his is not a manifesto. Manifestos provide a glimpse of a world to come and also call into being the subject, who although now only a specter must materialize to become the agent of change. Manifestos work like the ancient prophets, who by the power of their vision create their own people. Today’s social movements [...]]]>

his is not a manifesto. Manifestos provide a glimpse of a world to come and also call into being the subject, who although now only a specter must materialize to become the agent of change. Manifestos work like the ancient prophets, who by the power of their vision create their own people. Today’s social movements have reversed the order, making manifestos and prophets obsolete. Agents of change have already descended into the streets and occupied city squares, not only threatening and toppling rulers but also conjuring visions of a new world. More important, perhaps, the multitudes, through their logics and practices, their slogans and desires, have declared a new set of principles and truths. How can their declaration become the basis for constituting a new and sustainable society? How can those principles and truths guide us in reinventing how we relate to each other and our world? In their rebellion, the multitudes must discover the passage from declaration to constitution.

Early in 2011, in the depths of social and economic crises characterized by radical inequality, common sense seemed to dictate that we trust the decisions and guidance of the ruling powers, lest even greater disasters befall us. The financial and governmental rulers may be tyrants, and they may have been primarily responsible for creating the crises, but we had no choice. During the course of 2011, however, a series of social struggles shattered that common sense and began to construct a new one. Occupy Wall Street was the most visible but was only one moment in a cycle of struggles that shifted the terrain of political debate and opened new possibilities for political action over the course of the year.

Two thousand eleven began early. On 17 December 2010 in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, twenty-six-year-old street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, who was reported to have earned a
computer science degree, set himself on fire. By the end of the month, mass revolts had spread to Tunis with the demand, “Ben Ali dégage!” and indeed by the middle of January, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was already gone. Egyptians took up the baton and, with tens and hundreds of thousands regularly coming out in the streets starting in late January, demanded that Hosni Mubarak go too. Cairo’s Tahrir Square was occupied for a mere eighteen days before Mubarak departed.

Protests against repressive regimes spread quickly to other countries in North Africa and the Middle East, including Bahrain and Yemen and eventually Libya and Syria, but the initial spark in Tunisia and Egypt also caught fire farther away. The protesters occupying the Wisconsin statehouse in February and March expressed solidarity and recognized resonance with their counterparts in Cairo, but the crucial step began on 15 May in the occupations of central squares in Madrid and Barcelona by the so-called indignados. The Spanish encampments took inspiration from the Tunisian and Egyptian revolts and carried forward their struggles in new ways. Against the socialist-led government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, they demanded, “Democracia real ya,” refusing the representation of all political parties, and they forwarded a wide range of social protests, from the corruption of the banks to unemployment, from the lack of social services to insufficient housing and the injustice of evictions. Millions of Spaniards participated in the movement, and the vast majority of the population supported their demands. In occupied squares the indignados formed assemblies for decision-making and investigative commissions to explore a range of social issues.

Even before the encampments in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol were dismantled in June, the Greeks had taken up the baton from the indignados and occupied Syntagma Square in Athens to protest against austerity measures. Not long after, tents sprang up on Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard to demand social justice and welfare for Israelis. In early August, after police shot a black Briton, riots broke out in Tottenham and spread throughout England.

When a few hundred pioneer occupiers brought their tents to New York’s Zuccotti Park on 17 September, then, it was their turn to take up the baton. And indeed their actions and the spread of the movements in the United States and across the world have to be understood with the year’s experiences at their backs.

Many who are not part of the struggles have trouble seeing the connections in this list of events. The North African rebellions opposed repressive regimes and their demands centered on the removal of tyrants, whereas the wide-ranging social demands of the encampments in Europe, the United States, and Israel addressed representative constitutional systems. Furthermore, the Israeli tent protest (don’t call it an occupation!) delicately balanced demands so as to remain silent about questions of settlements and Palestinian rights; the Greeks are facing sovereign debt and austerity measures of historic proportions; and the indignation of the British rioters addressed a long history of racial hierarchy—and they didn’t even pitch tents.

Each of these struggles is singular and oriented toward specific local conditions. The first thing to notice, though, is that they did, in fact, speak to one another. The Egyptians, of course, clearly moved down paths traveled by the Tunisians and adopted their slogans, but the occupiers of Puerta del Sol also thought of their struggle as carrying on the experiences of those at Tahrir. In turn, the eyes of those in Athens and Tel Aviv were focused on the experiences of Madrid and Cairo. The Wall Street occupiers had them all in view, translating, for instance, the struggle against the tyrant into a struggle against the tyranny of finance. You may think that they were just deluded and forgot or ignored the differences in their situations and demands. We believe, however, that they have a clearer vision than those outside the struggle, and they can hold together without contradiction their singular conditions and local battles with the common global struggle.

Ralph Ellison’s invisible man, after an arduous journey through a racist society,developed the ability to communicate with others in struggle. “Who knows,” Ellison’s narrator
concludes, “but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” Today, too, those in struggle communicate on the lower frequencies, but, unlike in Ellison’s time, no one speaks for them. The lower frequencies are open airwaves for all. And some messages can be heard only by those in struggle.

These movements do, of course, share a series of characteristics, the most obvious of which is the strategy of encampment or occupation. A decade ago the alterglobalization movements were nomadic. They migrated from one summit meeting to the next, illuminating the injustices and antidemocratic nature of a series of key institutions of the global power system: the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the G8 national leaders, among others. The cycle of struggles that began in 2011, in contrast, is sedentary. Instead of roaming according to the calendar of the summit meetings, these movements stay put and, in fact, refuse to move. Their immobility is partly due to the fact that they are so deeply rooted in local and national social issues.

The movements also share their internal organization as a multitude. The foreign press corps searched desperately in Tunisia and Egypt for a leader of the movements. During the most intense period of the Tahrir Square occupation, for example, they would each day presume a different figure was the real leader: one day it was Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Prize winner, the next day Google executive Wael Ghonim, and so forth. What the media couldn’t understand or accept was that there was no leader in Tahrir Square. The movements’ refusal to have a leader was recognizable throughout the year but perhaps was most pronounced in Wall Street. A series of intellectuals and celebrities made appearances at Zuccotti Park, but no one could consider any of them leaders; they were guests of the multitude. From Cairo and Madrid to Athens and New York, the movements instead developed horizontal mechanisms for organization. They didn’t build headquarters or form central committees but spread out like swarms, and most important, they created democratic practices of decision making so that all participants could lead together.

A third characteristic that the movements exhibit, albeit in different ways, is what we conceive as a struggle for the common. In some cases this has been expressed in flames. When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, his protest was understood to be against not only the abuse he suffered at the hands of the local police but also the widely shared social and economic plight of workers in the country, many of whom are unable to find work adequate to their education. Indeed in both Tunisia and Egypt the loud calls to remove the tyrant made many observers deaf to the profound social and economic issues at stake in the movements, as well as the crucial actions of the trade unions. The August fires of rioting in London also expressed protest against the current economic and social order. Like the Parisian rioters in 2005 and those in Los Angeles more than a decade before, the indignation of Britons responded to a complex set of social issues, the most central of which is racial subordination. But the burning and looting in each of these cases also responds to the power of commodities and the rule of property, which are themselves, of course, often vehicles of racial subordination. These are struggles for the
common, then, in the sense that they contest the injustices of neoliberalism and, ultimately, the rule of private property. But that does not make them socialist. In fact, we see very little of traditional socialist movements in this cycle of struggles. And as much as struggles for the common contest the rule of private property, they equally oppose the rule of public property and the control of the state.

In this pamphlet we aim to address the desires and accomplishments of the cycle of struggles that erupted in 2011, but we do so not by analyzing them directly. Instead we begin by investigating the general social and political conditions in which they arise. Our point of attack here is the dominant forms of subjectivity produced in the context of the current social and political crisis. We engage four primary subjective figures—the indebted, the mediatized, the securitized, and the represented—all of which are impoverished and their powers for social action are masked or mystified.

Movements of revolt and rebellion, we find, provide us the means not only to refuse the repressive regimes under which these subjective figures suffer but also to invert these
subjectivities in figures of power. They discover, in other words, new forms of independence and security on economic as well as social and communicational terrains, which together create the potential to throw off systems of political representation and assert their own powers of democratic action. These are some of the accomplishments that the movements have already realized and can develop further.

To consolidate and heighten the powers of such subjectivities, though, another step is needed. The movements, in effect, already provide a series of constitutional principles that can be the basis for a constituent process. One of the most radical and far-reaching elements of this cycle of movements, for example, has been the rejection of representation and the construction instead of schemas of democratic participation. These movements also give new meanings to freedom, our relation to the common, and a series of central political arrangements, which far exceed the bounds of the current republican constitutions. These meanings are now already becoming part of a new common sense. They are foundational principles that we already take to be inalienable rights, like those that were heralded in the course of the eighteenth-century revolutions.

The task is not to codify new social relations in a fixed order, but instead to create a constituent process that organizes those relations and makes them lasting while also fostering future innovations and remaining open to the desires of the multitude. The movements have declared a new independence, and a constituent power must carry that forward.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s latest work, Declaration, is now available.

f you hang out with industrial designers, one thing you may have noticed is that they’re really into chairs.

In fact, tastes are predictable enough that you can often tell a designer’s favorite chair maker from his or her shirt. Black button-down? Mies van der Rohe. Black turtleneck? Peter Opsvik. Low-cut black V-neck [...]]]>

f you hang out with industrial designers, one thing you may have noticed is that they’re really into chairs.

In fact, tastes are predictable enough that you can often tell a designer’s favorite chair maker from his or her shirt. Black button-down? Mies van der Rohe. Black turtleneck? Peter Opsvik. Low-cut black V-neck and conspicuous hair product? Campanas. Every design school graduate wants a cool-looking chair in their portfolio, and chair design can be a savagely competitive field. If you can be bothered to read to the back of Wallpaper Magazine, I imagine you’ll find the page where they list all the job openings for the position of Famous Designer: “Need not apply unless strangely enthusiastic about crafting beautiful, terrible furniture for rich people.”

I hate to piss on the party, but chairs suck. All of them. No designer has ever made a good chair, because it is impossible. Some are better than others, but all are bad.  Not only are chairs a health hazard, they also have a problematic history that has inextricably tied them to our culture of status-obsessed individualism. Worse still, we’ve become dependent on them and it’s not clear that we’ll ever be free.

It sounds absurd to claim that chairs are dangerous. They’re comfortingly ubiquitous and seem almost too boring to be harmful. But when one considers that the average Briton, for instance, spends over fourteen hours seated per day, relying on chairs for support while working, relaxing, commuting, eating, and sometimes sleeping, it’s easy to believe that chairs could have a serious impact on public health.

It turns out that they do and the figures are grim: last year, the American Cancer Society wrapped up a fourteen-year longitudinal study of 120,000 participants and discovered that sitting for extended periods during the day dramatically increased participants’ risk of death. The result held even among participants who exercised regularly, and although there’s the usual confusion over causation and correlation, the study falls atop a growing pile of evidence that long times spent seated are a contributing cause of heart disease, obesity, diabetes, depression, and practically innumerable orthopedic injuries. It does not matter if you are young, eat well and live an otherwise active life. Just being seated, in excess, will hurt you.

Yet these results are misleading. They make it look like the problem is just that we sit too much. The real problem is that sitting, in our society, usually means putting your body in a raised seat with back support – a chair. Sitting wouldn’t be so bad if we didn’t sit on things that are bad for us.

What makes chairs so awful for the body? That’s a complicated question to answer, because different chairs get different things wrong. Uncomfortable chairs typically put adverse pressure on some part of the body or require excessive muscular work in order to sit. This can cause soreness and encourage the sitter to adopt slouched postures that restrict circulation, impede respiratory and intestinal function, and lead to musculoskeletal injuries.

Comfy chairs are even worse. By encouraging the sitter to remain in a single static position for long durations without moving, they put extended, unrelieved stress on the spine, weaken the muscles that support the body’s frame and prevent injury, and cause the same circulatory problems as their less comfortable counterparts. And that’s just the beginning.

There was a time when idealistic furniture companies like Hermann Miller prophesied that a safe chair design would emerge from the murky sort-of-science of ergonomics. But the ergonomics literature, pockmarked as it is with controversy and confusion, offers little insight.

