Decoding Chomsky, by Chris Knight

Noam Chomsky has often discussed "Plato's Problem," which he obviously finds fascinating. The problem is this: how can people know so much given a relative poverty of stimuli? Just today you found yourself talking to someone and the words just flowed out of you; you didn't have to think about them beforehand. You probably never uttered some of those sentences before, in the exact way. We all take this for granted, easily. Plato wondered about it and surmised that the reason we are able to know so much is because we already knew it in a previous life! You just talk to each other and knowledge sorta miraculously emerges via a quasi midwifery. Or rather: our forebears knew things and passed this ability to know (best example: apprehending our native language so easily) on to us. In a sense, we already "know" everything, but we need it drawn out by some...process. Today, people talk about genes. Chomsky takes Plato's "soul" and changes it to something like "biological language acquisition device," but you already knew that. (<----see what I did there?)

But this Plato Problem still seems iffy to me.

Chomsky has often written about "Orwell's Problem" too: how can people not know so many things that truly impact their lives, when the information is basically right in front of them? Noam has offered a solution to why this problem exists in books such as his famous one from 1988 (co-written with Edward Herman), Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Very sophisticated propaganda tools have been developed during the 20th century, suffice to write, for now.

                                     Chris Knight, radical British anthropologist, studied

                                        Chomsky's works for over two decades

In the 1970s an intellectual proposed there's a "Chomsky Problem," which is this: how can one man write a massive body of work on linguistics, while never mentioning the social world or politics in those books, while at the same time issuing scads of books critical of his own country's foreign and domestic policies? In Chomsky's political books the mention of science, much less linguistics is basically zero. The writer who (as far as I know) coined the "Chomsky Problem" thought Noam's linguistic work was brilliant; his political writings were, IIRC, "naive." 

For at least 20 years I've wondered about the Chomsky Problem, but as I read more and more I came to the opposite conclusion: I thought Chomsky's linguistics were preposterous, while his criticism of the official lies of the State Department (and much much much more) were astonishingly acute.

I read books from the Right about Chomsky that were mostly ad hominem character assassinations. I've read far too many books by academics on his linguistics that see his grammar models as genius. Of course, the worldwide Left love his political books. There are at least five intellectuals who seem to have made their careers out of explaining, collecting, and championing Chomsky's oeuvre. 

George Lakoff is one cognitive neurolinguist whose work makes a hell of a lot of sense to me, and he seems to despise Chomsky. Chomsky seems to despise Lakoff. (See Randy Allen Harris's The Linguistics Wars on this, and I understand Harris has an update in the works!) Chomsky answers Lakoff's barbs by saying Lakoff doesn't "understand" his work. But Lakoff was one of the early bright followers of Chomsky's linguistics models, only to break with him - radically - when it became apparent Chomsky's linguistics would never be able to account for semantics (by which I mean meaning in language). And Lakoff (who has amassed quite a large body of scholarship himself) has barely had anything to say about Noam's politics. Lakoff is definitely a liberal of some sort...

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So: Social Anthropologist Chris Knight (Wiki) has, almost miraculously, solved the Chomsky Problem. I've been trying to solve it for 20 years; I now feel the euphoria that one of us has solved it. My many blogspews here as the "Overweening Generalist" on my own attempts to solve the Chomsky Problem now seem horribly unsophisticated. And so it goes...

 Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics, recently released, is an astonishingly well-written and researched volume that will probably be the most important work in the history of ideas, post World War II, that you'll read for quite some time, and I say this if only out of Chomsky's massive influence. Knight has made a stellar contribution to the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of intellectuals 1945-now, and has explicated lucidly a new and dynamite version of how the "cognitive revolution" arose. 

Knight has apparently spent the past 20 years researching this book and has managed to boil it all down to 240 pages, plus endnotes, a massive bibliography, and index. In an interview he mentioned that he'd finished a work in his field of Anthropology and hadn't really covered the origin of language in humans, because he felt he didn't know enough about the subject. Knowing Chomsky was Mr. Linguistics (having virtually single-handedly made it into a science and moving Linguistics from the Anthropology Department into the new Cognitive Science labs at your nearby Big University), he read Chomsky's linguistics in order to understand. And he ran into what I ran into: it's a cold, abstract to a painful degree, literally meaningless, an unworkable series of models that, - get this - by definition, has nothing to do with humans communicating with each other. 

Chris Knight says he admires Chomsky's political work, and there's no reason not to believe him; he clearly admires Chomsky's scholarship and courage in this regard. As do I. At times Knight's said there are a lot of conscientious academics and intellectuals who have criticized the US as imperial power, but no one really even comes close to Chomsky. That said...

                                    Noam Chomsky, whose linguistic models are 

                                   (finally!) seeming to be exposed as going nowhere

Anyone who has tried to follow Chomsky's many models of "Cartesian Linguistics" (AKA masochists) and thought to themselves, "Either I'm an idiot or this is a put-on, or possibly massive fraud" - that was me at one point - will know what I'm referring to: "Phrase Structure Rules," "Transformational Rules," "Grammar," "Deep Structure," the nature of the "language organ," "The Minimalist Program," "Universal Grammar," and "Merge"? All scientistic, all going nowhere, basically. (Knight runs all these down, pp. 173-179)

So, wait a minute: What? How can Noam write about lies and propaganda - which are by definition language and signs and symbols and social work among human beings - while his linguistics work has nothing to do with our social being? Because of an admitted "schizophrenic" life Chomsky admits he must lead, because, since the 1950s, he's worked in the very place that the Pentagon has funneled enormous sums of research money into: MIT. Perhaps because his quasi-kabbalistic linguistics allowed him that Ivory Tower opiate he needed to deal with the cognitive dissonance? If so, if this is anywheres near a close view of Chomsky, then it's dramatic and strange to the nth degree, no?

Chomsky once wrote an article on the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War. He greatly admired the anarchists. He had just turned 10 years old. He decided he'd rejected Trotskyism by age 12. This is an interesting fellow, eh? 

Noam had friends help him land the job at MIT, where he was able to work on the Pentagon's new idea: that computers and cybernetics and information theory would help make the world safe for capitalism after WWII. The idea that there's a language acquisition device - a very sophisticated computer - inside every human being's head? Very appealing to Pentagon folk. This was a computer whose source code must be cracked! And Chomsky's work looked like it was moving in exactly the direction they wanted. Maybe we can develop a computer that can translate any language into English; that should help in the Cold War effort against the Godless Commies. Let's let Chomsky lead a disembodied cognitive revolution. And he did. But: Noam didn't want to do any intellectual work that would help kill people in the name of Omnicorp.

Here's where adept conspiracy theorists can take this book and run with it: did Chomsky hijack linguistics and purposefully make it useless? Neither Knight nor I believe this to be true: Chomsky seems to genuinely have ideas - which seem bizarre and fruitless to me - about a sort of purity of work in "science." There's one of William James's lectures on pragmatism from the early 20th century, in which James talks about two vastly different temperaments among thinkers: the "tough-minded" and the "tender-minded." Somehow, Chomsky is the apex of "tough-minded" when doing his political work, while his Linguistics is the very apogee of the "tender-minded."

His persona as a man of conscience and political integrity seems to have been a perfect match for the Pentagon: see? The top man in Cognitive Science is free to write his books, give talks criticizing the Pentagon all over the world. Because we're a free society! 

But how does Chomsky manage this cognitive dissonance? Does he feel it? What have been the unintended consequences of Chomsky's total oeuvre? Knight answers these questions to my satisfaction. To those of you who've heard or read that Chomsky defended a Holocaust Denier named Robert Faurisson, was/is friends with former CIA director John Deutsch, and went against virtually the entire faculty and student body at MIT in defending Walt Rostow in getting his job back at MIT, even though Rostow has been nailed overwhelmingly in Chomsky's books on Vietnam? Knight satisfactorily answers these queries, too. 

