the nervous character: Zeno 4

The popular stories about the introduction of various forms of using tobacco are always about the military. It is said that the habit of cigarette smoking passed from the Spanish soldiers, who had learned it from Brazilians, to the French in the 1830s. However, there is another story that locates the re-invention of cigarettes in the 1850s wars between Russia and Turkey. A Turkish soldier, whose pipe was destroyed by a bullet, put tobacco in the paper from the envelop of a cartouche, and smoked it. [[Ferland, 2007] And still another claims that it was the French soldiers, arriving with paper and tobacco, who diffused the habit in Russia. These different stories could be sorted out by considering that the Brazilians and Spanish may well have used a corn leaf – which is how cigarettes were described as late as 1864 in G.A. Henrieck’s Du Tabac. There we read that cigarettes are rolled in paper “sans colle”. Indeed, this was the technical difficulty with cigarettes as a commodity: its fragility.

The military is mobile, and at the same time idle, which has some effect on the form of drug that is being used. Tolstoy’s letter to his aunt Tatiana Yergoloskaya in 1851-2, when he was garrisoned in the Cacausus, describe the garrison life very well.  Garrisons were foyers for all the products that kill time, from gambling to smoking to, in recent times, heroin and marijuana. Also for politics and literature.

Here’s Tolstoy as he starts to settle in the garrison life:

 "I was at Stariy Yurt. All the officers who were there did nothing but play and at rather high stakes. As it is impossible for us when living in camp not to see each other often, I have very often taken part in card-playing, and, notwithstanding the importunity I was subject to, I had stood firm for a month, but one day for fun I placed a small stake: I lost. I began again: I again lost. I was in bad luck; the passion for play had awakened, and in two days I had lost all the money I had and that which Nikolay had given me (about 250 rubles), and into the bargain 500 rubles for which I gave a promissory note payable in January, '52.”

Tolstoy, of course, was not a typical officer, and killed time by writing “Childhood” and reflecting on the world around him.  Lucien Leuwen, the hero of Stendhal’s novel, shares some traits with Tolstoy – notably, his wealth and connections and interior life. But Stendhal’s hero is engaged not in suppressing the Turkic speaking mountain people on the Russian frontier, but, or so he feared, the French speaking people on the class frontier in Nancy – as Stendhal sets his story just after the French army had suppressed various worker strikes in Metz. Still, the life of idleness represented by Stendhal – and the contrast with the ambitions of the hero – takes on a very similar tone.

If killing time in the garrison corresponded with the use of drugs, it was a different kind of time that corresponds to the popular image of cigarettes by 1900.  In a sense, this is the same problem of weight and mass that is discussed in the preface to “The Telegraph as a means of commerce” (1857) by Karl Gustav Knies, who compares the ‘commodities’ of things, persons, and “information” – Nachricht. Knies was one of the first economists to recognize that telegrams, by introducing a real time speed into the diffusion of information, had, as it were, given a premium to the light and speedy. To come to this conclusion, Knies had to frame for himself a sense of information that, at the time he wrote, was still lacking. Yet he knew that the Nachricht “is obviously one of the objects in which commerce between people is represented.” Information (or “report”), unlike thought, requires distance – and even if one presumes to have information from oneself, one is at least metaphorically putting oneself at a distance from oneself. More normally, though, communication goes from a sender to a distanced receiver. Knies points out that if we have certain information that seems timeless, or at least doesn’t lose value in being transported from the sender to the receiver, much of what we communicate has only a passing value – just as any other commodity has. In other words, there is a shelf-life for reports. At the same time, there is a double time frame, one in which the immediacy of the need to which information corresponds may not be the same for the sender and the receiver. These things are true about letters and oral communications – but with the telegraph, a whole news temporal order, and a whole shift in the social construction of ‘immediacy”, comes about on the mass scale.

In a word, the lightness and quickness of the telegraphic message presages a different tempo in the life of human beings, which calls out for a drug that is both speedy and that suspends speed. That was the cigarette. It needed, however, to be technically changed. The cigarette becomes the object of certain changes, in manufacture and marketing, that make it an exemplary product of the turn to consumer goods in the later nineteenth century. Famously, the development of the tobacco industry in Russia, in which a skilled group of cigarette rollers were trained to produce cigarettes to serve a mass market, jumpstarted the American cigarette industry, which took its real start when James Duke enticed a number of Eastern European Jewish cigarette rollers to move from New York to North Carolina to train a number of Southern factory workers. Duke could not find an entrance to the cigar industry, so he chose to enter the tobacco industry by enlarging the production and market for cigarettes. America was famously addicted to cigars and chewing tobacco for most of the nineteenth century: cigarettes were suspiciously European. Duke introduced mechanisation, a new packaging method (a hard paper box), and advertising. Although he never was able to take over the cigar industry, which was resistant to the kind of speeded up manufacture that suited cigarettes, he did establish a strangle hold on cigarettes by 1912.