No one even knows what a “good” chair would have to do, hypothetically, let alone how to make one. Some ergonomists have argued that the spine should be allowed to round forward and down in a C-shaped position to prevent muscular strain, but this pressurizes the internal organs and can cause spinal discs to rupture over time. Others advocate for lumbar support, but the forced convexity that this creates is not much better in the short run and can be worse in the long: it weakens the musculature of the lumbar region, increasing the likelihood of the very injuries it’s meant to prevent. There are similar debates over seat height, angle and depth; head, foot and arm support; and padding.

Galen Cranz, a sociologist of architecture and perhaps the world’s preeminent chair scholar, has called ergonomics “confused and even silly.” For designers without a scientific background, it’s a clusterfuck.

But admirable efforts have been made, though with only limited success. A number of Scandinavian designers have designed ball chairs, kneeling chairs, and chairs that encourage sitting in several different positions. These are improvements but not total fixes. They also frequently don’t work properly at common table heights and their unconventional appearances make them unacceptable in most workplaces.

After decades of trying, perhaps it’s time to admit that there is no way to win.

If chairs are such a dumb idea, how did we get stuck with them? Why does our culture demand that we spend most of every day sitting on objects that hurt us? What the hell happened?

It should be no surprise to readers of Jacobin that the answer lies in class politics. Chairs are about status, power, and control. That’s why we like them. Ask any furniture historian about the origins of the chair and they’ll gleefully tell you that it all started with the throne.

Some time in the Stone Age, probably between 6,000 and 12,000 years ago, high-status individuals in some cultures began to sit on small raised platforms, just large enough to hold a single person and with a backrest to support or frame the sitter. This was an effective way to designate elevated status among people who otherwise sat on the ground – much more so than stools, which lacked a back, and benches, which accommodated more than one person. The earliest evidence of these primitive thrones comes from figurines excavated in southeastern Europe, but single-person seats with a back were important status symbols in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, as well.

Obviously our chairs today are utterly different from ancient Egyptian thrones, but the throne-like properties of chairs and their resulting importance as class markers have been the key historical factors behind their rise. The general trend at most points in Western history has been that upper-class people sit in a certain type of chair – typically the crappiest, most damaging design available at the time – and everyone else tries to imitate them.

During the Middle Ages, chairs were not common in the Western world at all. After the Visigoths sacked Rome, their habits of squatting and sitting on the ground became the predominant ways for commoners to sit and until the Renaissance even wealthy feudal households had very little furniture because they had to keep moving around to avoid getting sacked themselves. The richest families would have had a single massive chair for the exclusive use of the master of the house; this chair was typically too heavy to move (to keep it from getting stolen when the house got sacked). Tables were boards on trestles, which were set up in front of the chair rather than the other way around, a practice that we still reference today in the phrase “chairman of the board.”

Eventually life got easier for the rich and lavish furniture became more widespread among the upper class. Style became increasingly important in furniture design through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and chair making, previously the domain of generalist woodworkers, became a specialized trade in its own right. Tellingly, furniture in this period was typically designed based on trends in decorating fashion rather than physiological concerns. Despite increasing use, however, chairs remained an accessory for relatively affluent households until the nineteenth century. Poor people sat on stools, benches, their beds, or improvised objects like barrels and trunks.

That changed with the Industrial Revolution. Suddenly chairs were being made cheaply in factories and more people could afford to sit like the rich. At the same time, labor was being sedentarized: as workers moved en masse from agriculture to factories and offices, laborers spent more and more time sitting in those newly mass-producible chairs. As usual, class aspirations determined what people bought: body-conscious innovations like patent chairs, which were adjustable, and rocking chairs, which encouraged movement, sadly received only marginal acceptance from the wealthy and saw limited use.

And so it was that from the turn of the twentieth century on, chairs had society in their clutches.

As chairs became prevalent in schoolrooms, they became a tool for teachers to control the movement of children, whose healthy tendency toward activity made them difficult to teach. Today, children in the developed world learn early that sitting still in a chair is part of what it means to be an adult. The result is that by the time they actually reach adulthood, most have lost the musculature to sit comfortably for prolonged periods without back support.

As if social and physiological dependence on chairs weren’t bad enough, designers have screwed us once again by building yet another level of dependence into our environments themselves: offices and kitchens are often fitted with work surfaces fixed at standard chair heights, chairs are a fixture in almost every form of vehicular transport, and computer monitors, lighting, and other devices are often designed in such a way that they’re difficult to use unless seated at a table. Chairs are, so to speak, part of the furniture. Not only is there no way to win, there’s no way to escape.

We’re faced, then, with a couple of depressing conclusions. One is that chairs are a sort of inanimate parasite, ensuring their continued production by addicting each successive generation of kids. The other is that they’re here to stay for the foreseeable future.

I’d love to end this essay with a cry for a cultural shift away from chairs and toward more active sitting, on the floor or squatting or whatever, but really, we’re stuck with this shit for a while. The best we can hope for from chairs right now is a lesson on the dangers of fashion and a historical counterexample to the myth that the public acts in its own collective interest. If you want to sit healthily, you’ll have to take matters into your own hands; the best habit to develop is not to stay seated for more than ten minutes at a time.

If you read at an average speed, you should get up right now and walk around.

Colin McSwiggen is pursuing an MA in design at the Royal College of Art. He hates chairs, but he actually really admires Peter Opsvik and even likes Wallpaper just a little bit. Most days, no one in his studio wears black.

n the fall of 2009 I was approached by Hal Clifford, executive editor of Orion Magazine, and asked to write an essay about American philanthropy, especially in relation to environmentalism. From the first I was dubious about the assignment. I said, “Not-for-profit organizations like you cannot afford to attack philanthropy because if you [...]]]>

n the fall of 2009 I was approached by Hal Clifford, executive editor of Orion Magazine, and asked to write an essay about American philanthropy, especially in relation to environmentalism. From the first I was dubious about the assignment. I said, “Not-for-profit organizations like you cannot afford to attack philanthropy because if you attack one foundation you may as well attack them all. You’ll be cutting your own throat.”

Hal assured me that while all this might be true someone had to take up the issue, and Orion was willing to do so. And I was the right person to write the essay precisely because I was not an insider but simply an honest intelligence. So, with many misgivings I said I’d try.

I interviewed about a dozen people on both sides of the field, both givers and getters, and some in the middle. The people I spoke to were eager to articulate their grievances even if they were just as eager to be anonymous. I also should acknowledge that the development of these grievances was no doubt colored by my own experiences as a board member and president of the board of two not-for-profit organizations in the arts.

After working for several months writing and revising the essay, Hal Clifford announced that he would be leaving Orion. My first thought was “uh-oh.” The editor-in-chief, Chip Blake, took over my essay and at that point things got dicey. Ultimately he explained that he hadn’t been fully aware of my assignment, that he hadn’t known the essay would be an attack on “the oligarchy,” that it didn’t seem to be fully a part of the magazine’s usual interests, and that–fatally–from the magazine’s point of view publishing the essay would be an exercise in “self-mutilation.”

Which was exactly what I said at the beginning! They had come to their senses even if it had taken a long time and cost me a lot of work to get there.

But, secretly, I was pleased. This editorial catastrophe was the best possible confirmation of everything I argue in the essay.

In the United States, everyone may enjoy freedom of speech so long as it doesn’t matter.  For those who would like what they say to matter, freedom of speech is very expensive. It is for this reason that organizations with a strong sense of public mission but not much money are dependent on the “blonde child of capitalism,” private philanthropy. This dependence is true for both conservative and progressive causes, but there is an important difference in the philanthropic cultures that they appeal to.

The conservative foundations happily fund “big picture” work.  They are eager to be the means for disseminating free market, anti-government ideology. Hence the steady growth and influence of conservative think-tanks like the Heritage Foundation, Accuracy in Media, the American Majority Institute, the Cato Institute, the Brookings Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Hoover Institute, and on (and frighteningly) on.

On the other hand, progressive foundations may understand that the organizations they fund have visions, but it’s not the vision that they will give money to. In fact, foundations are so reluctant to fund “public advocacy” of progressive ideas that it is almost as if they were afraid to do so. If there is need for a vision the foundation itself will provide it. Unfortunately, according to one source, the foundation’s vision too often amounts to this: “If we had enough money, and access to enough markets, and enough technological expertise, we could solve all the problems.” The source concludes that such a vision “doesn’t address sociological and spiritual problems.”

Indeed.

The truth is that organizations whose missions foreground the “sociological and spiritual” go mostly without funding. Take for instance the sad tale of the Center for the New American Dream (NAD), created in 1997 by Betsy Taylor (herself a funder with the Merck Family Fund).  NAD’s original mission statement gave a priority to “quality of life” issues.

We envision a society that values more of what matters—not just more…a new emphasis on non-material values like financial security, fairness, community, health, time, nature, and fun.

This is exactly the sort of “big picture” that philanthropy has been mostly unwilling to fund because, it argues, it is so difficult to provide “accountability” data for issues like “work and time” and “fun” (!).  (To which one might reasonably reply, “Why do you fund only those things that are driven by data?”)

In any event, in 2007 NAD ran an enormous deficit, $500,000 in a budget of less than $2,000,000.  In 2008, however, NAD staged a remarkable recovery.  Suddenly, its restricted grants grew from $234,000 in 2007 to $647,000 in 2008.  The cavalry, apparently, had arrived.  NAD’s savior was the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Foundation which had given a restricted grant of $350,000 for 2008.

Good news except that the money did not fund NAD’s vision; it was restricted to a narrow project.  NAD was now in the bottled water business, as in “don’t buy bottled water.”  NAD’s 2008 Take Action! section in its newsletters was devoted to the Goldman Gospel: get local athletic teams off bottled beverages, etc.  In short, a visionary organization had become a money chaser.

One source summarized the general situation in this way, “Progressive funders say all things are connected, but act as if all things are disconnected.  Conservative funders never argue that all things are connected, but then they act—and spend money—as if they were.”

§

 One of the most maddening experiences for those who seek the support of private philanthropy is the lack of transparency, that is, the difficulty of knowing why the foundation makes the decisions it makes. In fact, most foundations treat this “lack” as a kind of privilege: our reasons are our own.  One of the devices employed by philanthropy for maintaining this privilege is what I call the mystique of the foundation’s Secret Wisdom.

So you want to ask, “What do you know that I don’t know?  What do you know that makes your decisions wise?”  The closest thing to an answer you’re likely to hear is something like this: “The staff met with some Board members last night to discuss your proposal, and we’re very interested in it.  But we don’t think that you have the capacity [a useful bit of jargon that means essentially that the organization should give up on what it thought it was going to do] to achieve these goals.  So what we’d suggest is that you define a smaller project that will allow you to test your abilities [read: allow you to do something that you have little interest in but that will suck up valuable staff time like a Hoover].  Meanwhile, we’d like to meet with your Board in six months and see where you are.”

And on you go one year at a time. But cheer up, you’ve made your budget for the year!

The uncertainty and opacity of this reality leave organizations frustrated and bewildered. No matter how many meetings are held, no matter how carefully the questions are posed, the fundamentals remain maddeningly elusive. It is as if grant seekers were Kafka’s K in The Trial searching absurdly for someone to tell him exactly what crime he has committed.

The foundation has money but it has no organic idea (no idea that is native to its being) what to do with it.  Perhaps the foundation really would like to help someone somewhere, but it can’t quite bring itself simply to trust the organizations it funds and set them free to do their work, in part because it fears that once freed this intelligence and competence might produce results not in keeping with the interests of the foundation.

Not wanting to acknowledge that brutal fact, all that the foundation is left with is the chilling satisfaction of its own undiminished and unaccountable authority. None of this, of course, can be said, least of all by the organizations that are still hoping for support.

Like the system of patronage that served the arts and charity from the Renaissance through the 18^th century, private foundations have the rarest privilege of all: they do not have to explain themselves. They do not have to justify the origins of their wealth, or how they use that wealth, or what the real benefit of their largesse is.

 §

In the end, what the foundation can be trusted to understand is not forest health, or climate change, or the imperatives of recycling; what it can be trusted to understand is the thing that gives it its privileges: its endowment.  Unfortunately, managing how the endowment is invested often leads to conflicts with the stated social purpose of the foundation.

For example, one of the emerging controversies in the world of private philanthropy is the 95-5 question.  Foundations are required to give away just 5% of their endowment each year.  The other 95% is invested.  But invested where?  Environmentalists are particularly sensitive to this question because if the money is invested in companies that continue to pollute, you have a very disturbing reality.  5% does (theoretical) good while 95% does demonstrable bad: chasing profits in the same old dirty and irresponsible way.

This issue came to a head when the Los Angeles Times concluded a long investigation into the investment practices of foundations by revealing that the Gates Foundation funded a polio vaccination clinic in Ebocha, Nigeria, in the shadow of a giant petroleum processing plant in which the Gates Foundation was invested.