As an Anthropologist, Knight treats the heavily-funded-by-Pentagon cognitive scientists as a "tribe." Why did this particular form of nonsense catch on so wildly in postwar Unistat? Knight gives a fascinating answer. If the only other superpower seemed to run on ideas based in matter (Dialectical Materialism), then what if we do away with matter? And, to a large extent, they did. Information/data is weightless, travels at the speed of light: matter is secondary. So is the Body...

Along the way, you'll learn about the deep roots of Sociobiology (and a form of scientific feminism that needs to come back from being beaten down by anti-science Leftists in academia), how a Russian Futurist/surrealist from the first two decades of the 20th century influenced Chomsky without Chomsky seeming to know about it, and much more.

If you had to ask me, what was the overall value of Chomsky's linguistic work at MIT? I'd say it was  "Don't study language using this approach! Language is and has no doubt always been a deeply social thing!"

If you're interested in politics, philosophy, and the idea of "science" being an open and public - and possibly ultimately unified thing?: Decoding Chomsky is for you. If you're already a seasoned reader of Chomsky, I feel safe to say you'll learn a few new things from this book. For me, the book spoke to my interests in the origin of language (of which Chomsky's work is literally laughable) and the fallout from the new and wonderfully interdisciplinary "cognitive sciences." Knight let me on to some reasons I hadn't even considered about why my valuation of being a "generalist" has taken such a beating since the 1950s. Not long ago I wrote a piece about why I thought Alfred Korzybski's work had waned, and Knight fills in a lot of gaps there, too. I'm interested in the history of Structuralism, the academy, "PR", mass stupidity, intellectuals, embodied knowledge, Descartes, Plato, Newton, Galileo and Bertrand Russell, the possible synthesizing of all knowledge, why many people have the idea that "science" isn't for them, the idea of theory and practice going hand in hand, and the timeless notion that ideas have consequences and one clue to this is looking at the time and place and social situation in which ideas blast off and catch on. 

So, I loved this book. My intellectual friends have already heard WAY too much about my problems with Chomsky, and I'm only so lathered up over Noam because I love him, although I know it doesn't seem like it. Ya just hafta take my word. - OG

Chris Knight's website for further ideas about Chomsky and MIT

Here's an interview with Chris Knight in the journal Radical Anthropology from five or so years ago that gives a lot of the gist and pith of Decoding Chomsky. It was this interview, sent to me by Sue Howard, that felt like a revelation: "Here's a guy who seems to have maybe solved the Chomsky Problem!" 

If you have been taken by Chomsky's ideas about language and want to remediate, some suggestions:

-The Major Transitions of Evolution, by John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary

-Adam's Tongue, by Derek Bickerton

-Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, by Michael Tomasello

-Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson

-From Molecule to Metaphor, by Jerome Feldman

-Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, by Sarah Hrdy

-The Way We Think, by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier

Here's something many of us are looking forward to: 7000 Universes: How the Languages We Speak Shape the Way We Think, by the stellar Lera Boroditsky. Gotta wait till 2018, though...

If you're way too busy and don't think you can get to reading Decoding Chomsky soon, HERE is a pretty damned good podcast interview of Chris Knight about Chomsky, by the thoughtful and erudite publisher and science fiction writer Douglas Lain.

Post scriptum: After writing about the Two Chomskys in light of William James's ideas of the "tough-minded" and "tender-minded" I remembered I blogged on it four years ago.

                                         Psychedelische Grafik von Bob Campbell

Intellectuals in the (late?) Anthropocene

Why "late?": Global warming, antibiotic resistance, global terror, income inequality, acceleration of AI, rapidly ephemeralized synthetic biological techniques, nuke proliferation. I'm not all that worried about an errant asteroid. I'm worried about sociopaths in power, and a species-wide inequality in knowledge and empathy towards The Other...

Three articles caught my eye in the past week. I'll link to them, give my idio-precis and comments. Why? Because I care about both of us.

1. ) L.D. Burnett in Chronicle of Higher Education: "Holding On To What Makes Us Human," an Adjunct who writes books about academia; Burnett implores us to defend the Humanities in the face of runaway "transferrable skills" and the cost/benefit reality of universities now. Screw "critical thinking" (although that's valuable, of course): we must find a way of articulating why knowledge of literature/history/philosophy etc is inherently valuable, despite all that's transpired in the epoch of NeoLiberalism. She wants arguments that set aside money and jobs issues. And I say: good luck with that, although I'm with you in spirit, Ms. Burnett.

Her keynote (fair warning: I do not have perfect pitch) seems to be that we must resist perishing, but if we must perish, we should go down resisting. At first I thought she meant "we" adjuncts. Then I realized she seemed a tad more cosmopolitan: we humans. I bet you're on board with her here with me, no?

If I sound like a dick here, I apologize. I'm just as caught up in the morass of being a Knower and struggling to pay the bills as she is, probably more so. I know Adjunct jobs suck ass as far as pay goes (usually), but I don't even get to do that. I'm a freelancer. There's a really heavy downside to that, apart from making your own hours and staying up all night taking notes in your books. Weed helps. It certainly helps.
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2.) Michael Lind, a prolific and fairly heavyweight intellectual who notes he's been "accused" of being a "public intellectual," claims that his own in-group of intellectuals are "freaks." Lind is not doing the Chomsky thing of calling out his fellow intellectuals for facilitating and sucking up to State power. He's merely saying he and his kind: academics, think tank experts, opinion journalists, and downwardly-mobile free-spirited bohemians? They really are "freaks" and out of touch with ordinary values. This last sub-class of Bohemians constitute a group who are living off (largely) inherited bourgeois-begotten capital in order to be revolutionaries, avant-garde writers, or artists.

Lind asserts that "populists" who've always argued intellectuals are out of touch are basically correct. He notes that non-intellectuals are/were wrong about the gold standard, the single tax and "other issues" (I wish he'd have gone into much greater detail here, as I think it's very many other issues, but that's just me), but populists are right: intellectuals are freaks and weirdoes who are out of touch with mainstream values.

Intellectuals live in large cities and their judgment is distorted by their borderlessness (because scholarship is inherently borderless). Proles finish high school and go into manual labor in what's now the "service sector." They work within 18 miles of where their mothers live and depend on family networks for economic support and child care. Intellectuals often defer marriage and children in order to further their career goals, and they move all over the place, as academia is found throughout the continent. Their notions about a borderless world as a moral and political ideal are, says Lind, "stupid and lazy" because there's no world-wide infrastructure to keep a welfare state equitably distributed throughout the world. (I see this as a worthy utopian goal, but Lind keeps mum about this: "stupid and lazy.") Their childlessness and deferred marriages make them "unusually individualistic"...Lind would like to see that studied more and so would I.

Talk about unrestricted immigration feeds nationalist and neo-fascist and right-wing populist political movements, and we're seeing that as I type, in many places. Also, it feeds the well-entrenched meme among the unwashed that the UN is taking over their lives, incipient fears of "lost sovereignty" (a classic divide-and-conquer/misdirection move by the Ruling Class), not to mention the Bilderbergers-bugaboo. (Enough food and clean water for Burundi? Tyranny!)

Here's another major problem with intellectuals: they see the problem of inequality and their solution is...be more like me!: More and better education is the mantra. (As long as Obama has been Prez he's repeated this old workhorse. And I'm embarrassed to admit that on more than one occasion I've yelled at him through the teevee screen, "For what?")

Lind says this idea of more education is natural, but "stupid and lazy." He's a conscience for his own class of freaks! How come "more education" isn't a good idea? Automation and the service sector job market is really all there is. He doesn't mention Adjuncts, and it's easy to conjure reasons why. Janitors with Master's degrees? Sad. He does say unionization might be a good idea for service-sector workers. A restriction of low-wage immigration (I don't see this happening). A higher minimum-wage is mentioned.

