Tenured Radical Can’t Find Any US Riots (Not That She Wants To)

A Tenured Radical wants to know where the U.S. riots are.

It seems a little bit of bad faith to me to critique the lack of riots in the U.S. and then say “Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to see cities burn.” Well, ok, I won’t “get you wrong,” you want some kind of middle ground between weekend recreational protest and, um, cities burning. Got it. Whatever that is. But obviously watching cities burn holds a kind of fascination, especially if it’s not your city, and that oppressed people are giving a big fuck you to their incompetent and corrupt minders can’t help but give a bit of cheer to anyone of left-of-center sympathies.

But TR is definitely keeping those complicated desires at bay — don’t get her wrong! — and instead shifting discussion to the safer terrain of, I don’t know, complaining about a lack of a general strike or whatever. This vague idealization of a nebulous ideal of an “activism” (a word that continually strikes me as a bit pathetic, at least etymologically) that is never quite right goes along with other cliches of thinking that radicals, whether or not they are tenured or have sufficient stock investments to be “a bit concerned,” should perhaps avoid, unless they want to come off rather more like Tenured Liberals.

First of all, your words. TR has dashed off this timely missive for her Chronicle column, so we can forgive a few infelicitous phrasings that could lead the reader to “get her wrong.” But really, do we want to characterize UK Uncut protests from earlier this summer as “a riot” and cite Time Magazine of all sources? The word “riot” easily slides into the kind of meaningless depoliticized “thuggery” we already see at work in the media framing of the uprisings in the UK. Why would a self-professed radical undercut the movement she herself calls for with this language? Why wouldn’t she point out the violent kettling techniques of the police, which have proven to cause injury and death? Might I recommend a new news service, such as Al Jazeera English, surely available on one of her 180+ cable channels.

Secondly, let’s not sell ourselves short. TR is rehearsing another trope, apathy, particularly student apathy. If you want to read endless griping about the condition of American college students, The Chronicle is your best bet.

This has all caused me to reflect on the extraordinary passivity of Americans, and of American students, who respond to reduced access to education by studying harder, getting better grades, and stepping on the people who can’t — or aren’t in a position to – compete any longer.

Well, maybe this is what happens at Wesleyan, where our Radical is Tenured, one of the “little ivies,” set in picturesque Middletown, CT. She might find something different at large urban campuses and public universities, where the response has certainly not been studying harder and getting better grades. Maybe it would have been more appropriate for TR to reflect on the passivity of American academics, who are responding to reduced access to decent jobs by… working harder, publishing more papers, and bitching in the pages of the Chronicle.

Pundits have a bad track record for predicting uprisings. These things can be hard to predict, surely, but especially if you are removed from the people getting hit with the most oppressive features of neoliberalism, or if you only interact with them in a classroom, as an authority figure, discussing academic topics. K-punk’s similar assertions of the passivity of British students (reprinted in his tract, Capitalist Realism less than two years ago) have been shown up. May we all hope TR eats her words soon. As Darcus Howe is at pains to explain, if you’ve been there, if your friends and family have been repeatedly victimized, this kind of thing isn’t really unexpected at all:

Lacan on Fucking and Killing the Poor

The episode of Saint Martin and the cloak is one of those paradigmatic parables of charity. Martin, coming across a naked beggar, cuts his own cloak in two to clothe the man.

Here’s Lacan’s interpretation, from The Ethics of Psychoanalysis:

Saint Martin shares his cloak, and a great deal is made of it. Yet it is after all a simple question of training; material is by its very nature made to be disposed of — it belongs to the other as much as it belongs to me. We are no doubt touching a primitive requirement in the need to be satisfied there, for the beggar is naked. But perhaps over and above that need to be clothed, he was begging for something else, namely, that Saint Martin either kill him or fuck him.

Ethics indeed! Of course, Lacan admits, the beggar does have basic needs to be satisfied. But “perhaps” — this word does a lot of work — what the beggar really needs — no, wants — is for the benefactor to, well, it’s (uncharacteristically) pretty clear from what Lacan wrote.

