Slothrop:
Boorstin – sheesh. There’s a very interesting summary in Braudel that shatters comfortable western myths about the inferiority and primitive nature of China. The world was not waiting in the dark for Europeans to light the candle.
As for regulation (1) “better” for who and (2) “anathema” is an ideological statement of faith, not a defensible analysis. Regulation and monopoly are recurring themes in the last 1.5 millenia of Euro/American history and that they run counter to the ideological justifications of the market is as “ironic” as the recurrence of war in self-proclaimed Christian societies. Please see (1) diversion of resources to military (2) state imposed monopolies starting from the Arsenal and the sale of mining concessions to Fuggers and continuing through the Dutch East India company and AT&T, capital imposed monopolies or oligopolies starting from the Lyon fairs and continuing through IBM in the 1960s and the oil companies today. All ruling ideologies are routinely violated when it is in the interests of those powerful enough to do so. Whatever Marxists and Chicagoists say, in practice the “commanding heights” of the economy appear to be subject to state and private power that is not market driven at all. Europe didn’t invest hundreds of billions in Airbus because the “anarchic” market was clamoring for a new producer. China is not bidding for Conoco to increase sales of oil. If you have to classify the operations of J.P. Morgan or US DOD as “anathematic” to capitalism, you are confessing that your analysis of the US economic system as “capitalist” forces you to close your eyes to a huge chunk of actual economic practice.
So can you define “capitalism” ?
Razor: Agreed. The sad thing about academic marxism is its blank refusal to analyze itself and try to see how the economic interests of privileged intelligensia affects the production of ideas. Odd that French communists eventually produce a slightly different flavor of bureaucratic supremism favored by all the other intellectual groups at the top of French society and American marxists end up with something startlingly similar to the b.s. of the Chicago school.

Posted by: citizen k | Jul 4 2005 3:28 utc | 104

I’ll be back next week and get involved in this a little more CK.
It seemes to me Marx is no more relevant today than Smith or Riccardo, and I am not even sure that Marx had a real clue about his own time.
Things get very murky in the subjective social “sciences”.

Posted by: Groucho | Jul 4 2005 3:52 utc | 106

You can’t defend Marxist economic analysis by attacking Thatcherism.
That’s not true. Because for neoliberalism, the only solution, say, to exurban irrational planning,[…]
But the failure of neoliberalism does not imply the correctness of Marxism. One can lack faith in Baal and Zeus.

Posted by: citizen k | Jul 4 2005 4:42 utc | 108

Annie: Well, I’ve been thinking about your post and trying to see how it works together. Wolfie wants democracy but imposes military rule and all the Bushies want American power but bankrupt the state and destroy the Army, and the execs who run big American high tech companies want money but donate republican. It seems obvious to me that the telecom/IT/tech people should have followed Vin Cerf and campaigned for Gore, but they championed people who have caused them to hit a concrete wall. And then it is natural to ask why someone like Vin Cerf ended up working for Bernie Ebbers. And why is that multinationals in the US and EU and Japan are devoted to hollowing themselves out? All of this makes me wish someone with more brain power was coming up with serious explanations and I guess that my complaint is that Comrade Slothrop, like many other smart people who should be helping us figure it out, seems trapped in a 19th century ideology and 21st century post-modern post-hoc explanations of why it was really right despite everything.
Slothrop: Small-is-beautiful markets are revisionist Proudonism, left-wing infantilism, and nostalgic petit bourgeois idealism, not to mention attempts to deny the rationalism of the pure market so you’d be sneered at from both economist camps.

Posted by: citizen k | Jul 4 2005 6:09 utc | 110

slothrop. as long as i can create the standards you must meet with every change in the discussion, i guess you will always lose to. As has been said here many times, to the irritation of many who are tired of hearing it, the history of humans on Planet earth wsince the 1840’s is a refutation of your particular positions. Read prior posts if you want some for instances. However, it is true i am not trying to pack this all into conclusory remarks about why the forces of enkarkenment are prevaling, so, by your standards, you are the clear winner, yet nothing in the world has changed as a result of your win, has it?

Posted by: razor | Jul 4 2005 14:15 utc | 112

ahh slothrop, you have got me lossely using a noun. “leftist.” You, of course, have never lossely used any nouns, but to the contrary, have documented all your claims, saving you from well-earned riduclue.
If memory serves, there is a long series of comments a while back about this subject, and, as I recall, you never had a valid defense to the criticisms made of the dead – that is, the late – tradition and its proven wroung nouns and verbs you insist on injecting into every discussion, and when faced with criticisms moving the goalposts to those you favor. It is there for the re-viewing for those interested.
But here is a simple proof for you of the left’s failure: Confederate Republicans control the executive branch of the Federal Government of the United States of America, the Senate of the Federal Government of the United States of America, The House of Representative of the Federal Government of the United States of America, and the Supreme Court of the Federal Government of the United States of America, not to mention, PBS. Seems to me a slam dunk case for the failure of the left. But, I suspect you have some marxist nouns and verbs to explain why this is in fact proof the “left” has no signficiant failing and someone else is at fault jsut as surely as it can be proven the heavens revovle around the earth, just as the Detroit Pistons just won the NBA championship, Tiger the last tournament, and Roddick Wimbledon. You just gotts to look at it with the right ideological blinders.
Or, from the other end, consider no one from the left has accomplished anything worth accomplishing for years. China for goodness sake is one big sweat shop. Cuba, is the world’s have for 1950’s American cars that still run and pvoerty for most everyone. But, rev up that leftist excuse making machine and crank out some more excuse for which there is no demand.
Wake up to this world or grow up and live in it, and the failure of the left will be obvious.