These are all developments that made cigarettes a symbolic accessory for the changes in the tempo of life that was being felt by urban populations in the U.S. and Europe by 1900.

The characterological correlate of this tempo was: the neurotic.

the new non-idle rich!

The NYT, which is caught between a love for the one percent that blooms in its style magazine and its business page and a political atmosphere in which the chummy relationship between liberalism and the one percent is coming apart, unrollsanother of its color pieces about the lifestyles of the rich. It features one Adam Katz in its first paragraph: “Adam Katz is happy to talk to reporters when he is promoting his business, a charter flight company based on Long Island called Talon Air.” So what did the Times reporters ask him?

Well, we are not far into the article when, breezing past the assets – “…an $8 million home, a family real estate company in Manhattan and his passion, 10-year-old Talon Air” … we are assured that, like so many of the 1 percent, Talon is a dynamo, a man who makes your average doublejob mom or dad seem like a slacker:

“”Still, they are not necessarily the idle rich. Mr. Katz, who sometimes commutes by amphibious plane and sometimes carries luggage for Talon Air passengers, likes to say he works “26/9.”

Of course, the NYT – as its Public Editor, Arthur Brisbane, recently put it – isn’t in the business of the “truth”. If a presidential candidate or a rich man says something, it is the Times policy to simply print it, and let he who has an hour to kill and Google find out if it is true or not. Such a comforting doctrine! Luckily, I am one of the idle non-rich, and having the time, I goodled Mr. Katz, and found that, in other interviews, Mr. 26/9 gives a different peek at his life. Especially revealing was his interview with OceanHome, which, you will be surprised to hear, does not contain any stories about CEO Katz manfully struggling to manipulate a hundred pound suitcase into his jet’s tight suitcase storage space.  He paints a different view of his time expenditure – for instance, in response to the question about what he did when he bought his current mansion in Nassau County: 

“After purchasing it in 2007, I did a $3.5 million gut renovation, rebuilding it as a six-bedroom smart house, using a Creston system for controlling everything from lighting, sound, and temperature control to operating any of the 20 flat-screen TVs that fold down from the ceilings. I added a movie theater, a solarium with a sunken hot tub, a customized gym, outdoor kitchens and fire pits, Jacuzzis, an infinity-edge pool, radiant heat terraces, and a dock for my 135-foot motoryacht and 47-foot Intrepid speed boat, with Ipe (Brazilian Walnut) steps leading to a private beach.”

You might think that all these accoutrements make it even sadder that he is spending 7 days a week away from home. But don’t cry! It turns out that he sometimes his working time is spent amid the solarium, Jacuzzis and pool: 

What do you love most about waterfront living?
I love the privacy of it all, and the views are always spectacular, particularly when the sun sets across Manhattan. Better yet, I can commute to the city via my speedboat in 15 minutes.
Is one particular room in the house used most?
For me, it’s the 2,000-square-foot master bedroom, mostly because of the water views and the comfort of relaxing near a wood-burning fireplace. And it’s where my home office is. Like I said before, because the house was built in the round, it really feels like you’re sleeping on a ship at sea.

Still, “easy living”, as Ocean Home labels the article on a man who works harder than any four man in the bottom 99 percent, doesn’t always elude our hero. For instance, asked about the worst element in living in a house facing the ocean, Katz said: “Cold temperatures and wind are pretty intolerable during the winter months, which is why we head down to the Bahamas and live and sail around on the yacht.” 

Life, on the whole, is hard for the 1 percent: “They work longer hours, being three times more likely than the 99 percent to work more than 50 hours a week, and are more likely to be self-employed,” according to unreferenced stats in the NYT article. But I like to think that the fifty hours of week does have its softer side. I imagine, for instance, there might even be tax write-offs involved with working and sailing that yacht around the Bahamas. But these are mysteries the 99 percent know not of.

smoke em if you got em: Svevo 3

The closer one comes to a material detail in a text, the more distant appears the division between symbol and fact. Symbol and fact are always found in one another's arms, like lovers, and it is not an easy task to separate one from the other. And the person who does attempt to separate them must put on an anerotic mood, and will always feel a bit like a prude, a busybody or a fool. Besides, just as he pries away the fact, undresses it and preps it for the  table of statistics, let him turn his back for only a moment - and it is irresistable, this turning of your back on the fact - and when he turns back the fact will have simply embraced another symbol, or worse, the same one.