Let me pre-empt any Lacan acolytes out there, who are always ready to jump to their master’s defense. Lacan is drawing a distinction between philanthropy and love, love being for Lacan a violent rupture that at bottom is the desire “to kill him or fuck him.” So he’s saying that if Saint Martin truly loved the beggar as his neighbor, he wouldn’t give him his coat, he would ram his dick down the poor man’s throat. That’s love. None of this pussy-ass charity when you have the guts to stare into the void of the Real! Of course, Lacan was a bit of a trickster, so he could be playing up his language, dropping an f-bomb to make his genteel-but-prurient audience titter while he makes an opaque joke about love. You can go through any number of interpretive backflips to justify what Lacan says; this suppleness, this studied indeterminacy of his work is no doubt one reason why Lacan is so attractive to people who spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about words and trying to outsmart one another.

But let’s pause with the image Lacan has given us. He wants his audience, bourgeois in an older sense, like Lacan himself, to imagine a hand grasping for help, the epitome of abjection begging for a simple need to be met, as secretly wishing for the superior owner of property to exploit, hurt, use, and dispose of him. The poor want to be used by the rich, and the rich in turn love the poor by exploiting them. This is not even saying that the poor deserve their abjection, as is so common in the West today. This is saying they desire it.

And this is one reason why I can’t understand why any left-leaning person would waste their time with this crap.

We Have It Worse

In the 1970s there was much talk of a ‘leisure age’ in which, thanks to automation, we would scarcely work at all — and a spate of books brooding earnestly on how we would fill our new spare time without becoming hopelessly lethargic. Anybody spotting one of these forgotten tracts in a second-hand bookshop today would laugh incredulously. The average British employee now puts in 80,224 hours over his or her working life, as against 69,000 in 1981. Far from losing the work ethic, we seem ever more enslaved by it. The new vogue is for books that ask anxiously how we can achieve ‘work-life balance’ in an age where many people have no time for anything beyond labour and sleep.

Francis Wheen, Das Kapital: A Biography (2006)

Rather than the pathetic equivocation of “work-life balance,” I propose a shift to older terms — working conditions. Don’t let some scowling supplicant to Capital from a previous generation tell you that you don’t know how good you have it; by every objective measure we have it worse.

(“Chained to your job” is less a metaphor than you might think, as unpaid prison slave labor proves so much cheaper than decent union jobs… but prisoners are often prone to radicalization…)

Lenin on “the struggle against petty-bourgeois revolutionism”

It was, however, different with Bolshevism’s other enemy within the working-class movement. Little is known in other countries of the fact that Bolshevism took shape, developed and became steeled in the long years of struggle against petty–bourgeois revolutionism, which smacks of anarchism, or borrows something from the latter and, in all essential matters, does not measure up to the conditions and requirements of a consistently proletarian class struggle. Marxist theory has established—and the experience of all European revolutions and revolutionary movements has fully confirmed—that the petty proprietor, the small master (a social type existing on a very extensive and even mass scale in many European countries), who, under capitalism, always suffers oppression and very frequently a most acute and rapid deterioration in his conditions of life, and even ruin, easily goes to revolutionary extremes, but is incapable of perseverance, organisation, discipline and steadfastness. A petty bourgeois driven to frenzy by the horrors of capitalism is a social phenomenon which, like anarchism, is characteristic of all capitalist countries. The instability of such revolutionism, its barrenness, and its tendency to turn rapidly into submission, apathy, phantasms, and even a frenzied infatuation with one bourgeois fad or another—all this is common knowledge. However, a theoretical or abstract recognition of these truths does not at all rid revolutionary parties of old errors, which always crop up at unexpected occasions, in somewhat new forms, in a hitherto unfamiliar garb or surroundings, in an unusual—a more or less unusual—situation.