Posted by: razor | Jul 4 2005 17:35 utc | 114

Your statement re Braudel is goofy. I cite Braudel for a real historian’s quick summary of the state of trade in the far east in contradiction to Boorstine’s Daniel Bell-esque recitation of Western mythology. Whether or not Braudel can be read as a refutation of Marx, and I recall your rather thin argument was that Braudel’s viewpoints and methodology trumped my reading of his evidence, the issue at hand is the attempted definition of “capitalism” by the presence of long-distance trade. Boorstine’s restatement of the theme of Oriental Depotism argues that the Chinese (who invented paper money and had quite complex instruments of credit while Europeans were figuring out how to scrape dirt from root vegetables) were not traders has more to do with European Orientalism than historical truth. Your theory that you can refute any reference I make to Braudel by some wacky argument about Braudel’s debt to Marxism is not any better. The problem you have failed to address is that your supposed “scientific” analysis of economic history depends on a term “capitalism” that appears to be undefined. Can you provide a clear definition of what is different and distinctive about “capitalism” beyond circular “next stage” hand waving or Engels obviously false “peculiarity” or a historically false claim on long-distance trade?
I’m not really sure what you think is my theory of power and I’m not sure I have such a theory. When you complain that I argue that “that power is neither the expression or cause of historically specific social problems I confess that I cannot make head or tails of it – the sentence fragment appears to be in some ritual form that I don’t recognize. I do believe that there are certain ahistorical human attributes (and certain unalienable rights) although they play out differently in different eras and situations. For example, there are recurring themes of domination and freedom that are present in the Han chronicles, Job, Thucydides and Malcom X although from very different perspectives. We have to recognize that Pericles took slavery and brutal oppression of women for granted, but that doesn’t mean his positive delineation of freedom is not still relevant to our lives. And I don’t see that the aims of imperialism have changed much since they were expressed in the Melian dialogues. By the way, that’s not an argument that an unchangeable human nature condemns us to some ugly hierarchy of violence.
Marx was a perceptive historian and social critic and obviously his critique of the pretensions to universality of the “classical” economists was devastating. But his predictions of the operation of economic history were dead wrong, his pretensions to have discovered scientific laws were unsupported Hegelian mythology, and his political programme was as pernicious as Bakunin claimed at the time. All of that is old news only interesting because the persistence of Marxist formalism seems to me to paralyze oppositional analysis and to lend itself to a “fetishization” if you will of texts and vocabulary that has become an obstruction to understanding. Your quote from Jameson is an illustration of shuffling word puzzles and lightweight academic “paradoxicalism”. One might write: Ironically, the very feyness of the paradoxes that litter academic social science pitilessly illuminates the superficiality that is at once the core subject and product hidden under the weighty engines of jargon, and when we translate such works into the language of bland journalistic punditry, we can see that the contents of Tom Friedman emerges from the thundering posturing of tenured revolutionaries, parodoxically and parodically, as if the class basis of the producers of this nonsense and the structural identities between their forms of reproduction and privilege submerge superstructural ideological distinctions. (Can I get a witness and a glass of red wine please?).
Finally, I draw your attention to the contradiction between your sympathy for Bookchin and your use of Marxist terminology. Bookchin’s attempt to save the 60s rebels from Marx is something you might want to read as well as Lenin’s argument that all markets contain the seeds of capitalism. That’s a contradiction that is not ironical or paradoxical, but in dead earnest.

Posted by: citizen k | Jul 4 2005 17:49 utc | 116

Wow!
As one with a fairly pedestrian mind, I shuffle along here on earth finding significance and inspriration close to the ground in things the Great Minds would not think noteworthy. However, even I am forced to look up at times when I hear the Great Minds hurling intellectual thunderbolts at each other with impressive strings of adjectives and adverbs. Sometimes, as in the recent discussions, there is enough light for me to gain a little understanding; sometimes, the thunder dominates when the discussions turn disparaging and defensive, but even then they are usually at least entertaining in their verbal creativity. I understand why rapt prefers to have a smoke and walk the dog, but I stay and listen to the philosophical karaoke.
I’m a lightly educated anti-ideological (not the same as anti-intellectual) type, so for me things are much simpler. Wealth and power have always gone together and have accumulated into fewer and fewer hands regardless of the time and place or source of wealth. Those with a common source of wealth have always cut their connection to the rest of humanity and banded together to protect their wealth and the power it produced. Generally, but not always, those with different sources of wealth band together in alliances that protect each other’s wealth and power. Sometimes, those alliances are not possible to maintain and great conflagrations result, as in the US Civil War when the Southern aristocracy tried to preserve it’s wealth and power through secession. For me, simple human self interest comes first and ideological rationalizations supporting it come later as do the ideological refutations to those rationalizations.
I respect and enjoy Slothrop’s perspectives, but abstractions, such as “capital”, remove me too far from the narrow human motivations behind power relations to form a basis for my admittedly limited perceptions. Behind capital are those we call capitalists, nothing more than people who band together to retain their privileged positions relative to others; rather than acknowledge their selfishness, they produce and hide behind thinly constructed ideologies to do it. However, Slothrop’s Marxian references often do help me when viewing capital movement and motivations from within its own system. (If I understand you correctly, C-K, I think you are saying this.) In other times and places when wealth – and therefore power – rested on different criteria, one might have devised a different intellectual framework to explain societal power relations.
Bottom line: I am leary of any intellectually created way of looking at the world. The mind is a useful servant, but a terrible master. The Way of the Heart is the only way to produce the kind of world Outraged – and everyone else here – would like to see.
Sorry to interrupt all the arias with my off-key version of Honky Tonk Blues, but sometimes a man’s just gotta sing. I’ll yield the mike now and stumble back to my table in the back.

Posted by: lonesomeG | Jul 4 2005 19:20 utc | 118

If you keep striking out, you gotta consider whether the batting coach knows what he or she is doing.
Yes, agreed. However, this is a failure of practice, not theory. I’m rather surprised, ck, you made this mistake.
About this “heart/head” nonsense…Haven’t you had your fill of the world pushed around the past 6 years by a “gut instinct” megalomaniac? I know I have.

Posted by: slothrop | Jul 4 2005 23:11 utc | 120

it seems both iron mike tyson & beautiful frank bruno have an exceptionally elaborative power in their attcks on what they call the ‘left’ – but they never offer a ‘model’ – merely some form of peculiar positivism & belief(s) in laws that have long gone
through listening now for over two months i hear nothing that i wouldn’t have heard from some smart ass libertarian lawyer with his eye on the money shot
i think slothrops heart is in the right place but his obediance to certain language norms which have been cultivated by a long doemant academy do not honour his arguments or his reading though i feel he holds on to the books sometimes for dear life & that shows in an inability to be flexible with the ideas he is using
groucho, it is easy to snap at their heels but it is a harder harder thing to actually engage & you do not seem to do that – either out of cynicism, boredom & what can pass here as an easy anti intellectual form of rhetoric
annie – i think the monster that capital has become is real & i welcome any tool, any kind of tool that can help me to examine or to dismantle it
i do not demean the heart as slothrop seems to do to sanctify the historical mechanism but that absence of heart tends to demean the model instead of illuminating it
& yes i too find in outraged’s work as i do in stan goffs – a certain ind of knowledge tempered with the understanding of power & what it means, practically
& for all the rhetorical bombast of the tyson/bruno duo – i find too much piety for my liking

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 4 2005 23:28 utc | 122

ô i’m sure i am a party of the vale of tears group

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 5 2005 0:03 utc | 124

Sloth: Theory and practice are not so cleanly separated. If the team loses, the coach is fired no matter how good the plays look on the whiteboard. And heart trumps head because there is no rational basis to choose life over death or good over evil. All knowledge starts with a leap of faith. Some leap to the side of evil and some do not. I wouldn’t be happier with GW if he used the coldest deduction to obtain his revolting aims. In fact, the irrationality and denial of empiricism in Bushism is our only hope. But the moral basis of freedom and human rights is an arbitrary choice.
RG: That libertarian lawyer crack is mean spirited indeed and when you toss in the “piety” I have to suspect that you are just firing off insults at random. Maybe you should find a more humane sport than boxing. I’ve alwys felt that my support for the late 1980s Detroit Pistons helped me become a better person. Cheering for Adrian Dantley to push past those thugs from Boston is not as dangerous to the spirit as watching poor crazy Mike Tyson be gradually sold off part by part.

