady loss of social and moral sovereignty in Pakistan. The popularly elected government of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto first capitulated in 1973 to the demands of fundamentalist right wing parties like the Jamaat-e-Islami to establish state-sponsored sanction for certain types of Islam and to declare all those who didn’t fit their categories to be separate and unequal. This was done as recompense for the crucial role played by the leaders of these parties, particularly Maulana Maududi, in securing Arab patronage for a state suffering from the withdrawal of US aid after the end of military rule in 1968.

The commitment to maintaining the religious supremacy of Al Saud in the Muslim world has exacted an unimaginable cost from Pakistanis in lives and sovereignty. A Pandora’s box was opened when the government first encouraged society to deprive certain segments of the population from the rights of citizenship. Now, other self-appointed arbiters of true Islam like the TTP are using this very same rhetoric of an exclusivist Islam against the state which nurtured it.

It has become fashionable to create a simplistic demarcation between civilian and military governments as democratic and undemocratic in writings about Pakistan. Frankly, this distinction simply doesn’t hold — the actualization of state responsibility and public accountability must be sought behind the veneer of military uniforms and election ballots. A week before Pakistanis go to the polls, violent ruptures are appearing in the faulty edifice of a post-colonial state that was never developed with the voting public’s needs in mind.

The autonomy and integrity of the nation has long been the plaything of others. Now the Taliban are providing the single greatest impetus in recent times for national soul-searching. Martyrdom for the sake of democracy in Pakistan will only be meaningful if state and society succeed in formulating a functional and responsive government. Otherwise, the ideological vacuum and lack of public support of the present Islamic republic will provide an easy path for a calculating and determined militant opposition to enforce its repulsive dogmas on the country.

Amid twinkling fingers and Guy Fawkes masks, few were pining for central committees. Occupy’s emergence was welcomed. The movement galvanized radicals, bringing the language of class and economic justice into view. Yet many saw a certain arrogance underlining the protests. Occupy, in part a media event that mobilized relatively few, was quick to assert its novelty and earth-shattering significance.

“Our model worked” was the refrain, cutting short debate with representatives from the gloomy socialist left. A disconnect from the lineages of past movements — movements that energized and accomplished more — was for some a point of pride. The posture was all the more tragic, because Occupy’s potential went beyond the minuscule core that laid its foundation. It rested in the millions who saw in it their discontent with austerity regimes, wage cuts, unemployment, and financial abuse. OWS, the argument of many socialists went, now drifting towards irrelevance, lacked the experience and political strategy to rally these people to action.

Of course, no diverse movement emerges out of an apolitical era and latches immediately onto a unified and comprehensive critique. Politicization is a process.

In this context, the translation of Lucio Magri’s The Tailor of Ulm, a history of the rise and fall of the Italian Communist Party, once the most powerful and influential one in the West, is perfectly timed. With the Communist movement long dead and Italian politics vacillating between the dry and technocratic and the bombastic and corrupt, that’s an odd pronouncement. But the history of the PCI is the history of a vibrant and deeply political organization that in a few short decades embedded itself within the Italian working class, attempting to chart a new course between Stalinism and social democracy. Its premature disappearance left that class in disarray. And today, Italy’s anti-austerity movement is almost as weak and scattered as our own.

So Rome inspired no one at Zuccotti. Unlike, say, Athens. In Greece, the far left has come close to leading a governing coalition and a radical extra-parliamentary movement has been fighting for years to stave off the European austerity packages.

But it goes unnoticed that the Left’s rise in Greece is a result of a unique history. Almost alone in Europe, that country’s unapologetically Stalinist Communist Party and its Eurocommunist splinters clung to life after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This tradition of working class organization, even in its ossified “Party” form, has fueled eclectic protests that make Occupy look like a tea party. Or the Tea Party.

“Eclectic” and “ossified” seem as if they don’t belong together. Today, the Old Left is invoked as a convenient foil: humorless, militaristic, rigidly holding onto a stale ideology. It’s a critique that has roots in the New Left. But the revolution danced before Emma Goldman, much less Abbie Hoffman.

As Magri explains, the Italian Communist Party incubated a social movement and a real community:

In the evening you went to a meeting on your bicycle or moped, where you would discuss the newspaper articles or membership campaigns; then you came back late to eat a plate of tripe or have a drink or two at the cafe attached to the House of Labor.

The web of solidarity made it possible for the unemployed to get by with no income and to feel a sense of belonging and power, whatever their personal ability or status. It was similar to the way the early German Social Democratic Party earned the loyalty of workers by filling the holes in the Bismarckian welfare state. Late night dances and sporting events were just as important as propagandizing.

