The Baffler Round Table, Entry #3: Keith Woodhouse

[Editor's Note: This is entry number 3 of 4 total in our round table covering The Baffler, No. 19 (March 2012). Today's piece comes from Keith Woodhouse, Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California. Monday's entry came from Eric Brandom, and Tuesday's from Adam Parsons. A response to all three will follow from John Summers, The Baffler's new editor-in-chief. - TL]

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Before Occupy Wall Street, before the WTO protests in Seattle, before No Logo and Adbusters, there was The Baffler, taking on a corporate ethos slowly insinuating itself into American popular culture. The magazine first appeared in 1988 to fill what its founders viewed as an empty space in cultural criticism on the Left, a space opened up by the retreat of academics further into their particular niches and schools of thought. It ran intermittently from 1988 to 2001, and then even less frequently (fewer than one issue a year) through 2007. There was a brief revival in 2010. Now The Baffler has returned with the institutional backing of the MIT Press. The first new issue is out and is numbered 19, suggesting continuity rather than a fresh start.

Reviewing a magazine is an odd practice because while all magazines strive for coherence within articles, far fewer attempt coherence between them. The Baffler is different, as the new editor-in-chief, John Summers, makes clear in his introduction to the issue. “Our mission” Summers writes, “is to debunk the dogmas that discourage the intuitions of experience from fully forming in a critical intelligence” (p.8). In the case of issue 19 that debunking is aimed generally toward technology, the high-tech industry, and what the geographer Richard Florida likes to call “the creative class.” The notion that the twenty-first century is a time of unprecedented and accelerating technological breakthroughs is, according to Summers, a bunch of crap. Placing all those supposed breakthroughs in historical perspective, he says, leads to the sneaking suspicion that the tech industry has succeeded “mainly at producing dazzling new ways to package and distribute consumer products…that have been kicking around history for quite some time” (p.8). It is, it turns out, an era of low expectations, or of moderate expectations cheaply satisfied.

The centerpiece of the issue – the longest article, and the inspiration for the cover art – is David Graeber’s “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit.” Graeber starts with a simple question: Why haven’t we gotten all the cool stuff promised to us by mid-to-late-twentieth-century depictions of the future, stuff like invisible force fields, hoverboards, interplanetary travel, and flying cars? He offers a rich and complicated answer, reaching back decades and involving a constellation of influences.

Graeber starts with a central irony: despite the serious claims of many 1960s intellectuals that fully mechanized factories would liberate human beings from menial work, it was not technology but outsourcing that freed many Europeans and North Americans from the assembly line. By the 1980s consumer products were increasingly made not at home in high-tech factories by robots but rather abroad in low-tech factories by displaced rural workers. If Marx was right that profits can be extracted only from human labor, Graeber notes, then there are powerful incentives in place to avoid at all costs the 1960s fantasy of automated production.

Market imperatives mixed with political ones determined the nature of technological innovation in the United States. The moonshot was probably largely responsible for unreasonable expectations about commercial space travel and vacationing on Mars, and for Graeber it was little more than a public relations effort to prove that capitalism could out-innovate communism. Once the United States had established its mastery of outer space, it was free to funnel the vast majority of its technological development funding into military research to insure its mastery of the planet’s surface as well. The story that the big-government scientific projects of the 1960s gave way to the entrepreneurs-in-a-garage breakthroughs of the 1980s, Graeber explains, is inaccurate. The government continued to spend many of the nation’s research dollars, but in an effort to create military and surveillance hardware that could project American power and undermine working-class politics. Government research bore our missiles aloft but left drivers on the ground.    

Still, as long as research is being done, for whatever reason, shouldn’t there be a slow parade of inventions and discoveries? Yes, probably, Graeber says, but the problem is that we have shifted from “poetic technologies” to “bureaucratic technologies”; instead of thinking freely in order to create whatever people dream about, researchers think within the confines of what can be easily proven to work and defended from criticism, and that’s only when they are not buried by paperwork. This hyper-bureaucratic state of affairs is a consequence of partnerships between government, academia, and private business, partnerships suffused with corporate thought. It is a mistake to assume, Graeber suggests, that bureaucratic inefficiency is a product of government; it is equally a product of market-based business practices that eschew free-range, curiosity-driven work in favor of immediate applicability.

On this point, Will Boisvert agrees fully with Graeber. His contribution, “Future Schlock: Creating the Crap of Tomorrow at the MIT Media Lab,” is a sharp case-study in bureaucratic technologies. The much-ballyhooed MIT Media Lab is supposed to be an incubator for innovations in consumer products, at least according to its many journalistic boosters. According to Boisvert it is in fact a junkyard of trivial and ephemeral doodads. A toothpaste that signals the temperature and weather through its taste. An alarm clock that runs away from its perch in order to force its owner out of bed. A remote-controlled teddy bear. Interactive wallpaper. Guitar Hero.

The real innovation, Boisvert tells us, is the lab’s business structure. Corporations fund the lab but cannot direct its work, and receive only non-exclusive rights to whatever eureka moments occur. That way the lab at least seems independent while it accepts private cash, although companies can fund individual graduate students, can use faculty members as “consultants,” and can place their own people on research teams. Corporations have funded specific university research for decades. But the result of the Media Lab’s generalized corporate funding is an even greater drive to demonstrate the marketability of the lab’s work, if only to build a track record. And the Media Lab is not an anomaly; similar institutions exist at several universities, including Carnegie Mellon and the University of Southern California.

Graeber and Boisvert both look at the contemporary technological landscape and see a desert. It’s a desert filled with gizmos, but a desert nonetheless since so many of those gizmos are little more than distractions or novelties. Graeber has an explanation for this: defenders of capitalism are trapped between two competing impulses. On the one hand, they want to suppress the idea of any sort of liberatory technology (or, really, just differenttechnology) that could re-order the economic hierarchy, and so they want to limit the notion of technological possibility. On the other hand, they want to reinforce the belief that capitalism brings technological innovation, and so they want to encourage the understanding that innovation is happening all the time. The tricky balance between these impulses is to stir up excitement around minor products with negligible features, like phones that play video games and televisions that play two channels at once.

But despite their disdain for just about everything sold by the average electronics retailer, Graeber and Boisvert are not Luddites, and neither is The Baffler. The magazine is not criticizing technology but the ideas and systems behind the technology we find today. There is even a longing for a more heroic technology that murmurs in the background of issue 19. Graeber laments the decline of poetic technologies with ambition and substance. Capitalism cannot hold them back forever, he says. “Breakthroughs will happen; inconvenient discoveries cannot be permanently suppressed” (p.84). New, important technologies will arise despite the fact that “The greatest and most powerful nation that has ever existed has spent the last decades telling its citizens they can no longer contemplate fantastic collective enterprises, even if – as the environmental crisis demands – the fate of the earth depends on it” (p.82).

The idea of massive technological enterprises as solutions to environmental crisis was once anathema to environmentalists, but the scale of global warming is so great that environmentalists may become the greatest advocates of large-scale technological change. They might, as Boisvert does, think nostalgically of a time when technology was big and bold and beneficial. “Back then,” he remembers, “we did not expect machines to be us; they were bigger and stronger and faster than us, and we revered them as they remade the world in ways we had never imagined” (p.98). Given the right motives, that remaking could be for the common good.