Posted by: citizen k | Jul 5 2005 0:29 utc | 126

r’giap. the capital will bring itself down. capital has to represent something, it cannot be in and of itself to survive. all those in the ivory towers won’t have anyone to play with. we are a long way from resolution but 30-50 years is a grain of sand in time. i truly believe be are sitting on a precipice of time. literally. just a couple years of the upcoming justices. imagine if it is gonzales and he then takes over renquists post at the head of the supremes? then one more right wing. this is not just another day in the life of america. this is a tipping point. when will the people see they have lost their country? many of us already have, there is strong grassroots effort but w/out the money be are bulldozed over. and many in the youth have grown up w/ so much of this infighting they are ammuned to it and clueless. just this past weekend i was roadtripping w/ my old roomie who’s 24. just hasn’t a clue. heard a little about the fillibuster(what’s that/she asks) but no association to the upcoming supreme court, and never heard of dominionist but just had her 3rd abortion on friday.just the shift in the last month is astounding(42% think if bush lied to us about iraq, dsm, he should be impeached). first i believe it is a lie we are in the minority, i think they tell us that to keep us down, but either way we aren’t some fringe group, not even at 48%. but what can we do??just because the msn isn’t on ourside nor the corporations doesn’t mean the people are all blind and deaf. will the world survive our generation. i hope so but i don’t know. surely the potential for this regime the likes of this world has never seen. what do i think will happen? truely i think the entire capital/monetary thing will be facing the biggest onslaught in the next decade, possibly a stretch maybe two, and we are going to see a huge shift(huge ) in priorities. 2nd, the swift rise of the obese and the health problems related coupled w/the fallout of a generation believing we need drugs for everything(getting bored at work is now add or is it cumpulsive disorder or WTF). this obsene money in the hands of drug companies, when will it ever end. when millions of people need their drugs and only 1% can afford them. in other words there will be this reckoning, very poor, no transportation, shitty food, no health care, all SS has been already handed over to the richies…….the destitute you speaak of can’t just go on indefinitely. i had a dream the other night we all worked for china! we will be needing new kinds of leaders. i see myself in a tribe. it is the natural state of man. our society has drifted towards many people living alone in their cubicles. when energy resources are scarce and we are living more locally we will need eachother more. i don’t think cheney plans for the ME are going to be successful. something like a global shift of that nature would take generations to implement and by then the oil will run dry. i’m aiming to keep my wit about me.when my father died my brother spoke about what he had seen in his lifetime. my grandparents came across the country in covered wagons. we won’t recognize the world in 50 years. but i hope/think we will prevail. so it will dismantel itself i predict.cannabalize itself is more aptly put. i just pray i live long enough to witness the demise of the empire. 4th of july my ass.

Posted by: annie | Jul 5 2005 0:37 utc | 128

Theory and practice are not so cleanly separated.
And so, back to the gramsci: “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will…”

Posted by: slothrop | Jul 5 2005 0:51 utc | 130

citizen k
yr right & i apologise. i’m a little irritable with myself about believing the rove/plame thing meant anything
but i am reminded of nietzche with what annie says – i don’t remember exactly the quote in english but it is something like “we are looking into the abyss & the abyss is looking back” & another little lesson from from the foul mouthed german – that would be pertinenet to myself & slothrop re marx – it is better not to remain a student because in remaining so we do not honour the teacher
& citizen k – the insults are never personal. ever; posting is sometimes to me like shorhand & sometimes the fatest way to a point might be a little too brutal
but i do maintain that you & razor have not been anywhere near as clear about models
annie thanks for the energy

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 5 2005 1:33 utc | 132

there is something in the july 4 post of billmon – that disturbs me – i know from what he has said that he has been involved ctivley against american policy in central & latin america – & it’s just that this hotdoh house is also shadowed by a consistent foreign policy that is consistently about the spilling of innocnt blood, the exporting of ideas & faiths that have nothing to do with the people they are being battered with
& it goes back to a very banal point – privelege is implicitly built on the barbarity practiced on others & that when a crisis arrives that barbarity is practiced against your own citizens
i can acept that the countries where my dreams have been turned into shit by circulstance or coercion – but to ever imagine that there was a ‘better’ america – this last century beggars belief in face of a history that tells us quite the opposite

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 5 2005 1:55 utc | 134

Actually RG, it was a reasonable country–given the real shit that was out there pretending to be nation-states–until VietNam and its aftermath.

Posted by: Groucho | Jul 5 2005 2:11 utc | 136

Rgiap: No problems. On the matter of models, I am not as sure as Groucho, but I confess to a loss of faith in the models I know of and a middle aged embrace of simplicity in goals and modesty in claimed understanding. You know: torturing people BAD, freedom of speech GOOD. Starving children BAD, moderate prosperity GOOD. I don’t have a model of why we are in Iraq or how society should be structured, but I don’t know if I need one. The 20th century would have been better with fewer grand theories and more common decency.
As for America, I think you are wrong on three points.
First, all hope in this world has been built on oppression. To write a statement about freedom it has been almost essential to be one of those at the top of the shit-heap – MLK or Gramsci in prison was still profiting from some kind of horrific privilege. So sure the rhetoric of America has grown from the manure of slaughter, but I don’t see how it could be otherwise.
Second, America, after all this is still a (feeble) light of freedom to the world. Not because of our government or military, but because Americans have been able to escape the crushing weight of tradition/custom/oppression more than anyone else and our heros from Thoreau to MLK to Ed Abbey to Malcom X and our artists have represented a hope of emancipation and defiance to humankind. Sure all of it was built on empire and slavery and special forces, but we don’t really have another option considering how human society has developed.
Finally, here’s my complaint in practice. The levers of power in the US are firmly in the hands of the very worst and they move day by day to consolidate their position. But the US does not firmly control the world. France, for example, is the fourth largest economy and it is astoundingly rich. But when I visit, I see an exhaustion of spirit that manifests itself among the political left as a “blame America” or Europe or anyone but France. There are demonstrations against GATT and Israel and the US war in Iraq and against the EU and McDonalds and so on, but these are all purely symbolic and assured to be inefectual. Everyone knows that these manifestations will do nothing just as thirty years ago carrying Mao posters did nothing – that must be part of the attraction. On the other hand, anyone who has seen the band of misery around grossly rich Paris or worse in the industrial belt or who knows about the effects of the French agricultural subsidy on poor third world farmers can see that there is a possibility for action in France that would help to change the world. Where is the will to challenge France to change the world instead of leaving Europe to Giscard and Iraq to the “serial-loser”? All I see is the same devotion to a hollow and purely symbolic politics that I’ve seen among the US left. Maybe there is no hope, or maybe we have to wait for the Chinese and Indians to take up the challenge, but what I hear from you seems to be only self-defeating insistence that the US is the source of all evil. That’s just not true: the peasant in Kenya who starves to protect wheat farmers on the Massif or the kids in those bleak banlieue who die from gangsters are not victims of the US.