For example, take the historic facts in the case of tobacco...


William Weaver’s translation of Zeno's Conscience begins by looking at Italo Svevo’s name – “(his real name): Ettore Schmitz. The first half is Italian and, significantly, it is the name of a Greek hero, not of a Catholic saint. The surname is German. Then consider the birthplace: Trieste, a city that has had many masters, from ancient Romans to Austrians to Italians. In 1861, when Ettore Schmitz was born there, Trieste was an Austrian city, a vital one, the great empire’s only seaport and a focus of trade between central Europe and the rest of the world.”


The split Weaver points to in Svevo’s very name is, if we look a little at the history of tobacco, echoed in Zeno’s habit.


A few subtending facts, then.


In December, 1847, Italian nationalists in Milan (which, like Venice, Trieste and other parts of Italy, were under Habsburg rule) decided to imitate the American tea party – just as the Americans boycotted tea to protest British rule, they would boycott tobacco to protest Austrian rule. Tobacco was chosen for good reason: the Austrian state exercized a monopoly on the sale of tobacco. Since the habit of smoking tobacco in cigar form had been “brought” into the German sphere by English soldiers during the Napoleonic war (such, at least, was the myth to which German writers on tobacco subscribed), the Austrian state, like the Prussian state, had reacted by regulating its use. But unlike the Prussian state, the Austrian didn’t only ban smoking in public in the capital – they also devised different regulatory regimes for different regions in the Empire. And they promoted the creation of large tobacco estates in Hungary, which became part of one of the largest industries in the Empire, from cultivation to curing to manufacture of snuff, pipe tobacco, and cigars. [See Wickett, Studien ueber das Österreich Tabakmonopol, 1897]


In Dalmatia, state control of tobacco production was relaxed – in accordance with the liberalization of this area of the Empire that had been inaugurated by Joseph II. Trieste was well known as an entry point for the tobacco smuggling trade. In 1830, when Stendhal was the French consul in Trieste, he had remarked upon the openness of the smuggling trade. The tobacco that came in was, most likely, of Egyptian origin.


In Milan, the Austrian state had no rules about smoking in public. The Milanese liberals, voting to boycott smoking, sparked a nationalist feeling in the populace. On the 2nd and the 3rd, there were disturbances in the street, as cigars were plucked from the mouths of passerbys and thrown into the road.


But who were these smoking passerbys? Here, contemporary accounts differ. According to a French history from 1857, the Austrian government, knowing that the boycott was coming, had distributed 30,000 cigars to the Austrian garrison in the city. Thus, the soldiery was ‘armed’ with smokes, and when the crowds attacked, they took this as a provocation to violence and reacted accordingly. According to a contemporary Italian historian (Giusseppi Ricciardi, 1850), the smoking soldiers were joined by smoking criminals, who had been released from the jails and given cigars by the Austrian authorities to add to the confusion. Like a trick cigar, the situation ludicrously exploded, with rioting that spread to other cities in Italy.


But in Berlin and Austria of that year, the public/private meaning of the cigar was reversed. The laws that were put in place after the Vienna congress had banned cigar smoking in public, and thus made cigar smoking a daring act – or at least an act of symbolic resistance. The progressive smoked cigars – “ a democratic symbol for rabble rousers and agitators’ – while the petit bourgeouis smoked pipes. As the revolution spread, in 1848, from Paris to Berlin and Vienna, one of the demands of the liberals was the freedom to smoke in public – shoulder to shoulder with the freedom of the press.


Against this background, there is not only a split in Schmitz’s pseudonym, Italo Svevo, but even in the meaning of the tobacco addiction that provides the connection in Zeno’s account of his life. Freedom, for the Italian patriots, came via giving up tobacco. Freedom for German patriots meant taking up tobacco. And freedom is at the heart of the habit that Zeno describes, the perpetually renewed freedom of giving up the smoking habit:

"I believe the taste of a cigarette is more intense when it’s your last. The others, too, have a special taste of their own, but less intense. The last one gains flavor from the feeling of victory over oneself and the hope of an imminent future of strength and health. The others have their importance because, in lighting them, you are proclaiming your freedom, while the future of strength and health remains, only moving off a bit."

  In Georges Bataille and Roger Caillois’s program for the College of Sociology, they wrote of ‘establishing points of coincidence between the fundamental obsessional tendencies of individual psychology and the directing structures that preside over social organisations and command revolutions.’ Surely we have landed upon one of those points.


