Four Preludes

Four Preludes by Dmitri Shostakovich, numbers 10, 15, 16 and 24 from his 24 Preludes, Op. 34, composed between 1932 and 1933.  The violinist is Leonid Kogan accompanied by Andrei Mytnik.  The performance was filmed in London, 26 March, 1962.  

 

Future History

"If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading."

 -Alan Cohen, The Dragon Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1981), (attributed incorrectly without source to Lao Tzu)

Not long ago I came across a twitter "thread" or whatever the kids are calling them these days, inviting people to speculate (or opinionate) on why the revolution has not yet come.  As a frame, assume that the focus of the replies is mostly on what's keeping the revolution from happening in the European sphere and diaspora-- the countries of origin of the global forces responsible for near universal human malaise, and particularly the United States.  The answers tended to fall along these lines:

• The people are stupid (deceived, cowed, kept too dumb to know they're miserable, lazy, overweight, distracted, addicted to consumption)
• The police who work for the owner class are heavily militarized
• The opposition has no leadership; the left is fragmented; the people atomized
• The owners' long-term investment in securing the perpetuity of their wealth and their global dominance by economic blackmail, by force and by the effective exercise of power over the systems of resource distribution, justice and communication has paid off and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

I can understand a general lack of faith in the human materials at hand (especially in the West) that the would be revolutionary has to work with, but I was a bit dismayed by the preponderance of variations on the blame-the-victim quality of the first category which seemed to predominate among the volunteered responses. Speaking for myself, I'm reflexively a bit more partial to the last two items in the list. 

As it happens, I've been reading Karl Marx's Theory of History by G.A. Cohen, and it weighs in on the topic.*  Working backward from the Revolution, Cohen says that we will know the revolution is complete when books like his and Karl Marx's are no longer necessary to explain how the needs of people are met.  A person has a need; labor is done to meet the need; the need is met.  No explanation necessary.  This says Cohen, is socialism.  In comparison, our current system is hidden beneath a labyrinth of forces of production and production relations that obscure the path between need and fulfillment, in fact subverting even the concept of need as being that which a commodity stimulates rather than the other way around.  It takes science to make visible what processes and relations have hidden, but the effect is clear: the stifling of human potential and happiness for all but a few wherever capitalism reigns (setting aside the destructive effects on the planet for the time being).

According to the science laid out in Marx (in Cohen's philosophically oriented interpretation of it which is not without some controversy), the forces of production are what drive the organization of society.  Humans have a demonstrated tendency to improve the forces of production with advances in technology or the deployment of innovations in processes or the adoption of new resources as they are discovered and developed.  The "relations of production"-- the institutions, hierarchies and offices that people and drive the engine of production such as ownership, management, investment, government, regulation, labor, distribution, reproduction, education-- tend to be conservative and lag behind the advances in the "forces of production" - the technological and other innovations as well as the material conditions that produce the goods that meet human needs.  But they will adapt -- as they have done from primitive communism to slavery to feudalism to capitalism-- and while it's not inconceivable that the forces of production might be forced into a reversal by material conditions or a concerted effort to retreat from a path (say by the insufficiently anticipated depletion of a critical resource), the tendency is to adapt in whatever way possible to retain a beneficial technology.  What characterizes progress beyond capitalism?  Why, Socialism!