Posted by: citizen k | Jul 5 2005 3:09 utc | 138

b real,
I’ll have what your drinking

Posted by: anna missed | Jul 5 2005 7:00 utc | 140

Its easy to parse the posts to MoA and criticise a large percentage of them for offering no solution. Yet the diversity of opinions of a range of people from all over this planet who largely share values does point us to a solution of sorts.
I have no intention of entering into a theoretical dialogue with those who have acquired advanced dialectic, my continual imposition of subjective meaning on terms which have quite another accepted meaning by those well schooled in political jargon always leads to misunderstanding and wiping mud off my nose. (I forget to clean shoes before placing boot in mouth).
We have differing strong opinions on issues with which we share similar values and we need to acknowledge that isn’t merely true of those that lurk in this bar but is true of humanity that has been exposed to a broad education and relative freedom of thought.
I have always found it slightly contradictory that the traditional left who are seen as seeking to impose a quite specific worldview on humanity can spend so much time arguing amongst each other.
Yes these discussions are a crucible in which the best ideas can be melted, moulded then forged. I’m sure I’m not the only one that comes in here and is more inspired to critique a well thought out point of view than a mediocre one.
When the age of man was in its infancy most ‘workers’ had not accessed a divers education and had come through a community that did not celebrate individuality. The tools that liberators used were geared towards mass movements and solidarity.
In effect the liberation was hoist on its own petard. As more people gained freedom they were less willing to subsume themselves to the sort of unity of action and purpose that mass movements require. On the other hand it is easy to to see individuality as a form of selfishness. For the powerful using that new found individuality to undermine the freedom expressed in it was a simple task.
Up until quite recently I argued that as in the 20th century people defined themselves in terms of their employment and therefore used mass action in their employment to effect change, in the 21st century people defined themselves in terms of their consumption therefore mass action around what they consumed would be a powerful tool for change.
I no longer believe that to be the case. The concept of mass action is antithetical to individuality. The last US presidency is a classic example of that. During that campaign Billmon’s pages reflected a group of voters who abhorred BushCo and everything it stood for but who had real difficulty with casting their lot in with John Kerry. Given that many of the repug supporters, despite their claim to be advocates of ‘freedom and individuality’ were in fact the remnants of the ‘sheeple’ who once populated every developed nation, a BushCo victory was inevitable.
The question then becomes; “If it is possible to get a large group of individuals to behave in a similar way to satisfy personal needs, is it possible for a group of individuals to act in a way to achieve common needs?”
I believe it is but the first hurdle must be to accept that we don’t have to agree with each other before we acknowledge our common humanity. We also have to accept we are individuals so that the only person we can ever hope to steer, control or otherwise hold to a certain point of view is ourselves. This is where a medium like the internet becomes a wonderful tool to achieve common ideals. Sites such as MoA allow those who believe they care about others to express that view and accesss others of similar ilk without ever subsuming their beliefs to anyone else’s.
This is certainly not true of any of the traditional mass media. If one wanted to understand a situation or express an opinion on that situation there was only a small and very finite range of opinions and someone accessing that medium would be expected to share them.
This is why BushCo is struggling now. They imagined that if they could ‘control’ the media access to the Iraq invasion the ‘mistakes’ of Vietnam wouldn’t repeat. Like all who prosecute war by referencing the last one lost, they failed to account for changes in circumstance. Yes they could control most of the hard news and pictures coming out of Iraq but they have absolutely no input into the broadcast of individuals’ subjective opinion of events. Despite claims to the contrary, most people seem to place more weight on what they feel about an issue than what they rationalise about it. This lack of control of opinion has been the Achilles heel of Iraq’s invasion.
Now the repugs belatedly acknowledge this we can expect distraction after distraction. The SCOTUS nomination is but one of many events which are known to engage the political opinion leaders of the US. Before anyone allows that issue to divert them from the suffering in Iraq I ask them to consider if it is likely that any realistic nominee chosen by either party could possibly be suitable. The process guarantees their mediocrity, any ‘independence’ Sandy Day may have shown recently appears to be an expression of “I did my job for Ronnie and Newt. Now you want more? Surely this will make you allow my retirement.”
If this diatribe has even less continuity than usual I apologise. I have decided to continue expression of my individuality on a laptop whilst I await the weekly poisoning laughingly termed my treatment. I’m still not sure if this is a better way of filling in time than attempting escape by way of remaindered mass produced best sellers.
One last thing. Between the original composition of this missive and picking it up again I caught up on newer posts one from Razor which states in part:
…”As I live and breathe, anyone today who believes wealth is created by stealing it from colonies is obviously more literary critic than economist, in an age in which America’s great current sin against Cuba is a refusal to fully exploit it. Duh and Doh….”
As first glance this statement has all the wit and accuracy of a Wilde epigram but it doesn’t withstand scrutiny. Nobody is complaining that the US isn’t exploiting Cuba the way it did Venezuala, Nicuragua, Ecuador or any of the other allegedly sovereign nations in Central America the US robbed blind while stiff arming away competition that any other trading partner might offer. The US wouldn’t trade with Cuba which while foolish and petty I suppose is it’s prerogative. It also heavied any other country that did trade with Cuba whether exploitatively or honestly. The issue was never about exploitation it has always been about the hegemony within the Munroe doctrine which continues to this day.
The US Ambassador to New zealand has once again thrown his weight around down here and scored an own goal This story in this morning’s conservative paper has had the leader of the opposition who had just crept ahead in the opinion polls for the election, scrambling for life on TV tonight. Everytime New Zealanders begin to wonder if the disadvantages of US ships visting (eg increased sex attacks on women) are outweighed by the lift in the economy that a free trade agreement might provide, some American waves his arms around and tells them what they should do. The result is predictable because you see Citizen K many people around the world do not see the USA as a “light of freedom” however feeble.
There are a great many other nations in the ‘new world’ whose citizens have travelled a lot more than US citizens and who look at the lack of freedom, poverty, corruption and censorship in the US with abhorrence.
And no that is not some sort of ethnocentric rant designed to take a ping at a cause of resentment. The people of the US are no different to people anywhere else but for nearly 200 hundred years they have been subjected to a culture of each man for himself, devil take the hindmost leavened heavily with religious bigotry.
Well if anyone has waded through this primal howl I’m pleased to tell you it’s over. I’ve been called for my chemo.

Posted by: Anonymous | Jul 5 2005 8:29 utc | 142

Denander:
You write to attribute Razor with the theory that “ Marx’s analysis is nothing more than theocratic babble (whereas of course Unca Miltie’s fantasies are presumably purest sweet empirical reason) and I point out that one of the reasons that you and Slothrop and RG have a hard time understanding is that you insist of such ridiculous dualities. It’s very simple: one can be even completely dismissive of Marx without being a devotee of Milton Friedman. One can also detest the US invasion of Iraq without endorsing the Baath Party or Islamic militias and vice-verso. See how easy it is? As I recall, Razor has explicitly tasked the left with failing to effectively challenge the utter evil of the Chicago school.
As to your arguments about “social darwinism”, I think that they unfortunately show the disease of “losing well” is not limited to the Democratic Party losership in DC, but extends out far to the left. The race is not always to the swift or the battle to the strong, but the comfortable post-hoc post-defeat theory adjustment of leftist upper middle class professionals has become as much a feature of the “left” as comfortable post-loss discussions at the Kennedy School of Government and DLC headquarters are for the liberals. I’m not interested in self-justifications. Those of us with some education, resources, and supposed good will have let our fellow citizens down by failing to produce a serious opposition with a message that sells. You can’t blame this on the far right. I believe that Razor and I agree that one of our impediments is that leftist academia/professional classes have become hotbeds of therapeutic leftism and class snobbery.
(BTW: the Jewish Bundists and Zionists and Communists of pre-holocaust Europe would have not used the words you used, but were unsparing in their criticism of the self-delusion of both the pretending-to-be-assimilated German Jews and the hoping-for-the-messiah superstitionists in the east. It is only thanks to their refusal to accept failure as a proof of purity that a remnant of Europes Jews survived.)
Debs is Dead: In my experience, most people around the world distinguish between the US government and its people although I confess I was not thinking of New Zealand when I wrote what I wrote above. I was recently in China and people were actually telling me not to worry, every country gets ruled by fuckwits at some time or another.
May your chemo be endurable and have a good outcome.