Or, maybe, environmentalists would agree more with G. Beato, who writes about Synthetic, L.L.C., the maker of Hipstamatic, in “Disposable Hip.” Beato likes Synthetic not only because the company is the rare tech-firm that makes a profit by selling its product rather than charming venture capitalists, but because of its newest invention, Hipstamatic D-Series. While the original Hipstamatic app imitated the pictures taken by Kodak Instamatic cameras, the D-Series will imitate the entire experience, by including only twenty-four exposures in a “camera” and preventing the camera’s users (the cameras can be shared online) from actually viewing the pictures until the roll is done. Rather than offering consumers unlimited use and total convenience, Hipstamatic D-Series will sell them the idea of limits. “What Hipstamatic D-Series makes clear is that scarcity can once again be ours,” Beato writes (p.110). It is a technology that makes a virtue of less rather than more.

One of the few articles in issue 19 of The Baffler that reads as thoroughly critical of technological fetishism of any kind is Robert S. Eshelman’s “Revolt of the Gadgets.” Eshelman takes on the popular narrative that the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street protests were victories for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and cell phones. That sort of lazy, class-unconscious reporting, he says, robs the people who were doing the protesting of agency and simplifies or ignores the economic and social issues behind the protests. No doubt he’s right. But while Eshelman is appropriately upset with all the attention paid to websites and telephones during the protests, I imagine he would be willing to admit that technology can play an important supporting role, at least, in social uprisings.

Eshelman might agree, in other words, with Graeber and Boisvert and Beato that the problem is less technology itself than its production and reception. He might even agree with Kim Stanley Robinson, by far the most techno-optimistic of The Baffler’s contributors. In an excerpt from his novel 2312 Robinson describes a future in which the solar system is colonized with “ terrariums” that replicate Earth’s basic environmental conditions and allow people to live on other planets. In Robinson’s imagining, colonists leave behind them not only Earth but the planet’s capitalist economy as well. The rest of the solar system becomes an opportunity to set up a non-market economy, regulated by a single computer program run on a quantum computer that determines precisely how much should be produced and where it should be distributed. A revolution on Mars helps establish the new economy system-wide, and capitalism retreats into a largely unregulated “marginal economy” that exists mainly for recreational purposes. This is as heroic and as poetic as technology gets.

The Baffler #19 is a magazine critical of the technology industry but hopeful for technology. It is also a magazine concerned with the technological present and future but oriented primarily toward the past. Despite the last line of John Summers’s introduction – “We have seen the future, and it doesn’t work” – The Baffler looks mostly over its shoulder. Some articles, like Graeber’s and Boisvert’s, are about the present but look wistfully back to a more hopeful technological era, to what Boisvert calls the “heroic Machine Age,” when flying cars were still just over the horizon. Other articles are more explicitly about recent or not-so-recent history. Rick Perlstein considers the rise of Ronald Reagan and concludes that his success was less a matter of social and economic policies than of his unrelenting optimism. Chris Lehmann reviews the early-twentieth-century work of novelist Ernest Poole, and finds that the current recession and Occupy Wall Street’s response echo Poole’s own proletarian stories. Jim Newell looks to his own past in a funny remembrance of his experience parroting monetary theory in front of Ben Bernanke in the final round of the Fed Challenge – a sort of Model U.N. for economics geeks – several years before Bernanke’s own, real-world Fed challenge.

A historical sensibility frames the whole issue. Early on there is an excerpt from a memo written by the economist James Galbraith in the summer of 2008 and sent to the Obama campaign, warning of the potential economic calamity to come. The memo went unanswered. Near the end of the issue is an excerpt from an article by James Agee depicting the lives of Alabama tenant farmers during the Great Depression – the article that would eventually become the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – sent to Fortune Magazine in 1936. The article went unprinted. The inclusion of Agee’s piece not only gestures toward the past and another example of boom-and-bust capitalism, but also portrays a much more technologically innocent – or impoverished - time. After reading about websites and iphone apps and consumer gadgets, it is all the more moving to read Agee’s spare and matter-of-fact descriptions of horse-drawn wagons, roadside picnics, and picking and storing cotton. On the weekends the three farming families that Agee follows might go by wagon to Moundville, a city of 500, where once in a long while the local school would show a movie, something few members of these families had ever witnessed.

The historical orientation of The Baffler#19 may be in part the influence of John Summers, the new editor-in-chief, himself a historian. But I think it is something more than that, and points to one of the few shortcomings of an otherwise great issue. The Baffler hasn’t found its sweet spot: it doesn’t seem quite sure of what it is doing. It knows what is wrong: the “wreck of dogmas, bound in shallows and miseries,” in Summers’s words, that got us here, and to which we risk returning when the recovery comes. “The Market is understood not as a fallible mechanism…” Summers writes, “but as metaphysical truth incarnate” (p.6). That critique, though, is well established by now. Occupy Wall Street has furthered it, as have some labor unions. Left-leaning journals have said it repeatedly. Even the president has made vague suggestions in that direction, if only for rhetorical purposes.

The original run of The Baffler worried – rightly – that in a time of relative peace and relative prosperity the Left was easily seduced by corporate cool, and the appearance of a sleek, trouble-free post-industrial society. Because The Baffler started at a time of Left-Wing complacency it had an especially pointed critique. Corporate values had infiltrated liberal culture and The Baffler took it upon itself to point this out.

The new Baffler has a more difficult task. At a time when the Left is energized, or at least paying attention, and when everyone has a blog to stand on and shout from, it’s not clear what street corner The Baffler is laying claim to. It’s worth pointing out, for instance, the disappointment behind both Silicon Valley’s successes and the glamour of the creative class, and The Baffler does this as well as anyone. But fables of techno-utopia are not nearly as hegemonic as were the fantasies of post-industrial society in the 1990s. For every celebration of the latest dot-com there is another weary sigh that the internet, in the end, is just a massive waste of time.

All the looking back that The Baffler #19 does, then, is probably a matter of taking stock. “How did we get here?” is the question of the moment. Even Thomas Frank, one of the magazine’s founders, seems somewhat perplexed. In a piece on the unburstable bubble of Washington, D.C. consensus called “Too Smart To Fail: Notes on an Age of Folly,” Frank usefully runs down the several examples of common wisdom in the capital that proved totally wrong over the past decade and for which there was no fallout whatsoever. Surely, he suggests, this sort of fatuousness can’t go on much longer, before admitting that of course it can, and wondering “what kind of blunder it will take to shatter this city’s epic complacency, its dazzling confidence in its own stupidity” (p.16).

The next step for The Baffler is probably to get past the “How did we get here?” question to mapping the terrain of “here.” This is especially crucial at a time when liberals are wandering through a dark political woods with little sense of direction. It’s what the old Baffler did so well, and the new one undoubtedly will too. John Summers and the magazine’s staff clearly know what they’re doing – the first issue of the third time around is packed with good writing and packaged well. We’ve seen The Baffler’s future, and it works.

The Baffler Round Table, Entry #2: Adam Parsons

[Editor's Note: This is entry number 2 of 4 total in our round table covering The Baffler, No. 19 (March 2012). Today's piece comes from Adam Parsons, a Ph.D. candidate at Syracuse University. Yesterday's review was by Eric Brandom, and tomorrow's will be authored by Keith Woodhouse. A response to all three will follow from John Summers, The Baffler's new editor-in-chief. - TL]
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In his editorial introduction to the newest issue of the revived Baffler, John Summers (who will, I hope, forgive me for perhaps reading too deeply into his remarks) sounds like no one quite so much as Voltaire responding to the Lisbon earthquake. “Has the market god,” he thunders, “ever appeared so remote and mysterious as it does in the present crisis?” While the ostensible theme of the issue is technology, in many of the pieces, as in Summer’s introduction, the real question is theological: where, as Summers asks, is the god of the market? Why have its priests (who, with their “mind-cure” homiletics, read as decidedly mid-century Protestant clerics) failed so miserably to produce a brave new world with their endless ministrations?(p. 7)

Few of the authors wax so openly theological as does Summers; the exception is Barbara Ehrenreich, who examines the relationship between early human religiosity and new, mystical ideas about the curative power of animals. Nevertheless, many of the entries in this issue are devoted to attempts to answer the question of why, after all the assurances, after all the predictions, there has been no deus ex machina in the late capitalist world; of why our societies are left waiting on hilltops like so many bands of disappointed Millerites. None are more focused on this question than David Graeber’s “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit.” Citing a “sense of disappointment” bred by the failure of a “generational promise” made to the children of the Cold War that technological wonderment lay in their future, he argues that even our most impressive inventions are merely Baudrillardian hyper-real simulations of objects and activities we had once dared to imagine ourselves making, as it were, flesh (p. 66).