I read Lind's short piece three times and I still can't discern the level of wryness in it. If you read the piece he exempts those intellectuals in the "hard sciences." Gee, I wonder why?

A final idea: it's often floated out that one or two years of national service could be  a moral and social balancer. Lind says: stupid idea, because the proles already have it hard enough without doing two years of unpaid work. But then he gets off his best riff: But: "it might not hurt" for professional intellectuals to face "a year or two working in a shopping mall, hotel, hospital, or warehouse."

My Wry-o-Meter was sparking and giving off noxious fumes on that last bit. That Michael Lind!

As a general comment on Lind, some dialectical sparks from Alvin Gouldner, who is writing about the history and alienation of intellectuals, first from the Old Regime of inherited landed aristocracy, and then the bourgeoisie, this latter group being at first allied with the intellectuals against the Old Regime and helped by their cultural capital...until the bourgeoisie came into ascendancy. Gouldner refers to both the technical intelligentsia and humanistic intellectuals as The New Class:

The New Class believes its high culture represents the greatest achievement of the human race, the deepest ancient wisdom and the most advanced modern scientific knowledge. It believes that these contribute to the welfare and wealth of the race, and that they should receive correspondingly greater rewards. The New Class believes that the world should be governed by those possessing superior competence, wisdom and science - that is, themselves. The Platonic Complex, the dream of the philosopher king with which Western philosophy begins, is the deepest wish-fulfillment fantasy of the New Class. But they look around and see that the men who employ them do not begin to understand the simplest aspects of their technical specialties, and the politicians who rule them are, in Edmund Wilson's words, "unique in having managed to be corrupt, uncultivated, and incompetent all at once."
-p.65, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979), Alvin Gouldner, PhD
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3.) "Power, Powerlessness, Thinking and Future," by French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, from about 10 months ago. Stiegler notes that intellectuals have been steeped in the analysis of power relations since M. Foucault, but that thinking about this should also highlight powerlessness too, and maybe more now than ever, since intellectuals seem to not understand that techne has accelerated faster than they could conceptualize, and they are now proles themselves. He attacks those intellectuals who claim the term "right wing intellectual" is an impossibility or oxymoron, because, well, Freud, Heidegger, Niklas Luhmann, Maurice Blanchot, and many others. And deeper: there was thinking before the French Revolution and "Left" vs. "Right" and we now need to reconceptualize what it means to think, now that almost all of us are proles.

Stiegler thinks it's unfortunate that the term "intellectual" was ever used as a noun, when it's an adjective. Further, the term activates neurological opposition between "manual workers" and the types Gouldner is talking about, above. And yet throughout the article you notice Stiegler uses "intellectuals" as a term for their class. That's because it's ensconced in culture. And Michael Lind's presuppositions about his own class seem to hold sway, eh?

Here's where it gets interesting for me: Stiegler claims, based on Marx and Engels, that "proletarianism" now effects not only most of us, but all forms of knowledge. Futhermore, it's a "widespread generalization of entropic behavior" since the Anthropocene commenced and we began to time-bind like mad. Proletarianization destructs knowledge: how to live, do and conceptualize. And intellectuals seem oblivious that this is what has happened to them. They are now much closer to Lind's janitors than any sort of Gouldner's Platonic philosopher kings, no doubt.

Stiegler wants to clarify: Marx and Engels thought that proletarians denote not a state of poverty so much as a loss of knowledge...knowledge about how to harness negentropy to conceptualize our way out of this mess. Rather than doing this, they "adopt attitudes and poses." A culture of knowledge construction and new ideas has been run out of town by consumer capitalism, based on "behavioral prescriptions produced by marketing." In the weakest part of his fascinating article, Stiegler uses Alan Greenspan's testimony about why he didn't see the 2008 crash coming. It seems there were a few hundred better examples, but perhaps this one suffices...

So, let's stop with labeling "left"and "right" thinking and replace it with thinking, which he seems to align with negentropy, the notion that, though entropy is The Law, its negative reciprocal is creating novel order and structure amidst chaos. (What Korzybski called "time-binding'.) The acceleration of technology has lapped our social systems of law, education, political organizations and forms of knowledge. We will always be late, it seems. Our only hope is realizing we're all proles now, begin thinking from within casino economies and marketing and short-term R&D "disruptions." We need not become Luddites and reject technology, and Stiegler cites Evgeny Morozov's article (presumably HERE although Stiegler merely claims this "evokes") as a way into a new politics, in which it's essential to re-think "value."

Morozov seems like a start to me, too, but I'd also cite John Dewey's 1920 book Reconstruction in Philosophy as a text that argued the Platonic ideal of the "spectatorial view" of knowledge had it backwards: no intellectual need fool herself into believing that just because she doesn't get her hands dirty that she truly knows, and that those who do things with their hands (mechanics, plumbers, craftspeople of every stripe) don't "know" anything. Workers know quite a lot, and so the fuck what if it's not Hegel or organic chemistry: it's knowledge that produces immediate material results in the sensory/sensual world. Dewey's book disabused me of these notions about the primacy of spectatorial/armchair views of knowledge long ago, and this text seems woefully underrated to me.

Earlier, Marx had expressed a dislike for the opposition of Techne and Logos. Bernard Stiegler reminds us here that, "Knowledge is always constituted by technics, which in so doing always constitutes a social relation." (italics in original)

Also, and more practically, look at contemporaries like Douglas Rushkoff and his marvelous recent book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, and Martin Ford's Rise of the Robots. Here are thinkers who can get us started thinking ourselves...out of our proletarian situation. There are many, many more...

Hiroshima and Nagasaki occurred 71 years ago this past week or so. Soon after that Dark Moment, a very smart individual noted that everything had changed...save for our "way of thinking."

                                             Tueuses graphiques par Bobby Campbell

World Book Day/Night 2016

[Apparently World Book Night came again this year, and I was busy doing other things, totally oblivious. Yesterday I logged on to "surf the Net" - which fogies like me still say, by the way - and kept noticing all these new articles about Shakespeare and wondered, "wha?" Then it hit me: World Book Day/Night was April 23rd, so here I am, a mere six days late. - OG]

Fore-Words: Set the Tone
Here's part of a dialogue between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell:

Moyers: Who interprets the divinity inherent in nature for us today? Who are our shamans? Who interprets unseen things for us?

Campbell: It is the function of the artist to do this. The artist is the one who communicates myth for today. But he has to be an artist who understands mythology and humanity and isn't simply a sociologist with a program for you.

Moyers: What about those others who are ordinary, those who are not poets or artists, or who have not had a transcendent ecstasy? How do we know of these things?

Campbell: I'll tell you a way, a very nice way. Sit in a room and read - and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time. This realization of life can be a constant realization in your living. When you find an author who really grabs you, read everything he has done. Don't say, "Oh, I want to know what So-and-so did" - and don't bother at all with the best-seller list. Just read what this one author has to give you. And then you can go read what he had read. And the world opens up in a way that is consistent with a certain point of view. -  The Power of Myth, p.99
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Short Note on Books and Revolutions
My writing on the visceral thrill I get from reading "forbidden" or "dangerous" books, books with some purported "demonic" power, books linked to infamous crimes, etcetera, has appeared at this blog and in other places. Currently I've been reading in books about other books on the topic of what books can/might/did "do" to certain readers, and, oh, all kinds of fallout in human history. For those who want to look at some choice academic research quite readable about books and revolutions, two that I've recently found of surpassing interest are Robert Darnton's The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, and John V. Fleming's The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War.

Darnton - one of the great scholars of books in our time - breaks down the forbidden best-sellers during the 20 year period before the ancien regime turned to guillotine-time (a much different time than the time Joseph Campbell warned us about; I tend to agree with Campbell about best-sellers under the current dispensation); Darnton's sleuthing is marvelous, teasing out the many "underground" forbidden books from roughly 1769 or so to 1789. These books get classified into three categories: 1.) "Philosophical Pornography"; 2.) Utopian Fantasy; and 3.) Political Slander. Darnton writes a chapter on each. Later, Section 3 of Darnton is titled, "Do Books Cause Revolutions?" and this section constitutes a marvelous contribution to the sociology of knowledge.