But what made the Italian Communist Party, so different than the Soviet monolith it followed and then sparred with? Though he documents the Great War’s disorienting effect on an ascending European workers’ movement, the core of Magri’s history starts in 1944, the year party boss Palmiro Togliatti returned from exile. The Italian Communist Party had long been a marginal force, with only a few thousand members throughout the fascist era. Its main asset was an intellectual inheritance from Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci critiqued Stalinist orthodoxy and grappled with the unique problems revolutionaries had to deal with in the West, where capitalist hegemony stood not just in the coercive power of the state, but within civil society.

But, for all his effort preserving Gramsci’s prison writings, Togliatti was for most of his life an orthodox Stalinist. He was, however, also a skilled organizer who was able to position the communists at the vanguard of a growing resistance movement. The PCI emerged from World War II with widespread popular support and a base so militant that it had to be restrained. The creation of a mass party capable of governing, after all, would require more than a putsch.

This so-called “Salerno turn,” which disarmed Communist partisans was supported by Stalin, as well. But something unusual happened after. Togliatti set in motion a model that would pose an alternative, democratic road to socialism and challenge aspects of the Soviet model. His protégé Enrico Berlinguer, a father of Eurocommunism, would make the rupture between the PCI and Moscow absolute.

But in the immediate postwar period, the contradictions of an avowedly revolutionary party shoring up the state did not come to the fore. Italian conditions — war-ravaged, underdeveloped to begin with — favored this approach. The PCI played a major role in drawing up one of the most progressive constitutions in Europe and, despite being excluded from national government after 1947, ran local and state administrations efficiently, proving that it could also “make the trains run on time.” Its success paid off. Within a decade, with membership well over one million, the PCI was not only the largest Communist party in the West, it was second only to the German SPD as the largest mass membership party in Europe. A little more than a decade before, the PCI was an isolated Leninist vanguard composed of a few hundred, largely expatriated, anti-fascist intellectuals.

Most importantly, the party played a vital role in fostering civil society after Mussolini’s long interlude. The Left presided across much of postwar Italian culture. To the PCI, cultural predominance was not meant to be an achievement in its own right, but a necessary prerequisite to power.

But perhaps confirming Max Shachtman’s distinction between Stalinism in power and “official Communist” movements in opposition, this vibrancy was not a result of a break with the Soviet Union. The party received millions from Moscow annually until the 1980s and its leadership not only joined the Cominform in denouncing Tito, it supported the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, as well. As Magri notes, the PCI was neither a Soviet shill nor completely independent during this transition period — and its leadership showed a parallel mix of rigidity and creativity.

After joining as a young man in the mid-1950s, Magri gravitated to the left-wing of the party. Critiquing an increasingly reformist leadership, amid the upheavals of Italy’s “long 68,” Magri and other dissidents created the journal il manifesto. Student and worker radicalization in the Sixties had taken the party by surprise. Amendola, an ex-resistance member and a leader on the PCI’s right, claimed to see streaks of “anarchist nihilism” in the protests. Other apparatchiks followed suit, fighting a two-front battle against the bosses and the “ultra-leftists.” Pier Paolo Pasolini’s sentiment on witnessing the Italian student movement, “Poliziotti figli di proletari meridionali picchiati da figli di papà in vena di bravate,” was not unique.

But Magri saw potential in the new upsurge and thought the party’s gradualist approach did not fit the moment. New contradictions had emerged over the past decade, he argued, and the conservative posture that might have made sense in the immediate postwar period no longer did now. The central committee had other plans. Under Berlinguer, the PCI distanced itself further from Moscow, but this separation was under the banner of “Eurocommunism,” not the quasi-Trotskyist leanings of Magri’s group. Magri soon found himself, along with his co-thinkers, expelled from the party, a party that he still pledged allegiance to, seeing it as not only redeemable, but the Italian working class’ legitimate representative.

As general secretary from 1972 to 1984, Berlinguer formulated the “historic compromise.” In the same way the early capitalist class made peace with elements of the ancien régime and remade society in its own image, while keeping the symbolic trappings of aristocracy around. Communists, he postulated, could share power with capitalists, while cementing working class hegemony. Practically, it was a stupendous failure. The PCI ended up propping up a fragile Christian Democrat-led government, getting little in return for their service to capital. The uproar after the leftist terrorist group Red Brigades assassinated that party’s Aldo Moro put a quick end to the experiment. The PCI, a long target and frequent denouncer of the Red Brigades, received a public backlash after the killing.

What were the Italian communists doing? They had helped create a republic, had garnered the support of more than a third of the population, and governed major cities and whole regions, but had nothing to show for it at the national level. When there was finally working class militancy at the base, its reaction was to turn rightwards, help restore conditions for stable accumulation, and seek accommodation with the Right. Before long the party — still with a mass base and significant electoral support — would make the rightward turn official, dropping the iconography of October and embracing the language of social democracy in 1991.