And yet – not quite. For what Zeno smokes as a mature man are cigarettes. His brush with cigars, though, was his first brush with tobacco. His father was a cigar smoker (like, it should be remembered, the founder of the psychoanalysis that provides the framework for the story – Freud). His father had a habit of smoking half a cigar, then leaving the butt for later. Zeno had a habit of stealing and smoking those butts.


“My father left some half-smoked Virginia cigars around the house, perched on table edges and armoires. I believed this was how he threw them away, and I believe our old maidservant, Carina, did then fling them out. I carried them off and smoked them in secret. At the very moment I grabbed them I was overcome by a shudder of revulsion, knowing how sick they would make me. Then I smoked them until my brow was drenched in cold sweat and my stomach was in knots. It cannot be said that in my childhood I lacked energy.”


We have not yet reached the moment of the cigarette. However, it is as though Zeno had to wean himself from cigars in order to reach that moment himself.

Svevo's Zeno 2: the croupier's rake

The individualism of methodological individualism is a strange beast. On the one hand, it promises a robust defense of the individual as the ultimate level of social analysis. All collectives, go the doctrine, are composed of individual behaviors. There are no collective agents – like a pantomime horse, when you see a collective – a state, a firm, an organization – you are seeing the sheeting over the actors inside it. And yet, this defense of the individual is, at the same time, an emptying out of the individual. Whatever his or her beliefs, passions, or promises, in effect the content of the individual consists of an algorithm for calculating the maximization of his or her advantage. It is thus that the pantomime horse of capitalist organizations gets to its feet and proceeds to walk all over you. Hayek, who was a great believer in individualism, was conscious of this paradox and explains it in The Counterrevolution in Science.  It happens that those who are not entirely sold on individualism and those who emphasize ‘historicism’ – the interpretation of social action that does not hold that a universal maximizing principle is at the heart of it – are pretty much synonymous. This gives us the paradox that those who emphasize the collective level are also those who oppose the universalism of a conjectural history going back to Smith. Thus, historicists would dispute that, say, price or monopoly as categories developed in contemporary economics could be usefully imposed on social behavior in Egyptian society in 1400 B.C. - the example Hayek uses. 

But, according to Hayek: "What this contention overlooks is that “price” of “monopoly” are not names for definite “things”, fixed collections of physical attributes which we recognize by some of these attributes as members of the same class and whose further attributes we ascertain by observation; but that they are objects which can be defined only in terms of certain relatins between human beings and which cannot possess any attributes except those which follow from the relations by which they are defined. They can be recognized by us as prices or monopolies only because, and in so rar as, we can recognize these individual attitudes, and from these as elements compose the structural pattern which we call a price or a monopoly. Of course the ‘whole” situation, or even the “whole of the men who act, will greatly diiffer from place to place and from time to time. But it is solely our capacity to recognize the familiar elements from which the unique situation is made up which enables us to attach any meaning to the phenomena.” (66)

Hayek’s notion – which appeals, in the end, to an "us" who is above the wholes of the situation and the men involved – reflects a pattern of social meanings that capitalism introduced into Western Europe in the 19^th century, and with which, especially, intellectuals caught up in the sphere of circulation wrestled: the seemingly unbridgeable difference between the individual as an accounting entity and an individual as an existential mystery. The latter is on the side of ‘experience’ – but the former rides mankind. Experience fills in the empty algorithmic unit – the economic individual – with matter that seems, well, beyond the bounds of his maximizing reason, or the reduction to individuals that is theoretically called for in analyzing economic action. The money in my pocket passed to me from some individual, truly, but the individuals involved in the chain that touched that money are all, with regards to me, rather empy and automatic – the man who put the money in the ATM machine, the woman who gave me change at the grocery store, the software engineer who designed paypal, the client who paid me – all are in my life to varying degrees, but their roles, the money, and myself seem to be bound together by arithematic more than intimacy. “The technical form of commerce creates a ralm of values that is more or less commpletely loosened from its subjective – personal substructure,” Simmel says (30)

It is in the conflict between the two aspects that is brought to bear on the discourse on freedom that was passed down from the ancien regime to the increasingly capitalist dissolution of the ancien regime in the  nineteenth century. “Commerce always strives – never fully unreal and never fully realized – towards a stage of development in which things determine their value through a self-acting mechanism – unmarked by the queion of how much subjective feeling this mechanism has taken into account as its precondition or as its matter.” (Simmel, 30)