The Los Angeles Times report states:

But polio is not the only threat Justice [a Nigerian child] faces. Almost since birth, he has had respiratory trouble. His neighbors call it “the cough.” People blame fumes and soot spewing from flames that tower 300 feet into the air over a nearby oil plant. It is owned by the Italian petroleum giant Eni, whose investors include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Say what you like about the need to invest wisely for the future of the foundation, but this is prima facie evidence of a deep moral conflict not just at Gates but in all of private philanthropy.  The simple fact is that most boards actually don’t know if their investments and their missions align.  When pushed on the matter, most foundations respond as Gates did:  investments are the foundation’s private concern and no business of ours.

But the problem remains, when organizations receive funding, what confidence do they have that this happy money is not itself the expression of a distant destruction?  (Perhaps your funder owns stock in British Petroleum.  Of course, for the people of Louisiana, that’s anything but distant.)  When philanthropy proceeds without acknowledging this reality, it proceeds without conscience.  It proceeds pathologically.  It destroys the thing it claims to love.  And it makes the organizations it funds complicit.

§

 Because this culture of unaccountable authority is rarely challenged, especially by the organizations that receive funding, the foundations become little more than, as one source put it, dramas of “self-aggrandizement.”—the lavish year-end celebrations in which many indulge being a particularly noxious demonstration. They like to be thanked for their generosity, and they like the warm feeling of virtue that washes over them when they receive their thanks.

It is as if they could not tell which was the more worthy: the organization for its work or the foundation itself for its generosity.  You can sense this tension in the films that the big  foundations underwrite for PBS.  “Support is provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation,” emblazed on the screen with heraldic force, as if it had been struck with a single blow into brass.

Without an understanding of this psychology, it’s difficult to explain the most perplexing question asked of private philanthropy: why do most foundations give away only 5% of their endowment each year, the legal minimum?

Let’s say the funding is going to address the problem of global warming.  If that problem must be successfully addressed within the next two decades, if it’s really the critical moral issue of our time, or any time, why spend only 5%?  For a simple reason: spending 5% annually will allow the foundation to do its work into eternity. Sadly, a world without a livable climate is easier for the philanthropist to imagine than a world without the dear old family foundation.

 §

Most of the sources that I contacted for this essay requested anonymity.  The reasons for this may be obvious and hardly worth mentioning except that what’s hardly worth mentioning is a powerful emotion: fear.  Fear of losing a grant or a job, fear of harming a client, or fear of becoming persona non grata in the field. Everyone has skin in the game, so “discretion is the better part of valor,” as Falstaff put it. One source spoke of being threatened with blackballing by one wealthy donor.  His error? He’d supported Ralph Nader rather than Barack Obama.

Mark Dowie reports in his book Losing Ground that in the early 1990s the Pew Charitable Trust entered the fray over public land forestry.  Josh Reichert, Pew’s environmental program officer, created a foundation coalition, the National Environmental Trust, to address forestry among other issues.  Once the money was held out, large organizations like the Sierra Club fell in line, talked the talk, and took the money.

The downside was that this program was not allowed to consider a “zero cut” position.  The organization would be about moderating policy on behalf of corporate interests.  Smaller, more principled organizations like the Native Forest Council were “left out in the cold.”  But Reichert was unapologetic.  According to Dowie, “Reichert stipulated that no one advocating zero cut, criticizing corporations by name, or producing ads that did so would be eligible for membership in the forest coalition—or for funding.”

All of this leads to the reasonable assumption that to criticize is to invite punishment.  All that’s left is a lot of smiling and bad faith.

Part Two:

Why Organizations Experience What They Experience

In the end, philanthropy wants the wrong thing.  It may think that it ought to want what the lovers-of-nature want, but its actions reveal that, come what may, it loves other things first: the maintenance of its privileges, the survival of its self-identity, and the stability of the social and economic systems that made it possible in the first place.

This is not an inhuman feeling.  As Nietzsche put it, it is “all-too-human.”  The people who live within the culture of wealth can’t do the things that grassroots environmentalists want them to do without feeling that they are dying.  They can’t fund the creation of ideas that are hostile to their very existence; they can’t abandon control over the projects they do fund because they fear freedom in others; and they can’t give away all of their wealth (“spending out”) without feeling like they’ve become the Wicked Witch of the West (“I’m melting!”). Instead, philanthropy clings to the assumption of its virtues. Its very being, it tells itself, is the doing of good. It cannot respond to criticism because to do so might lead it to self-doubt, might lead it to honesty.  And that would be fatal.

The great paradox of environmental philanthropy is this: How do institutions founded on property, wealth, and privilege (in short, plutocrats) seek to address the root source of environmental destruction if that source is essentially the unbridled use of property, wealth, and privilege?   And yet when we ask that foundations abandon their privileges and simply provide funding so that we activists can do our work without hindrance, what the foundation hears is a request that they will their own destruction.  Not unreasonably, they are bewildered by the suggestion and unwilling to do so.

 §

There’s an old saying on the Left that goes something like this: Capitalism accepts the idea that it will have enemies, but if it must have enemies it will create them itself and in its own image.  In fact, it needs them in the same way that it needs the federal government: as a limit on its own natural destructiveness.

The periodic Wall Street meltdown aside, the most dramatic problem facing capitalism for the last thirty years has been its tendency to destroy the very world in which it acts: the environmental crisis in all its manifestations.  The response to this crisis has been the growth of the mainstream environmental movement, especially the Environmental Protection Agency and what we call Big Green (the Sierra Club, et. al.).  But, it should go without saying, Big Green was not the pure consequence of an up-swelling of popular passion; it was also the creation of philanthropic, federal, and corporate “gift giving”.

For instance, the Natural Resources Defense Council was created by the Ford Foundation, just as Pew created the National Environmental Fund.  (Pew itself was first endowed with money from the Sun Oil Company.  At its inception, Pew’s political views were deeply conservative.  It advocated free markets and small government, and funded the John Birch Society.)  These large environmental organizations are more dependent on federal and foundation support, and accordingly tend to take a “soft” line on economic and industrial reform.  As Mark Dowie reports, “They are safe havens for foundation philanthropy, for their directors are sensitive to the economic orthodoxies that lead to the formation of foundations and careful not to do anything that might diminish the benefactor’s endowment.”

As with the Environmental Protection Agency, Big Green is not so much an enemy as a self-regulator within the capitalist state itself.   The Sierra Club is not run by visionary rebels, it is upper management.  It really does have effects that are beneficial to the environment (many!), but in no way are those benefits part of an emerging new world that is hostile to the industries that are the most immediate origin of environmental destruction.

Consequently, a given industry may attack environmentalism when it interferes with its business, but the plutocracy as such is dependent on Big Green and will regularly replenish its coffers so that it may stay in existence, never mind the occasional annoyance for an oil company that wants to spread its rigs and pipelines across delicate tundra.

Capitalism has taught environmentalism how to protect it from itself.  Federal and philanthropic funding allows Big Green to play a forceful national role, but it also provides the means for managing and limiting the ambitions of environmentalism: no fundamental change. Sadly left out of negotiations between government, industry and environmental NGOs are the communities of people who must live with whatever decision is reached. As Paula Swearengin of Beckley, West Virginia, commented after House Republicans stripped the EPA of its authority to refuse a permit for yet another project for mountain top coal mining, “The people of Appalachia are treated like we’re just disposable casualties of the coal industry. We live in the land of the lost, because nobody wants to hear us.”

Will environmental philanthropy ever convince the federal government to limit the ability of the coal industry to destroy mountaintops in West Virginia?  Maybe. But will they seek to curb that industry’s constitutional freedom to deploy capital in their ruinous “pursuit of happiness”?  No.  Absolutely not.  In the aftermath of the British Petroleum disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, no one understands the importance of environmentalism better than the stockholders of BP.  They will be very happy for environmental groups to put pressure on the oil industry to provide more safety for deep sea drilling.  But they are most unlikely to welcome the end of deep sea drilling itself, and putting an end to the reign of corporations is utterly beyond the pale.

Philanthropy and the organizations it funds are what they are.  They are not in the revolution business.  They are in risk management.

Curtis White is a novelist and social critic. His recent work includes The Barbaric Heart: Money, Faith, and the Crisis of Nature and Requiem, a novel.

merican intellectual historians are no strangers to argument. But few have been as  defined by contrarianism as James Livingston. Where others have mourned the early twentieth century defeat of the Populists and the Wobblies, he has made a career extolling the radical potential of the corporate order which emerged at the same time. [...]]]>

merican intellectual historians are no strangers to argument. But few have been as  defined by contrarianism as James Livingston. Where others have mourned the early twentieth century defeat of the Populists and the Wobblies, he has made a career extolling the radical potential of the corporate order which emerged at the same time. He has hailed the volunteer army as an outstanding example of progressive politics, and defended John Dewey’s World War I hawkishness against Randolph Bourne’s tragically heroic opposition. In his first non-academic book, Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul, Livingston argues that a bias against consumerism mars not only academia but American moral common sense more generally. “We’re afraid,” he writes, “that we consume too many resources, that we save too little of our incomes, and that meanwhile we produce almost nothing of real value.” Americans are neurotic about our consumption, he claims, and his book is the therapy that can help us get over it.

But why is thrift a habit we need to break? Livingston’s argument has both economic and cultural aspects. Like other Marxist analysts, including David Harvey and Robert Brenner, he explains our present crisis as the result of “huge shifts in income shares away from labor, wages and consumption toward capital, profits, and corporate savings.” Productivity gains in the last few decades have gone almost entirely to the rich. Their surplus profits, lacking profitable avenues for investment, are channeled into whatever bubbles are at hand. He goes farther than others in claiming that the re-investment of profits is no longer even necessary for economic growth. This argument is difficult for non-specialists to evaluate, but Livingston documents his case with graphs showing a growth in GDP despite declining net investment. He argues that the superfluity of private investment licenses us to tax and redistribute corporate profits without fear of destroying our economic future. Instead of generating crises, our social wealth can underwrite a reduction of working time and an expansion of income and leisure for workers.

According to Livingston, our unfortunate economic orthodoxy is bound up with anachronistic moral commitments. He accuses most Americans, left and right, of being stuck in a mindset from the 1890s, one that favors production, work, and restraint over consumption, leisure, and indulgence. The tendency to attack bankers through moralistic categories, the anti-monopoly faith in small business, nostalgia for the “real economy” of manufacturing jobs—all this, he argues, is a Populist hangover inadequate to the present moment. Opposition to consumer culture is fundamentally rooted in the conviction that moral worth comes from socially productive labor, not parasitic prodigality. These beliefs made sense in a time of scarcity. But now that our productive advances have made widely shared abundance possible, the demand that consumer culture be checked is a demand for unnecessary privation.

What to make of all this? Livingston, who elsewhere summarized the historic mission of the Left as “FUCK WORK,” is unmistakably part of a venerable tradition stretching from Paul Lafargue’s “The Right to Be Lazy” through Ellen Willis’s “Women and the Myth of Consumerism.” Whatever one makes of the details of his economic argument, the two main points—that we have the productive capacity to reduce working time and expand leisure, and that our present crisis can be explained by the maldistribution of income—will be agreeable to most leftist readers. And yet, gazing at the rack of almost identical collared shirts gracing Livingston’s cover, these readers might ask themselves why he is so intent on defending the culture of capitalism?

One answer is that he’s only kind of doing that. A key moment comes halfway through the book, when Livingston appears to yield some ground. To those who accuse advertising and consumer culture of the “crapification” of American culture—pointless product differentiation, advertisements for unhealthy food, etc—he concedes that this is an “ugly process.” He maintains, however, that the remedy leads through the center of consumerism, not away from it. Properly dialectical, but what does he mean, exactly? “The obvious solution is to redistribute income,” he writes, so that no one will have to eat fast food for lack of a Trader Joe’s in their neighborhood. This is a good socialist answer, one that avoids moralizing the politics of consumption by blaming the victims.

But the nature of Livingston’s defense is revealing. He doesn’t contest the “crapification” charge, or urge poor people to give in to the libidinal desires they’ve discovered through McDonald’s billboards. Instead of defending actually existing capitalist consumerism, he defends the promise of a future which will feature consumption alongside “redistributing income and socializing investment”—bringing it under popular control so it can be driven by social concerns rather than mere profit. (It is only fair to note that Livingston might object to this distinction by reiterating his position that “capitalism and socialism are complementary, not mutually exclusive, modes of production.” Lacking the space and expertise to address this more fully, I can only echo the historian Howard Brick, who has doubted whether Livingston and his mentor Martin Sklar provide a “means for critically assessing the recipe of the [capitalism-socialism] mix.” In Against Thrift, Livingston speaks of the need to socialize investment as if it hasn’t happened, so I feel comfortable distinguishing a present and future consumerism.)