Fleming writes at length about four books that influenced the Cold War: Koestler's Darkness At Noon (1940), which was the only one of the four I'd been familiar with. The others are Out of the Night (1941, but really only a few weeks after Koestler's book came out), by "Jan Valtin" AKA Richard Krebs, a supposed autobiography and the best-seller in Unistat by the end of the year; I Chose Freedom, by Victor Kravchenko (1944). The last anti-commie book for Fleming was one I'd known of, but that was the extent: Whittaker Chambers's Witness (1952), which Fleming calls "perhaps the greatest American masterpiece of literary anti-Communism," and a book which greatly benefited by the Cold War being then in full swing, and even more so by Chambers's nailing of Alger Hiss. At the end of last year I read a cracking good just-off-the-presses book about the history of today's Unistat right wing, Right Out of California, by UC Davis History professor Kathryn Olmstead. That book - which argues persuasively that the origin of the Unistat Right began in Depression Era California, where the migrant farmworkers were not considered under The New Deal, because FDR needed the South - foreshadowed a lot of the information in Fleming's book, and extended the boundaries of my own historical imagination vis a vis the refinement of propaganda techniques by Unistat spy agencies and the military/industrial/entertainment complex. Juxtaposing Fleming's book on mid-20th century political books that the State "likes" vs. the underground sales of books forbidden by the State in Darnton made me feel like 1789 was more like 500 years ago.

Darnton and Fleming and Olmstead (oh my!) also reminded me of Frances Stonor Saunders's must-read, The Cultural Cold War. Get a load of this:

"'Books differ from all other propaganda media,' wrote a chief of the CIA's Covert Action Staff, 'primarily because one single book can significantly change the reader's attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other single medium [such as to] make books the most important weapon of strategic (long-range) propaganda.' The CIA's clandestine books programme was run, according to the same source, with the following aims in mind: 'Get books published or distributed abroad without revealing any US influence, by covertly subsidizing foreign publications or booksellers. Get books published which should not be 'contaminated' by any overt tie-in with the US government, especially if the position of the author is 'delicate.' Get books published for operational reasons, regardless of commercial viability. Initiate and subsidize indigenous national or international organizations for book publishing or distributing purposes. Stimulate the writing of politically significant books by unknown foreign authors - either by directly subsidizing the author, if covert contact is feasible, or indirectly, through literary agents or publishers." -p.245, Saunders, who is quoting from the Final Report of the Church Committee, 1976. Saunders quotes a NYT article published on Christmas Day, 1977, about the investigations into the CIA's history: "The New York Times alleged in 1977 that the CIA had been involved in the publication of at least a thousand books."

When I first read Saunders, I noted a CIA-backed book I had read that no one I personally knew had read. And I'd liked the book: The New Class, by Milovan Djilas. E. Howard Hunt, working for the CIA admitted he helped get that book published. Was I a dupe? I guess any one of us who reads books at this level will be reading "propaganda" at some point, unwittingly, or possibly quasi-wittingly. Chomsky has written many times that the intellectual class is most subject to this sort of thing, simply because they read so damned much...So there's another reason to embrace those rebel writers you love, the outre and declasse ones that never get reviewed by the New York intellectuals?

To return to our Big Q: do books cause revolutions? I'd like to think so. My oblivious reading of Djilas's CIA-backed book led me to read a wonderful book by the renegade "outlaw Marxist" Alvin Gouldner, and his The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. Gouldner turned Socrates and interrogated Marxism from within, walking the perimeter of "the dark side of the Dialectic," which I still find thrilling. I find the intellectual stimulation so bracing I return to this slim volume every few years. In it, Gouldner says that Marxism is a product of bookstores and libraries.
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Thirdly, and really a bald non-sequitur, I will state a personal strong esthetic preference for reading "dead tree" books over reading them on any digital gadget, and that replacing paper books with e-books is - and I'm not the first to float this analogy - like replacing real cut flowers with plastic ones.

Dead Tree Books, Despite the Peril of Paper
Oh, okay yes: the "real" cut flowers will wither in a week or so, while your plastic flowers look the same year after year, so there's gotta be something wrong with this analogy. But I will throw in a monkeywrench and say that with cannabis and hemp legalization more publishers will probably want to use hemp for paper because it last many, many, many times longer than pulped paper.

And our diminishing world forests get a break. Lousy quality paper: have you ever picked up an old paperback novel produced in the 1950s at a yard or library sale? I've bought ones where the paper is increasingly sort of brownish-rusty near the edges, the paper itself has a rough fuzzy feel to it, and the pages are likely to break if you bend them. Lamentable books like this - even if you read 'em and they're great - are not the ones you'd give to someone else, "You've got to read this! It's fantastic!" Then you hand them the book and a couple of pages fall out, having detached from the spine during the apparently rough drive over, when you hit that pothole. Sad. What an overall lugubrious-evoking state of affairs, indeed.

40 years after a book rolls off the presses ready for the bookstore, it's literally disintegrating in your hands! (I first noted these books in the 1990s.)

In the bargain basement pulp paper era (BBPPE), which lasted into the 1980s, according to one source I probably just made up, publishers of paperbacks sought to save money by buying the cheapest pulp paper they could find, then "extend" this pulp by throwing in some acid.

No, that's cutting corners. It's more like this: when you use wood to make paper there's this stuff called lignin, which went into making the cell walls of wood and bark and helped make up the vascular structures of a plant. This is odorless, mostly colorless, and I imagine fairly tasteless. (Ever get one of those old crappy paperbacks that actually have a big fleck of wood embedded in a page? This I count as one of those Things That Ought Not Be in my world.)

You get rid of the lignin when you're making the paper by adding acid, particularly something called peroxycetic acid. It's more complex than this (of course!), but adding the acid is part of the delignification process. We worry about old Ray Bradbury paperbacks - or at least I think we should -  but documents and artworks, if not delignified, will break down and deteriorate, and even faster if exposed to light and heat. And don't we do some of our best reading under light, with adequate heat? To get the pH level of your pulp back to something closer to the 7 of alkaline/acid balance, you need to go through another process or two, but that costs money. Just take the acid-riddled pulp and print that dimestore novel on that. Take the money and run...

To cut to a less technical aspect of this spiel, hemp has lower lignin content. If treated just right, it's fairly inexpensive to produce paper for books from hemp that will last 500 to 1000 years before it noticeably starts to deteriorate. Robert Anton Wilson cited an article in a February, 1938 issue of Popular Mechanics about a hemp harvesting machine that would make farmers rich and allow us all to have the most fantastic paper in our books, no cutting down forests either. The male (you don't get high off it) cannabis plant: hemp. Easy to grow. Here's RAW's bit:

"Well, kiddies, the wonderful invention was a device that made it possible to harvest hemp more cheaply than ever before. Hemp was the chief ingredient in paper throughout most of history (our Declaration of Independence was written on it, for instance) and paper made of hemp lasted a good long time compared to paper made of wood pulp. Ever notice how 19th or 18th century books, or even 17th century books like the original folio of Shakespeare's plays, printed on hemp, are still around, while modern books printed on wood pulp fall apart in only decades?"
-p.178, "Deforestation," Email To The Universe

Wilson then goes on to link this to the War on Drugs, including pot. The Unistat gummint found out people were getting high, so sorry: millions of lives must be ruined, forests chopped down, and books must fall apart. I wish I believed in "hell" so I could imagine someone like Harry Anslinger paying for his part in all this, but he's probably just food for worms.