These conflicting aspects of individualism are very much part of Svevo's novel, Zeno's Conscience - for the conscience is, too, both a peculiar personal thing and a sort of introjection of norms and rules that the individual was never consulted about. At one point Svevo’s narrator,  Zeno Costini, who, as the  heir of his father’s business, has nothing to do – by which we readers understand that he does not need to do anything to have money – insists on being given a job with his Olivi, the man to whom Zeno’s father entrusted the management of the business. Consequently, Zeno is instructed in accounting - or 'economics':

“Olivi’s son, an elegant, bespectacled young man, erudite in all the commercial sciences, took over my instruction, and I honestly can’t complain about him. He annoyed me a little with his economic science and his law of supply and demand, which seemed to me more self-evident than he would admit. But he showed a certain respect for me as the owner, and I was all the more grateful because he couldn’t possibly have learned that from his father. Respect for ownership must have been part of his economic science. He never scolded me for the mistakes I often made in posting entries; he simply ascribed them to ignorance and then gave me explanations that were really superfluous.

The trouble came when, what with looking at all those transactions, I began to feel like making some of my own. In the ledger, very clearly, I came to visualize my own pocket, and when I posted a sum under “debit” for our clients, instead of a pen, I seemed to hold in my hand a croupier’s rake, ready to collect the money scattered over the gaming table.” (166)

The croupier’s rake instead of the pen! – one seems magical, a wand that brings us back to the archaic, pre-capitalist world of treasure, while the other seems anything but magical, imprisoning us in double columns. The libido of the sphere of circulation flows into this image, which has urged itself upon theorists and clerks since the days of Law’s system.

On Svevo's Zeno 1

V.S. Pritchett once wrote about the novelist’s knack of “showing how people live in one another’s lives.” This is not only a concise way of talking about what novelists do – it also points to a large economic fact, which is that people do live in one another’s lives. Surprisingly, economists are, for the most part, blind, or at least hesitant, about seeing this fact. They have even systematized this blindness and called it the ‘micro-foundations of the economy.’

Unfortunately, all too often novels, when they are considered from the aspect of economics, are considered to be free zones over which preconceived economic theories and ideas roam. But one can think of two other relations of the novel to economics – one is as a test of economic ideas, and the other is as a source of economic ideas. It might well be that the social interactions involving exchange, the symbolization of value, gifts, scarcity  – are rehearsed in a sophisticated way in certain novels to the extent that the economist should learn from the novel, rather than the other way around.

I’d like to put these consideration in the background  against which I am writing these notes about  Italo Svevo’s novel, Zeno’s Conscience.

Let’s begin with the novel’s premise. In a short note by Dr. S., Zeno’s journal is presented to the reader as an act of malice on the part of Dr. S., and a means of ‘catching’ his former partient. In other words, the novel begins with the breaking of a contract, that of privacy between the doctor and the patient. It begins outside the law, so to speak. Zeno’s own notion is that his memoirs are therapeutic, serving one end: to help him break the habit of smoking.

Thus, on the one hand, we have the broken contract to which the book owes its existence as a published object – and on the other, we have the desire to break a habit to which the book owes its existence in the mind of the narrator. 

Before I begin with the second form of the book’s existence, let’s look at what is implied in Doctor S.’s premise – that a book not only has an inward side of content, but an outward side that objectifies that content. The book is a product of writing. Writing creates an object. And objects are not, contra the economist’s grand model, all the same kind of commodity. If they take on the form of the commodity, they take on that form because their use value for people living in each other’s lives varies not just in terms of some original position in which a preference is expressed, but in the way that preference is lived with. For instance, there is addiction. There is routine.

As Svevo’s novel was translated into French, it began to be noticed in Italy. The poet Montale wrote an enthusiastic review that, to an extent, introduced the Italian intelligentsia to Svevo, this half German Triestian Jew, whose language, according to his English translator, William Weaver, seemed “flat, unaccented, even opaque.”

Svevo wrote Montale a rather extraordinary letter, expressing his thanks and correcting Montale’s assumption that Svevo was a modernist writer linked to Joyce and the literary schools of Paris.  Instead, Svevo took the view that writing was a form of performance and manufacture – and even a form of bad habit.

“I feel the need to tell you that I don’t believe that the difference between Conscience and the two preceeding novels should be searched for in the influence of the most modern literature. I was very unaware of that literature when I was writing, since after the failure of Senilita, I forbade myself literature. I even had a ruse to help myself from falling bak into it: I studied the violin and I conscretated to it, for twenty years, all my free time. I read a lot of Italian novels, and among the French, the greatest authors of our time. I know English, but not enough to easily read Ulysses, which I am now reading slowly with the help of a friend. As to Proust, I am now hurrying to to acquaint myself when, last year, Larbaud told me that in reading Senilita (which, like you, he loves especially), one thinks of that writer.