Posted by: citizen k | Jul 5 2005 11:54 utc | 144

@Debs is dead
Your incisive rants are always good to read, and for what it’s worth, you are held in high esteem in MoA’s little corner of the world.
I hope New Zealand can maintain the ‘distrust with the US’ so that I can (again) escape to there if need be.
@citizen k
America, after all this is still a (feeble) light of freedom to the world.
Mostly, Americas own myth. If you think about it, the world could get along just fine without America. I can’t think of anything that ‘America’ has to offer to ‘the world’.
… might be a while before America can shrug off the world’s ‘most hated nation’ status.

Posted by: DM | Jul 5 2005 13:22 utc | 146

@citizen k I travel a bit but not enough to be an authority. But I do think that there is a lot of resentment even at the strata below the middle class liberal professional. Interesting observation, though, re Americans Vs. French in Vietnam. One of mine that I will add, is less resentment in the Philippines toward the Japanese than the Americans. However, is it possible that your experience with the Vietnamese was tainted to some extent in that it would be more difficult for them to openly express resentment to an American? (the French being an easy target). I don’t know — this is just a question. It may be that the French were such shitty arrogant colonial pigs that their occupation did stick in the collective craw even more than the American onslaught.

Posted by: DM | Jul 5 2005 14:26 utc | 148

I’m pissed most about your selective reading of Braudel. Academic … snobbery.
I’ll get over it.

Posted by: slothrop | Jul 5 2005 14:49 utc | 150

ck,
What is lacking in your polemic against “leftism,” and especially an analysis of history, is theory.
That’s what I mean by “historicism.”

Posted by: slothrop | Jul 5 2005 15:21 utc | 152

barnyard of ideas:
Be very careful there, slothrop.
You might step in something.

Posted by: Groucho | Jul 5 2005 15:39 utc | 154

I give you Cosma Shalizi one of the world’s more interesting bloggers imho:

For the past several months, I have been wondering where Phil Agre has been, and why we haven’t been hearing anything from him. The answer, it now appears, is that he has been preparing an essay on “What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?”, and it’s glorious and essential. This is how it begins:

Liberals in the United States have been losing political debates to conservatives for a quarter century. In order to start winning again, liberals must answer two simple questions: what is conservatism, and what is wrong with it? As it happens, the answers to these questions are also simple:
Q: What is conservatism?
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.
Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.

This I think cuts to the chase. Critiques of capitalism centre on its failure to offset the tendency of wealthy elites to leverage their wealth to corner more wealth, immiserating and dominating others — thus resembling more and more the feudalism it claimed to render obsolete. Critiques of Communism centre on its high ideological claim to confound and defeat this tendency, but its practise relying too often on the concentration of power in the hands of elites who then immiserated and dominated others. One might say that at least Communism admits that concentration of wealth is a problem and some kind of redistribution is the answer, instead of retreating into fantasies of “trickle down” prosperity or Cornucopian visions of infinite resources on a finite planet (so hey, no need to share). But in practise, fallible human beings have repeatedly managed to turn the grand theory into a practise barely distinguishable from good ol’ … feudalism.
I recommend Cosma’s various essays as perhaps a palliative to the ongoing barfight over Marx — he moved “beyond Marx” a long time ago and fears not to criticise Communist practise, but remains a trenchant Leftist analyst and critic whose ideas often seem fairly fresh to me.

Posted by: DeAnander | Jul 5 2005 18:09 utc | 156

what i find odd at times is that i have been nvolved with cultural practice actively for 35 of my 50 yrears in many many countries. i have used transformations a marxist methodology for all that time. far from being useless our outdated as citizen k & razor would have me believe – the contrary is the truth. it is its marxist kernel that has always kept it alive & it is that critique which has always been the context & it would seem in each country i have worked & i have worked in many – it functionns & i am humble enough to say that it functions well
marxism is not something strange to me – not at all – it is marxism which has been the impetus for the reading i have done & will always do – i have never been frightened of contrary ideas & my work is not evangilical in nature. it needs to work & it needs to work for the largest number of people. there have been failures of course but they are more failure of nerve or imagination on my part & a benjamanian melancholia that has been with e all my days – the melancholia by the way is not a counterproof – after all marx sd nothing about smiling – but a kind of inner underpinning that protects me from the myths of freedom liberty that i see contradicted practically every day
i think if i had been a dentist that dialectic would have helped me just as well – but i am not – & the only problem there has been on the methodological level is that i have not been able to write as much as i would like
all to say – ideas, conscious practice – ideas – conscious practice as as normal to me as breath

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 5 2005 18:54 utc | 158

Deanander
Moving beyond Marx was accomplished when the old patrician of the proletarian mind died in 1876. The left never bothered to send condolences, but instead have paraded his corpse of 19th century solutions to 19th century problems through our marketplace of ideas. No matter how noisome the application of these moribund conventions become, how obviously impractical the elitist condescensions of “equity” and “egality”, the left never complains of the smell. For it is coruscatingly clear the comparison cannot be made of, say, the cause and solutions of poverty in Marx’s day to the problems some of us suffer now. The manipulation of economies by Prussian Burghers and Dutch mercantalists can in no sense be compared to the machinations of international finance in the affairs of Paraguayan or Indonesian development. The world is much too complicated to even identify, let alone sanction, the activities of “capitalists” in attempts to improve the lives of “workers.” As for workers, the “masses” dwelling in the basement of Fred’s dialectical materialism, who are these who suffer so at the hands of diabolical capitalists? The romance image of the scythe-wielding worker toiling in the hot sun, reposing to breastfeed an infant at lunch only to return to the fields until sunset, is nothing more than romance even in the brain of the living Marx. The “laborer” of today is the cosmopolitan wetback, picking our potatoes, sure, but also enjoying the benefits of subsidized medicine, schools, and Toyota pickups.
Deanander, show me one person dispossesed by “capitalism” and I will show you ten “laborers” with much more to sell than their own labor. Thered can be no better confirmation of this fact: I see it everyday in my suburban neighborhood. We finally move beyond Marx, because we finally notice the complications of modern life reveal no class conflict at all, and therby, no grand theory to fix it.

Posted by: Citizen K | Jul 5 2005 20:00 utc | 160

an absence of class conflict
the next time you are in europe citizen k – yu are welcome to follow me in my work here – to note the opposite – the acceleration & excacerbation of those conflicts

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 5 2005 20:25 utc | 162

that was “me”
can’t I be avatar of ck? c’mon. it’s pretty fun simulation of another grandiloquence not my own.
but the logic is impeccable, no?