Rather, Graeber argues, what technological advances have accrued have been either mundane or politically expedient, and often both. Information technologies have not created a “workless utopia,” but, on the contrary, have allowed for the large-scale precarization of a workforce which is at the same time driven to work longer hours and to relax the work/leisure boundary. Advances in more tangible fields like robotics - once central to the techno-utopian dream - have instead been turned to political ends. The most pressing political end, of course, is the preservation of neoliberalism, which he imagines future historians describing as a “form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones,” a system concerned with its own perpetuation rather than with its viability in any substantive sense (p. 75). However (and here we return to theodicy) it has become eminently clear that neoliberalism has failed not only to provide the kind of future which it has promised, but also to provide the basic goods - a rising middle class, intellectual and technological innovation, geopolitical stability - which it offers to justify its present stranglehold on power. To succeed this dead god, Graeber offers the promise of spontaneous creativity. This offer comes, of course, as no surprise to those familiar with his political activities.

A similar hope animates Kim Stanley Robinson’s excerpted novel 2312, which imagines a humanity who, having expanded to fill the solar system, have constructed for themselves an economy which is equal parts Kurzweil and Belloc. In this interplanetary Mondragon, humans occupy themselves with pastoral fantasy writ large, constructing entire private biomes in hollowed-out asteroids. Notably, Robinson alone in this issue offers a concrete and winsome view of the future. The other piece of speculative fiction, Chris N. Brown’s strange and compelling short story “Edge Lands,” imagines a more sinister possibility in which the creative impulse has canvases both larger and more alive, but is restricted to an elite class of self-referential and self-modifying socialite high artists.


Self-referentiality among the would-be cultural elite is not, however, a dystopian fantasy, suggests Maureen Tkacik. On the contrary, we can have all we want right now, in the form of so-called “Thought Leaders,” or, as Tkakic calls them, the “Omniscient Gentlemen of The Atlantic” (p. 114). In particular, she is concerned with tracing the similarities between the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its journal Encounter and the array of centrist think tanks within which Atlantic editor David Bradley seeks to position his publication. More interesting, however, is the compelling, if occasionally tacit, case she makes for the intellectual affinities between contemporary centrism and the “mind-cure faith” of Bradley’s childhood in Christian Science (119). Convinced of the societal irrelevance of productive labor, she argues, they are also prone to “level the playing field between reality and fiction” (p. 120).

A similar leveling, argues Will Boisvert, has occurred in that Vatican of technological research, the MIT Media Lab. Comically juxtaposing the lab’s inflated descriptions of new technologies (“seamless and pervasive connections between our physical environments and information resources”) with the mundane devices themselves (in this case, new ways to pick TV channels at a bar), Boisvert, like Graeber, bemoans the absence of real innovation. The devices produced by the lab are not only lacking in novelty, but also in any of the grandeur of a previous age of invention. These are not monuments of ingenuity but “feeble, feckless gadgets” who “simper and cringe at our dieting travails;” in large part, they are simply more efficient tools for the perpetuation of narcissism (p. 98). Boisvert’s indictment of the gadget is something of a shared theme. G. Beato, comparing the iPhone apps Hipstamatic and Instagram, complains of their ability to manufacture and market scarcity itself as a good: we can, their structures inform us, have unlimited information for free, but we must pay to limit that same information. The virtualization of goods which our gadgets enable now requires us to pay more for the absence of goods than for their presence. As always, capitalism provides us with the means to manage the crises it causes - but for a price.

Robert S. Eshelman’s attack on the cult of the gadget is even more pointed: talk of a Facebook revolution in Egypt is not only exaggerated, he says, but wrong, an attempt to put a technocratic mask on working-class agitation centered around trade unions. In his telling conclusion, Eshelman quotes from the memoir of Egyptian Internet activist Wael Ghonim, who is explicit about the inability of social media to connect with working-class Egyptians. According to Ghonim, the Egyptian revolution was “not an Internet revolution... In the past, revolutions happened, too” (p. 106).


If one were to judge only by the contents of the latest issue of The Baffler, in fact, one might think that revolutions and the conditions which cause them happened only in the past: either the temporal past of the earlier United States or the displaced past which Westerners so often imagine for the second and third worlds. The poor and the dispossessed are present everywhere here, and often compellingly so, but they are never our poor: never the poor of east Kentucky, or of suburban Paris, or of Washington Park in Chicago. Rather, along with old-fashioned Egyptian trade-unionists, the reader encounters the poor of Ernest Poole’s socialist novel The Harbor, of post-Communist Russia, of Depression-era Alabama, and of 1930s India. In themselves, these pieces are often impressive, but taken as part of the whole, they reveal a striking absence (or, perhaps, an absence of striking - but I digress).

Analysis of the present political situation is mostly limited to bemoaning failure. Jim Newell closes an otherwise excellent memoir of his time as a member of a championship-winning Fed Challenge team (a sport which is both nerdier and more strange than one might imagine) by moralizing about the damage a “single Randian ideologue” like Alan Greenspan can do (p. 35). Thomas Frank seems genuinely shocked that, in the years leading up to the crash, mainstream economists and pundits were so consistently wrong in ways so consistently beneficial to the wealthy. Even Rick Perlstein’s fantastic analysis of Reagan’s appeal is framed as a lamentation: in this case, for Americans' easy succumbing to the Gipper’s seductive moral imprimatur, which offered a way to escape the self-criticism which the aftermath of the Vietnam War was demanding of them.

The most serious attempt at a concrete prospectus is, to return to the metaphor of religion, atheistic. James K. Galbraith, writing in 2008, advises neither a recourse to the arcane machinations of the Federal Reserve nor the breeding of a better and more moral class of experts but, instead, a return to “collective action on the grand scale”(p. 27). This, he argues, necessarily entails the demilitarization of industrialized economies, both to allow the devotion of resources to the construction of infrastructure and to remove incentives for technological solutions which, like coal power plants, are militarily preferable but socially and environmentally disastrous.

Galbraith is so starkly different, in fact, that one is almost tempted to think that the entire issue is intentionally arranged to make Galbraith seem more attractive. However, even if that is not the case, the revived Baffler works remarkably well. The volume is skillfully edited and, even when it is absurd, not for a moment dull. Marked by a visual style that is almost nostalgically postmodern, it manages to create the same sense of disorientation which its contents so frequently criticize. Perhaps there is some irony here - after all, isn’t the freedom from endless and disorienting stimulation, a la Hipstamatic, precisely what G. Beato suggests we are paying for when we pay for curation?