The Good News: we have good reason to believe we'll get lots of hemp in our paper in our books, soon, the cultural winds finally having shifted. And I'm sorry, but we cannot extend the life of our cut flowers indefinitely, and I'm sure someone's working on it. (Then where will the florists be? Uber drivers? Oy!)

I love the story about Ts'ai Lun, who made paper out of hemp and mulberry bark and tried to convince the Chinese bureaucracy to adopt his invention, paper, in 105 CE. The stuffed shirts wouldn't give Ts'ai a decent hearing, so he pulled the old shamanic stunt of burying himself alive and then returning to the living. He used a hollow reed to breathe, and his friends burned a bunch of his hemp-paper over his grave, which caused Ts'ai Lun to miraculously come back to life. Quite a trick! The bureaucrats were impressed (jeez, the shit The Suits put you through before they'll listen to a new idea!), and his paper was adopted, and Ts'ai became a palace favorite. But political winds shifted after a spell, and Ts'ai faced a trial, which he wasn't up for. So, as Dale Pendell writes, Ts'ai Lun "dressed in his best robes and drank poison." - PharmakoPoeia, p.183

Coda: A Future?
So, we're all used to the print/dead tree/dead hemp plant "codex" book vs. the book read on some electronic gadget argument. Well, Google is working on a combination of the two, but as I read about it, I had mind's eye trouble: an "augmented reality" pop-up book that adds sound, lighting elements, and video projection? And it interacts with other personal information you had stored on your other e-gizmos? You can add content? I'm not sure if I understand what these visionaries want to do, but I guess there are some areas in all our lives and - I'll speak for myself here - I think I already add that stuff to my reading of the plain old paper-bound book. I do it in exercising my imagination. For what the wizards at Google and Apple want to do, I'll just watch a fucking movie, your mileage may vary. See the article I'm getting all reactionary over HERE. What am I missing?

On second thought: this could become the next great art medium, and you know what? I hope it does...

Adieu
I wish you all a Joseph Campbell-ian "nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time" in your reading, chums.

                                          fantasztikus grafikus Bob Campbell

Swift/Marx/Wilson: Ironies, Paradoxes, and Satires Mordant: Some Faves

De gustibus non est disputandum, I guess it's just one of those things, but I marvel at certain stylistic flair in satire. I think a struggling composer must feel similar things when listening to Bartok or Beethoven, or a young would-be Serious Novelist when reading Joyce or Pynchon.

                                               Jonathan Swift                        

Swift (1729)
My first example is Swift's A Modest Proposal. I dig the rhythm, the build-up before the modest proposal. There certainly were major problems with poverty/overpopulation among the poor in Ireland around 1729, no doubt. And the tone is exemplary of the "can-do" spirit among the well-fed. One of my favorite devices: Swift bolsters his rhetoric with statistics - as if he's some proto-policy wonk - the subtext being that we're reading a rational man here. And, from the first paragraph, we know we're in the midst of a writer filled with compassion and empathy, with a foolproof appeal to the heartbreaking difficulties of Motherhood. (If you haven't read the piece, it's very short, and I know you'll read it all "eventually" but for now click on the link above and read the first paragraph, so we can all be on the same page. Thanks.)

Swift has given this a lot of thought. He wants to alleviate misery. He's a practical man, too.  He's considered others' attempts at solving the problem and thinks he has a better solution. And so, before he tells us he's going to enumerate many reasons why the poor should sell off their children to be fattened and eaten by more wealthy gentry-types, he soberly writes, "I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection." He then follows with this sentence:

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

He just wants to "ease the nation of so grievous an encumbrance." Let's face it: a lot of these kids were born out of wedlock anyway. And you know what's really terrible? Many of these desperately poor kids are hired on as cheap labor, which, being so poor, they hardly have the strength to carry out. Eating these kids has so many advantages that Swift's argument is a slam-dunk. (To the madman who would take this seriously and not see that the real problem is vast income inequality and oppression by the church, state, and landlords...Are there such madmen amongst us? I mean besides Dick Cheney...)

Some of the benefits of this idea:

-Nine months after Lent, Catholics give birth at an inflated rate; eating their babies will lessen the number or papists in our midst.

-When the poor sell their babies for food, at least they'll have a slightly easier time paying off their landlords. The landlords have already (figuratively) devoured the parents.

-Butchers will do a bang-up biz. A kid can fatten up to 28 pounds after a year: delicious!

(As Swift cites esteemed, virtuous patriots who care about the dignity of humans, and while he keeps citing stats to bolster his claims...)

-A colleague - the same unnamed "American" who we find got his ideas from "the famous Psalmanazar"  - noted the problem of stores of venison being depleted too soon, so maybe we could eat boys and girls who have reached the age of 12 but not older than 14?: Swift is discerning: no, he's heard the boy-meat is "tough and lean" while you may as well let the girls live on, because they're almost of the age to produce more succulent meat from their own bodies. Point well-taken!

-Despite the practical reasons for not eating young teenage girls, as cited above, Psalmanazar's story about criminality - such as trying to poison the rich and powerful - should be considered if plump female teens commit such heinous crimes. Hey, it worked in Formosa...

-The argument against Swift - that he's not considered the aged, maimed, and diseased? Ah, but take this into consideration: they're already, every day, "dying and rotting by cold and famine, and filth and vermin, as fast as can reasonably be expected." Objections overruled. Swift wins this one, too. And besides, who cares really? Those losers aren't working anymore, anyway. Practicality, people!

-This new source of succulent, tender meat, will provide for a "refinement of taste" for "gentlemen of fortune in the kingdom." Who in their right mind can argue with this?

-Poor people will have a few less mouths to feed. Swift cares. He really does. Bless him!

-This whole scheme will be an economic boost to taverns, where gentlemen who "justly value themselves upon their knowledge in good eating" will gladly pay whatever is asked for that sweet sweet kid-meat.

-It will enhance the quality of marriage, something every state wants. Why? Well, for one thing, fathers will attend with much more loving care their wives who are pregnant with the cargo that will help them pay the rent in a few month's time. Wife-beatings among the poor will diminish. And who can quarrel with that?

-We all like the fruits of pig-meat: bacon, pork, etc, but let's admit it: things can get a bit dull eating pork chops and bacon day after day. And no pig is "comparable in taste or magnificence to a well-grown, fat, yearling child, which roasted whole will make a considerable figure at lord mayor's feast or any other public entertainment." Such refinement!

To sum up, Swift can see no objection to his proposal. I mean, think of the beauty of it: it provides for the poor while also relieving them. It also gives "some pleasure to the rich."

I've read this piece maybe 15 or 20 times in my life, and it's never lost its power over me. I think what I admire most is the way Swift, whose voice here seems to emanate from a completely insane man, at the same time has us on his side, because this mode of rhetoric - satire of the highest level - is perhaps the fullest response to poverty and suffering when one feels angry that we can do better. The requisite distance between the rhetoric and the suffering of humans is enough that no one can take this seriously, even if the tone and "rational" argument implore us to consider such a ghastly idea.

The Irish government made lame attempts to silence him, but his character and esteem were of such elevation that Swift continued to publish whatever he pleased.

                                                       Karl Marx

Marx (1862/63)
In the so-called fourth volume of Das Kapital, "Theories of Surplus Value," Marx discusses previous economist's ideas about people who provide productive labor versus those who provide "unproductive" labor. Adam Smith (who Marx greatly admired) thought that the unproductive were, among others: "churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of all kinds; players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera-dancers, etc." When Smith wrote men of letters and musicians, it frankly stung the OG. But "buffoons"? That one was like a punch to the gut. Anyway...All these lay-abouts were parasitical upon the labors of people who actually did real, honest work. But Marx, who knew his Swift (and everyone who ever wrote anything of interest, it seems), disagreed with the greatest classical economist of all time:

A philosopher produces ideas, a poet poems, a clergyman sermons, a professor books and so on. A criminal produces crimes. If we look a little closer at the connection between the latter branch of production and society as a whole, we shall rid ourselves of many prejudices. The criminal produces not only crimes but criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable book in which this same professor throws his lectures onto the general market as "commodities"...