Understanding the book this way makes it easier to swallow, but it undercuts the force of its contrarianism. How many left critics of consumer culture would leave their indictments unrevised in the face of the radically different social and economic conditions Livingston proposes? He positions his book as a lonely dissent from “the celebration of craftsmanship and small business that still animates Marxism, existentialism, phenomenology, Populism, and the American Dream.” But painting with such a wide brush obscures differences within the body of criticism of consumer culture, and exaggerates the distance between Livingston and his interlocutors. There are surely some—members of the Catholic Worker, perhaps, Wendell Berry, or the later Christopher Lasch—who would frown upon Livingston’s collectivist vistas because of objections to a “riotous standard of living.” But just as common are those who share the goals of reducing work and increasing living standards, but remain critical of the consumer culture we currently possess. It’s possible, for instance, to prefer leisure to hard work but still worry about the way consumerism functions in a wildly unequal society. You might accept Livingston’s point that there’s nothing a priori immoral or unnatural about the way advertising awakens new desires, but as long as poor people have to sate these desires through borrowing instead of a guaranteed minimum income, it’s easy to look disapprovingly at the manufacture of need.

It’s also possible to worry that elements of actually existing consumer society block the path to a more democratic and more affluent society. Livingston drafts Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer into their familiar roles as elitist killjoys, tracing much subsequent anti-consumerism to the influence of their mandarin distaste. In fact, they were fierce left critics of the “pathos of productivity.” Adorno labeled anti-consumerist Thorstein Veblen a “Puritan” whose “criticism stops at the sacredness of work,” and Max Horkheimer’s refused to criticize those who preferred “privacy and consumption rather than production” since “in Utopia production does not play a decisive part.” Livingston is not mistaken in opposing his position to theirs—they certainly had no great love for the consumer society of their time. But they shared Livingston’s basic premise that increasingly productive human societies could and should abolish the economic discipline of work. Faced with the uncomfortable reality, however, that late capitalism had “made not work but the workers superfluous,” they naturally became deeply skeptical of the dominant culture, and searched its institutions—including consumerism and advertising—for explanations of what had gone wrong. They may have reached unusually dour conclusions, but they are typical of many leftists insofar as their objections to consumerism have nothing to do with small business or craftsmanship.

Livingston does address the argument that consumerism is a barrier to social change. Citing the role consumer demand played in the Civil Rights sit-ins and the Eastern European democratic revolutions of 1989, he argues that identities and solidarities based in consumption can therefore be powerful forces for reform. But when he tries to apply this model of consumer-driven social change to his most provocative claim— consumerism is “good for the environment”—he falls regrettably short. This is an important point, and not just because it occupies a third of the book’s subtitle. For most of Livingston’s potential audience, I suspect, the ecological limits to consumption are the hardest to imagine overcoming.

His brief defense, presented in only seven pages, rests on the old distinction between use and exchange values. Since consumers are concerned with specific use values, he avers, the standpoint of consumption offers the best “alternative to the endless accumulation of exchange value” presently threatening our planet. As a historical illustration, he argues that the “foodie” movement of recent decades offered a compelling consumer-driven challenge to industrialized agriculture. If corporations had their way, we’d eat bad things that are bad for the environment, so long as they are profitable. But the discerning confidence of Michael Pollan readers (backed by effective consumer demand) reshaped the production of food in line with their demand for quality use values.

This argument won’t quite satisfy those concerned that our present level and style of consumerism is bad for the environment. It counts on redistribution to enable all consumers to become as discriminating as middle-class foodies, and on the socialization of investment since the “endless accumulation of exchange value” will continue as long as finance capitalists can make a lot of money moving numbers around. But even assuming his political and economic goals can be met, Livingston has not quieted every doubt. The climate impact of higher incomes—and even of democratically controlled investment—is indeterminate. With more money to spend, won’t people will fly more, and buy more meat (food revolution notwithstanding, after all, beef consumption continued to climb until the recession made people too poor to buy so much)? Why couldn’t a democratic public prove as bad at accounting for long-run externalities as private corporations have, perhaps by voting themselves a huge gas subsidy? As leftists, we should not abandon increasing the consumption of use values as one purpose of income redistribution. But, contra Livingston, a real tension does exist between this goal and another—keeping the planet livable.

There is another common argument Livingston doesn’t addresses, though he anticipates it. “We know without thinking,” he writes in a summary of the conventional wisdom he aims to dispute, “that [consumer goods] already contain a barbaric history of exploitation—’Made in China,’ the label says.” Having mentioned them on the second page of his introduction, Livingston ought to return to the human beings whose daily labor makes it possible to talk about a “post-scarcity” situation in the United States. Maybe he thinks that the Chinese need only to bide their time until they too pass through the stage of industrial discipline into the realm of consumer freedom, or maybe that enfranchised American consumers will use their organized power to demand better conditions for their overseas enablers, just like they demanded better food. But the question remains unexamined, much like a related issue: can the whole world sustainably match the level, not just of current American consumption, but of the increased American consumption Livingston calls for? I’d sincerely like to think it’s possible, but it’s not self-evident. Without addressing consumption in its global context, Livingston leaves himself open to the charge of ethical particularism—socialist consumerism in one country, as it were.

Some will be tempted to write off Livingston’s vision of a consumer society slouching toward Utopia as reconciliation under duress. He is so eager to talk back to pessimistic cultural critics that he can sound uncannily optimistic. In a country where a guaranteed minimum income failed even in the 1960s, when a labor movement and inner-city rebellions forced the issue, it is far from obvious how we might today begin to articulate the demand for less work and more pay. Livingston gives us little guidance on this point, noting only that he believes in a kind of cultural “war of position” following the examples of (for all their differences) Antonio Gramsci, Vaclav Havel, and WEB DuBois. But there are worse things for the Left than optimism, and it’s a mistake to demand a tactical roadmap from a quick-moving and light-spirited brief. It’s also unfair to accuse Livingston of complacency, given his enthusiastic participation in Occupy Wall Street and the injuries he sustained at the hands of Bloomberg’s army.

It’s hard to deny Livingston leaves some absolutely crucial questions dangling. But he draws exactly the right line of antagonism for the present moment: between the austerity class and those who demand for each of us the respectable standard of living our socially-produced wealth already allows. If Against Thrift helps carry this analysis a little further into the American mainstream, leftists—even those with serious and justified reservations—will owe James Livingston some gratitude.

Tim Barker is a contributor to Jacobin, Dissent, and The New Inquiry.

 or most of the twentieth century, the hopes and frustrations of the global left were  stitched into the two red flags of communism and social democracy, political traditions marked indelibly by their European origins. Of these tattered traditions, Europe today, along with Latin America, stands as a last remaining redoubt.

 or most of the twentieth century, the hopes and frustrations of the global left were  stitched into the two red flags of communism and social democracy, political traditions marked indelibly by their European origins. Of these tattered traditions, Europe today, along with Latin America, stands as a last remaining redoubt.

Of course, the last decades of the twentieth century saw European socialism in its various guises lose much of the soil in which it had grown for generations, as the continent’s industrial towns decomposed and its leftist parties and trade unions were hollowed out. Still, despite everything, the socialist idea retains in Europe a cultural resonance and legitimacy, as well as an institutional base, that exceed anything comparable in the democratic world. If the twenty-first century were to bring any global resurgence of socialism, Europe would likely be among the first regions to feel the tremors.

This special section of Jacobin looks into the prospects and problems of the European left in the new age of austerity. Why now? What makes this perennial sad story worthy of another reexamination? I’d like to suggest that Europe today is witnessing developments that may soon bring an end to the last forty years’ trajectory of steady left decline; whether what comes next will be a revival or a final collapse will be determined by events that lie closer than we think.

The default mode of left politics in Europe in the past four decades has been a steady narrowing of political horizons, a lowering of expectations. This path has led from François Mitterrand’s 1972 Common Program, with its exuberant call to “changer la vie” via a “rupture” with capitalism, to his “U-turn” into austerity a decade later, to his helpless plaint a decade after that, when pressed on France’s endless mass unemployment, that “we tried everything.” It led from the socialist vision of the British Labour Party’s Alternative Economic Strategy, inaugurated in 1973, to New Labour architect Peter Mandelson professing to be “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” a generation later. And it led, more modestly, from the “reform euphoria” of the Willy Brandt era in Germany – the electoral high-point of the Social Democratic Party’s 140-year parliamentary history – to an altogether different sort of “reform” euphoria under Gerhard Schröder, whose unprecedented assault on the German welfare state a decade ago forms a key moment in Alexander Locascio’s account of the rise of the German Left Party in this section.

In grasping for explanations of social democracy’s historic decline, commentators on the Left have tended to fall into two opposite traps. The first – a staple of vernacular left-wing analysis – is that of political voluntarism, in which a story is told of treacherous center-left politicians conniving to sell out their co-opted working-class constituencies at the first opportunity. This version gains its plausibility from a long history of social-democratic governance in which the imperatives of capitalist management have always, in the last instance, had to trump the interests of social progress.

The problem with fixing the blame on craven politicians, however, is that it explains too little. Why did the social-democratic betrayals of the postwar Golden Age typically take the form of failures of nerve regarding promised social advances, while the betrayals of the past forty years have so often amounted to the brazen championing of retreats?

When the question is posed this way, a different type of answer is often forthcoming – this one falling into the opposite trap, that of economic determinism. In this version, unfathomably profound tectonic forces within world capitalism are said to have changed the rules of the game in the 1970s, rendering social democracy unviable and obsolete. Politicians, in this account, though perhaps still two-faced, ultimately had no choice but to comply with the dictates of falling profit rates, or entrenched overcapacity in global manufacturing, or the end of “Fordism.” Where the voluntarist perspective gains its radical sheen by scorning “reformists,” the deep-structural explanation gains it through an ostensibly Marxist stress on the illusions of “reform.”

The starting point for understanding social democracy’s slow collapse since the 1970s is to grasp the economic underpinnings of its success in the Golden Age. As the Dutch political scientist Ton Notermans documents in Money, Markets, and the State, a penetrating history of social-democratic economic policy since World War I, the precondition of left governance under capitalism has always been the ability to reconcile full employment, requiring expansionary monetary policy, with price stability; and this depends on the availability of mechanisms to control inflation directly at the source, by repressing or moderating wages or prices without having to resort to the weapon of unemployment.

In the absence of such price-repressing instruments, maintaining a tolerable level of inflation requires the bludgeon of permanently high unemployment achieved through tight money. Social democracy under such conditions is impossible, since the only tools that politicians can now credibly claim to boost employment are microeconomic: “reforms” that attack union bargaining power, minimum wages, job protections, social insurance contributions, and the like. To make matters worse, the regime of high interest rates necessitates chronic austerity, as public debt increases faster than national income and social spending has to be constantly cut back. As Chris Maisano explains in his essay, this is the world Europe has been living in since the 1970s.

§

n the postwar Golden Age, a panoply of wage and price-repressing institutions were available to Western European governments – in some cases taking the clumsy form of wage and price controls, but more often various incomes policies and social pacts negotiated with unions to moderate their wage demands. By achieving inflation control through microeconomic means, they freed left-wing governments to focus on maintaining full employment through macroeconomic means — almost always via a steady supply of cheap money (rather than the somewhat mythical “Keynesian deficit spending” so often invoked in retrospect).

This Golden Age strategy began to come unglued during the boom of the late 1960s, when ultra-full employment gave workers an unprecedented degree of bargaining power on the shop floor. In the hothouse atmosphere of Vietnam era radicalization and generational change within the working class, union leaders were no longer able to contain rank-and-file workers’ wage demands, and a “wage explosion” set in around the turn of the decade. Repeated attempts to negotiate social pacts with union leaders foundered amidst wildcat strikes and local “wage drift.”

For a few years, there were hopeful signs throughout Europe – from the Meidner Plan in Sweden to the Social Contract in Britain — that these conditions might foretell a push beyond social democracy, toward some fundamental transformation. But after 1973, when the West was hit by the quadrupling of oil prices and a worldwide productivity slowdown, inflation and unemployment both surged simultaneously, and each seemed suddenly impervious to the usual remedies.