The Baffler Round Table, Entry #1: Eric Brandom

[Editor's Note: This is entry number 1 of 4 total in our round table covering The Baffler, No. 19 (March 2012). Today's piece comes from Eric Brandom, a Ph.D. candidate at Duke University. Tomorrow's will be from Adam Parsons and Wednesday's from Keith Woodhouse. A response to all three will follow from John Summers, The Baffler's new editor-in-chief. - TL]
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“The man in the street is not expected to know the intricacies of the magic of inducing fertility or casting evil spells. What he must know, however, is which magicians to call upon if the need for either of these services arises…The practical difficulties that may arise in certain societies (for instance, when there are competing coteries of experts, or when specialization has become so complicated that the layman gets confused) need not concern us at the moment.” [1]

This is the first part of a roundtable discussion of The Baffler 19. The normal conventions of academic reviewing are difficult to apply to such a publication. I have been selective, knowing that other contributors will have different interests and perspectives. As a guiding hypothesis, useful as a provocation, I want to suggest that The Baffler’s editorial line in this issue is shaped by social constructivism as opposed to a more thoroughgoing materialism. The central problem to be solved is the one raised, and deferred, in the above citation: expertise. This means, I want to suggest, that although the writers here represented--let us called them Bafflers--can explain why certain social arrangements crush creativity and imagination, their critical stance amounts to asserting the autonomy of the various spheres of life, most saliently the economic, political, and artistic. This is problematic because the Bafflers care very much about how these are or might be connected to one another.

The Baffler was founded in the late 1980s as an anti-business “punk literary magazine” in the spirit of Arthur Rimbaud.[2]
It is now considerably older than this precocious young man was when he gave up poetry and took up trading in Africa. What is The Baffler up to these days? John Summers frames Baffler 19 as a broadside against faith in a digitized “creative class” (7). It keeps its distance from academia yet, as Thomas Frank wrote almost 15 years ago, it is conducted with the understanding that, “yes, postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism.”[3] It is surely a somewhat quixotic gesture to so proudly claim the form of the “little magazine” this far into the 21^st century. Does The Baffler help us, as Lionel Trilling wrote commemorating the tenth anniversary of another little magazine, “to organize a new union between our political ideas and our imagination”?[4] How is this best done? The quality of the contributions and the general level of editorial ambition--especially as this issue is a new beginning--suggests that this standard is not too high. But, it seems to me, the constructivist rather than materialist perspective adopted by the magazine as a whole makes it difficult to engage either with the technology under debate in so much of the issue, or the physicality of the human bodies this technology is meant to liberate or at least comfort.

The Baffler 19 certainly paints a discouraging picture of the experts supposed to manage the rolling crisis that is today’s economy. Most alarming is, in Maureen Tkacik’s evocative phrase, a “tendency to level the playing field between reality and fiction” (120-121). According to Thomas Frank, the marketization of everything and the attendant growth of inequality have undermined all the institutions of “organized intelligence” (11). Frank compares the current patterns of economic thought to the transition from the 1930s to the 1940s. “Premature market skeptics” are dismissed today, even as their positions are publically confirmed, just as “premature antifascists” were dismissed after the opening of hostilities against Nazi Germany (a theme echoed by Newell’s fondness for referring to “quislings” in the press or congress (30, 34)). The system as currently rigged, Frank says, means that even the election of a president who believes in expert opinion does not solve the problem. The experts are rewarded not for telling hard truths that eventually turn out to be right, but for reassuringly collective error. James K. Galbraith frames and excerpts from a memo drafted by a group of economists, which he sent to the Obama administration in 2008. It is filed under “We told you so,” and is the moment Cassandra rarely gets. Jim Newell’s “I Was a Teenage Gramlich” is something like a microhistorical account of how one learns to speak the language of economics fluently without, in fact, attaching thoughtful meaning to these words. We are far from 1969, when it could be publically asserted that “we have learned at last to manage a modern economy to assure its continued growth”--what happened?[5]

Rick Perlstein begins the story in the ‘70s--the 1870s. Intransigents like William Lloyd Garrison who “pointed out that the new systems of agricultural labor […] guarded by Ku Klux Klan terror, scarcely differed from slavery,” were dismissed (38). The great strike waves of the era were called anti-American, “transcending strife--achieving consensus--was the meaning of the new nation” (38). Reconstruction was achieved through a nationalist, racist, anti-labor ideology. The same ideology of transcendent national unity, again built out of broken promises to African Americans, Perlstein suggests, brought Ronald Reagan to the White House in the wake of a civil rights struggle that was was somewhere between a revolution and a civil war. Reagan invented--or anyway first made real--a new political language: “Reagan did not get elected to the presidency because he promised to dismantle big government. The Reagan Moment arrived less because of any popular shift in ideology about the role of the state than because of the kind of stories Ronald Reagan told” (46). Through sheer embodied political work--but also very canny timing--Reagan remade American political discourse and therefore the coordinates of the politically possible. Perlstein’s Reagan, we might suggest, is the organic intellectual of the rising creative class that comes in for such abuse throughout this magazine.

Which, it seems to me, begs the question of how American political discourse might be changed in a different direction, one more to the liking of The Baffler. Chris Lehmann’s meditation on The Harbor, a recently re-published novel written in 1915 by Ernest Poole, suggests one set of constraints. It is a bildungsroman for Billy, a writer, torn between the upper reaches of the business elite and the toiling manual laborers at the harbor. Poole knew something about this himself. Indeed, the novel draws heavily on Poole’s own experiences helping to put on the 1913 Paterson Pageant in Madison Square Gardens, to support an IWW-led silk workers’ strike. The Pageant, an “artistic success,” was, according to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “disastrous to solidarity during the last days of a losing strike.”[6] The show closed after one performance, the strike lost, and many of the artists involved went off to Europe. As Lehmann emphasizes, this way of thinking about international and cross-class solidarity came to an abrupt end with the arrival of war the next summer. 

The novel comes from a very different moment in American politics and culture--one in which many of the most prominent writers were socialists. Yet Lehmann detects some echoes with our own time and draws a cautionary conclusion. The Harbor’s “real romantic conflict lies between the narrator and the crowd” (56). It is an exploration of a bourgeois intellectual’s psycho-drama involvement with the proletariat, “his craving for authenticity” (58). “The socialists of the past century were less besotted with working-class internationalism for its own sake than they were smitten with the psychic compensations of the enhanced reality that life among the proletariat had to offer” (59). Indeed one can only agree that “the struggle for justice in the workplace is plenty taxing on its own, without the added burden of producing existential meaning for restless bourgeois spirits” (58). Lehmann, citing Christopher Lasch’s judgment that “one signal failing of the twentieth century’s new radicalism was its misapplication of political means to cultural ends” (59), concludes that whatever the working class is, “one way to ensure that its lot will never improve is to keep it always at voyeuristic arm’s length” (59). It is easy to find contemporary examples of wealthy and privileged audiences finding “authenticity,” “enhanced reality,” and “existential meaning” in representations of what was once called the lower depths. But I wonder if the widely-held assumption that “struggle for justice in the workplace” can no longer generate existential meaning for anyone is not a more serious problem. What’s more, the heirs of Poole and Billy seem unable to provide any kind of answer to Perlstein’s Reagan who, following Lasch, seems to have successfully applied cultural means to political ends. What’s a Baffler to do about this?

One answer might come from a different moment of American leftism. Baffler 19 prints the first third of the story--“Cotton Tenants”--that James Agee and Walker Evans filed with Fortune Magazine in 1936. The story was refused, and has never before been published in this form; Agee expanded and reworked it into Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It is brilliant writing, a powerful and detailed description of the “existential meaning” of a given time and place. Such a document is not published here out of purely historical interest. What should a writer or artist who wants to be political today learn from the kind of literary reportage of humanity in misery represented by Agee’s text?