Think how much of our precarious economy owes to criminals! Where would judges or bailiffs or courthouse builders be without them? How about those fine men we call "police"? Jailers, makers of iron bars, gas chambers, badges and truncheons, guns, handcuffs? What about John Grisham and Perry Mason and Sherlock Holmes and The Sopranos? They'd be nowhere without the productions of criminals. Marx reminds us of all the improved and applied science that went into torture devices, and just think how good locks have become because of criminals. In Unistat, the gun trade is booming (sorry); the criminal's at times murderous contributions seems most essential to our very way of life!

The value of crime upon the way we think about morality is endlessly productive, and furthermore, as Francis Wheen writes, "The criminal breaks the monotony and everyday security of bourgeois life. In this way he keeps it from stagnation and gives rise to that uneasy tension and agility without which even the spur of competition would get blunted..." (p.78, Marx's Das Kapital)

Here's more of Marx on the subject:

Would the making of banknotes have reached its present perfection had there been no forgers?...And if ones leaves the sphere of private crime: would the world-market ever have come into being but for national crime? Indeed, would even the nations have arisen? And hasn't the Tree of Sin been at the same time the Tree of Knowledge ever since the time of Adam?

To those of my Dear Readers who find themselves unemployed, I offer Marx's riffs on productive labor here as merely a suggestion that perhaps we may frame our problems in different ways...

Wheen's slender book is one I found a delight, and he made me go back to reading Marx anew. There's a considerable take on Marx as a literary figure. Marx certainly wanted to produce something thoroughly along the lines of a literary masterpiece, but I personally would direct the reader to something like Dickens's Hard Times instead.

That said, Wheen covers the reception and attempts at categorizing Marx's sprawling work: "The book can be read as a vast Gothic novel whose heroes are enslaved and consumed by the monster they created ('Capital which comes into the world soiled with gore top to toe and oozing blood from every pore')." Stanley Edgar Hyman saw the book as a Victorian melodrama: "The Mortgage on Labour-Power Foreclosed." The book can be seen as a black comedy, with a debunking of the "'phantom-like objectivity' of the commodity to expose the difference between heroic appearance and inglorious reality." (Wheen, p.75)

Wheen notes the critic C. Frankel saw Kapital as like a Greek tragedy: fate, tragic blindness, fixated ideas, seeing the truth too late, etc. In To The Finland Station, Edmund Wilson saw Marx as the greatest ironist since Swift, as a supreme parody of classical economics texts, and that, having read Kapital, the classical economists "never seem the same to us again; we can always see through their arguments and figures the realities of the crude human relations which it is their purpose or effect to mask."

I can see you now, Dear Reader: you've gathered your family and closest friends in one room for an announcement. Everyone is whispering what it could be. Tension in the room is palpable. Finally, you enter through the very large main door into the parlor. Everyone becomes silent. All eyes are trained on your every move. You let the drama build, then finally, get down to brass tacks: "Friends, my most beloved family members...this has been a difficult period in my life, as you all know, but I've done a lot of thinking - soul-searching, if you will - and I've made a decision about what to do, and I hope you will all help me in my new endeavor as best you can."

"Well? What is it?!?!," your father shouts, not with a small note of anxiety in his voice.

"I've...decided to enter a life of crime."

                                                 Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson (c. 1975?)
If Unistatians follow politics to any appreciable level, you will note that our "leaders" tell us that many things must be done in the name of "national security." The very phrase has proven to carry a mass hypnotic effect of considerable heft. "We cannot tell you anything about why we might be doing something that would make Al Capone look like Laura Ingalls Wilder. Trust us: it's about national security." And that is usually that. Oh, some Nosy Parker journalists will look behind the curtain and then report what vast cool and unsympathetic beastly doings are going on in our name, but who the fuck READS anymore?

Much less: who actually cares?

And maybe it doesn't matter at all. Why? Well, maybe we've had it all wrong in the first place. And I mean all wrong: it could be that "national security is the chief cause of national insecurity." This is the "First Law" of Hagbard Celine, a real character who uses the words of his author, Robert Anton Wilson.

The Reader would do well to consult the primary text, in The Illuminati Papers, pp.118-122. Wilson's virtuoso satirical chops are on display here, but like Swift and Marx - whose writings RAW knew well - it's only because he's at pains to convey the many invasions of our "privacies" that we find ourselves in. And I assert RAW was not drilling in a dry hole, but has shown that, in this First Law ("National security is the chief cause of national insecurity") he has, as of 2013, proven to be a Prophet. RAW made this observation around 40 years ago - probably after citizens broke into the FBI office in Media, PA in 1971 - and the essay was written (possibly) around the time Watergate became a news item, and (possibly) close to the summer of 1975 Church Committee hearings that "damaged" the CIA...at any rate, COINTELPRO was at work and possibly known, this was all well before Internet and the massive We Make the East German Stasi Look Like Pikers-era of Total Information Awareness by the NSA, FBI, CIA, local police, nefarious hackers, Wall Street, Facebook, Google, the TSA...et.al

RAW's main rhetorical ploy there was one he played with verve and aplomb like Bach played the organ: the reductio ad absurdum. That is, if we took the claims of "national security" seriously in the early 1970s, it meant that  the watchers must have watchers, because who can place total trust in the first group of watchers over our security and movements? But that second group can't be entirely trusted - something corrupt might happen - so we need another "security group" to watch the second group. And while they're at it, they should probably try to watch the first, initial group of security-providers. You can see where this went. For RAW, it was satire, but with a point. For us in 2014, it's something like Nightmare Prophecy come true: the (near) total Surveillance State.

Most of you are way ahead of me, so I'll just pick one story that I've mentioned with my friends that seems to have slipped through the cracks: NSA intercepts shipments of laptops purchased online and installs malware in them.  I'm sure you guys have a "favorite" that's "better" than this one. Have at it in the comments!

O! To be able to write satire with the panache of Swift, Marx, Wilson!

Rise of the Robots and Technological Unemployment

When I was in grammar school and high school I'd often ditch class and go to the library. One of the things I'd learned was good for laffs and the imagination: look at microfilm of old Life magazines, or if the library had bound versions of the entire year for old magazines I'd love to read those. The ads in magazines like Colliers that showed a doctor saying he prefers these cigarettes over all others because of their fine, smooth taste. His stethoscope around his neck, smiling. Wow! How things had changed since...1952!

Always wondrous were ads for gadgets that would eliminate drudgery and free up the woman of the house (it was always a woman) to live a life of leisure. The rhetoric of machines that would eliminate soul-numbing work captured my attention at a very early age because all you had to do was extrapolate...wouldn't it be cool if dad didn't have to go to work and he and mom would be there when I got home from school...doing...whatever it was they wanted to do? What would my world be like when I was an old man of 30?

As I began to study the history of the Industrial Revolution up to present days, I found this rhetoric of labor and machines a constant: at some point in the future - possibly my own future - we would enter another Epoch: robots and computers (same thing) would do all the horrible work, leaving humans to create, socialize, dream. How would the bills get paid? I didn't know, never having paid bills. I figured the money went to others...who worked. But: their work would have gone away too, right?

Everyone would be playing games, painting, writing poetry or learned papers and books, learning new languages or music, or joyously goofing off.

         "Because everything in her house in waterproof, the housewife of 2000..." Wow!

It doesn't look like it's going to happen like They Promised, does it? Why?

Well, the simple answer: instead of the populace understanding that any machine that puts people out of work was invented not only by a genius and his team, but the genius and his team built upon millions of hours of previous work by previous toilers and tinkerers and basic scientific research funded by everyone - all of who were supported by farmers and mothers - we instead allowed the idea that whoever could buy the biggest and fastest machines, owned All Of That.