It cannot be overstressed how shocking and confusing these events appeared, not only to finance ministers and central bankers, but to left-wing party activists and trade union militants at the base. While in retrospect there is good reason to think that the adverse shift in the inflation-unemployment tradeoff was a temporary reaction to the instability of the mid-1970s, to them it did seem as if the rules of the game had suddenly changed, and they could only interpret the flow of events during these years as so much incoming data revealing the grim new laws of motion of a transformed economic world.

Of great importance in shaping perceptions was the relative stability that Germany’s Bundesbank achieved for a few years in the mid-to-late 1970s after switching to a strict anti-inflation monetarist regime, while in France an attempted stimulus in 1975 made no dent in unemployment, but sent inflation soaring to 12 percent. Observers drew the appropriate lessons. In 1976, the right-wing French government shifted to its own contractionary policy, explicitly justifying it by pointing to German success, and two years later French president Valéry Giscard D’Estaing decided to tie France to the mast of austere German monetary policy by creating, with Germany’s Social Democratic chancellor Helmut Schmidt, the European Monetary System of fixed exchange rates.

The last act of this morality play arrived when François Mitterrand came to power in 1981 on a radicalized Keynesian reflation program that had been devised a decade earlier. Inevitably, applying it in the new context of Europe-wide monetary rigor led only to a series of forced devaluations and, ultimately, to the Socialists’ ignominious March 1983 retreat into orthodoxy and realignment with Germany. This retreat was then institutionalized by Mitterrand’s agreement to a plan for a single currency under a German-style central bank — making France’s and Europe’s subordination to Teutonic monetary policy irrevocable, and sanctifying it with a halo of “European” idealism. By this point Germany itself was no longer immune to deflation. Unemployment rates, having averaged less than 1% in Germany and 2% in France in the decade before the oil shock, rose to heights of 8% and nearly 10% by the mid-1980s. With the exception of a few years in the late 1980s, they have largely stagnated in that range.

For a while, the partisans of old-style postwar Keynesianism, especially in its traditional American bastion, put up a fight. In 1984, Nobel laureate James Tobin bewailed the “prevailing attitudes” of “fatalism and complacency”: “The lesson learned by many policymakers, influential citizens and economists is that unemployment cannot be cured [by expansionary policies] without unacceptable risks of inflation. This view is more solidly entrenched in Europe than North America.” Tobin judged that analysis a “misreading of, or at least an overreaction to, the events of the 1970s.”

§

ut by the mid-1990s, the vast, transnational apparatus of neoliberal policy economics – central banks, finance ministries, international institutions, academic departments, and elite economic journalists — had converged on a single, hegemonic intellectual framework for understanding these economic relationships, one that quickly hardened into an almost unthinking doxa.

The centerpiece of the received view is the concept of the “non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment” – the NAIRU, or “natural” rate of unemployment, a construct that grew out of Milton Friedman’s late 1960s macroeconomic counterrevolution. At any given moment, the theory holds, an economy has an equilibrium rate of unemployment at which inflation will be stable. In the short run, policymakers can try to force the actual unemployment rate below the NAIRU by stimulating demand; but this course will show its futility by yielding ever-rising inflation rates, until the policy is finally reversed and unemployment restored to its equilibrium level — at which point inflation will stabilize, but now at its new, higher rate. (The reverse is also held: a negative shock that pushes unemployment above its natural rate will cause ever-falling inflation, until it is pushed back down again by demand stimulus.)

The natural rate, then, sets the limit of a capitalist society’s economic ambitions. Critical, therefore, is the question of how the NAIRU’s level is supposedly determined. As Friedman first argued in his celebrated 1968 presidential address at the American Economic Association, the level of the NAIRU is that which is “ground out” by the “actual structural characteristics of the labor and commodity markets,” including, first of all, their “market imperfections.” By preventing wages from adjusting to productivity, labor market imperfections (or, to use the current term of art, “rigidities”: unemployment insurance, union collective bargaining rights, disability benefits, employment regulation, payroll taxes, minimum wages, etc.) doom a country to a high NAIRU, and hence to mass unemployment.

The only solution is a comprehensive round of “structural reforms,” the going euphemism for the systematic dismantling of the social-democratic achievements of the twentieth century.

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, this orthodoxy of rigidities, natural rates, and “structural reforms” was lent an air of plausibility by the ubiquitous comparison with the “flexible labor markets” of the United States, where unemployment rates were continuously held well below those of the major European economies without sparking inflation. And it was ruthlessly enforced by the actual policy of the European Central Bank itself, which made no secret of its opposition to the use of monetary policy to reduce unemployment, since, in its words, “the level of employment [is], in the long run, essentially determined by real (supply-side) factors…notably property rights, tax policy, welfare policies and other regulations determining the flexibility of markets.”

Thus the post-1980 regime of social-democratic decay has its origins in the interaction between two specific historical developments: first, subjectively, a creeping loss of belief – shared across the political spectrum and grounded in the traumas of the 1970s — that full employment could be sustained; then, objectively, the gradual “locking in” of this belief into the structures of European monetary and governance institutions, systems from which dissent and divergence became increasingly costly or even impossible. The inexorable logic laid out by Ton Notermans swiftly set in: once full employment via macroeconomic means was ruled out – by acts of political choice, though under the pressure of events – social democrats hoping to “manage the system” were all but forced to become microeconomic neoliberals. Meanwhile, microeconomic incomes policies that once aimed to stabilize domestic inflation in a Golden Age world of abundant demand degenerated into modern “social pacts” aiming, in beggar-thy-neighbor fashion, to pilfer scarce demand from foreign competitors by undercutting their wage and price levels. Capitalists and their political allies, naturally, were quick to capitalize on the Left’s defensive stance to push the counterrevolution even further.

But the global crisis of 2008 has set in motion forces that threaten the smooth functioning of this neoliberal regime. The first threat is intellectual. It is not simply that the crisis has tended to discredit neoliberalism in general. More specifically, the vast rise in American unemployment has dealt a serious blow to the specific NAIRU-based intellectual edifice supporting the status quo. By itself, the simple fact that America’s vaunted flexible labor markets have coexisted with sharply depressed employment rates – in 2010, the U.S. working-age population had a lower employment rate than every West European country except Italy, Spain, Greece, and Ireland – already makes it difficult to blame European unemployment on rigidities.

But even more damaging has been the behavior of U.S. inflation. In 2009 and 2010, when unemployment skyrocketed beyond all reasonable estimates of the NAIRU, mainstream center-left economists who accepted the consensus, such as Paul Krugman, duly predicted that inflation would fall continuously, even to the point of deflation. Instead, by the end of 2010, inflation stabilized and even rebounded; by the canons of mainstream theory, this should mean that the natural rate of unemployment – supposedly determined by slow-moving fundamental economic structures – had suddenly jumped to European levels. To most mainstream economists, especially those within the Democratic orbit, this was one credulity-straining bridge too far. Moreover, the parallel with the European experience of the 1980s was disturbingly evident.

At first faintly, but then louder, a long-neglected alternative theory began to make itself heard in policy debates. In 1986, Larry Summers and Olivier Blanchard published a paper, motivated by concern about the situation in Europe, suggesting that the “natural” rate of unemployment could shift simply due to a change in the actual unemployment rate. Borrowing a term from physics, they called this concept “hysteresis”: a situation in which the present state is influenced by the history of past states. Although the difference may seem technical, it overturns the fundamental logic of the Friedmanite view that only microeconomic rigidities and imperfections determine the NAIRU.

If an elevated NAIRU can be caused by high unemployment itself, then a protracted period of tight money can produce an unemployment rate that at first exceeds the NAIRU, pushing down inflation, but that eventually pulls the NAIRU up towards itself, congealing into a new “permanent” equilibrium. This sequence seems to describe the European experience of the 1980s. Presumably, then, the reverse would be true as well: a period of expansionary policy, though initially inflationary, could eventually push the NAIRU down and result in a permanent reduction in unemployment. Blanchard and Summers suggested a number of mechanisms that might produce this effect, but their concept found few supporters within the firmament of mainstream macroeconomics.

§

hen the 2008 crisis hit, more than twenty years later, Summers was assuming the role of chief economic adviser in the Obama White House; Blanchard was chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. As Laurence Ball, a prominent macroeconomist at Johns Hopkins, wrote in 2008, “Blanchard and Summers have been poor stewards of their hysteresis idea” — either ignoring or explicitly denying the possibility of hysteresis in the twenty years since publishing their paper. “When even the creator of an idea doesn’t seem to believe it, the idea loses credibility,” he added wryly.

Ball himself was a lonely voice in the profession producing a raft of evidence for hysteresis, showing that extended periods of high unemployment do indeed raise the NAIRU, specifically by increasing the share of long-term unemployed, who gradually become detached from the labor market, exerting less and less downward pressure on inflation. Ball showed empirically that it was the European countries whose central banks refused to reverse their tight monetary policies in the 1980s, even in the face of soaring joblessness, that experienced large increases in equilibrium unemployment (in contrast to the U.S. experience). And he demonstrated that those few countries that have achieved large declines in equilibrium unemployment have done so following periods of rising inflation — suggesting that these success stories were brought about by expansionary policy or other forms of demand stimulus, not supply-enhancing “reforms” (which should tend to reduce inflation).

Versions of this sort of unreconstructed Keynesian view of the labor market were once the basis of macroeconomic policymaking by social democrats, but for decades now they have been virtually banished from the councils of mainstream economics. Under the pressure of the crisis, however, the consensus has recently begun to buckle. In a major paper released this March, Larry Summers finally returned to the idea he birthed almost stillborn a quarter-century ago. Written with Brad DeLong, a former Clinton administration official, Summers’ paper includes a lengthy review of the hysteresis hypothesis, citing the dissident work of Ball and others, and concluding heretically that “the case that high European unemployment in the 1980s and 1990s was a result of a long cyclical depression starting in the late 1970s is quite strong” – dismissing in a footnote “the principal alternative theory” that it was a “supply-side phenomenon” caused by a reaction to “rigid labor market institutions.”

Make no mistake: a paper by Larry Summers will not by itself change so much as a single basis point of interest rates in Frankfurt. But the thirty-year-long intellectual united front of transatlantic neoliberalism is beginning to crack – a loss of faith in long-accepted models reminiscent of the turmoil of the 1970s. And what makes this intellectual reassessment potentially so significant is that it comes just as the European institutions that embody and enforce the intellectual orthodoxy are facing an unprecedented degree of political and economic instability.

There is no need to rehearse the narrative of the endless Eurozone crisis that began in 2009. Suffice it to say it has, for the first time, thrown into question fundamental features of the monetary union first conceived twenty years ago: the no-bailout principle insisted on by Germany; the independence of the central bank; the irreversibility of euro membership. What was once seen as a bewildering technical issue has become a vital matter of day-to-day social stability in country after country. Austerity enforced from Brussels, Frankfurt, and Bonn is not only sinking Europe into an ever-deeper depression with no visible endpoint; it is searing the political connection between daily hardships and E.U. structures into the consciousness of the continent’s citizens. In the interview featured in this section, the French political scientist Emmanuel Todd speaks of a “vast debate on economic globalization which will inevitably take place after the [May presidential] election,” and predicts that the winner will face decisive pressure from the French middle and even upper classes, who “are now turning their backs on free trade and perhaps even on the euro.”

Moreover, the astonishing defiance of democratic norms that has become an essential feature of European Union governance – a key issue in the rise of the Dutch Socialist Party (SP) highlighted by Steve McGiffen in this issue – is increasingly becoming its defining characteristic in the eyes of Europe’s citizens. Already in 2005, after the European Constitution failed in referenda in France and the Netherlands, it was simply repackaged as an ordinary treaty and passed via national parliaments; when that treaty was then rejected by the Irish in a referendum of their own, they were made to re-run their vote like schoolchildren who had failed a test. Last fall, when Greek prime minister George Papandreou had the temerity to call for a popular referendum on the austerity package that will subject his country to years of impoverishment and social disintegration, he was swiftly forced to resign and replaced with a technocratic viceroy dispatched from the European Central Bank. The same month, a former European Commissioner, Mario Monti, was brought in to run Italy after Berlusconi lost the confidence of E.U. leaders.