–Lenin, “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder” (1920)

For my money, there’s plenty to recommend in left anarchism at this conjuncture; while it’s often reflexively anti-Bolshevik, there are plenty of Marxist anarchists with quite cogent analyses of the contemporary condition. However, it’s the petty bourgeois variants that you really have to watch out for, especially in the capital of middle-class individualism, the U.S.A. Knee-jerk anti-authoritarianism, individualist punk nihilists, and most alarming, the libertarian and “anarcho”-capitalist ideologies popular among self-styled rebel economists and dissident political scientists — these have a more immediate hold among a (white) America increasingly disenchanted with neoliberal empire. These are the ideologies (and “infantile” is still as apt a descriptor as any) that need to be fought as much as — perhaps more than — liberalism, whose hypocrisy and impotence are already on full display to everyone.

Hoping for a Chinese Century?

According to the official statistics, about a quarter of Chinese college students who graduated in the year 2010 were unemployed. Of the students who graduated in the previous year, about 15 percent remained unemployed. Those college graduates who are “employed” often have to accept a wage that is no higher than that of an unskilled migrant worker. About one million college graduates (compared to the current annual graduation of about six million) are said to belong to the so-called “ant tribes.” That is, they live in slum-like conditions on the outskirts of China’s major cities. The surge of housing, health care, and education costs have further undermined the economic and social status of China’s existing and potential petty bourgeoisie, forcing them to give up their aspiration to “middle-class” living standards.

One of the darker parts of this excellent Monthly Review article on the contemporary political situation in China.

Here are the stats for the U.S. via a NYT article entitled “Outlook is Bleak“:

Not quite as bleak as China — no ant tribe infographics yet. But we have another problem: we haven’t given up middle-class aspirations. Instead, we’re content with the dream neoliberalism continually offers up: a future crappier and more difficult than the past, but bearable.

NPR:

Still, today’s economy will force many graduates to settle, says John Irons, policy director at the Economic Policy Institute. Young people who start their careers in a bad economy tend to accept jobs at lower wages, and that leaves them at a disadvantage with their salary for about a decade, he says.

Just give it ten years! The American Dream is still available, you’ll just need to get a cheaper model. And you might have to lie about that master’s degree you spent 40 grand on.

But now [Berenzweig] sometimes considers that degree she paid so dearly for a liability, at least when it comes to some jobs. She takes it off her resume when applying for waitress jobs.

Meanwhile China has other some advantages: a class-for-itself.

MR:

In the words of a prominent Chinese worker-activist, compared to the working classes in other capitalist states, the Chinese (state-sector) working class has developed a “relatively complete class consciousness,” based on its unique historical experience in both the socialist period and the capitalist period.

…and at least one proven method for stemming neoliberal privatization:

When the Jianlong general manager threatened to fire all workers, the enraged workers beat the manger to death. Although the provincial governor and thousands of armed police were at the scene, no one dared to intervene. After the beating, Jilin Province was forced to cancel the privatization plan. The Tonghua Steel workers’ victory was a huge inspiration for workers in many parts of China. Workers in several other steel factories also protested and forced the local governments to cancel privatization plans.

Of course, the glum resignation you so often find in the declining U.S. petty bourgeosie is not exactly the mood required for this task:

Worker-activists in other provinces saw the Tonghua victory as their own and regretted that “too few capitalists have been killed.”

Almost makes you want that Chinese Century the newspapers keep talking about!

 

imperial nation-building and calculated precarity

Security action against ‘insurgents’ is only one small element of an American counter-insurgency doctrine which dates back at least to General J. Franklin Bell’s campaign of the early 1900s against Filipino ‘rebels’. Its principles include building a ruling elite to carry out the occupier’s plan; establishing security services accountable only to that elite; concentrating economic control within that elite; and setting up a generous aid policy which sustains a ‘trickle-down legitimacy’ for that elite. The underlying rationale, from the Philippines to Vietnam, has been to instil acquiescence. In the Palestinian case, the doctrine hopes to facilitate close collaboration with Israel and the dismantling of Palestinian resistance. In return, the Palestinians have been promised a depoliticised ‘state’ hardly worthy of the name and subservient to Israel. Perhaps, in such a state, a new Palestinian middle class might live more comfortably; perhaps the visible tools of occupation and control over Palestinian life would be more discreetly concealed; but such ‘statehood’ would amount to little more than a more benign occupation.