There seem to be a few hundred choice entry points to tell this story to myself and y'all, but for now I'll cut to December of 2012.

Paul Krugman
In one of his shorter posts for the NYT, Krugman published "Rise of the Robots" on December 8, 2012. He notes that the "college premium" had been stagnant for a few years. In other words, the payoff for getting a degree was not showing its previous earning power in the marketplace. When he first started writing about income inequality twenty years earlier, it was about the gap between laborers and CEOs and other assholes, like hedge fund managers. Now it seems to be between workers and capital...and OMG Marxism! The dreaded Karl Marx, hibernating for a hundred years, suddenly stirs. Production rises, income of labor stays the same and then begins to lose. Why? Automation. Read the article. "If this is the wave of the future, it makes nonsense of just about all the conventional wisdom on reducing inequality." Education won't help when what we really have are a few people who own machines. The biggest and fastest machines. Those with the biggest and fastest machines are reaping all the rewards; everyone else gets the shaft. You buy the biggest machines, you pay 100-1000 of the brightest PhDs to collect data, write algorithms, maintain the data servers...you win! Everyone else is fucked.

Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier, computer whiz/prodigy/generalist/genius says he was there (and he was, as numerous books on the history of Silicon Valley attest to) when this really got going and he and his famous friends thought it was going to be this incredible "information is free" thing that would make everyone's lives better. Now he says they were horribly wrong. Because it turns out that the NSA, Wal-Mart, Facebook, Goldman Sachs...all bought the biggest, fastest computers and hired an army of gifted geeks. He has ideas about how to save us, and I think they're good to begin our thinking with.

I've followed Lanier's career for a long time. I think he's one of the best and most interesting thinkers in the world, but rather than talk about his ideas, I'd rather you took the time to watch what he's saying about the existential situation we're in now:

Here's 4 minutes on "Why Facebook isn't free."

Here he is interviewed by Andrew Keen, about Lanier's book Who Owns The Future? It's about 10 minutes and 40 seconds:

Finally, for 27 minutes or so - I think you'll find it well worthwhile - he's interviewed about his books and his changed thinking and what we might do to remedy this "jobless recovery" situation. NB around 5:20 to 6:00, in talking about the structural changes from Kodak to Instagram: "We pretend that the people who do the work don't exist." Another notable moment: from around 8:00 on: "honesty in accounting" could solve the mess the middle class is in. Also a fascinating point: around 11:30: "levies" and their history:

I have a bee in my bonnet and I'm afraid you're going to be hearing more from the OG on income inequality, American fascism, mob mentality, robots/automation/computers, Real Wealth vs. Money, the college loan bubble, Missing Public Discussions, and social fallout of Winner-Take-All Hypercapitalism and Privateeing, and ideas about how we might extricate ourselves from rising misery.

Some Origins of Marxism and Instrumental Rationality as a Revolutionary Tool

I see that the NY Times has found out that the FBI has had counterterrorism agents investigating Occupy. Gosh. I knew the FBI infiltrated, undermined, bugged, harassed, planted evidence...on anyone they deemed "left wing" since...their inception. But gosh darn it, I thought they would have quit by now. I thought COINTELPRO was all over, and the FBI now suddenly cared about a person or group's Constitutional rights to think and say whatever they wanted, no matter how unpopular (or wildly popular?) or seemingly non-violently threatening of the existing order of wealth and privilege. Yea. Golly.

How did Marxism start? In secret societies. The right-wing conspiracy theorists who see Illuminati everywhere are/were right: these revolutionary movements do get going in secret Masonic-based societies, with initiations, etc. But this still doesn't mean Nesta Webster was "right," although I confess I do find her a wonderful paranoid read.

                                             Someone drew this pic of Marx, the 
                                             Young Hegelian. We can see why some
                                             of his friends called him The Moor

Who were The League of Outlaws? Oh, they gave birth to The League of the Just. Who were they? Oh, they gave birth to the League of Communists. When Marx and Engels wrote that the Communists had nothing to hide, in the Communist Manifesto, they were addressing this very issue: time to come out from hiding!

The League of Outlaws were German emigrants in Paris who blindfolded initiates in secret ceremonies and used secret handshakes, recognition signs, and passwords. (If you dropped the term "civic virtue" in conversation you were indicating where you stood.) They had a pyramidical structure. A strict distinction was made between upper and lower members. They were bound by oath, says the late great Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, in his terrific Primitive Rebels, pp.169-170. All of these ritualistic secret society gimmicks were taken from the Carbonari. This was around 1834. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 - carried off by extremely well-educated professional revolutionaries who led peasants - we see that Marx was wrong about educated proles in a vanguard party leading other proles in taking over the means of production. Marx was wrong about pretty much every "Communist" revolution of the 20th century. It was educated professional revolutionaries leading barely-literate peasants. But I digress...

So lemme back-up: what was the beef of the guys in The League of Outlaws? They were smart enough to see the Rich were dealing from the bottom of the deck, and they wanted things more...democratic. More fundamental fairness. What horrible people. But don't worry, the version of the FBI they had to deal with was even more brutal. And the FBI has many thousands of buckets of blood on their hands. I hope you know about, say, Fred Hampton?

On Marx himself: There's a fascinating discussion on radicalism and intellectuals being prevented from rising higher on the status ladder in Marxist sociologist Alvin Gouldner's The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. (Get from the local public library?) At one point, in a long footnote discussing Lewis Coser's ideas about "blocked" intellectuals - as Coser writes in his Men of Ideas - Gouldner writes, "Coser develops the argument that the Jacobin leadership was composed largely of those whose careers had manifested upward mobility, but whose future ascendence was blocked. The study of diverse career blockages - e.g, of educated clerkly revolutionaries, of the sons of those killed during nationalist struggles, of displaced elites - is crucial to an understanding of the radicalization of intellectuals. A basic and familiar source of such blockage is, of course, having the 'wrong' gender, ethnic, national, racial, linguistic or religious identity. Thus early communist leadership in Czarist Russia had a 'relatively high proportion of men of non-Russian extraction,' according to W.E. Mosse, Slavonic and East European Review (1968), p.151. Radicalized Jews are thus simply a special case of this more general problem of blocked ascendence. But we need to be careful not to overestimate the role of injured material interests in producing radicalization nor underestimate radical interests (in *CCD), which, when offended, can also radicalize. And it is not only career blockages which may sharpen radicalization (e.g, Marx), but prior radicalization may elicit repressive career blockages which only then further intensify the pre-blockage radicalization (again Marx)." - Gouldner, p.114

[*CCD = Culture of Critical Discourse, a basic orientation in language and mind of the contemporary intellectual.]

Marx was radical, hounded all over Europe, ending up in London, subsidized by his wealthy friend Engels. But what Gouldner's talking about is Marx's anger.

                                            a semi-witty reversal on Groucho

Two scholars of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), Bergin and Fisch, document Vico's influence on Marx in The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, pp.104-107. In a footnote to Marx's Das Capital, Marx wrote:

"A critical history of technology would show how little any of the inventions of the eighteenth century was the work of a single individual. No such book has yet been published. Darwin has aroused our interest in the history of natural technology, that is in the development of the organs of plants and animals as productive instruments sustaining the life of these creatures. Does not the history of the productive organs of man in society, the organs which are the material basis of every kind of social organization, deserve equal attention? Since, as Vico says, the essence of the distinction between human history and natural history is that the former is made by man and the latter is not, would not the history of human technology be easier to write than the history of natural technology? By disclosing man's dealings with nature, the productive activities by which his life is sustained, technology lays bare his social relations and the mental conceptions that flow from them."

Too bad Marx did not foresee the advent of electronic communications (radio/TV/Internet/phones) and how this affected relations in capital so profoundly. But then what do we expect from him? Certainly not to be a Prophet, as so many Marxist ideologues have...However, another antecedent of Marx seems surely and ironically Matthew25:15; Acts 2:45; Acts 4:32-35...