“It is true that Conscience is a  completely other kind of thing than the preceeding novels. But just think that it is an autobiography and not my own. Much less than Senilita. I put three year into writing it in my free moments. And I proceeded in this way: when I found myself alone, I tried to persuade myself I was Zeno. I walked like him, like him I smoked, and I stuck on my past all of thos of his adventures that resembled my own, for this sole reason: that the evocation of a personal adventure is a reconstruction that easily becomes an entirely new construction, when one succeeds in placing it in a new atmosphere. And it doesn’t lose so much the taste and value of a memory, no more than its sadness. I am sure that you understand me.” [Translated from Ecrits intimes, essais et lettres trans. by Marco Fusco, 1973]

For a reader of Zeno’s Conscience, this is a pretty astonishing letter, since it seems to be both a distancing from Zeno and a usurpation of his style of audacity – the peculiar audacity of the fool that we can see, as well, in the Jewish jokes that Freud loved, and in Kafka’s never-say-die men, who are continually scheming to get into the Castle.Remember, Kafka howled with laughter when he read his own stories to his friends, according to Brod.

In Svevo, that audacity takes the peculiar form of hypochondria and addiction – which are, in turn, exemplary forms of routine. Svevo even takes writing as an addiction that he prevents himself from falling back into by taking up another routine, one that he knows he is bad at – just as a recovering  alcoholic will take up cigarette smoking, and a cigarette smoker, gum.

This, of course, is a whole other dimension of revealed preference.

TBC

New year predictions for the moronic inferno, version 2012

Prediction is a doddle. Successful ones usually fall into two groups: the easy and the lucky. In human affairs, the easy are usually derived from the two great grifter principles: 1. there’s a sucker born every minute, and 2. never give a sucker an even break.  applying these as your two parameters can make you seem like a genius when the subject is a society like America, the con man’s paradise. As for the lucky, they are composed of guesses that are driven forward by some unguessed social pulsation. Prediction, in this case, gloms onto a phenomenon without glomming on to its cause, and thus loses its intellectual strength.

I think I can rely on the  grifter principle to predict that Mitt Romney will defeat Obama, and that Romney will face a strongly Republican house and a majority Republican senate. The problem here is that the same principles also give us an Obama win. However, the superstition that lightning never strikes twice in the same place gives the edge to Mitt.

Obama, however, will proudly pass onto Romney a plutocracy that is almost completely intact, save for the odd Maddoff casualty. 16 trillion dollars in emergency loans, at 1 percent or below, have saved the upper 1 percent for us all. We are, well, tearfully grateful, of course.

The bankruptcy of hopeyness cannot of course be laid completely at the President’s feet. In fact, all liberal-left parties in the West have rotted from the head. When they work and actually elect a leader, the leader and the party then engage in such clueless policy making as would puzzle the angels. Except, of course, those fallen angels who have read Marx.

The latter have notice that, in the course of the state sponsored well being spread out over the last sixty to seventy years, a certain political and business class has done extraordinarily well in both conservative and liberal-left parties. The elite in the latter face a problem that is intimately connected to their ascent to the rarified 1 percent group, for in effect, as their personal circumstances change, so do their interests. Interests are always a hermeneutic product, but hermeneutics is done on a social level as well as a subjective one. If the tissue of your social level is constructed from interactions with fellow citizens in the gated community and the habits that grow around the perks of great wealth, your relationship to a party base that is composed of much lesser mortals becomes one of a strained sympathy. The result of this has been a threefold splintering of left politics. Substantially, the party elite engages in the ‘nudgework’ of slowly unwinding and destroying the progressive legislation and institutions that were gained over the past one hundred some years. They aren’t elected to do this, of course – quite the opposite. But they do it because it is in their interest to do it, and they simply quietly project their interest upon the population as a whole and believe, often quite sincerely, that the population as a whole is just living a little too well and needs discipline. It never occurs to these denizens of the 1 percent that they are living too well – this is a thought that simply can’t get through the gate. The gated community is especially vigilant in suppressing such ideas.

However, in order to distract their constituencies, the party elite is ever alert to moral panics and sensational trivialities. This is the sum of their political art. And thus, as congressmen making ‘regulations’ for banks retire to become lobbyists for banks, or tax breaks for the wealthiest are somehow tantalizingly never closed, or emphasis shifts from immediate problems – massive and catastrophic levels of unemployment – to problems involving the tax burden on the 1 percent’s next generation – that terrible deficit! – massive distraction work is called for. And this involves the elite’s third political method, identity politics.