But they did so at a peculiar moment. The crisis of the Western socialist tradition was two-fold: traditional social democracy had withered almost as much as official communism. For decades, the center-left had tasked itself with the burden of governance, delivering welcomed doses of socialism within the capitalist framework. The crowning achievement of postwar social democracy, the welfare state, represented a high point in human civilization. The state was wielded, not smashed, and class compromise, not class struggle, fostered economic growth and shared prosperity previously unimaginable.

But social democracy faced the structural crisis in the 1970s that Michal Kalecki, author of “The Political Aspects of Full Employment,” predicted decades earlier. Against the anticipation of some Leninist, near-full employment and a cushy welfare state made workers bold, not docile. They made militant wage demands. Capitalists were able to keep up with them when times were good, but when stagflation hit — the intersection of poor growth and rising inflation — capital suffered from a crisis of profitability. Neoliberalism’s success came in curbing this inflation and restoring profits through a vicious offensive against the working class.

Social democratic parties that sought to administer advanced economies in the neoliberal age, especially with the pressures wrought by globalization, had to adapt their platforms to this new reality. It has often meant, such as in the case of New Labour in Britain, betraying the principles and constituencies that these parties built their legacies around. At its best, it has yielded a “progressive neoliberalism,” with certain European nations, like Sweden, maintaining much of their social safety net. But the emancipatory core of this tradition — pushes for decommodification and a nominal commitment to a post-capitalist future — has been completely lost.

Some of the PCI’s failures then can be chalked up to historical circumstance. It could have neither moved right nor stayed in its contradictory posture. But looking back at then leader Achille Occhetto’s decision to advocate for the party to be renamed the Democratic Party of the Left, the remnants of the Italian far-left are less forgiving. They see it as an unnecessary action that dissolved decades of hard-work and organizing. Magri agrees, but he doesn’t see the PCI’s dissolution into social democracy and later social liberalism, as the natural result of a creeping reformism that first emerged at Salerno.

After all, the PCI’s motive, finding a “third way” between Leninism and social democracy in Western European conditions, was not necessarily reformist. Even the term used by the Italians, “structural reforms,” was the same used by New Left theorist André Gorz: certain reforms short of revolution, short of smashing the state, not only improve the conditions of people in the present, they lay the terrain for more sweeping structural changes in the future. Attempting such a political strategy within the traditional “Party form,” was not unusual either, since that organizational structure predates Leninism, something that Lenin, self-consciously modeling the German SPD to clandestine conditions, would not have disputed.

Magri knows the last point and writes cogently about the early social democratic movement. He laments the dissolution of the PCI, while acknowledging objective factors that led to it — an aging membership, the onerous legacy of the Communist experiment. But his way forward is nothing more than left-wing “umbrellas,” organizations that can take scattered resistance and identitarian movements and rally them together. One, two, three World Social Forums. It’s an absurdly facile solution for a man who was an unrepentant Marxist, aiming to abolish classes, a set of social cleavages that have existed since the Neolithic Revolution.

When activists energized by Occupy do look towards one of the few bright spots on the radical left — the rise of Syriza in Greece — they sometimes show a similar naivety, imagining that Greek “resistance” can be easily replicated domestically. What’s lost is that the legacy of serious, disciplined organizations, both social democratic and socialist, rooted in the Greek working class, made this resistance possible.

Given the Left’s lofty goals and the political impasse it finds itself in, a look back at the Italian Communist Party, despite its ultimate failure, is a strong reminder of the merits of conscious political work and of the path not taken between the horrors of state socialism and the bankruptcy of modern social democracy.

As someone who made a certain amount of my reputation by using the Star Trek universe to illustrate the dangers of strong intellectual property law, I feel obligated to comment on the recent court decision against the entity commonly referred to as Prenda Law. The case combines copyright battles, Star Trek, and pornography — if I can slip in a picture of a cute animal, I may be able to construct the Platonic ideal of a popular Internet post.

The case, decided in the District Court for the Central District of California, concerns a group of lawyers engaged in a particularly egregious form of copyright trolling. Their strategy was to file a large number of lawsuits accusing individuals of illegally downloading a single porn video, the copyright for which was apparently assigned to one of the lawyers’ groundskeeper on the basis of a forged signature. The basis for these lawsuits was quite flimsy, but the firm had no real intention of winning the lawsuits in court. Instead, they would offer to settle — and as the court decision notes, the offer was “for a sum calculated to be just below the cost of a bare-bones defense.” This, combined with the embarrassment of being publicly linked with downloading porn, was apparently enough to extort money from a significant number of people.

The tangled organizational web woven by the trolls is shown in the image below, taken from the court decision. It won’t shock anyone who followed This American Life’s story about patent-trolling front companies. In this case, though, the strategy of obfuscation ultimately contributed to Prenda’s undoing, as the judge concluded that its only purpose was to “shield the Principals from potential liability and to give an appearance of legitimacy.”