Another - O! I could cherry pick influences on Marx all day! - interesting influence on Marx, one frequently omitted in discussions, is Bachofen, who thought human society was originally based on motherhood, female ideas, the rights of mothers. I throw him in here for the truly committed. If the machines of war that threaten to annihilate the human race seem "male" to you, then maybe Bachofen and Marx weren't whistling up the wrong tree?

Instrumental Rationality: Only recently are a few Economists understanding that they must think of the natural environment as part of their system. Need I say more about this 240 year old Mass Hypnosis? It has us near the brink. Will we be able to survive and recover from this "rationality"? It remains to be seen. There will be more and more technology-caused unemployment. Spend a month Googling "robots" and see if we can think about money and human values in a new way quickly enough, because our idea that "I bought the machine, therefore I rule: you're fired!" is killing a lot of us. Go back to what Marx said about the history of technology, by way of Vico: how the eighteenth century inventions were not the work of a single individual. This has been evermore true as time has passed. We missed a Golden Opportunity at some point to claim all productive machines on behalf of the collective mind of Humanity. Which brings us back to Occupy.

I've spent a lot of time hanging with Occupiers. They're young, well-educated, not part of a secret society or revolutionary vanguard. They do know the score: they have incurred large debts for their educations and the "free trade" agreements and banksters and automation have made those jobs they were trained for go away. Another term for what banksters and automated, ultra-fast computerized  trading with "derivatives" and other "instruments," and automation and free trade agreements, blah blah blah: that term is instrumental rationality. And where are the human values there? And in this day and age, instrumental rationality for what?

There is more of a disparity of wealth in Unistat since 1928, which should make even an FBI agent care about that generation. I said should. Somehow I doubt the FBI is as worried about armed right wing lumpenproles who get all their ideas about "reality" from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh; naw, you never know: the Occupy kid with his Anthropology degree might be a real threat! Best keep an eye on her.

Here's a 2 1/2 minute video essay on this famous picture of Marx, by Marshall Poe.

Potshots at Economics: Take Five (and then I'll give Ec a break for awhile)

O! Economics' storied past! Let's start from the Man of God, Reverend Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) - one of the "great" political economists - saying in the late 18th/early 19th century that, if you're not independently wealthy and can't get a job on the current market, you need to starve or go to worker's prison, or get the hell out of the country; it was simply a "natural law." Famine and Disease are GOOD...because they check the population, weed out the weak, and make sure the food supply is there for the decent people. It seems like an odd interpretation of The Gospels to me, but I'm like Montaigne: "Que sais-je?" (trans: "What do I know?")

I need to be more fair to Malthus - and pretty much every economist of the 19th century - because they didn't think it was your fault you were a loser and made the mistake of not being born into wealth or at least the petty bourgeoisie - it was simply a natural law, like, say, Newton's law of gravity.

And enough nuclear weapons to blow the planet to dust many times over? That, if I know my 19th century economists, was a natural law, too. Like Halley's Comet comes around every 76 years. If you think about it, they're pretty much the same thing. The invention of the telephone and laser beam were like slavery and genocide. All of the 19th century economist's "natural laws" and the examples I gave have the same thing in common: they all occurred in Nature. There must be some "law" that accounts for it; we can't help any of those things, can we? Those old-time economists were no dummies, no sir! If you tried to complain that some action or occurrence was "unnatural" they would just laugh! Err...right?  (I hate to say it, but I bet if you looked into it yourself, "sodomy" might fall outside the realm of the Natural.) I mean, if it occurs in Nature, it must be Natural, eh? And as Aristotle and God said, all these things are subject to Laws. Because if there were no Laws governing Everything, well, then it would just be everyone wearing black t-shirts and listening to punk rock, or some of the more unruly Bach sonatas. And breaking windows. And throwing bombs that look like tiny bowling balls with fuses on them. That's what anarchists do! I think we can all agree we'd rather have a Civil Society, one where you get thirty years for trying to sell an ounce of pot to an undercover cop in Texas. That's what God and/or The Invisible Hand wants!

Can't you see the Beauty in it all? The harmony of the spheres!

(Aristotle is reputed to be a heavy smoker of ganja, so please don't ask me to explain it all. I will admit that these things are more complex than I sometimes make them out to be. There are limits to even MY knowledge. But we do know Aristotle [384-322 BCE] would frown upon anarchy. Aristotle lived before the MRI machine, so he thought the brain was an organ to cool the blood, which I don't hold against him, great Generalist that he was. He also thought slavery was "natural" and that women lacked a certain something that men had, so they shouldn't be allowed to vote, which explains why Tea Baggers are buying up old copies of his Politics like they're the last of the grits at Waffle House. But I digress...)

Anyway, it's nice to have something so gol-derned unpleasant such as dire poverty subject to the wonderful laws of Nature; we get to wash our hands of the unpleasant stuff, enjoy the fruits of the cool stuff, and make it to the All U Can Eat Steak night at the buffet before closing time.
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Things evolved towards some measure of nuanced understanding of humanity when David Ricardo (1772-1823, but keep in mind that he died on 9/11 of 1823), the brilliant Scottish economist, argued that, if you tell the poor they have any rights beyond what they can win in the market, it's only hurting them. And we ought not hurt the poor. Explain to them calmly: I know it may sound somewhat harsh and lacking in sentiment, but you don't have even a right to live (I'm not making this stuff up folks!) if you interfere with the profound workings of the wonderful Market, with its ineffably magical Invisible Hand. Efficiency and growth are what we're after; you should've picked your parents more wisely. My point is: just communicate to the poor why they're fucked; it's the human thing to do. What are we? Animals? I think not...
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Think about it: Marx (Karl, not Groucho: dates: 1818-1883) had, in the what? 45 million pages he wrote? Marx had hardly anything to say that was specific about a future non-capitalistic society; he spends almost his entire life having the audacity to critique the thinking of Malthus and Ricardo and other intellectuals. And Marx is the guy wearing the Black Hat in our history? (Well, Unistat's history...) That's all I heard as a kid: Karl Marx (which equals "Russian people") gonna hide under yo bed; git yo momma!

So, everyone: give up 53 cents out of every tax dollar you pay so we can give it to high-tech companies so they can figure out a way to make a better bomb. (And then, with the R&D you funded, they eventually sell you a Hi-Def TV that evolved from the research. And that's...capitalism?)

(Oh, and your money also paid all soldiers in 130 counties in which the US had military bases, funded the Pentagon, numerous wars, funded Saddam Hussein against Iran, taught the Afghan mujahideen - many who later morphed into al-Qaeda - how to fight off the damned Russkies, kept Noriega on the payroll as he administered his narco-state, the CIA, DIA, NSA...an entire alphabet soup of upper-middle-class people needed socialism so we can keep capitalism as our "way of life" and keep out "communism." It makes sense, if you think about it. If you think about it while the cold grip of adrenalized terror marks you every moment on Earth, that is.)

And people bought it. Literally. You can do a lot with fear, turns out. Hell, just look at your TV today.

Anyway, back to David Ricardo's (no relation to Lucille Ball except they're both a real laff-riot!) ideas and how they played out in the 19th century in industrializing nations: if you were an economist you HAD to believe that stuff. Thankfully, things have changed.

For example, in 1986 an economist named Rajani Kannepalli Kanth at the University of Utah wrote a book very critical of the social conditions that the non-rich lived under during Ricardan economics. The book is titled Political Economy and Laissez-Faire: Economy and Ideology in the Ricardan Era. 


And then, Kanth was chased out of the University of Utah. You can be outraged at this, in the late 1980s, but you know what I call it? Progress. And it was about effing time...


Well, that's about all for my first round of Potshots at Economics, folks! If you didn't like these stories, I'm afraid I have more upcoming. No one forced you to read this Overweening Dude's blog!