If there is anything to this theory, it might not be unreasonable to expect that if the revolution is coming, it will likely be preceded by a sufficient accumulation of innovations in production or resources that will collectively make obsolete ownership by capitalists of the means of production and the consequent need of workers to be dependent on underselling their labor to bosses in order to afford survival.  What might this accumulation look like?  An abundance of free, renewable energy, like wind, hydro, geothermal or solar power is a start.  Perhaps unlimited, uncensored public ownership of the internet as a means of spreading information and building networks of knowledge, solidarity and worker power.  Worker owned factories and farms increasing in response to capital's myopic tendency to starve the root in order to engorge the head.  History would likely need to proceed through a transition from private ownership of the means of production to communism (or if you prefer, non-ownership) through a phase in which ownership is communal and public.  The Dictatorship of the Proletariat if you will, which will wither and die when it becomes a fetter on achieving fully automated luxury communism, say.  The upshot is that we will then have a world in which the vices in which we engage to cope will no longer interest us.  No one will be stuck in a dead end job in order to stay alive long enough to work themselves out of debt.  Dream it and do it will be the order of the day.  Need it and it shall be yours.  The culture wars will have ended because we will all have won.  The struggle long attributed to human nature and thought by conventional wisdom to be the very reason for things continuing to be the way they are--which has made the subjection of the impoverished and powerless many to the wealthy and powerful few (and the ambition of some to seize wealth and power for themselves rather than working shoulder to shoulder with their brothers and sisters to make a just, free and plentiful world for all in which everyone by virtue of being alive and human can live to their full potential) seem so necessary and unavoidable-- will simply be over.

Cohen was writing in the 1970's before the conquest of history by neoliberalism and the advent of what Yanis Varoufakis calls "Techno-Feudalism"-- a terrible development which could well be a transition out of Capitalism and into something else, if not something worse-- and there is a temptation to dismiss it as a quaint relic of a bygone era that is receding at light speed into the ancient past.  But this would be a mistake.  For one thing, it is a very thorough analysis that rewards the effort of reading it (and it's not a completely painful experience).  It also affords a very clear picture of what a revolved society should be like-- a model for Being Purely Human Together to keep the mind from succumbing to despair.  

~~~~~~~

* To the topic at hand, almost as if anticipating the twitter discussion particularly with respect to the responsibility of the chained masses in the holdup of their own revolution, at one point in the book Cohen discusses the case of the "Unlocked Door" that a prisoner doesn't think to open as an illustration of the precept that you can't be free if you don't know you're free. 

Which Side She is On

In a recent story in the New York Post, Hillary Clinton is quoted saying of Bernie Sanders in an upcoming book on the 2020 election "I know the kind of things that he says about women and to women."*  It appears to have been said as a way of declaring sides after the fact in the controversy surrounding insinuations just before the Iowa primary from the Elizabeth Warren campaign about remarks Sanders allegedly had made to Warren in private months before about her prospects for winning against Trump in the general election should she win the Democratic nomination (an outcome of diminishing likelihood given polls at the time that the Warren campaign leaked the story in a move that ultimately failed to work as it was presumably calculated to-- i.e., to drive young democratic primary voting women and their allies from Bernie Sanders to Elizabeth Warren.  It almost has to be said out loud to be appreciated.).  

To recap, Sanders was supposed to have said to Warren that he didn't think a woman could be elected president.  Sanders has denied that he said what the allegation implies and in any case does not agree with the statement. Wisdom subsequently expressed from inside both the Warren and Sanders circles (but not yet from Warren) suggests that if there is any kernel of truth to the allegations, it had to have been expressed in terms of what was certain to be Trump's lack of reservation about using misogyny as a political weapon-- one that Trump had a demonstrated mastery at brandishing as his success at derailing the Hillary Clinton express four years earlier had shown.  If there was anything to the story other than desperation from Warren's campaign, the details of the incident were kept vague and archly hinted at forcing the voter to evaluate the veracity based only on their knowledge of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and their respective relationships to the truth.  

With her recently reported statement, Hillary Clinton gives us the benefit of her astuteness on the matter, with the implication that she too was a casualty of Bernie Sanders' alleged belittling of the ambitions of women.  But Hillary Clinton has a history of trying to keep the waters about her own role in her 2016 defeat at Trump's hands muddied, preferring to deflect blame anywhere but on her campaign's incompetence in conducting what should have been a cakewalk if the opinion of the political class were an indication, and most of all away from the antipathy the electorate has for Hillary Clinton herself from decades of over-exposure to her husband and to her and to the Clinton brand of politics.

On the one hand, you have to wonder what Clinton thinks she's accomplishing by her repeated attempts to impugn Bernie Sanders' character years after he rocked her cruise to neoliberal glory in the democratic primary of 2016.  On the other, it's hard to imagine that there could be any thought behind it.  Maybe Clinton (whose brand of feminism depends on the premise that what is good for Hillary Clinton is good for women) is the type of operative who sees more value in undermining the public's perception of Sanders-- the candidate who gave her a real old fashioned run for her money; a stalwart who in spite of the prevailing austerity of the neoliberal climate of the past 40 years has consistently championed and succeeded in keeping a focus off of the shallow personality politics of our era and instead on the types of economic and social policies that materially benefit women of all classes and circumstances, not just those at the top-- than in advancing those same causes herself.  Maybe her status as also-ran despite her vaunted unprecedented qualifications for the presidency of the patriarchy is merely the result of the lingering misogyny of those who challenged or refused to support her with even a vote.  Or maybe she is just a bitter, small-minded loser who would rather moan about her better Sanders-- who challenged her in 2016 as a way of modulating the unremitting sameness of her candidacy in a time that screamed for difference only when Elizabeth Warren didn't--  than to be instructed by where her shortcomings got her-- most notably among them the blindness to her own vulnerability that was her certainty of her candidacy's inevitability. 

Hillary Clinton would like you to think that misogyny is the only possible explanation for her failure to be the first woman president let alone the first two-term woman president.†  In the real world, it was the ceiling she broke through-- that of leadership of the neoliberal democratic mediocrity-- that lay behind the disappointing scale of the public's indifference to her.