Posted by: slothrop | Jul 5 2005 20:36 utc | 164

slothrop
yr a devil & a devil of an imitation. don’t think its the first time i’ve been tricked by ya – hell, i’m going to listen to some jan gabarak to calm my nerves
i think you should be put on a retainer

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 5 2005 20:54 utc | 166

jan gabarak
make sure it’s afric pepperbird–the newer stuff sucks

Posted by: slothrop | Jul 5 2005 21:02 utc | 168

ô dea
though all your thoughts are good nones as usual – that rascal slothrop needs a talking to – i’m somehow going to get inside america & – find our comrade slothrop – to teach him some of the harder edges of my marxism
& dea is correct in relation to you my rascal slothrop – you are rarely – openly bad tempered – but i must admit – tho i understand its absolute necessity – your language sometimes a little liturgical
but then i think you’d think that i think that you think – i’m a bit of a bully boy like bukharin

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jul 5 2005 21:43 utc | 170

the only music worthy as soundtrack to the mounting horror is Brötzmann’s Die Like A Dog.
ugly & beautiful at once

Posted by: slothrop | Jul 5 2005 21:57 utc | 172

DeA:
I might have seen a couple of the cosmo wetbacks driving Mercedes too, but it was probably an aberation.
I live in a rural county of 45000, of which 3000+ are immigrant labor, mostly Mexican.
50% drive similar or better vehicles than I do, and 50% foot it except when going to work.
And a small percentage deal drugs.
These folks live in “shanty housing” often by choice. It’s cheaper and when you live 3-4 to an apartment, 6 or 8 to a house, you can send more money home.
It is interesting that Indian programmers in Washington state have a remarkably similar attitude toward housing.
I would write more, but I fear that I would somehow destroy the myth of the expoited Mexican, so dear to certain segments of the political spectrum.

Posted by: Groucho | Jul 5 2005 22:08 utc | 174

Much to chew on on that piece DeA brought home.
I’m still working on it.
The difference between entreprenurialism and bureaucratic capitalism is a subject on which I don’t think too much could be written.

Posted by: Groucho | Jul 5 2005 22:30 utc | 176

Sloth: Keep your day job.
Denander: That was too easy, wasn’t it?

Posted by: citizen k | Jul 5 2005 22:53 utc | 178

Here’s one for your list, Citizen:
In the 1960s in some states in the U.S., married women were not allowed to own property. Any property they owned at the time of marriage, whether from their own labor or from a family inheritance, became the property of the husband…thus, the wife was not an adult citizen, tho her husband was.
Another benefit of the 1960s: birth control pills.
Another benefit of the 1960s: desegregation.
Another benefit of the 1960s: The Church Committee in the 1970s, which helped Americans learn a little bit about the real way their govt operates.
Another benefit: The Twilight Zone and all the years of re-runs. 🙂

Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 6 2005 1:43 utc | 180

This Agre fellow does have a talent for hitting the nail on the head. The PR peversion of the media may become a victim of it’s success. So much of the way that information is presented is aimed at fashion and trends that eventually the context as well as the content must become unfashionable. That’s the best chance isn’t it? I mean surely I’m not the only human who finds the cheap sensationalism of tabloid media very ‘last year’.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jul 6 2005 2:38 utc | 182

PR, or propaganda, has always relected a one-way communication, strictly top down, in the service of an elite aristocracy. from stuart ewen’s book PR! A Social History of Spin, wherein ewen is relating his conversations w/ edward bernays, probably the most influential originator of PR:

“There are strange things about the culture,” he intoned. “The average IQ of the American public is 100, did you know that?” Assuming I grasped what for him was obvious, Bernays then sketched a picture of the public relations expert as a member of the “intelligent few” who advises clients on how to “deal with the masses…just by applying psychology.”
As a member of that intellectual elite who guides the destiny of society, the PR “professional,” Bernay explained, aims his craft at a general public that is essentially, and unreflectively, reactive. Working behind the scenes, out of public view, the public relations expert is “an applied social scientist,” educated to employ an understanding of “sociology, psychology, social psychology, and economics” to influence and direct public attitudes. Throughout our conversation, Bernays conveyed his hallucination of democracy: A highly educated class of opinion-molding tacticians is continously at work, analyzing the social terrain and adjusting the mental scenery from which the public mind, with its limited intellect, derives its opinions.

and according to alex carey, from his book taking the risk out of democracy: corporate propaganda versus freedom and liberty, the united states has been more susceptible to social control via propaganda because of several key,conditions: “the will to use it; the skills to produce propaganda; the means of dissemination; and the use of ‘significant symobols’, symbols with real power over emotional reactions – ideally, symbols of the Sacred and the Satanic.” of this latter condition, the symbols, carey points out that this is where the real power of propaganda plays such a particular role in the u.s.

The propagandist in the United States starts with advantages deriving from independent features of American society which predispose its members to adopt – or accept – a dualistic, Manichean world-view. This is a world-view dominated by the powerful symbols of the Satanic and the Sacred (darkness and light). A society or culture which is disposed to view the world in Manichean terms will be more vulnerable to control by propaganda. Conversely, a society where propaganda is extensively employed as a means of social control will tend to retain a Manichean world-view, a world-view dominated by symbols and visions of the Sacred and the Satanic.
In addition, US society has a pragmatic orientation. This is a preference for action over reflection. If the truth of a belief is to be sought in the consequences of acting on the belief, rather than through a preliminary examinations of the grounds for holding it, there will be a tendency to act first and question later (if at all – for once a belief is acted upon the actor becomes involved in responsibility for the consequences so that they justify his belief and hence his action. If it is that American culture, compared with most others, values action above reflection, one may expect that condition to favour a Manichean world-view. For acknowledgement of ambiguity, that is, a non-Manichean world where agencies or events may comprise or express any complex amalgram of Good and Evil – demands continual reflection, continual questioning of premises. Reflection inhibits action, while a Manichean world-view facilitates action. On that account action and a Manichean world-view are likely to be more congenial to and to resonate with the cultural preference found in the United States.
Moreover, the kind of evangelical religious belief to which American culture has always been held hostage provides habits of thought already formed to accommodate the Manichean world-view.
…
The Manichean dichotomy that has been the most powerful – as a means of social control – in respect of both domestic issues and foriegn policy issues is not God/Heaven versus Devil/Hell but the secular equivalent of these. Thus on the one hand an extravagant idealization fo the Spirit of America, the Purpose of America, the Meaning of America, the American Way of Life – the transcendent values by which the United States is represented to the world as the Manifest Destiny of the world in Piety and Virtue. On the other hand the extravagant negative idealization of Evil secularized in communism/socialism as sui generis, in all places and at all times, malevolent, evil, oppressive, deceitful and destructive of all civilized and humane values.
…
The manipulation of patriotic and nationalist sentiments has, above all else, given American anti-communism its remarkable psychological force as a means of social control. Peacetime ‘patriotic’ hysteria such as characterized the McCarthy period is a phenomenon largely peculiar to the United States among Western countries which have any extended experience with democratic forms of government.

as a timely tie-in, carey later in the book writes on the “fourth of july campaign”. chomsky mentions it first in the introduction:

What started as a method of controlling the political opinion of immigrant workers quickly turned into a massive program for controlling the thinking of an entire population. One of the most startling examples of the escalation of the whole population in the processes of propaganda was how the Americanization program (a word which conjures up the ‘thought police’) came to be transformed into a national celebration day for the fourth of July. To many of us it comes as a shock to discover than American Independence Day had its beginnings in a business-led program to control public opinion, rather than as a direct expression of a nation celebrating its historical birth.