Now the next major question will be the fate of the “fiscal compact” signed by European leaders at a summit last December. Adopted at the most perilous moment of last year’s debt crisis, after the head of the European Central Bank openly blackmailed heads of state by threatening to withhold a rescue of the continent’s teetering debt markets unless they signed, the document envisions a strictly enforced regime of permanent budget austerity imposed on every country in the Eurozone. It must now be sent to parliaments or popular referenda and ratified by twelve of the seventeen members of the Eurozone before next January. There have been growing signs that this effort will not be so easy. French Socialist presidential candidate François Hollande, favored to win election in May, has declared that he will insist on “renegotiating” the compact, and similar noises have been made by the German Social Democrats and Spanish Socialists – although none of these has so far questioned the treaty’s essential features. The Dutch Labor Party, under pressure from the SP, has announced that it will vote no if the current center-right government insists on meeting the 3% deficit target mandated this year by Brussels. And in Ireland, which will once again vote on the treaty via referendum, the odds are impossible to guess.

If the treaty were to fail the ratification process, no one could predict the consequences. Yet there is no guarantee of how these events will unfold. It is entirely possible, as Chris Maisano reminds us in his essay on the European center-left, that the permanent austerity regime will defeat all challenges and will end by undoing what remains of European social democracy. The balance of political forces will be decisive.

§

t is in this context that Jacobin examines a distinct new political trend that has become especially visible since the mid-2000s. As social-democratic parties have migrated to the right since the end of the Cold War, a new group of far-left challengers, many of them descended from various strands of the communist tradition, has gradually moved from the political margins to the center of political life, to fight for genuine left politics in a number of countries. Although still in its early stages, this evolution is growing in importance, and the articles by Alexander Locascio and Steve McGiffen in this section sympathetically profile two of its most important and intriguing examples: the German Linkspartei and the Dutch Socialist Party. Other examples abound throughout Europe: In Greece, the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) is currently set to triple its vote share in elections this spring, polling ahead of the discredited social democrats of PASOK (as is the Communist Party). In France, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a left-wing dissident who broke off from the Socialist Party to establish the Parti de Gauche in 2008, has formed an electoral alliance with the Communist Party to contest this year’s elections; although his standing in polls has essentially matched the typical ceiling of support for the fractious French far left (around 15%), Mélenchon, a commanding orator who opens his speeches by reading from Victor Hugo, has managed for the first time since the Communist Party’s heyday to unite that vote around a single standard-bearer. [Update: Preliminary results of the April 22 vote credit Mélenchon with 11.13% of the first-round vote.]  And in Norway, the Socialist Left Party, while currently weak, has been that rare breed: a party of the radical left with real influence over government policy. After a remarkable grassroots campaign by the country’s unions in the early 2000s, the social-democratic Labor Party was forced to accept the once-marginal grouping as a coalition partner. Since then, Labor has been obliged to abandon much of the neoliberal program it had gradually adopted in the 1990s — privatization and marketization of health and social service, E.U. membership, participation in NATO wars lacking a “clear U.N. mandate.” The coalition continues today, and the current Norwegian government is, along with Iceland’s, probably the most left-wing in Europe.

Finally, the interview with Emmanuel Todd that we offer in this section presents an idiosyncratic but compelling analysis of the volatile state of French politics amid the Eurozone upheavals. One of the most perceptive observers of French society, Todd shares large parts of the radical left’s analysis of the crisis, but has little time for Mélenchon’s outsider campaign. Instead he believes that history may force the French social democrats themselves into the role of radicals malgré eux.

However improbable his predictions may seem, Todd’s analysis, like the other essays in this section, does much to lay bare the converging elements that promise to make the coming months and years a major turning point in Europe’s history.

Seth Ackerman, a doctoral candidate in History at Cornell, is an editor at Jacobin. He has written for Harper’s and In These Times, and was a media critic with Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting.

homas Friedman, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, once offered the following insight into his modus operandi: “I often begin writing columns by interviewing myself.”

Some might see this as an unsurprising revelation in light of Edward Said’s appraisal: “It’s as if … what scholars, poets, historians, [...]]]>

homas Friedman, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times, once offered the following insight into his modus operandi: “I often begin writing columns by interviewing myself.”

Some might see this as an unsurprising revelation in light of Edward Said’s appraisal: “It’s as if … what scholars, poets, historians, fighters, and statesmen have done is not as important or as central as what Friedman himself thinks.”

According to Friedman, the purpose of the auto-interviews is merely to analyze his feelings on certain issues. Given that his feelings tend to undergo drastic inter- and sometimes intra-columnar modifications, one potentially convenient byproduct of such an approach to journalism is the impression that Friedman interviews many more people than he actually does.

For example, while one of Friedman’s alter-egos considered blasphemous the “Saddamist” notion that the Iraq war had anything to do with oil, another was of the opinion that the war was “partly about oil,” and another appeared to be under the impression that it was entirely about oil, assigning the blame for U.S. troop deaths in Fallujah to Hummer proprietors. Despite Friedman’s identification as “a liberal on every issue other than this war,” competing layers of his persona defined said conflict as “the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the U.S. has ever launched” as well as part of a “neocon strategy.”

Other novel interviewing techniques employed by Friedman have meanwhile resulted in anthropological discoveries such as that “[t]he people of Sri Lanka” understand that it is “stupid” to oppose US-directed corporate globalization, which our columnist learns by chatting with the owner of a Victoria’s Secret factory in the village of Pannala in 1999. Friedman testifies that, “in terms of conditions, I would let my own daughters work in” the factory—an offer that is not revisited in 2012 when Friedman produces a glowing report on an Apple factory in China.

The gist of the report is that, because the factory reached a daily output level of over 10,000 iPhones simply by rousing 8,000 workers from their dormitories in the middle of the night and administering them each a biscuit and cup of tea, Americans must understand that “average is officially over.” Friedman’s exuberance at the above-average abilities of the Chinese factory workers is occasioned by a “terrific article in The Times by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher about why Apple does so much of its manufacturing in China.” The fact that the same Duhigg produces another co-authored article four days after the terrific one—in which other aspects of Apple factory life in China are discussed, such as explosions, exposure to poisonous chemicals, and worker internment in overcrowded dormitories surrounded by safety netting to impede suicides—raises questions about what sub-average American laborers will have to do to woo jobs back to the U.S.

This is not to imply that none of Friedman’s personalities harbors any potential sympathy for the concept of workers’ rights. In a 2001 column, for example, he acknowledges that “human beings simply are not designed to be like computer servers. For one thing, they are designed to sleep eight hours a night.” (In the same column, his own above-average qualifications in fields like journalism, technology, and logic are cast into doubt with his reasoning: “I still can’t program my VCR; how am I going to program my toaster?”)

In The World Is Flat, a 660-page treatise on globalization written under the supervision of corporate CEOs, Friedman meanwhile manages a rare favorable citation of someone whose weltanschauung exists in fundamental opposition to his own. Despite such personal convictions as that “[t]he most important thing [Ronald] Reagan did was break the 1981 air traffic controllers’ strike, which helped break the hold of organized labor over the U.S. economy,” that “the easier it is to fire people, the more willing companies are to hire people,” and—more recently—that “we are entering an era where to be a leader will mean, on balance, to take things away from people,” Friedman writes approvingly:

In her 2004 book, Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers’ Rights at Wal-Mart, journalist Liza Featherstone followed the huge women’s discrimination suit against Wal-Mart. In an interview about the book with Salon.com (November 22, 2004), she made the following important point: ‘American taxpayers chip in to pay for many full-time Wal-Mart employees because they usually require incremental health insurance, public housing, food stamps — there are so many ways in which Wal-Mart employees are not able to be self-sufficient. This is very ironic, because Sam Walton is embraced as the American symbol of self-sufficiency… If anything, Wal-Mart should be crusading for national health insurance. They should at least be acknowledging that because they are unable to provide these things for their employees, we should have a more general welfare state.’

Of course, Friedman’s second-hand ode to workers’ and citizens’ rights occurs approximately 100 pages after his enraptured discussion of “‘the Wal-Mart Symphony’ in multiple movements—with no finale,” which is how he characterizes the company’s perfected cycle of “delivery, sorting, packing, distribution, buying, manufacturing, reordering, delivery, sorting, packing…”

Wal-Mart is furthermore honored in the book as “one of the ten forces that flattened the world,” an honor that appears even more out of place when Friedman pleads that isolation and insularity are in fact the cause of flagrant workers’ rights violations on the part of the world-flattening symbol of global integration:

“It is hard to exaggerate how isolated Bentonville, Arkansas [the location of Wal-Mart HQ], is from the currents of global debate on labor and human rights, and it is easy to see how this insular company, obsessed with lowering prices, could have gone over the edge in some of its practices.”

One example Friedman provides of a possible over-the-edge Wal-Mart practice is that “of locking overnight workers into its stores.” Given his recent elation with regard to midnight practices at the Apple factory in China, however—especially when juxtaposed with his assessment in The World Is Flat according to which “Wal-Mart is the China of companies”—it seems that the Arkansas-based behemoth may have instead been demonstrating a commitment to cutting-edge labor policies.

I meanwhile had the fortune to meet Liza Featherstone in person a few weeks ago and thus did not have to rely on an interview with myself to determine how she felt about her cameo in Friedman’s magnum opus. According to Featherstone, the disproportionate reader response she received after appearing in one paragraph of the tome was a rude awakening as to the extent of Friedman’s reach.

As for other beneficiaries of the Friedmanian reach aside from laborers cavorting to the tune of the Wal-Mart Symphony, these include Afghan civilians who, in exchange for being slaughtered by U.S. weaponry, earn immortalization inside quotation marks on the pages of the New York Times in 2001:

“Think of all the nonsense written in the press—particularly the European and Arab media—about the concern for ‘civilian casualties’ in Afghanistan. It turns out many of those Afghan ‘civilians’ were praying for another dose of B-52’s to liberate them from the Taliban, casualties or not.”

Friedman does not divulge the source of his insights into Afghan prayers, though the tried and true auto-interview is certainly a possibility. Friedman’s foray into Umm Qasr, Iraq, a month after the 2003 invasion meanwhile turns up further evidence of the inadvisability of seeking indigenous opinions on relevant issues: “It would be idiotic to even ask Iraqis here how they felt about politics. They are in a pre-political, primordial state of nature.”

The following month, Friedman appeared on public television, and—despite having recently debunked the notion of a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden—proceeded to outline the “real reason” for returning Iraq to the primordial era: Iraqi citizens needed to “Suck. On. This” as punishment for 9/11. Other popular Friedmanian fatwas issued over the years have ranged from the determination that Palestinians are “gripped by a collective madness” to the idea that Israel’s mass bombing of Lebanese civilians in 2006 “was not pretty, but it was logical” to the notion that Iraqis do not “deserve such good people [i.e. the U.S. military, i.e. the administrators of the ‘Suck. On. This’ directive] if they continue to hate each other more than they love their own kids.”

Friedman’s predilection for delivering haughty apocalyptic lectures to the over 1.5 billion Muslims in the world who are not suicide bombers leads to the coinage of such proverbs as: “A civilization that does not delegitimize suicide bombing against any innocent civilian is itself committing suicide.” It is not explained why the—historically more lethal—U.S. tradition of non-suicidal bombing of innocent civilians poses no civilizational risks, or why an American columnist who regularly encourages the killing of Muslims is not thrown into the same category as Muslims who kill other Muslims: “completely disconnected from humanity.”

Friedman has done a superb job of delegitimizing himself as a journalist by peddling an array of schizophrenic postulates against a solid backdrop of warmongering apologetics on behalf of empire and capital. It says much about the dismal state of contemporary journalism that his unabashed advocacy for collective punishment, both military and economic, has facilitated rather than jeopardized his prominent perch at the U.S. newspaper of record, his elevation to the rank of Top Global Thinker by Foreign Policy magazine, and his occasional service as dispenser of personal advice to Barack Obama.

It is unlikely that Friedman will ever begin a column by interviewing himself about why his expressions of human empathy are reserved for events such as mealtime in the dining hall at the US military base in Kirkuk and the adoption of “proglobalization” strategies by China, India, and Ireland—which, we are told in The World Is Flat, prompts him to “get a little lump in my throat.”

We might thus take the liberty of casting Friedman in the role of “supply chain” in the following scenario, which he offers in response to Featherstone’s critique of Wal-Mart but which is just as applicable to a discussion of the corporate media symphony starring the New York Times: “[W]hen you totally flatten your supply chain, you also take a certain element of humanity out of life.”

Belén Fernández is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work and an editor at PULSE Media.

eading Astra Taylor’s n+1 essay “Unschooling,” I was reminded of my first   semester in a classroom. Like many student teachers, I’d been offended by the idea of myself as an authority figure. Standing in front of the class at the chalkboard felt like a lie. Was I smarter than my students? No. [...]]]>

eading Astra Taylor’s n+1 essay “Unschooling,” I was reminded of my first   semester in a classroom. Like many student teachers, I’d been offended by the idea of myself as an authority figure. Standing in front of the class at the chalkboard felt like a lie. Was I smarter than my students? No. Did I know more about the subject I was teaching? Not always. I was so afraid of humiliating kids that I refused to call on a student unless her hand was raised.