The ethical problem that drove the prose of Famous Men was self-torture over the possibility of making something like saleable art out of the suffering of real human beings. It is absent from this earlier version. Consider the first sentence: “Line them up on their front porches, their bodies archaic in their rags as farm bodies are; line them against that grained wood which is their shelter in three rude friezes and see, one by one, who they are: the Tingles, the Fields, the Burroughs” (152). Here is the objectification--archaic bodies in friezes--by insertion into art history that Agee struggled against in order to make Famous Men. The sensitivity of the writing is calibrated to an objectivity so confident in itself that the unknowable is not destabilizing. Lucile Burroughs, ten years old, is a “full-blown enigma […] she uses her eyes to watch into the eyes of other people, quite as calmly as death itself, and as cluelessly, too. [… S]he is advanced in consciousness to that stage at which a child dislikes its name” (157). But Agee is not yet so advanced as to replace this name with a pseudonym--that would come only in the later version of the text.

For Agee’s cotton farmers, labor comes quite directly out of the body, and is inscribed on it. Like George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier (1937), with which it is almost exactly contemporary, “Cotton Tenants” is therefore obsessed with bodies. A mother’s breast is “shriveled and knottily veined; and her hands, when you notice them, are startling: it is as if they were a couple of sizes too large, drawn over what the keen wrists called for” (156-157). One man’s body “which would otherwise have been very conventionally handsome, is knotted into something else again by the work he has done; and his skin, alarmingly fair beyond the elbows and neck, is cratered and discolored by the food he has eaten and the vermin he has slept with” (156). The same man “is a very poor picker. When he was a child he fell in the fireplace and burnt the flesh off the flat of both hands, so his fingers are stiff and slow and the best he has ever done in a day is 150 pounds. Average for a man is nearer 250” (161-162). It is clear that in a certain immediate sense, if one is to criticize an economic or political regime, one must insist on the damage done to people, the pain inflicted on human bodies. Yet from social criticism, it is easy to slide into a new voyeuristic exploitation. The Baffler 19 contains nothing else like Agee’s prose, and does not seem interested in contemporary journalism that treads the same dangerous ground.  

Fiction, on the other hand, still aspires to map out just how each body is pinned to the reproductive wheel of the capitalist economy. It avoids Agee’s ethical dilemma by subtracting truth-claims. “My Own Little Mission,” a sort of monologue from Dubravka Ugrešić that is broken into pieces and spread at intervals through the issue, is its most effective literary encounter with life under late-late capitalism--the question of its fictionality, perhaps like Reagan’s imaginary bridges, seems beside the point. “Edge Lands” by Chris N. Brown is set in an artists’ colony, a quasi-sovereign state carved out of Mexico. The dystopia running underneath the spectacular, sensual, experiments that the artists perform on themselves and other living bodies is, of course, the corporate world that pays for it all. It is an apologetic, self-pitying story told by the “creative class” to itself. Kim Stanley Robinson’s “2312” rings a change on the witticism (now raised to the level of postmodern metaphysics) that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The first part of the text is a light and helpful guide to physically making one’s own biosphere out of a hollowed-out asteroid. Its smooth and reassuring voice gives way to chopped-up fragments of exposition describing the Accelerando: a space elevator in Quito; Mondragon accords for an AI-planned economy; and the GINI coefficient on Mars. Insistence on the level of form that it is difficult for us to imagine that “capitalism […] with some rule and attitude changes […] has proven it can be an interesting game, even beautiful, like baseball or volleyball. It is a valid project at the margin, a form of self-actualization, not to be applied to the necessities, but on the margin a nice hobby, even perhaps an art form” (139). Here indeed is a dream for the politicized artist--if only capitalism could be rendered as marginal and easy to ignore as I am--that would have made little sense to Agee.

David Graeber tells us, in “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” that we aren’t likely to get any of this imagination-freeing technology. Graeber has been most in view recently both for his early involvement in Occupy Wall Street and for his timely Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011).[7] His basic claim is that since the middle of the 20^th century, but particularly since 1970, the rate of real technological change has slowed and nearly halted. We are literally going more slowly now--Apollo 10, in 1969, was the fastest a human being has ever travelled (71). Postmodernism, as a broad cultural constellation, is the recognition that in the last 40 years “the only breakthroughs were those that made it easier to create, transfer, and rearrange virtual projections of things.” These have stood in for what we really wanted, “pocket-size nuclear fusion plants or telekinetic mind-reading devices” (68). Nor, in a binary he uses several times, do we have artificial intelligence or robots to do our housework for us. “The Internet”--the obvious answer to the challenge that nothing has changed--“is a remarkable innovation but all we are talking about is a super-fast and globally accessible combination of library, post office, and mail-order catalogue” (77). Adding touch-screens to cell phones is kind of neat, but it does not constitute a fundamental technological breakthrough, and for the past decades we’ve done little better than this.

The central explanation Graeber offers for this failure of expected change is in the title of the piece--the declining rate of profit. “Marx argued that […] value--and therefore profits--can be extracted only from human labor. Competition forces factory owners to mechanize production, to reduce labor costs, but while this is to the short-term advantage of the firm, mechanization’s effect is to drive down the general rate of profit” (73). There is no consensus about the accuracy of these claims, “but if it is true, then the decision by industrialists not to pour research funds into the invention of […] robot factories […] and instead to relocate their factories to labor-intensive, low-tech facilities in China of the Global South makes a great deal of sense” (73). Of course capital prefers not to invest in labor-saving machines, and will take its profits wherever the geopolitical situation allows. Globalization and sheer police power have broken real worker resistance.

This Marxian explanation is accompanied by what strikes me as a profoundly constructivist reinterpretation of capitalism and creativity. If, for Marx, intra-capitalist competition inevitably drove innovation, Graeber gives social form--bureaucracy, abstracted from any non-human technological basis--the power to trump change. For Graeber, American capitalism is basically corporate, which means bureaucratic (80). It is in contrast with British capitalism, which had a more diverse social structure and was therefore more open to change. Not profit as such, but corporate-bureaucratic standardization has halted scientific progress--especially in academia. Far from freeing us from standardization, bureaucratic technologies like the internet and “computers have played a crucial role in […] narrowing our social imagination” (81). Toward what sort of politics does this point?

The goal of politics would be--as in Robinson’s story--to put rationality at the service of poetry, and not the other way around. Graeber describes replacing bureaucratic technologies with “poetic technologies” (81), so that “free of the dead hand of the hedge fund managers and the CEOs […] our imaginations  [can] once again become a material force in human history” (84). This is a call to the post-scarcity society that the 1960s believed it was about to achieve, and is a directly voluntarist challenge to the contemporary class structure. Graeber suggests that if sufficient resistance to capital can be mounted, or simply in the fullness of time, technological progress will pick back up, and we indeed will be able to dispense with capitalism without giving up the benefits of modernity. 

Here, it seems to me, we see again the broad difficulty into which The Baffler falls. Graeber effectively wants the economy to be made autonomous, so that it can be ignored. Elsewhere, Graeber has described his anarchist politics as “prefigurative.” In short, a hierarchical and authoritarian revolutionary party will not produce an egalitarian and free society. The Occupy movement was consensus-based and participatory, prefiguring the desired social order. There is an element of political formalism here--when politics is imagined as an autonomous sphere with its own logic, that logic is the essential thing.

One triumphal narrative in recent years has been that new communications technologies are prefigurative of a coming society. The Baffler 19 exhausts itself in destroying this narrative, but cannot make an alternative one out of the pieces left by the demolition. As Robert Eshelman insists, Twitter didn’t make the Egyptian revolution. But Graeber himself notes that new ways of organizing people, not steam power or anything so obviously ‘technological,’ built the pyramids (82). Is it really unimaginable that these new means of (what Graeber would perhaps call non-) production do not carry some potential for resistance? If so, surely it can be revealed only by the kind of attention that Agee sought to pay to the life-world of the cotton tenant farmer. That is, only by taking seriously--not dismissing as failure or distraction--the realities created by the new means of communication, by the “creative class” and its daily life, will it be possible to rise, as The Baffler wants to do, from distemper to dissent.