Two recent newspaper stories provide a little glimpse into the content and soul of the Obama era.

One was the recent contribution by his former economics advisor, Christina D. Romer, to a NYT roundup of economists for Year End reports was a cri de coeur of Obama-ism. It contained this gem:

“On the deficit, the big worry isn’t the current shortfall, which is projected to decline sharply as the economy recovers. Rather, it’s the long-run outlook. Over the next 20 to 30 years, rising health care costs and the retirement of the baby boomers are projected to cause deficits that make the current one look puny. At the rate we’re going, the United States would almost surely default on its debt one day. And like the costs of maintaining a home, the costs of dealing with our budget problems will only grow if we wait.
We already have a blueprint for a bipartisan solution. The Bowles-Simpson Commission hashed out a sensible plan of spending cuts, entitlement program reforms and revenue increases that would shave $4 trillion off the deficit over the next decade. It shares the pain of needed deficit reduction, while protecting the most vulnerable and maintaining investments in our future productivity. Congress should take up the commission’s recommendation the first day it returns in January."


Notice the bogus analogy to the house. Notice that the deficit is considered only from the side of government spending, and no notice is taken of the effect on growth if we ‘sensibly’ shave off the ability of the majority to retire in any type of comfort, educate themselves, receive health care, or even receive standard government services, which of course are all determinates of growth and affordability. The Bowles-Simpson commission, of course, never made any suggestions because it couldn’t ultimately agree on its ‘sensible’ cuts, but the country club set hears what it wants to hear, and what it heard was the joyous sound of an ultra-right Republican senator giving cover to an ultra-connected Democratic lawyer for screwing Democratic constituencies up the wazoo. This is Obama’s vaunted ‘socialism’. Alas, it ain’t socialism. It is rat poison, and its effects, so far, are predictable: it has killed the beast. The enthusiasm of the Obama people for Bowles Simpson is not the reason Obama will lose, but it is a symptom of the attitude that will lead to his loss: an astonishing callousness with regard to the biggest slump in employment in two generations, a blindness to the American middleclass’s plucking as its housing asset disappears into a murk of bad mortgages and illegal bank finagling, and a general disconnect from any issue whose explanation would displease the 1 percent, from global warming to the Gulf disaster.
Such, then, is the policy substance that makes President Nudge’s reign a curious mixture of elevated but robotic rhetoric and astonishingly boneheaded reactionary policy, sweetened around the edges with the occasional liberal approved appointment.
But a political regime doesn’t just live – or die - on policy substance (and substance abuse). Politics has a soul. Soul, in America, is the kind of work that has devolved upon celebrities, since nobody else has time for it. Here, one needs an ear to hear. One needs to read for symbols. And a beautiful symbol came down the pike this holiday season: the bio-pic of Thatcher, brought to you by the makers of Mamma Mia.
Meryl Streep, who stars as Maggie Thatcher, is giving interviews that are simply alight with the privileged world view of the 1 percent liberal. This is the end of one she gave the NYT:
““So did Margaret Thatcher. But that’s understandable. She couldn’t show weakness. Imagine what the men would have said.” She added: “In parts of England now it’s a transgression even to consider her as a human being. She’s that monster woman, the she-devil. For me the point of the film was to find the human side.” And though hardly a Tory, she said she vividly recalled the moment when Mrs. Thatcher came to power. “Just as I remember not voting for her, I remember sitting in my room at university when the radio announced that she had been asked to form a government, and I went ‘Yes!’ It felt like one for our team.”
Ms. Streep nodded and said: “I did the same thing. We all thought if it can happen in England, class bound, socially rigid, homophobic — if they can elect a female leader over there, then it’s just seconds away in America.””
Streep is old enough (as am I) to remember the beginning of the feminist movement in the 70s. Back then, the point was to destroy patriarchy. Now, of course, the point is to find women (one from “our team”) who can be leaders – the CEOs of tomorrow! This is a feminism neutered of its original purpose, and remade in the interest of ‘role models’ – that combination of fetishized hierarchy and moralism that is the wholly owned subsidiary of patriarchy. Where once feminists fought corporations on behalf of the millions of women who were victimized in the system that gave corporations outsized power, they now are supposed to fight to make sure those corporations are led by women who, in a triumph of the new, new feminism, have broken the glass ceiling and receiving the stock options and outsized salaries of their male counterparts. The liberal-left party in the U.S. has always had a bad conscious about class, but as class recedes as an issue that the elite takes at all seriously, it becomes what all things become that sink into the unconscious: a ghost. A specter, as Marx might say. Identity politics, haunted by that spector, becomes a compensatory activity, a form of pablum, rather than a revolutionary activity. The center not only holds, it freezes the moment of liberation, stuffs it full of windy truisms, and wheels it out on all occasions in order to keep the party – the political system that has been so good to the elite - going.  This is the way formerly liberal-left ideas, bereft of their former revolutionary context, are effortlessly assimilated to the great liberal country club that goes on to worry about the deficit and the bad habits of the lower classes. Thus, Maggie Thatcher, who unleashed a Hobbesian lifestyle on the majority of British women under the withered blessing of Hayek and General Pinochet, becomes a role model of female leadership. 
Jesus (and Susan B. Anthony) wept.  
And with that: have a happy new year!