~~~~~

*Apparently she's not satisfied with my mere lack of enthusiasm for her as a Clinton voter in 2016.  She's trying to make me regret it.

† This has got to be a rough eight years for her.

Capitalism Will Eat Itself

Long ago, in days before anyone conceived of the idea of "Business School", the rules of the market made economic transactions simple: I need a leek but I don't have time to grow one.  You grow leeks to sell and so I buy one from you.  Nice!  Now beat it, you leek-growing freakus.

In the Modern Era, this simple, honest model is so over.  The contemporary MBA can identify the problem immediately: for the consumer, the existence of a leek market to meet a very specific demand is perfect.  For the leek merchant, it's a dead end.  The merchant has the customer's florin.  All right.  Now what?  That's it for the benefit to the merchant of the leek?  Unacceptable!  What was needed was a Disruption!

The answer for the contemporary MBA was found in a parallel model of commerce: organized crime.  Instead of leeks, let's talk about printers-- the peripheral devices by which a user can output a document stored in a file on their computer to paper.  Now imagine a modern printer manufacturer, let's call it, I don't know, HorsePiss. Not too long ago, the transaction between the consumer and the printer manufacturer resembled that of the leek scenario.  In this case, the printer company engineered the printer, built it and placed it on the market, and the consumer purchased it.  With the transaction complete, the consumer returned home with their new device, established a connection between it and their computer and happily proceeded to print away-- a wonderful capability especially in light of the way that advances in the technology and tight competition made printing documents, webpages, photos and files from the comfort of ones home practical and affordable for all, with the only ongoing additional expense, the purchase of supplies such as ink or toner for the print jobs and paper of various stocks to meet the particular needs of the user.  Transaction complete.

Enter the MBA. A little business managerial magic, and now when the user purchases the printer, they are offered an enhancement-- for a monthly fee, the company will now ensure that the user is well stocked with ink which will come as needed through the mail.  The consumer was really only looking for the printer, but if for a nominal fee that works out in the math one does in one's head to somewhat less than the cost of buying toner off the shelf based on current usage, the manufacturer will see to it that the user does not run out of ink (always the primary inconvenience of home printing), what could be the harm?  The unwary consumer signs the form slid under his nose when the sale is rung up and forgets it.