In practice, that meant that over and over again I gave a lot of outgoing kids the chance to speak, while effectively ignoring the ones who weren’t interested. When no one’s hand was raised, I wasted time wondering what to do next. In the middle of the semester, my students filled out their evaluations. “Dear Ms. Erickson,” one student wrote, “when no one raises their hand, it’s okay to just call on someone.” He was right. It was okay. I’d been protecting tenth graders from something they were perfectly prepared to face.

It is this false and misguided sense of children’s fragile identity that informs the educational philosophy of “unschooling.” Demographically, unschooling is homeschooling for middle class people with master’s degrees. Its heroes are Paul Goodman, John Holt, and A.S. Neill, the author of a once influential but largely forgotten book called Summerhill, about a boarding school run entirely by the students.

Taylor’s self-education – which she says she experienced as a compromise between the wild fantasy of freely communing with other young people and the reality of submitting “to irrational authority six and half hours a day, five days a week, in a series of cinder-block holding cells” – involved reading, weeding vegetable gardens, running through the woods, publishing an animal rights newsletter, and watching reruns of the The Simpsons with her three siblings. Her mother facilitated.

Dana Goldstein has already written at length about the economic infeasibility of unschooling as a national philosophy for education, and Taylor has responded that her essay is not meant to be prescriptive, but instructive. It’s the values we should take from radical pedagogy, the willingness “to take seriously words like ‘freedom,’ ‘autonomy,’ and ‘choice,’” which have been ceded to the political right, she argues. Looking “at the radical margins may help us ask better questions about what we really want from our educational system and how to go about getting it.”

These are questions worth asking in the golden age of young adult dystopian fiction. Are schools jails? Is institutionalization an inevitably soul-crushing enterprise, meant to inculcate children into, in Taylor’s words, an “ethos of boredom”? Is it time for the Left to take choice seriously?

The fundamental problem with unschooling, an essentially anarchist critique of compulsory education, is that it fails to account for the fact that privilege and authority, though intimately linked, are not the same thing. It is not only possible but preferable for teachers to guide children without “molding” or forcing them. Goodman and Holt were both committed to delaying socialization in children, regarding growth as an individual, solitary, and natural pursuit that must be protected from the corrupting influence of adults. It’s a primitivist impulse. It’s also sentimental and paternalistic.

Insistent as these critiques are on the primacy of individual freedom, they almost always invoke self-guided learning as a liberating answer to the oppressive teacher-student relationship. The idea is that, as Goodman wrote, “natural” learning means that the organism itself must create its own structures as it goes. One common refrain is “you don’t need to teach a baby how to speak. You speak to it and it learns to speak”—in other words, let nature do her work, and everything will turn out fine.

But it doesn’t always turn out fine. In fact, this contradicts everything we know about learning and cognition. Inquiry and engagement are important, but students also need scaffolding, in the form of “modeling, direct teaching, and prompting, which is gradually removed as students become adept at self-evaluation and metacognition” (Resnick and Williams Hall). Teachers use direct instruction strategies not just to bore kids, but because they work: a combination of direct instruction and real life examples is a more effective way to teach than either is on its own.

Taylor writes, “Our solitude, to paraphrase Thoreau, was not trespassed upon. What a gift! What kind of respect for intellectual or artistic immersion is signaled by a world in which the sound of a bell means that the work at hand, no matter how compelling or urgent, must be put aside, and something else started? How deeply can anyone enter a subject in fifty minutes unless the material is broken down into component parts too small to communicate any grand purpose?”

I read this as a refutation of worksheets. And fine. Who doesn’t hate outlines and graphic organizers? Before I began teaching, I promised myself I’d never go near a photocopier. Compare/contrast exercises feel reductive, mechanistic, too “Another Brick in the Wall.” But it turns out that this breaking down into component parts is exactly what many students need in order to get to the grand purpose. Study after study has shown that students’ ability to identify the structure of a text influences whether or not they understand and remember what they have read. One researcher found that only 11% of ninth graders consciously identified and used high-level structure to recall their reading, and this group was able to recall twice as much as the students who did not use the strategy. Training the other 89% to identify and use top-level structure more than doubled their recall performance.

The ability to recall what you have read matters a lot. The brain’s working memory capacity is limited, and if it’s entirely devoted to decoding a sentence, it’s less likely to be able to construct and engage with meaning. This is why we have to spend years learning basic math before we get to calculus. What separates experts from novices is not some innate mystical genius; it’s the automaticity and pattern recognition that comes only from hours of practice. Sometimes, learning is work because it’s work, not because it’s busy work.

There’s another aspect of Taylor’s argument that I find troubling. Why shouldn’t kids be asked to put away their crayons and go to lunch at the same time? Why do we assume that clear boundaries, a schedule, and a sense of hierarchy are so threatening to students? Why must the individual’s vision be so carefully and serenely sheltered from other people, who are experienced in this framework as interruptions? There is value in being pulled out of a daydream. There is value in learning to cope with a little coercion, in knowing what it means to cooperate on a daily basis with someone who doesn’t love you, someone who’s not your family member.

Taylor summarizes the debate over compulsory schooling as, “Do we trust people’s capacity to be curious or not?” To me, it seems to be about sparing children the discomfort of conflict. Curiosity leads us to follow our own interests, but what about the interests of others? Conflict is what happens when we’re asked to reckon with them. Just as not every child learns to read “when they’re ready,” some students understandably “resist the critical thinking process; they are more comfortable with learning that allows them to remain passive” (as bell hooks writes).

True, it’s not important or desirable that every student become a professor. I’m not arguing against the incorporation of technical training into public schools. But, whether we’re willing to admit it or not, there is a body of mainstream academic knowledge that students either have access to or don’t–for example the ability to speak “Standard English”–and that access is crucial to being able to support oneself as an adult. In Other People’s Children, Lisa Delpit writes about her disillusionment with her progressive, child-centered teacher training: “In many African-American communities, teachers are expected to show that they care about their students by controlling the class; exhibiting personal power,” and “‘pushing’ students to achieve.” Teachers who don’t exhibit these behaviors are regarded as uncaring.

“There are several reasons why students and parents of color take a position that differs from the well-intentioned position of the teachers I have described,” she writes. “First, they know that members of society need access to dominant discourse to (legally) have access to economic power. Second, they know that such discourses can be and have been acquired in classrooms because they know individuals who have done so.” Delpit sees the public schools as a place where students should be acquiring the skills and language that help them survive and transform systemic oppression.

At the heart of the anarchist vision for public schooling is the idea that if public schools don’t work for you, you should stop going. Burn them down. Refuse to pay taxes. Rebelling against the institutional part of public institutions is the defining characteristic of this response to structural inequality. Goodman sees schooling as social control, the individual thwarted, taxes squandered on “war, school teachers, and politicians.” True, education systems have in many cases throughout history served to reinforce the class structures of the society that set them up. But tearing them down or boycotting them and rebuilding on a local level is not a viable solution.

The fact is, we don’t need more decentralization in our public schools. U.S. schools are already highly decentralized compared to others around the world. Liberals and conservatives have long resisted the creation of a national curriculum, effectively handing the power over to Texas and California to create a de facto national curriculum because they order the most textbooks. In 2010, the Texas Board of Ed. approved a social studies curriculum which emphasizes the importance of capitalism in American life. Board members were unable to agree on whether Darwin’s theory of evolution should be included.

“Unschooling” ends with a portrait of the Albany Free School, an alternative school where students pay a sliding scale tuition averaging a little over $100 a month. “Pitching in to weed the vegetable beds or feed the chickens are fine examples of how the Free School staff turns necessity into virtue, creatively stretching their meager resources while embracing self-reliance and simple living,” writes Taylor. It’s a model school, though she readily admits it isn’t scalable. Nor would we want it be. The school’s existence relies on fundraising, volunteering, the work of interns, and teachers who make a stipend of only $11,000 a year with no benefits—well under the already low going rate. In doing so, it adds to the devaluing of care work on which American capitalism relies.

It’s no accident that this is a microcosm of what is happening to public schools, where parents and kids are increasingly being asked to pitch in and paint the building or hawk candy bars to fill budget gaps. That’s because the values of freedom, autonomy, and choice are in perfect accordance with market-based “reforms,” and with the neoliberal vision of society on which they’re based. Alternative, student-centered education sounds like community action, until you remember we’re already paying for public schools, and patching them up after hours is an inadequate and piecemeal way to go about changing them. We need a common space that offers students access to knowledge they may be but aren’t necessarily getting at home — and we need to insist, through taxation, that the wealthy contribute to it. Make no mistake: “unschooling” is a retreat from this ideal.

Megan Erickson is an associate editor at Big Think and has worked as a tutor and teacher in New York City public schools.

ork in a capitalist society is a conflicted and contradictory phenomenon, never more so than in hard times. We simultaneously work not enough and too much; a labor famine for some means feast for others. The United States has allegedly been in economic “recovery” for over two years, and yet 15 million people [...]]]>

ork in a capitalist society is a conflicted and contradictory phenomenon, never more so than in hard times. We simultaneously work not enough and too much; a labor famine for some means feast for others. The United States has allegedly been in economic “recovery” for over two years, and yet 15 million people cannot find work, or cannot find as much work as they say they would like. At the same time, up to two thirds of workers report in surveys that they would like to work fewer hours than they do now, even if doing so would require a loss of income. The pain of unemployment is well-documented, but the pain of the employed only occasionally sees the light, whether it’s Amazon warehouse employees working at a breakneck pace in sweltering heat, or Foxconn workers risking injury and death to build hip electronics for Apple.

When work is scarce, political horizons tend to narrow, as critiques of the quality of work give way to the desperate search for work of any kind. And work, of any kind, seems to be all that politicians can offer; right and left differ only on who is to blame for the scarcity of it. Go to the web site of the Barack Obama campaign, and you will be told at the top of the “Issues” page that “The President is taking aggressive steps to put Americans back to work and create an economy where hard work pays and responsibility is rewarded.” Likewise the site of the AFL-CIO labor federation, where a man in overalls grins behind the words “work connects us all”. This is how the virtuous working class appears in the liberal imagination: hard-working, responsible, defined, and redeemed by work, but failed by an economy that cannot create the necessary wage labor into which this responsibility can be invested.

When the Right rejects this romanticism of workers as ascetic toilers, it is only to better shift the blame for a weak economy from capital to labor. University of Chicago economist and sometime New York Times contributor Casey Mulligan tried to define the recession out of existence by insisting that collapsing employment reflected only a diminished desire to work, rather than a shortfall in demand. Meanwhile, the more culturally-minded reactionaries fret about the waning of the work ethic as a herald of civilizational decline. Charles Murray, who made his name promoting pseudoscientific accounts of the shiftlessness and mental inferiority of African-Americans, has recently returned with dire warnings about the decay of the white working class. White men, he says, have lost their “industriousness,” as demonstrated by declining labor force participation rates and shorter average work weeks among the employed.

The practiced liberal response is that such statistics reflect an absence of opportunity rather than a lack of gumption. But this leads only to calls for job creation which emphasize the value of “hard work” without reflecting on the nature of that work. The grueling toil of the Amazon warehouse is certainly hard; so too, in a way, are the 80 hour weeks and intense stresses of a Goldman Sachs trader. Yet the former can hardly be said to be healthy or improving for the human spirit, while the latter only creates wealth for the few and economic chaos for the rest of us. Murray’s “industriousness” is the attitude ridiculed by the wayward Marxist Paul Lafargue in his 1883 pamphlet The Right to Be Lazy, “a strange delusion” that afflicts the proletariat with “a furious passion for work.”

Lafargue is part of a dissident socialist tradition, which insists that a politics for the working class must be against work. This is the tradition picked up by political theorist Kathi Weeks in her recent book, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Weeks identifies advocates of more work and those who want better work, and finds each lacking. As an alternative, she holds up the straightforward and unapologetic demand for less work. In the process, she powerfully articulates the case for a politics that appeals to pleasure and desire, rather than to sacrifice and asceticism. It is, after all, the ideal of self-restraint and self-denial that ultimately legitimates the glorification of work, and especially the ideology of the work ethic.