The Baffler’s rejection of the contemporary situation seems so complete that I cannot resist, by way of supplement to Trilling’s goal of uniting imagination and political ideas, citing from a text written at the same moment as “Cotton Tenants” and mentioned by Maureen Tkacik: “if you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality.”[8]

-----------------------------------------------------------

[1] Berger, Peter L., and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. (London: Penguin Books, 1966), 95-96.

[2] The Baffler, “About,” http://thebaffler.com/faq (accessed April 26, 2012)

[3]  Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from The Baffler, eds Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (New York: Norton, 1997), 15.

[4] Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. (New York: Doubleday, 1950), 103.

[5] Richard Nixon:"Inaugural Address," January 20, 1969. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=1941. (accessed April 26, 2012)

[6] Cited in McNamara, Brooks, “Paterson Strike Pageant,” The Drama Review: TDR 15, no. 3 (1971): 61.

[7] An anthropologist by training, his first book drew on his own fieldwork in Madagascar as well as other ethnographic resources to present a process-oriented theory of value by synthesizing Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss. See Graeber, David. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams, (New York: Palgrave, 2001).

[8] Mao Tse-Tung “On Practice.” http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_16.htm (accessed April 26, 2012).

Baffler Returns

Baffler #19 (cover art to your left), the first from editor in chief John Summers, features original salvos by founding editor Thomas Frank, Rick Perlstein, Barbara Ehrenreich, and David Graeber ("Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit"); fiction by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and Kim Stanley Robinson; poetry by Geoffrey Hill, Laura Riding, Charles Bernstein, and Peter Gizzi; satirical art by Peter Arkle, Mark Dancey, Steve Brodner; and a new column by senior editor Chris Lehmann, The Dollar Debauch. To top it off, the issue offers the first look in seventy-six years of the original Fortune article that James Agee wrote on tenant farmers in Alabama. The article, written in 1936, has never been published before (announced last fall in the Times' letter section, here.)

Subscriptions are available here.

Referential Slipperiness: Bourgeois, Bourgoisie, And American Class Anti-Intellectualism

Long-time USIH reader Varad Mehta posted this piece from Slate---"Is 'Middlebrow' Still an Insult?" by David Haglund---on our Facebook page. He added this short article from Maria Popova as a supplemental read. Both intelligently discuss now well-known problems of the high, middle, and low cultural distinction tropes (i.e. these categories are historically shifting matters of perception, made problematic by the advent of mass culture and the ongoing development of democratic cultural forms in the twentieth century).

The occasion for Haglund's post is that The New York Review of Books is issuing a new collection of Dwight Macdonald's classic essays, titled Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain.* It will be of interest to USIH readers that the editor is John Summers, and the collection contains an introduction by Louis Menand. [*Who knew that NYRB published books, let alone essay collections and "classics"?]

Haglund's article is a first-rate abstract on the history and usage of the "brow hierarachy" for cultural theory novices. Explore all the links if you have some time. Otherwise, near the top Haglund refers to a line from Menand in the collection, about "Masscult and Midcult," that reads as follows: "Louis Menand...calls the title essay 'a kind of summa of the New York highbrow’s contempt for bourgeois culture.' "

This created an immediate disjunct for me; the line derailed me from finishing the article for another 15-20 minutes. Why? Far be it from me to question the thinking and prose of Menand (I bow at his feet...seriously), but aren't "the highbrow," as a class, either overlapping or the same as the bourgeoisie? After a bit I realized that this muddled use of the term "bourgeois"---especially in relation to American class categories---has bothered me for some time. As a quick and dirty reference* and review, I scanned Wikipedia's entry for bourgeois---which immediately redirected me to its entry for bourgeoisie. [*I'm shocked with myself that I had never tried to explore this etymology before, but that's a question I'll leave for another day---chalking it up, for now, to the usual professional distractions.]

The opening line of the Wikipedia piece reminds us that bourgeois and bourgeoisie are moving targets---as nouns representative of groups of people over time. It's a fairly obvious point, and I knew that Marx's bourgeoisie was not the same as bourgeois described by communists, socialists, and class-aware academic types all through the twentieth century. In other words, I knew the term did not strictly describe a group that owns the means of production---that bourgeois describes an attitude, a disposition, or a cultural matrix, and not just one's economic means.

What has bothered me for so long, however, is the inbred, slippery nature of the term bourgeois when it's used as a pejorative. Those who use the term are usually of an upper-middle (economic) class background, or of a minority of disaffected upper class, and they use it to describe the materialism of their hereditary social set. It's those who, by training or empathetic moral sensibilities, use the term to describe the lack of a true Christian gentility in their peers (i.e. modern condescension).

Proof the term's inbred nature lies in the fact that it feels awkward to imagine lower or working-class folks accusing those of relatively higher classes of being bourgeois. First, it's not a regular part of lower class or lower middle class vocabulary, at least as I've experienced, first-hand, those categories of income/wealth. Furthermore, the inherent American anti-intellectualism of large swaths of the American working class preclude use of the term: you would be "putting on airs" by using three-syllable word when you can use the one-syllable "snob."

Consulting a common reference book, the online Merriam-Webster (MW) dictionary, we find this definition of "bourgeoisie":

1. Middle class; also plural in construction : members of the middle class
2. A social order dominated by bourgeois

And here's MW's definition of bourgeois:

1. Of, relating to, or characteristic of the social middle class
2. Marked by a concern for material interests and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity
3. Dominated by commercial and industrial interests : capitalistic

So if we strictly followed MW's normalization of both terms, we would not use either term to describe America's upper classes of capital owners and accumulators.

Things get more confusing, or slippery, when we recall that Americans normalize "middle class" to include large swaths of the upper and working classes; it's used by both of the latter as a term of humility and aspiration, respectively.

In other words, the American bourgeois and/or bourgeoisie includes---by definition (literally above) and convention (usage of the terms)---probably 75-80 percent of the American populace. Even so, we hardly ever observe the terms in use except, as noted above, in upper-middle and upper class circles. In those circles it's a pejorative, not a class descriptor.

In sum, in American culture and history the terms bourgeois and bourgeoisie have no stable meaning in relation to communicating real economic information across American classes. If you use these terms, you're likely to confuse your audience---especially those in America's bourgeois middle class. We don't even have, or teach, the baseline knowledge of Marx to utilize as a referential starting point. We are so startlingly and willfully blind to class distinctions in our education establishment (not in everyday life, where we are acutely aware of them) that we have no shared vocabulary to discuss inequality. Our "economic class anti-intellectualism" prevents us from understanding the nature of the bourgeoisie as Marx communicated the term.

There's much more we can say about this topic, but I'll stop now to let you take over. What have I missed? What have I exaggerated? How am I missing the larger picture?* - TL

[*I'm serious here because I wrote this post while in a late-night, post-midterm grading haze of exhaustion.]

The Curse of Communitarianism?

Below is Adolph Reed Jr.’s assessment of Obama shortly after the latter won his first Illinois state senate race—written in Reed’s now (in)famous article, “The Curse of Community,” Village Voice, January 16, 1996 (reprinted in Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene):

In Chicago… we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program—the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance.