and carey goes on w/ the details

Up to 1914 the Americanization movement had not succeeded in capturing the mind of the American public and had made limited progress in obtaining the support of public funds. … However, this situation changed in 1915, mainly as a consequence of the war in Europe. The war stimulated intense nationaliztic feelings and a growing suspicion of all things alien as certainly ‘un-American’ and possibly subversive. Many Americans began to suspect that the prior allegiance of immigrants and national minorities might be to their old rather than their new country.
Thus in 1915 an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust of the immigrant provided a much more receptive audience for the Americanizers than they had ever found before. … In the summer of 1915 plans carefully laid by the Federal Bureau of Naturalisation six months earlier blossomed into the full crusade.
At the suggestion of the bureau arrangements were made for President Wilson to speak at a highly dramatized ‘patriotic’ reception for 5000 newly naturalized citizens at Philidelphia on 10 May 1915. … Wilson’s address affirmed his dislike and suspicion of what he called ‘hyphenated Americans’ and stressed the idea ‘that those who thought of themselves as belonging to a particular national group in America had not yet become Americans’. As a result of the President’s widely publicized address a ‘wave of patriotic sentiment was aroused’ and Americanization committees were ‘formed in cities throughout the county to promote and celebrate naturalisation of immigrants’.
Meanwhile the CIA (Committee for Immigrants in America) saw this newly aroused public interest as means to strengthen and legitimize the Americanization program. … The CIA…produced a brilliant propaganda strategy to involve every American in an annual ritual of national identification. This ritual would embed the cultural intolerance of the Americanization program within an identification that was formally and officially sanctified. The CIA thereby launched its campaign for the fourth of July 1915 to made a national Americanization Day, a day for ‘a great nationalistic expression of unity and faith in America’. To ensure the success of this proposal it established a National Americanization Day Committee (NADC) comprised mainly of leading corporate executives and their wives.
This new committee issued a pamphlet written by [Francis] Kellor which argued the need for a domestic policy on the immigrant and ‘stressed in particular the great role which American industrial organisations could assume in working out this policy’. The pamphlet welded together the various interests of the campaign into a single message. It emphasized that however well government, business and philanthropy might conceive and launch a national policy for the Americanization of the immigrant, the ultimate success of that policy would depend on how effectively the ‘average American citizen’ could be induced to bring the influence of his conservative views to bear on the immigrant. For ‘such a citizen is the natural foe of the IWW and of the destructive forces that seek to direct unwisely the expressions of the immigrant in his new country and upon him rest the hope and defence of the country’s ideals and institutions’. Here we have a blatant industrial and partisan view fused with an intolerance of the immigrant and the values of national security, in a submission which would cement these interests and intolerances within the paraphernalia of the annual ritual of what became Independence Day. Such was the breadth and scope of this propaganda campaign.
For the fourth of July program the NADC managed to obtain the support of the Federal Commissioner of Immigration, who sent letters to the mayors of every city in the nation asking for support in observing the fourth of July as Americanization Day.
The Americanization Day campaign generated so much new activity and interest that teh NADC decided to continue in operation to guide and direct this development. Changing its name to the National Americanization Committee (NAC), it set to work on a permanent campaign for the Americanization of the immigrant. In October 1915 the NAC launched an ‘America First’ campaign…to establish standardized citizenship courses in all normal schools and night schools and by this and other means to promote the Americanization and naturalization of immigrants. It was apparent that the NAC was making a strong bid to have its Americanization program made a part of the general war preparedness campaign which had seized the country as a result of America’s increasing diplomatic difficulties with Germany. The NAC therefore expected that by linking the Americanization program to growing public anxieties about national security it would gain popular support and public funding, which the industrial leaders of the movement had long sought for a program against radicalism among immigrant workers.
…
During 1918 the leaders of the Americanizaiton movement completely achieved two objectives they had long pursued: the movement was officially accepted as one of the fundamental parts of the war program, and it obtained the full benefit and prestige of two new federal agencies, the Council of National Defence (CND) and the Committee on Public Information (CPI). Achieving this government support meant that business propaganda received an enormous increase in its power of persuassion.
These advances were obtained chiefly by the efforts of the Federal Bureau of Education, which, through its Division of Immigrant Education, took the lead in in publicizing and promoting the Americanization movement as a fundamental part of the war effort.
…
Until 1918 state councils of defence had been primarily occupied with registration and surveillance of the foreign-born, ‘to prevent sedition’. Their main occupation now became ‘War Americanization’, a version of Americanization which integrated preparation for citizenship with promotion of patriotic support for the war and surveillance of all the foreign-born.
…
During 1918 the CPI set up fourteen foreign-language bureaus and made them responsible for developing, among their people, Americanization sentiment and support for the war. These bureaus were so successful that 745 foreign-language newspapers co-operated out of a total of 865. In addition, it was the foreign-language bureaus which were largely responsible for the petition presented to President Wilson on 21 May 1918, asking that the fourth of July be especially recognized as a day for the foreign-born to demonstrate their loyalty to their adopted country. Wilson agreed. With the President’s stamp of approval the CPI set to work to plan an enthusiastic celebration for what was to be called Independence Day.
…
Within its historical context ‘Independence Day’ refers to both an immigrant’s separation from old cultural ties and their alienation from the new business-oriented American culture. Current Independence Day celebrations still contain the residual power and meaning of these historically dislocating circumstances, even though most people would think of the day as a celebration for national rather than ethnic independence.

Posted by: b real | Jul 6 2005 4:58 utc | 184

To answer my own question, apparently it is the conservatives who decide. And the conservatives, per Agre, serve an aristocracy.
I really am stumped on the question of deliberate intent vs. a self-perpetuating system. Perhaps it doesn’t matter if there is someone pulling the strings (evildoers, self-determination) or that the system itself has a positive feedback (fate, a successful meme, self-organization without free will). I have tended to the latter view. Perhaps it does not matter.
Is this the power of the Agre viewpoint, that we can lump up an opponent, call it “conservative” and use that to focus upon.

Posted by: jonku | Jul 6 2005 7:56 utc | 186

Fear of marketing seems to me to be indefensible on moral grounds. Marketing is a technology for persuasion. Compare “common sense” to e.g. the 2004 Democratic campaign and the 2005 state of the art on US leftie news ranging from “Democracy Now” to Pacifica Radio to Move ons lame-ass TV ads, to whatever (blogs don’t seem to me to be suited for mass marketing). Paine’s pamphlet is state of the art marketing for 1700s. It is written simply and freshly, borrowing style from the Bible to make it both accessible and authoritative. It conveys the impression that the author is just a regular guy, compelled by logic and morals to an inescapable conclusion. It makes a coherent and easily graspable moral point and provides a call to action. Aside from being superbly crafted, it gains power from being actually a good argument. Now turn to the Kerry message of 2004: a murky chaos, lacking center, filled with unrelated parts, and infused with a clear insincerity and paucity of ideas. I’m a grossly overeducated, left-liberal, middle class person who was absolutely committed to voting for anyone but Bush and Kerry’s message pissed me off with its smug “I’m better than you” flavor. My neighbors, were more easily offended. While Ken Mehlman was working hard at demographics and messaging and George Bush and his team were working hard at acting the part, Kerry’s amatuer hour was congratulating itself on how fucking smart they were and Kerry and his team were self-indulgently improvising (improvisation requires brilliance, the rest of us should read the script). Then turn to e.g. “Democracy Now” and you see the same sloppy operation and broadcast self-regard in distilled form. I catch that show on the radio sometimes and find myself asking whether the Iraq war is not a noble cause after all. Imagine Amy Goodman writing Common Sense and imagine Americans speaking with British accents. I used to think that the problem with the left was purely a marketing failure, but I now think the marketing failure arises from a deeper problem. There is both a lack of commit to winning ( what seems to me to be a prissy and insincere squeamishness – for the love of God, is using a focus group comparable to enabling the war in Iraq?) and a pervasive elitism that must be from class basis of the liberal professions. The republican message is actually honest: we are your natural leaders, like you, but at the top of the hierarchy, do what we say and salute. And republicans promote people like Ken Mehlman on skills while the Democratic party and those to its left, in my observation, are much more of a closed group – there is a remarkable story of the dimwit JFK school loser running Kerry’s campaign hiring a neophyte to run the internet part instead of someone who had done a brilliant job for Dean essentially because the neophyte was “one of us”. And that brings us back to an earlier more localized point. Since Marxist language even offends and repels on this self-selected and presumably favorable venue, a little reflection and cold analysis would be better than defensive “we use experts language” nonsense – but only if one were interested in both real communication and persuasion.