And for several months, the system seems to work seamlessly.  The printer works great, has several other useful functions, and whenever there is an indication that toner might be running a bit low, right on schedule a replacement cartridge comes sliding through the mail slot.  And then one day, for a special project the printer's owner needs to actually use the printer for a big job.    Instead of the page or two here or there that they might typically print, they need to print a few hundred index cards.  The paper tray can adjust.  Because of the nature of the project, none of the cards has more than a few words on it, but it's a big job, and naturally in the process some of them need to be re-done.  No problem for the Horse Piss 5000.  Good enough.

The next month is a more typical month for printing, which is why it's surprising when one day, on a small but urgently needed print job, the printer comes up with an unexpected message: Printing is unavailable. Visit the HorsePiss website for a resolution.  Although there is plenty of ink and nothing seems to be wrong with the printer, it will not print-- no way around it-- and so to get to the bottom of it, you visit the company's website.  There you learn that the trouble seems to originate from an outstanding bill.  The nominal monthly subscription has been paid, so what could the problem be?  Surprisingly, the problem is the large number of index cards that were printed the prior month.  Although in terms of ink, the job was not much bigger  than what you might typically print in a month, and although your understanding is that what you are paying for with your subscription is ink, according to the contract you didn't read, the number of pages printed for that job was far over the limit of what you are allowed for the month.  HorsePiss now needs $200 before the printer will work.  How does HorsePiss know how many pages you printed?  It's in the contract: the internet connection you have to your printer is used by HorsePiss to monitor your use.  

Because you didn't read the contract, you thought you owned the printer you bought in that store that day outright, but -- ha ha!  Wrong!-- you are actually merely paying monthly for a privilege that you thought was a right; a privilege that is policed by surveillance you inadvertently invited like a vampire into your home when you hastily signed that agreement you didn't read.  The printing of index cards might be a bit unusual but you'd have exactly the same issue printing a large number of labels since each label is considered by HorsePiss a page-- to the business office, a receivable.  They could all be blank but if they passed through your printer and were counted by the HorsePiss spies, your ink service would still charge you.

You really need your regular sized print job, so when you have the $200, you fork over the money to HorsePiss and like magic-- once the check clears and whatever process Horse Piss has to go through to release your hold-- the printer works once again.  Until the spies of HorsePiss release you, your ineffectual printer continues to disappoint you with the same error message whenever you try to print with it.

For the consumer, it can feel like a violation.  But for HorsePiss, it's genius!  Didn't expect that fee?  Perhaps avoid a future fee and get more pages per month by upping your service agreement.  Of course none of the agreements will cover unlimited printing.  That is the old way of  possessing a printer.  Welcome to the future!  For the violated consumer, what recourse is there to go back to the old way and get HorsePiss out of the picture?  You can't call the police.  You signed the contract!  They work for HorsePiss in this instance.  In any case, the police can't order the printer to print.  That power lies with HorsePiss, pursuant to your fulfillment of the terms of your contract.  Can this printer that you thought was yours until you were rudely disabused by the spies of HorsePiss actually be yours by terminating the contract?  Sure-- just pay the fee and return all cartridges the company has sent you.  Don't still have them or just don't feel like it?  Just pay an additional fee.  You'll need to wait for the next billing cycle of course.  Oh, and by the way that ink that the company has been sending you is a special ink that lasts about ten times longer than the ink you pay several times more for in the store.  And it is only available through the service, and HorsePiss knows when you're using it and if you insist on using up this special toner you thought you purchased, you will be need to remain under contract, or else the printer will not work.  But as the nice young man from some other part of the world who HorsePiss outsourced your rage call to patiently explains to you, if you want to go back to expensive short-lasting toner you yourself have to buy every month, fine.  Just give the gentleman your credit card number to be let out of your indenture.

Of course, you pay one way or the other.  Until HorsePiss is satisfied that their demands are met, the printer that you thought you already bought from them might be useful as a doorstop but it ain’t gonna print. What are you going to do, write your print jobs out by hand?  

Don't rule it out.