Permutations of the Work Ethic

The furious passion for work is not a constant of human nature but rather something that must be constantly reinforced, and successive versions of the work ethic have been used to stoke that passion. At the dawn of capitalism, the call to work was a call to salvation, as Weeks explains in her reading of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. She recognizes that, far from providing an idealist alternative to Marx’s account of the rise of capitalism, Weber complements historical materialism by describing the construction of a working class ideology. The word is used in Althusser’s sense: “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” The Protestant ethic allowed workers to imagine that when they worked for the profit of the boss, they were really working for their salvation, and for the glory of God.

By the twentieth century, however, the calling had become a material one: hard work would ensure broad-based prosperity. Each of the century’s twin projects of industrial modernity developed this calling in its own way. Soviet authorities promoted the Stakhanovite movement, which glorified exceptional contributions to the productivity of the socialist economy. In Detroit, meanwhile, the social democratic union leader Walter Reuther denounced advocates of shorter hours for undermining the U.S. economy in the struggle against Communism. In neither case was the quality of industrial work called into question; it was simply a matter of who was in control and who reaped the spoils.

The industrial work ethic ran aground on the alienating nature of industrial labor. Workers who still remembered the Great Depression might have been willing to subordinate themselves to the assembly line in return for a steady paycheck, but their children were emboldened to ask for more. As Jefferson Cowie recounts in his history Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, the 1970s were characterized by pervasive labor unrest and what was popularly called the “blue collar blues,” as “workers were harnessed to union pay but longed to run free of the deadening nature of the work itself.” In the realm of left theory, this development was reflected in the vogue for “humanist” critiques of work, rooted in the young Marx’s theory of alienation. Weeks highlights the Freudian-Marxist Erich Fromm, who argued that “the self realization of man . . . is inextricably linked to the activity of work,” which will again become authentic and fulfilling once it is freed from capitalist control. In recognizing the limitations of demanding more work, the humanists instead called for better work.

But this critique proved to be doubly unsatisfying: it either points backwards to austere primitivism or forward to another iteration of capitalism. In the hands of feminists like Maria Mies, the critique of alienated work becomes a call to produce only for immediate use, rather than for exchange; this, Weeks notes, is “a prescription for worldy asceticism of the first order.” If the productivist form of Marxism trafficked in the illusion that capitalism’s forces of production could be upheld and preserved independent of the class-based relations of production, then the romantic call for a return to small-scale or craft labor attempts to split apart another of Marx’s dialectics, that between exchange value and use value. But use value, like productivity, is ultimately a category internal to capitalism; the demand that what we produce be “useful” is inseparable from the work ethic itself.

The most influential line of argument against industrial labor, however, has not been the ascetic one but instead what the sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello call the “artistic critique.” Under this critique, industrial labor is condemned not because it separates exchange and use, but because it restricts the autonomy, freedom, and creativity of the worker. The solution is not to reconnect work to earthy craft labor, but to elevate workers into flexible, autonomous, self-fashioning individuals, truly able to realize themselves in their work.

But this position quickly curdled into apologia for the precarious world of post-1970s capitalism, in which individuals were encouraged to celebrate unstable jobs and uncertain income as forms of freedom rather than insecurity. Intangible benefits were offered as an alternative to a share in rising productivity, which became decoupled from wages. Thus we arrive at a third iteration of the work ethic in the post-industrial era, where work is now represented neither as a path to salvation nor as a road to riches, but as a source of personal identity and fulfillment. This ethic is exemplified by hip Silicon Valley firms like Apple, which reportedly told employees, in response to their wage demands, that “Money shouldn’t be an issue when you’re employed at Apple. Working at Apple should be viewed as an experience.”

In these circumstances, Weeks argues, calls for “better work” are not only inadequate, they tend to reproduce and extend a form of capitalism that attempts to colonize the lives and personalities of its workers. Hence “worker empowerment can boost efficiency, flexibility can serve as a way to cut costs, and participation can produce commitment to the organization . . . quality becomes quantity as the call for better work is translated into a requirement for more work.” Any attempt to reconstruct the meaning of work in a non-alienating way must begin, then, by rejecting work altogether.

Yet the manipulative invocation of the autonomy of labor is only possible because the artistic critique did address real desires. Given the shortcomings of the old industrial labor paradigm, it hardly seems possible or desirable to return to an older proletarian ideal of long-term, protected employment with a single firm. Yet some are still attempting to resurrect the idea of better work. In The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, economist Guy Standing identifies the new mass of insecure workers as a “precariat” rather than a proletariat, one which desires “control over life, a revival of social solidarity and a sustainable autonomy, while rejecting old labourist forms of security and state paternalism.”

Like Weeks, Standing is a proponent of an unconditional basic income—a regular payment provided to every individual regardless of whether or how much they work—as a way of providing income security without locking people into jobs. Yet he still grounds his appeal on the concept of work, now expanded beyond the boundaries of wage labor. “The fact that there is an aversion to the jobs on offer does not mean that . . . people do not want to work,” he argues, for in fact “almost everybody wants to work.” Subsequently, however, he speaks of “rescuing” work from its association with wage labor: “All forms of work should be treated with equal respect, and there should be no presumption that someone not in a job is not working or that someone not working today is an idle scrounger.” This evokes the notion of a social factory in which we contribute various kinds of productive activity that is not directly remunerated, ranging from raising children to coding open source software.

But no amount of redefinition can escape the association of work with the capitalist ethos of productivism and efficiency. The contrast between work and “idle scrounging” implies that we can measure whether any given activity is productive or useful, by translating it into a common measure. Capitalism has such a measure, monetary value: whatever has value in the market is, by definition, productive. If the critique of capitalism is to get beyond this, it must get beyond the idea that our activities can be subordinated to a single measure of value. Indeed, to demand that time outside of work be truly free is to reject the call to justify its usefulness. This is a central insight of Weeks’ consistent anti-asceticism, which resists any effort to replace the work ethic with some equally homogenizing code that externally validates the organization of our time. Time beyond work should not be for exchange or for use, but for itself. The point, as Weeks puts it, is to “get a life,” as we find ways “to sustain the social worlds necessary for, among other things, production.”

Politics of the Demand

What is the politics of getting a life? It is easier to reject the ideology of work in theory than it is to craft a political strategy that advances an anti-work agenda in practice. Neither side of twentieth century socialism’s reform-or-revolution dialectic is particularly helpful in this regard. Social democracy has managed to partially liberate workers from work, by providing public services and income supports that lessen the dependence on wage labor. Yet this de-commodification of labor has been halting and uneasy, due to a preoccupation with maintaining full employment and conserving jobs. The insurrectionary seizure of state power, meanwhile, if it leaves the structure of capitalist labor relations intact, merely puts the workers in charge of their own exploitation—meet the new boss, same as the old.

Weeks attempts to transcend these limitations by elaborating a concept of the political demand that merges the reformist and revolutionary impulses. The demand is seen here as a call for a specific reform, but also as something more. The demand, and the way it is articulated, can be a tool for ideological demystification and for what Fredric Jameson calls “cognitive mapping,” charting the relationships between various spheres of production and reproduction. A demand can be something to organize around, a way to build collective capacity. Finally, a demand can set the stage for radical struggles and transformations in the future, even if it does not challenge the foundations of the system immediately.

This concept of the demand is evocative of André Gorz’s idea of the “non-reformist reform,” although Weeks shies away from the implication that a demand could have radical implications while still partaking in the reformist terrain of policy proposals and tactical compromises. In a move that is reminiscent of some of the anxiety about “demands” in the Occupy Wall Street milieu, it seems at times that Weeks wants to preserve her radical credentials by denying that the system could ever really accommodate the demands she puts forward.

Yet the two specific demands she discusses, though they are ambitious, are within the horizon of reformism: an unconditional basic income and a shortening of the work week. These are common enough proposals among leftists of an anti-work persuasion, but Weeks’ treatment is distinctive because it grounds both demands in the politics of feminism. Basic income is offered as a successor to “wages for housework”, a signature demand of the Marxist feminists who emerged from the Italian workerist scene. The objective, says Weeks, is to highlight “the arbitrariness with which contributions to social production are and are not rewarded with wages,” thus making visible the enormous amount of unwaged reproductive labor performed by women. Against those who reject basic income as an unearned handout, we can respond that it is capitalism which arbitrarily refuses to pay for a huge proportion of the labor that sustains it.

Shorter hours, too, is inherently a feminist demand. The proletarian of the Left’s romantic imagination has always been implicitly a male figure, the full time worker relying on the reproductive labor of a woman in the home. However, Weeks is careful to reject calls for work time reduction premised on making more time for the family. Such arguments may contest the work ethic, but they do so only by reinforcing an equally pernicious family ethic. Time in the home comes to be portrayed as inherently better or less alienated than time in the workplace, and the need for such time becomes naturalized. This ignores the alienating and oppressive qualities of the family, which led an earlier generation of feminists to seek the relative freedom and autonomy of wage labor. What’s more, the self-denying asceticism of the work ethic has not been overcome but merely displaced, from the workplace to the home. Shorter hours, asserts Weeks, should be offered not as a prop to the traditional family but as “a means of securing the time and space to forge alternatives to the present ideals and conditions of work and family life.”

Workers Against Work

The rejection of work has a rich history in left theory, but a more intermittent presence in mass politics. It crops up sporadically, from the nineteenth century ten hour day movement to the Italian Hot Autumn of 1969. One great difficulty is that by jettisoning the work ethic, anti-work politics simultaneously takes up the cause of wage laborers while undermining their identity as wage laborers. It insists that their liberation must entail the simultaneous abolition of their self-conception as workers. This is in contrast to the more traditional Marxist vision, in which the working class first realizes itself in the metaphorical “dictatorship of the proletariat” before ultimately dissolving itself into a totally classless society. Yet even as orthodox a Marxist as Georg Lukacs observed in History and Class Consciousness that “the proletariat only perfects itself by annihilating and transcending itself.” Its ultimate destiny is to be not just a class for-itself but “against itself.”

This is not a problem unique to the struggle against capitalism, and it is perhaps inherent in any truly radical politics. It is always easier to pose demands on the terms of the enemy than it is to reject those terms altogether, whether that means racial minorities demanding assimilation to white society or gays and lesbians demanding admission to the institution of bourgeois marriage. By asking workers to give up not just their chains but their identities as workers, anti-work theorists relinquish the forms of working class pride and solidarity that have been the glue for many left movements. They dream of a workers’ movement against work. But this requires some new conception of who we are and what we are to become, if we are to throw off the label of “worker.”

Writers in the anti-work tradition have often sought these new identities in the outlooks and practices of figures who are marginal to the production process and outside the working class. Lafargue lapsed into noble savagery, comparing the deluded proletariat to “the Spaniard, in whom the primitive animal has not been atrophied,” and who therefore recognized that “work is the worst sort of slavery.” For Oscar Wilde, the artist showed us the future of life after our liberation from work and property, when everyone could finally develop a “true, beautiful, healthy Individualism.” Labor was, for him, not the source of a meaningful life but its antithesis, and the promise of modernity was that it could be overcome for the many as it was once overcome for the few:

The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. And when scientific men are no longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own joy and the joy of everyone else.

Lafargue and Wilde’s arguments have Nietzchean overtones, with the defense of work portrayed as a form of ressentiment and the work ethic as a detestable slave morality. Weeks makes this connection as well in her final chapter, joining Nietzsche to the iconoclastic Marxist Ernst Bloch as a theorist of utopian politics. To give up ressentiment, Weeks suggests, means to ask, “Can we want, and are we willing to create, a new world that would no longer be ‘our’ world’, a social form that would not produce subjects like us?” This brings about the difficulty raised above, as it pertains to the politics of rejecting work: “its mandate to embrace the present and affirm the self and, at the same time, to will their overcoming; its prescription for self-affirmation but not self-preservation or self-aggrandizement.”

Elsewhere, Weeks remarks that we should not underestimate just how much hesitation about anti-work positions is rooted in fear. Fear of idleness, fear of hedonism—or to borrow a phrase from Erich Fromm, fear of freedom. It is relatively easy to say that in the future I will be what I am now—a worker, just perhaps with more money or more job security or more control over my work. It is something else to imagine ourselves as different kinds of people altogether. That, perhaps, is the unappreciated value of Occupy Wall Street encampments and similar attempts to carve out alternative ways of living within the interstices of capitalist society. It may be, as critics often point out, that they cannot really build an alternative society so long as capitalism’s institutional impediments to such a society remain in place. But perhaps they can help remove the fear of what we might become if those impediments were lifted, and we were able to make our exodus from the world of work to the world of freedom.