—Alastair Crooke, “Permanent Temporariness”

This continues to be Western imperial strategy, from Sudan to Kosovo. This is in turn what is waiting in the wings for the revolutions in the Arab world, should the West gain much of a foothold. Hold strong, Libya!

But this piece is remarkable in another sense. It’s long been understood that the colonies were laboratories for a variety of techniques and technologies, which were then exported to the mainland: from concentration camps to industrial modes of accumulation.

It was Sharon who pioneered the philosophy of ‘maintained uncertainty’ that repeatedly extended and then limited the space in which Palestinians could operate by means of an unpredictable combination of changing and selectively enforced regulations, and the dissection of space by settlements, roads Palestinians were not allowed to use and continually shifting borders.

…a kind of Kafkaesque praxis that should ring familiar far beyond the Palestinian territories.

Hobsbawm on the Depression

The foundations of the prosperity of the 1920s, as we have seen, were weak, even in the U.S.A., where farming was virtually already in depression, and money wages, contrary to the myth of the great jazz age, were not rising dramatically, and actually stagnant in the last mad years of the boom. What was happening, as so often happens in free market booms, was that, with wages lagging, profits rose disproportionately and the prosperous got a larger slice of the national cake. But as mass demand could not keep pace with the rapidly increasing productivity of the industrial system in the heyday of Henry Ford, the result was over-production and speculation. This, in turn, triggered off the collapse….

When the collapse came, it was of course all the more drastic in the U.S.A. because in fact a lagging expansion of demand had been beefed up by means of an enormous expansion of consumer credit. (Readers who remember the later 1980s may find themselves on familiar territory.) Banks, already hurt by the speculative real-estate boom which, with the usual help of self-deluding optimists and mushrooming financial crookery (Not for nothing were 1920s the decade of psychologist Emile Coué who popularized optimistic auto-suggestion by means of the slogan, constantly to be repeated: “Every day in every way I am getting better and better.”), had reached its peak some years before the Big Crash, loaded with bad debts, refused new housing loans or to refinance existing ones. This did not stop them from failing by the thousands, while (in 1933) nearly half of all home mortgages were in default and a thousand properties a day were being foreclosed.

–Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes (pp. 100-101)

Readers living through the current crisis may also find themselves on familiar territory. However, as Hobsbawm continually stresses, political strategies and policy implementation during this period never let that defining moment of the 20th Century out of its purview: the successful Russian Revolution and the presence of actually existing socialism. That the USSR did not live up to its promises was besides the point: for capitalist governments, the threat of leftist revolution was palpable; for capitalists, it was terrifying; for left activists, it was energizing. Rooselvelt-era social programs, still beloved today for their proven ability to keep people from dying in the streets, owe a debt to the Bolsheviks. For all the resonance the contemporary moment has with Hobsbawm’s description of the Depression, one stark fact divides them: the lack of a credible socialist alternative means there’s nothing to restrain the ownership class (which everyone paying attention knows includes the Obama administration) from using the crisis as pretext for a huge wealth grab and a solidification of power.

be always fully occupied

Men are entrusted from infancy with the care of their honour, their property, their friends, and even with the property and honour of their friends. They are overwhelmed with business, with the study of languages, and with physical exercise; and they are made to understand that they cannot be happy unless their health, their honour, their fortune and that of their friends be in good condition, and that a single thing wanting will make them unhappy. Thus they are given cares and business which make them bustle about from the break of day.– It is, you will exclaim, a strange way to make them happy! What more could be done to make them miserable!– Indeed, what could be done? We should only have to relieve them from all these cares; for then they would see themselves: they would reflect on what they are, whence they came, whither they go, and thus we cannot employ and divert them too much. And this is why, after having given them so much business, we advise them, if they have some time for relaxation, to employ it in amusement, in play, and to be always fully occupied.

–Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1669)

Work hard, play hard is a corporate cultural philosophy that hard work and long hours should be balanced with intense leisure activities (including, for instance sports, parties, and outings). Its manifestations are commonly seen in sales/marketing departments and are often tied to performance targets. Many top consulting firms have adopted the philosophy and regularly advertise it as corporate policy to prospective employees.

Recently, critics of the “Work Hard, Play Hard” philosophy have asserted that the long hours and stressful environments that go come with the Work Hard aspect of the theory leads to burn-out and other emotional and physiological problems in employees.

How does one “play hard”? When play is also work.

 

Neocolonialism, Authenticity, and the Ethics of World Music

Boima has a post on the neocolonial aspects of crate-digging that caused some furor when said crate-diggers descended on the comments section, but the result was interesting, and I’d like to weigh in on a few dynamics of contemporary global music the discussion crystalized.

The first thing that struck me was that authenticity is not the dead horse the popists beat to a pulp back in the early Oughts. Its spirit has migrated away from production — in which authenticity was ascribed to certain types of sounds and their presentation — into the realm of consumption.

The cataloging tendency tends to be a colonial one. Also, many of the DJs and label owners, perhaps because of its shared lineage with Hip Hop, have concentrated on Afro-Beat, or have given more weight to genres that are popular in the west like Rock and Funk. For African artists, these are generally styles that artists often used as tools, or influences to fuse with their own popular local styles. The reissue train has been slow to recognize larger genres in Africa like Soukous, Highlife, or Benga, unless they find an artist that has an added funk or rock influence. In the past the tendency was to look for “authentic” music that sounded more “traditional.” Are they now shying away from things that sound too … African?

Certainly a weird reversal is at work here. Previous critiques of world music accused compilers (and by extension, yuppie listeners) for exoticizing non-Western music, for fetishizing its lack of modernity, and finally, for ascribing authenticity to what was essentially constructed for Western tastes. We have moved to a new periodization. Boima criticizes compilers (and by extension, hipster listeners) not for exoticizing Africans, but for disregarding actual tastes of Africans in favor of music that sits alongside American funk and rock more comfortably. Now hybrids — music that belies a fusion of African and Western — are inauthentic for not being “African” enough. “African-ness” is no longer a pre-modern essence as it was for first-gen world music. Now it’s been filtered through the analytic lens of our best science of consumption, market research: In the words of a recent Guardian article, “African music the actual African diaspora likes.” Actual. Real. Authentic.

The “authentic listener” is even more flawed concept than the “authentic artist.” For one, it’s difficult to pinpoint why particular music strikes someone in a particular way. Does that French DJ like Afrobeat because it’s exotic or because it’s Western-sounding? Unfortunately for both marketers and sociologists, demographics never match easily with musical tastes. But there’s a bigger problem: the frame of analysis. To examine and criticize individual actors in a tiny corner of the music industry, itself but a portion of the economy, is to miss what is important and revealing about the phenomenon Boima is commenting upon.

Boima makes an analogy between these vinyl tourists and colonial extraction: “it does seem that the current mad-dash for rare African vinyl could be analogous to Europe’s 19th Century Scramble for Africa, a mad-dash for rare African minerals.” He gets raked over the coals in the comments by the diggers, who don’t exactly appreciate being associated with violent exploitation. They argue variously that they listen to a wide variety of African music, that they make little money, that they are actually helping some of the artists on their compilations. Boima is taken to task, and rightly in my view: his resort to the “authentic listener” is just a shaky defense for an argument that was falling apart even before the diggers pile on in the comments section. Even if we had a bunch of European DJs releasing benga and soukous, we could still use this argument. Whenever “non-Western” music is released to “Westerners,” it provokes anxiety for the more multicultural-minded. It even pushes left-leaning people into defending things you wouldn’t think they would: property, nation, the buying and selling of culture, “tradition,” and yes, authenticity.