It’s also worth noting, amid concerns over ISP monitoring of user traffic, that actually being able to correctly identify downloaders was superfluous to Prenda’s strategy. They claimed to show that their targets had used Bittorrent to download the video. Yet the judge points out that they never bothered to “conduct a sufficient investigation to determine whether that person actually downloaded enough data (or even anything at all) to produce a viewable video.” Nor did they make any effort to “conclude whether that person spoofed the IP address, is the subscriber of that IP address, or is someone else using that subscriber’s Internet access.” Why bother, when they never intended to defend their claims in court? “When faced with a determined defendant . . . they dismiss the case.”

All of this would be signficant enough just for providing an extreme example of the way copyright law can be exploited within the American legal system — what the court decision calls “the nexus of antiquated copyright laws, paralyzing social stigma, and unaffordable defense costs.” But the author of the decision, judge Otis Wright, took things to another level entirely when he chose to write a decision littered with Star Trek references, beginning with an opening quotation from Spock in Star Trek II: “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

It only gets better from there, as Wright unloads his scorn on what he refers to as “the porno-trolling collective.” An analogy to the Borg begins by explaining why “resistance is futile” to the porn-trolling scheme, and several pages later notes that some other attorneys who colluded with the main culprits “were not merely assimilated; they knowingly participated in this scheme.” In his concluding remarks, Wright observes that

Though Plaintiffs boldly probe the outskirts of law, the only enterprise they resemble is RICO. The federal agency eleven decks up is familiar with their prime directive and will gladly refit them for their next voyage. The Court will refer this matter to the United States Attorney for the Central District of California.

Watching these scumbags get their comeuppance gives this story a happy ending. But as usual, the real scandal is what’s legal. There’s no happy ending for Jammie Thomas, the working class mother of four who’s still on the hook for $222,000 for the crime of sharing 24 songs on the Internet. And while bottom-feeders like Prenda get upbraided in court, high class patent trolls likeNathan Myhrvold get puffed up as brilliant innovators by Malcolm Gladwell in the pages of the New Yorker. Unfortunately, we may yet look back on Prenda Law as the real innovators, who were just a bit too audacious and a bit too far ahead of their time.

In Behind the Kitchen Door, Saru Jayaraman finally reveals what many of the 10 million people who work in the rapidly growing U.S. restaurant industry face daily while cooking and serving food. She reframes the meaning of sustainability to include justice for these workers. Jayaraman tells stories of her eleven years as a union organizer in New York and leader of the Restaurant Opportunities Center, and the workers and organizers she’s met and marched with along the way.

The stories are sad. Chefs hurl insults at immigrant servers and bussers (“You stupid Mexican! You don’t know how to work. You don’t know how to do your fucking job”). Managers refuse to follow through on raises even after promotions. Supervisors suppress workers’ potential: One manager told Daniel, a Latino worker, “You don’t know how to communicate with our clients. You’ll always be a runner.” Bartenders and servers are denied paid sick time off, forcing some to work until serious injury disables them.

But management is just part of the problem. Jayaraman discusses what has been for decades the core policy environment restaurant workers toil within: the legal minimum wage for restaurant workers is $2.13 per hour. This is part of the legacy of former Republican Presidential hopeful Herman Cain who, as leader of the National Restaurant Association (the other NRA) lobbied fiercely to keep tipped workers’ federal minimum wage low even as it rose — albeit slowly — for other workers. While federal law mandates employers pay the difference between lower minimum wage and federal minimum wage, Behind the Kitchen Door tells stories of restaurant managers forcing workers to report that they made the money anyway. Currently, the median wage for cooks and servers is just $9.02 per hour. Wait staff have three times the poverty rate of the rest of the U.S. workforce.

Jayaraman’s accounts are enough to disillusion any foodie. What she reveals behind the kitchen door is truth: truth about wage theft and tip garnishment, truth about women hosts being forced to flash or kiss their bosses before clocking in or getting paid; truth about the challenges women and people of color face in ascending to management positions; truth about darker-skinned workers consistently being relegated to the back of restaurants.

She also shares the truth about what’s possible. Jayaraman writes of worker-organizers who successfully striked to compel fancy restaurants in Midtown Manhattan to offer overtime, while also mobilizing consumers to write letters to restaurant ownership urging fair wage policies. She asks readers not just to tip better, but also to be vocal in restaurants: after paying for a meal, talk to management about whether workers have the opportunity to advance, whether they are committed to promoting more women and people of color, whether they are committed to paying fair wages.

While talk of sustainable food can seem like a pet project for privileged Americans, Jayaraman’s analysis returns this discussion to a practical analysis of class and critiques systems that, fundamentally, devalue the laborer in pursuit of profit.