 

From 2007

Making the rich less rich is not socialism

I’ve become a reader of Floyd Norris’ blog over at the NYT. I’ve noticed, with some amusement, that any time a vague and distant hint arises that the rich in America might be oh, oh, slightly too… rich, the comments section is reliably flooded by screeds against socialism and for the American way.

It makes me long for a snappy way to point out that capitalism was not abolished in the U.S. in the fifties, nor was the Reagan tax cut on the wealthiest the second coming of Adam Smith in the eighties. What is funny about the rabid defense of the wealthy is that I imagine it often comes from the non-wealthy. It isn’t like billionaires are trolling blogs. But what they are defending is, of course, absolutely against their interests. It is the great American paradox: the almost saintly disinterestedness of the American householder in defense of systematic greed.

There are a number of ways to redistribute wealth down. Imagine, for instance, that unions had been strong enough, back in the eighties, to peg earnings to the ratio between upper management and the lowest paid functionaries in a company. Back then, the ratio was about 70 to 1 – today, it averages something like 300 to 1. If the unions had done this and the CEO level had succeeded in extorting the pay packages they had today, we would be living in a utopia in which the merest entry level receptionist would be taking home 150-200 thou. This would be excellent – except of course that corporations would no longer make profits. Instead, they’d be pouring all their cash into paying their workforce. Still, at the 70 to 1 ratio, upper management’s efforts to increase their compensation packets would have significantly pulled the earnings up of the entire workforce.

Unfortunately, when you don’t have powerful unions, you have to rely on the countervailing powers of the state. You have to work, then, to raise the taxation on the upper tier considerably. You have to do this not only because you need to pay for public investments, but because there is a macro good to great income equality. For one thing, it discourages economic activity that is, in reality, mere churning. Looking at the mortgage mess, one can see more and more clearly how the fantastic, Pirenesian structure of false economic activity has worked since 2001. It has allocated money not to the most productive, but to the most churnful. For another thing, more equality now means more equality latter. As the gap widens between the resources of the rich and the not-rich, it becomes exactly what we socially reproduce. Those non-rich who, for instance, decided that the death tax, otherwise know as the estate tax, was just terribly unfair to their children actually screwed their children terribly, because they are not leaving the kids fortunes, whereas the fortunate few are – thus aggravating the already unfair structure that separates rich from non-rich children. The cost of abolishing the estate tax is borne by the non-rich in such areas as trying to get their kids into top schools and the like.

But what most impresses me about expropriating a good share of the wealth of the wealthy is its environmental impact. As anybody with the eyes to see can see, the last twenty years have been years of great GDP growth in many countries. In fact, the whole Tom Friedman-esque economy is oriented towards steroiding GDP. Why? Because if you are going to have increasing inequality, growth is the way that the middle income sector – the vastly more numerous non-rich – can, at least, maintain their lifestyles. But GDP growth could also be called the Diminishing Environmental Return. DER is the natural result of overexploiting a system that is limited in many ways. Put up a zillion towers for cell phones, and you can say bye bye to songbird populations – make your McMansions of tropical wood, and strew them with the kind of wiring that gives you 24/7 instaconnectoinstamaticinstatubelivegirlsxxxxpronomatic action, and you can say bye bye to the environment of Sumatra. Down the intertubes it goes. It is an incredible waste of resources, which is the total result of the elite decision to grossly exacerbate the wealthiest’s share of the wealth. With a greater equality of income, of course, GDP doesn’t have to grow as fast. The drift of our current society into endless war, endless stupidity, an endlessly degraded public sector, the unwinding of all those hard fought democratic gains of the last one hundred years, is the direct result of a simple arithmetic ratio. To repair this – to go back to the managed capitalism, as Kuttner calls it, of the past – isn’t socialism – it is the self interest of the vast mass of American citizens.