What Boima gets right is his analogy. There is a connection between Westerners crate-digging in Africa and 19th Century colonialism. But to narrow in on a tiny section of Western operations in Africa, and castigate the individual operators misses the point. The heritage of imperialism, which is not the past at all, but our very real and ongoing present, is not their fault. The presence of Western music and technology in Africa, the infrastructure that enables tourists to fly there, the economic imbalances that allow a European of modest means to purchase thousands of rare records, the lack of distribution channels for commodity export on the continent — these are larger, structural factors. Even on the level of desire — for the rare, for the exotic, for the familiar, for the exotic-but-not-too-exotic, for the authentic — are conditioned and manufactured by a system that has compressed time and space, thrown disparate peoples together, and fused and warped culture in uncountable ways. The practices examined in the debate, and the debate itself, are symptoms of much larger, much more insidious processes: actually existing imperialism. The crate-diggers are in a sense enabled in their task by Leopold chopping off hands in the Congo and by Shell dumping oil into the Niger Delta. They are part of this story. But they are not the villains.

This historical perspective is obscured by another problem lurking in current world music (fuck it, that’s what it is) discourse — the version of authenticity it draws upon. The authenticity-as-essence (especially pre-modern essence) argument is pretty much dead, so we can leave that in the dustbin of shitty NPR shows. But the more ethical stance that Boima raises — the one of responsibility, of being an ethical musical tourist — is alive and well, and also problematic.

Philosophers of the liberal tradition such as Charles Taylor and Lionel Trilling argue that authenticity relies on a kind of relational stance towards others, one of mutual recognition and sincerity. Without getting too theoretical, these positions rely on a long tradition of thought about the liberal subject — self-contained, self-directed, individualist, tolerant. If I am a good liberal subject, and you are a good liberal subject, then we can find a way to behave ethically, authentically, towards each other, and make the world a better, more civil place through recognizing each other as legitimate beings. But if I don’t recognize you, if I “fetishize” or “exoticize” you, or improperly represent your cultural artifacts, I’m acting unethically. You see this argument pop up all the time; one of the commenters, “wills,” states

if we continue to fetishize the psychedelic African past at the expense of a more mature, nuanced relationship with the present (and other eras), we might end up stuck in graceland (or on some blog).

There’s no shortage of advice on how the proper relationship you should have with African music. The problem is, no one knows what it means. How do you listen to something in a “mature” and “nuanced” way? How is releasing a compilation of Afrobeat “fetishizing” and making an mbalax remix of Akon not? These words are what Adorno would call the jargon of authenticity — they are essentially meaningless, erected only to set arbitrary boundaries. As a good dialectical materialist, Adorno has no patience for this stuff about mutual recognition and ethical stances. The liberal subject position assumes that we have ultimate control over our actions, which leaves out the history that inflects and conditions so much of who we are and what we do, the travels we take, the art we consume and how we react to it, the blog posts we write. We are not independent, self-contained actors in the world; we move through larger structures that determine more than we care to admit. And so any critique of transnational production or consumption, especially if you want to politicize it (as you should) has to discuss this, and not haggle over the tastes of individuals. The “colonial tendency” is both ours and not ours — it is there, we must acknowledge it, but attempting to ameliorate it in ourselves while ignoring actual imperialism just makes imperialism function more smoothly. Our responsibility is not to our taste — it is to ending the neocolonial project.

This starts at home.

Some Were Masked

I looked at the newspaper cover photo, really looked, the first time I’ve really done so in over two months in Mexico. It was full of dead bodies, as usual, so I don’t know why this one struck me. Men strung up on a fence, in a crucifixion pose, bloodily executed. Some had rags over their faces, others didn’t — ASSASSINATION: SOME WERE MASKED the headline screamed. They looked my age, maybe younger. The first thing I wondered: Were they alive when they strung them up to the fence? And then: What were they thinking? At what point did they know they would die? What did they say to their killers? What were their last moments like?

A professor had remarked about the ubiquitous organ grinders in Mexico that it’s a pity that it makes more economic sense for a young able-bodied man to crank an organ for pocket change than do anything else. What the fuck is this then?

Like the other gawkers crowded around the newsstand, I didn’t buy the paper. I’ve already paid for this disgusting spectacle.

Read more: The brutal face of Mexico’s 21st-Century War