In Reading Obama, James Kloppenberg links Obama’s political thought to three American intellectual traditions (traditions that Kloppenberg claims are interrelated): pragmatism, civic republicanism, and communitarianism. In his review of Reading Obama, John Summers takes Kloppenberg to task for, among other things, too rosy a view of the relationship between philosophical pragmatism and democratic politics—a debate that goes at least as far back as Randolph Bourne’s classic 1917 “Twilight of Idols,” where Bourne lashed out at John Dewey for supporting Woodrow Wilson’s entry into the Great War (albeit, on the grounds that Dewey had betrayed the pragmatism of William James, not out of a rejection of pragmatism per se).

As opposed to pragmatism, I’d like to focus on community, the subject of Reed’s irate 1996 article, and communitarianism, one of the philosophical traditions Kloppenberg thinks has influenced Obama. Kloppenberg rather obviously comes to different conclusions about community than Reed. Whereas Reed sees community as a cover for repressive neoliberal policies, Kloppenberg thinks communitarianism can serve the ends of justice—when he (tepidly) criticizes Obama, he does so for not living up to the ideals of communitarianism (and pragmatism and civic republicanism). Although Kloppenberg is careful to note that communitarianism can operate as a means to diverse ends, including ends that Kloppenberg—a self-described progressive—does not support, on the whole he seems rather favorable to communitarianism as a political philosophy. He writes that “the work of radical reformers has been informed by, and has been driven forward through the work of, communities—frequently religious communities… (78)

In a compelling bit of recent intellectual history, Kloppenberg examines the trajectory of John Rawls’s thought in light of communitarianism. At first, Rawls was predisposed to favor community as a political principle, made evident in his 1942 undergraduate thesis—“A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith” (which I blogged about here)—in which Rawls related the search for justice to religious traditions. But later, in A Theory of Justice, his 1971 tome that proved his most influential work, Rawls grounded justice in a more individualistic social contract theory. Behind a veil of ignorance, so Rawls theorized, people would opt for a reasonably just society on the grounds that they would not want to be on the lowest social rung if such a position were intolerable. Extending this line of thought, Rawls supposed that a just society would operate along the lines of the difference principle: degrees of inequality would be tolerated so long as inequality brought greater freedom and justice to all members of society, including those on the proverbial bottom rung. But then the late Rawls—he of Political Liberalism, his 1996 book that was, in effect, a response to his communitarian and feminist critics—partially came around to his earlier views about community. This he made clear in his elaboration on what he called “overlapping consensus,” where people enmeshed in communities could find political common ground with people enmeshed in other communities so long as the focus was indeed on common interests.

Kloppenberg maintains that the most “widely read version” of the communitarian critique of A Theory of Justice was written by one of Charles Taylor’s students, Michael Sandel, namely, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982). Kloppenberg writes: “From [Sandel’s communitarian] perspective, Rawls not only ignored, he ruled out of bounds, the most precious of all human commitments, the basic commitments that make us who we are” (99) Other communitarians influential to late-twentieth century American social thought include Robert Bellah, co-author of Habits of the Heart, and Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone. Putnam organized the communitarian Saguaro Seminar at Harvard, dedicated to “civic engagement in America,” which Obama attended in the late 1990s. This is one kernel of evidence that Kloppenberg applies to his thesis that Obama’s worldview is saturated with the lessons learned from the recent intellectual history of communitarianism. Another is that Obama learned from his community organizing days on the Chicago south side that people were more inclined to political activism if such activism was within the constraints of communities, usually religious. None of this convinces me that Obama is particularly familiar with the debates over Rawls that dominated one variant of social thought, but insofar as Obama does adhere to the principles of communitarianism, which both Reed and Kloppenberg maintain, from very different positions, how is this of consequence? Is communitarianism a viable political philosophy towards the ends of justice?

Count me a skeptic. I’ve always thought communitarianism a vacuous political philosophy. No, I don’t think it always operates as a cover for repression, though it often does, sometimes unwittingly. But I do think it works better in the descriptive than in the prescriptive. Of course critics were right to point out to Rawls that people are motivated by things other than individually-defined interests, as ever, and that such motivations should not be deemed irrational. But what does this mean going forward as a political philosophy?

Historical example is the best way I know how to demonstrate the problems of community as a political philosophy. In the late 1960s, blacks in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, with political support from liberal Republican Mayor John Lindsay and with Ford Foundation largesse, undertook a controversial experiment in community control of their schools. Ocean Hill-Brownsville activists, influenced by Black Nationalist thinkers such as Malcolm X and Harold Cruse, believed that their schools were failing largely because of racism built into the city’s educational institutions. Community control activists sought to hire black teachers to replace predominantly white teachers, on the grounds that black teachers would not only better relate to black students, but also because, unlike their white counterparts, black teachers would not be beholden to “culture of poverty” presumptions that lowered expectations.

The Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment in community control had powerful opponents, especially the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the teacher’s union that represented the vast majority of New York City teachers, led by the outspoken Albert Shanker. Thanks to a flourishing public sector unionism in the 1960s, the UFT was powerful enough to help the centralized New York City Board of Education govern the largest school system in the nation. And as part of its collectively bargained contract, teachers were hired and promoted in accordance with a set of standardized tests that they took at several points along their career. This system, which the UFT described as objective and, thus, meritocratic, served whites well—especially Jews, who comprised a majority of the union—but left black teachers behind. Thus, as part of its community control prerogatives, Ocean Hill-Brownsville activists violated the terms of the UFT contract and fired several of the white teachers in their neighborhood, replacing them with black teachers or non-unionized whites more committed to the principles of community control, but less qualified by UFT standards. This, predictably, brought the wrath of the powerful and savvy Shanker. In a battle that included three citywide teacher’s strikes in the fall of 1968, the UFT decisively defeated Ocean Hill-Brownsville community controllers.

Although raw power defeated the Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment in community control, power was not the only principle guiding it. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville communitarians believed that their values were more consistent with justice than the values of the white teachers. They contrasted their belief in mutuality with the individualistic materialism of the white middle-class world inhabited by the teachers. They theorized that they were better equipped to make education relevant to black children.

The problem, as explained by Gerald Podair in his excellent book, The Strike that Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis, is that community meant different things to different people. Whereas Ocean Hill-Brownsville blacks could plausibly claim that their communitarianism served the ends of justice, if only because it was a response to institutionalized racism, community looked very different when whites in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn organized to bar blacks from being bussed into their schools. Jonathan Rieder, author of Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism, calls the protest the result of “deferred white vengeance for the New York school crisis of 1968.” As one Canarsie resident addressed the media: “You and the God-damned liberals, you screamed along with the blacks in 1968 for community control... now whites want what the blacks have, and you say we can’t have it.”

So to return to Rawls: how could blacks and whites in Brooklyn have found an overlapping consensus? Didn’t “community” prevent such a consensus from prevailing? As both Podair and Rieder argue, a new consensus was formed, that between formerly antagonistic outer-borough Jews and the city’s mostly Catholic Italians. Blacks were left in the lurch, especially when the city responded to its fiscal crisis of the 1970s by cutting social services that blacks were most dependent upon. Blacks were powerless to stop these cuts because they no longer had many white allies in the city. The Jews whom blacks previously relied upon as a sort of cosmopolitan buffer between themselves and the rest of the white population could no longer be counted on as such, in part because of the anti-Semitic-baiting that accompanied the 1968 controversy.

To conclude: to me, the history of Ocean Hill-Brownsville serves as a warning against community as a political principle. Am I missing something?

The Curse of Communitarianism?

Below is Adolph Reed Jr.’s assessment of Obama shortly after the latter won his first Illinois state senate race—written in Reed’s now (in)famous article, “The Curse of Community,” Village Voice, January 16, 1996 (reprinted in Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene):

In Chicago… we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program—the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance.