Posted by: citizen k | Jul 6 2005 11:32 utc | 188

Fauxreal: I don’t advocate glitz marketing. I advocate marketing that works. Since positions like “no imperialism and take care of children and the environment” make more sense than the converse, they could be powerfully marketed without smoke and mirrors. As for Amy Goodman, the objective problem is that broadcasting on prime FM space in the prime markets, Pacifica attracts only people who already define themselves into a helpless minority. It’s not just that I hate that show, it’s that not just that it fails to reach a larger audience, it’s that the producers of the show and the audience seem to somehow take comfort in their marginality and see it as a virtue instead of a shameful failure.
For Kerry: everyone with any sense knew the rethugs would cheat. The Democratic candidate needed a significant margin to compensate (and an aggressive “proactive” campaign against vote fraud which feckless Kerry couldn’t do either). But the campaign was a defeat not just because the rethugs stole the election, it was a defeat because it didn’t make a case, it didn’t energize an opposition or crack the ideological uniformity of the media but instead produced a demoralizing mish mash.

Posted by: citizen k | Jul 6 2005 14:06 utc | 190

citizen k- just a reminder that Kerry lost while receiving more votes than Ronald Reagn did when he won.
and I think the numbers came down to, what…something like 52 or 54% for Bush and 48 or 46% for Kerry? So nearly half the population is marginalized? Nearly half the population didn’t want Bush.
Where I live, btw, Democracy Now! is only available via community access tv and a low power community radio station that recently bought one day worth of Democracy Now! They asked for feedback to see if they should spend the money for a full week of shows and the response was overwhelmingly yes. This is a liberal town, of course, but it broadcasts out into the corn fields, too. Information is out there if people seek it out. When they get pissed off enough (which was the case with me) they’ll find resources and the plain-speaking will be a relief to many. btw, Democracy Now! has no where near the funding, nor do any of the community stations, etc. that carry the program, that any commercial station has.
So Pacifica isn’t the only way that Democracy Now! is broadcast, and for the program and for the public/community stations who buy it, expenses matter. All depend on contributions. If you want to improve Democracy Now! maybe you could volunteer to fundraise or work on programs or create your own that market in a way that appeals to you and surely to others as well.

Posted by: fauxreal | Jul 6 2005 16:35 utc | 192

jonku- i think that xenophobia came to this country w/ the earliest invaders. it’s a built-in component of our identity and it’s been exploited whenever profitable. the convergence of industrial, mass communication, and economic forces that we see taking place in the time frame spawning the Americanization program are rather part of the blueprint for a utopian capitalist mass culture, a melting pot distilling all range of memories & traditions into a bland, manipulable consumer society reliant on mass production and, more importantly, mass consumption. Americanization was & is a social transformation, a neutering of the traditional, to be replaced w/ shiny new markets. coercive measures were required to defang & pacify those factory workers at first resistant to their devaluation as cogs in a larger machine, to eliminate the very real threat of more inclusive ideologies being imported w/ the immigrant labor forces. but the blueprint clearly pointed the way for making industrial consumers out of the non-industrial. exploitation of the other for the profit of others. let us not forget which class initiated the revolutionary war to create their own empire. it wasn’t the yeoman or the craftsman. it was the merchants, lawyers & slave owners.

Posted by: b real | Jul 7 2005 2:45 utc | 194

b real:
Too bad America couldn’t have benefited from the “inclusive ideologies” that have been so widespread in the rest of the world and those communal and egalitarian traditional cultures lwhere everyone lived in peace and harmony. Amazing that all those immigrants were willing to come here and face this xenophobia after having enjoyed the blessing of more advanced civilizations.

Posted by: citizen k | Jul 7 2005 3:28 utc | 196

something amusing just struck me…
from Agre’s essay

Another common theme of conservative strategy is that liberals are themselves an aristocracy. (For those who are really keeping score, the sophisticated version of this is called the “new class strategy”, the message being that liberals are the American version of the Soviet nomenklatura.) Thus, for example, the constant pelting of liberals as “elites”, sticking this word and a mass of others semantically related to it onto liberals on every possible occasion. A pipeline of “facts” has been established to underwrite this message as well. Thus, for example, constant false conservative claims that the rich vote Democratic.[…] Rush Limbaugh asserts that “they [liberals] think they are better than you” […] Conservative strategists have also been remapping the language that has historically been applied to conservative religious authorities, sticking words such as “orthodoxy”, “pious”, “dogma”, and “sanctimonious” to liberals at every turn…

Now, a little trivial amusement… quotes from upthread…
CK:

The sad thing about academic marxism is its blank refusal to analyze itself and try to see how the economic interests of privileged intelligensia affects the production of ideas…
I believe that Razor and I agree that one of our impediments is that leftist academia/professional classes have become hotbeds of therapeutic leftism and class snobbery…
There is [on the US left] both a lack of commit to winning ( what seems to me to be a prissy and insincere squeamishness – for the love of God, is using a focus group comparable to enabling the war in Iraq?) and a pervasive elitism that must be from class basis of the liberal professions.
Kerry’s message pissed me off with its smug “I’m better than you” flavor.

razor:

citizen k consistently cites to human realities that confound marxians, and is, in effect consistently attacked for being either a marixan [sic] apostate…
Human possibility is too vast a subject for marxians to encompass with their initiation rites and study of scripture…

this is way cool! right out of Agre. razor does the religious-dogma metaphors — this time directed at Marxists rather than Libruls, but the general idea is perhaps “anyone to the left of Me” — and ck does the accusations of classism and betrayal of the Common Man. it looks like the rightwing message machine has been far more successful than we ever thought 🙂
well I thought it was funny anyway. o would some power the giftie gi’e us and all that.

Posted by: DeAnander | Jul 7 2005 4:14 utc | 198

DeAnander,
you are the berries!
I have been wanting to figure out what specifically bothers me about citizen k’s rhetoric, and you’ve nailed it: it has given in to the wurlitzer.
Sorry ck, but rage/disgust may not always help one win against those one thinks of as enemies.

Posted by: citizen | Jul 7 2005 4:57 utc | 200