In Reading Obama, James Kloppenberg links Obama’s political thought to three American intellectual traditions (traditions that Kloppenberg claims are interrelated): pragmatism, civic republicanism, and communitarianism. In his review of Reading Obama, John Summers takes Kloppenberg to task for, among other things, too rosy a view of the relationship between philosophical pragmatism and democratic politics—a debate that goes at least as far back as Randolph Bourne’s classic 1917 “Twilight of Idols,” where Bourne lashed out at John Dewey for supporting Woodrow Wilson’s entry into the Great War (albeit, on the grounds that Dewey had betrayed the pragmatism of William James, not out of a rejection of pragmatism per se).

As opposed to pragmatism, I’d like to focus on community, the subject of Reed’s irate 1996 article, and communitarianism, one of the philosophical traditions Kloppenberg thinks has influenced Obama. Kloppenberg rather obviously comes to different conclusions about community than Reed. Whereas Reed sees community as a cover for repressive neoliberal policies, Kloppenberg thinks communitarianism can serve the ends of justice—when he (tepidly) criticizes Obama, he does so for not living up to the ideals of communitarianism (and pragmatism and civic republicanism). Although Kloppenberg is careful to note that communitarianism can operate as a means to diverse ends, including ends that Kloppenberg—a self-described progressive—does not support, on the whole he seems rather favorable to communitarianism as a political philosophy. He writes that “the work of radical reformers has been informed by, and has been driven forward through the work of, communities—frequently religious communities… (78)

In a compelling bit of recent intellectual history, Kloppenberg examines the trajectory of John Rawls’s thought in light of communitarianism. At first, Rawls was predisposed to favor community as a political principle, made evident in his 1942 undergraduate thesis—“A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith” (which I blogged about here)—in which Rawls related the search for justice to religious traditions. But later, in A Theory of Justice, his 1971 tome that proved his most influential work, Rawls grounded justice in a more individualistic social contract theory. Behind a veil of ignorance, so Rawls theorized, people would opt for a reasonably just society on the grounds that they would not want to be on the lowest social rung if such a position were intolerable. Extending this line of thought, Rawls supposed that a just society would operate along the lines of the difference principle: degrees of inequality would be tolerated so long as inequality brought greater freedom and justice to all members of society, including those on the proverbial bottom rung. But then the late Rawls—he of Political Liberalism, his 1996 book that was, in effect, a response to his communitarian and feminist critics—partially came around to his earlier views about community. This he made clear in his elaboration on what he called “overlapping consensus,” where people enmeshed in communities could find political common ground with people enmeshed in other communities so long as the focus was indeed on common interests.

Kloppenberg maintains that the most “widely read version” of the communitarian critique of A Theory of Justice was written by one of Charles Taylor’s students, Michael Sandel, namely, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982). Kloppenberg writes: “From [Sandel’s communitarian] perspective, Rawls not only ignored, he ruled out of bounds, the most precious of all human commitments, the basic commitments that make us who we are” (99) Other communitarians influential to late-twentieth century American social thought include Robert Bellah, co-author of Habits of the Heart, and Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone. Putnam organized the communitarian Saguaro Seminar at Harvard, dedicated to “civic engagement in America,” which Obama attended in the late 1990s. This is one kernel of evidence that Kloppenberg applies to his thesis that Obama’s worldview is saturated with the lessons learned from the recent intellectual history of communitarianism. Another is that Obama learned from his community organizing days on the Chicago south side that people were more inclined to political activism if such activism was within the constraints of communities, usually religious. None of this convinces me that Obama is particularly familiar with the debates over Rawls that dominated one variant of social thought, but insofar as Obama does adhere to the principles of communitarianism, which both Reed and Kloppenberg maintain, from very different positions, how is this of consequence? Is communitarianism a viable political philosophy towards the ends of justice?

Count me a skeptic. I’ve always thought communitarianism a vacuous political philosophy. No, I don’t think it always operates as a cover for repression, though it often does, sometimes unwittingly. But I do think it works better in the descriptive than in the prescriptive. Of course critics were right to point out to Rawls that people are motivated by things other than individually-defined interests, as ever, and that such motivations should not be deemed irrational. But what does this mean going forward as a political philosophy?

Historical example is the best way I know how to demonstrate the problems of community as a political philosophy. In the late 1960s, blacks in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, with political support from liberal Republican Mayor John Lindsay and with Ford Foundation largesse, undertook a controversial experiment in community control of their schools. Ocean Hill-Brownsville activists, influenced by Black Nationalist thinkers such as Malcolm X and Harold Cruse, believed that their schools were failing largely because of racism built into the city’s educational institutions. Community control activists sought to hire black teachers to replace predominantly white teachers, on the grounds that black teachers would not only better relate to black students, but also because, unlike their white counterparts, black teachers would not be beholden to “culture of poverty” presumptions that lowered expectations.

The Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment in community control had powerful opponents, especially the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the teacher’s union that represented the vast majority of New York City teachers, led by the outspoken Albert Shanker. Thanks to a flourishing public sector unionism in the 1960s, the UFT was powerful enough to help the centralized New York City Board of Education govern the largest school system in the nation. And as part of its collectively bargained contract, teachers were hired and promoted in accordance with a set of standardized tests that they took at several points along their career. This system, which the UFT described as objective and, thus, meritocratic, served whites well—especially Jews, who comprised a majority of the union—but left black teachers behind. Thus, as part of its community control prerogatives, Ocean Hill-Brownsville activists violated the terms of the UFT contract and fired several of the white teachers in their neighborhood, replacing them with black teachers or non-unionized whites more committed to the principles of community control, but less qualified by UFT standards. This, predictably, brought the wrath of the powerful and savvy Shanker. In a battle that included three citywide teacher’s strikes in the fall of 1968, the UFT decisively defeated Ocean Hill-Brownsville community controllers.

Although raw power defeated the Ocean Hill-Brownsville experiment in community control, power was not the only principle guiding it. The Ocean Hill-Brownsville communitarians believed that their values were more consistent with justice than the values of the white teachers. They contrasted their belief in mutuality with the individualistic materialism of the white middle-class world inhabited by the teachers. They theorized that they were better equipped to make education relevant to black children.

The problem, as explained by Gerald Podair in his excellent book, The Strike that Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis, is that community meant different things to different people. Whereas Ocean Hill-Brownsville blacks could plausibly claim that their communitarianism served the ends of justice, if only because it was a response to institutionalized racism, community looked very different when whites in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn organized to bar blacks from being bussed into their schools. Jonathan Rieder, author of Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism, calls the protest the result of “deferred white vengeance for the New York school crisis of 1968.” As one Canarsie resident addressed the media: “You and the God-damned liberals, you screamed along with the blacks in 1968 for community control... now whites want what the blacks have, and you say we can’t have it.”

So to return to Rawls: how could blacks and whites in Brooklyn have found an overlapping consensus? Didn’t “community” prevent such a consensus from prevailing? As both Podair and Rieder argue, a new consensus was formed, that between formerly antagonistic outer-borough Jews and the city’s mostly Catholic Italians. Blacks were left in the lurch, especially when the city responded to its fiscal crisis of the 1970s by cutting social services that blacks were most dependent upon. Blacks were powerless to stop these cuts because they no longer had many white allies in the city. The Jews whom blacks previously relied upon as a sort of cosmopolitan buffer between themselves and the rest of the white population could no longer be counted on as such, in part because of the anti-Semitic-baiting that accompanied the 1968 controversy.

To conclude: to me, the history of Ocean Hill-Brownsville serves as a warning against community as a political principle. Am I missing something?