Ya want resistance? I got resistance for ya.

We’ve been here before.

In 1852, a slave named Joshua Glover escaped from the household of Bennami Garland of St. Louis. He ended up in Racine Wisconsin. Unlike Huck and Jim, this slave knew the direction of freedom – the ductus of liberation, you might say. Or thought he did. In 1854, Garland got a court in St. Louis to recognize that Glover was in Racine, and that Glover had stolen Garland’s property – Glover. Given the power encoded by the Fugitive Slave Act, Garland informed the U.S. Marshals, who descended on a shack Glover was staying in – while he worked for a local businessman at a sawmill – and they captured him.

What happened next was real resistance, not a hashtag. The bells rang in Racine to warn the populace about the invasion of free territory by the slavers. Racine, at that time, was a strongly anti-slavery town. A meeting was held, and resolutions were passed decrying the kidnapping of Glover. A writ of habaeus corpus for Glover was submitted to the court, which would decide whether Glover could be sent back to Missouri. Glover had been removed under cover of night to Milwaukee by the slave catchers, due to fear that Racine’s enraged citizens would rescue the man. But in Milwaukee the slavers were not safe: a meeting was called in front of the courthouse, and thousands attended. At this time in America, the idea that the feudal remnant called the judiciary could arbitrarily slice and dice the inherent rights of human beings – which we now accept gladly, watching millions process through our jail system – was not so passively accepted. An abolitionist and the editor of a local newspaper, Sherman M. Booth, incited the crowd to do a wondrous work of freedom by crashing the jail in which Glover was held. Eight men volunteered. The jailhouse was merrily cracked open, Glover was taken out of it, hidden in a cart, and taken to Canada.

This is resistance.

Booth was arrested. He was tried. The judge in the case, one A.D. Smith, covered himself with glory by freeing Smith and overturning the Fugitive Slave act on a state’s rights plea.

One should remember that the Southern states were very willing, at this point, to override state’s rights if it involved supporting slavery, before they decided to invoke state’s rights – again, to support slavery – because Southern states identified themselves with slaveholding.

This is from Smith’s opinion:

“But they (the States) never will consent that a slave owner, his agent or an office of the United States, armed with process to arrest a fugitive slave from service, is clothed with entire immunity from state authority, to commit whatever crime or outrage against the laws of the state; that their own high prerogative write of habeas corpus shall be annulled, their authority denied, and their officers resisted, the process of their own courts condemned; their territory invaded by federal forces, the houses of their citizens searched, the sanctuary of their homes invaded, their streets and public places made the scene of tumultuous and armed violence; and state sovereignty succumb, paralyzed and aghast, before the process of an officer unknown to the Constitution and irresponsible to its sanctions. At least such will not become the degradation of Wisconsin…”

Change the words slightly to ICE and this is as pertinent now as ever. ICE, which, lets remember, was started under George Bush. Like almost everything that the Trump administration is doing – from overturning its predecessor’s edicts to tax cutting to war mongering to polluting – the beginning is there in the horrid administration of that world class ignoramus, George Bush. This too.

in defense of envy: the bad sister of greed

When you read conservative and libertarian economists, you will inevitably, at one time or another, run into an interesting paraodox: the envy paradox. While greed among this type is the good bad emotion, and has been since Mandeville, envy is the wicked sister, the bad bad emotion which we must shame.
Right away, it seems that this makes little sense. If you dub envy “aspiration”, hey presto, it becomes a virtue. The Horatio Alger striver, realizing that capitalism is the best of all systems and the thing to do is to swim upstream and rescue the bankers daughter, is mucho applauded – while the woke Horatio Alger union organizer or (heavens) community organizer who aspires to a more equal society by, say, limiting the amount of wealth possessed by the wealthy, using the democratic tools at hand, are falling for the bad bad emotion of envy.

It is a curious twist. Even more curious, though, is the economists blindness, on a massive, ideological scale, to the economics of envy in capitalism. Because for the neo-classical economist, one thing is clear: advertising is an epiphenomena that has no effect on the market.

This ludicrous position comes out of a deeper, structural ludicrousness about preferences and the sovereign consumer. Advertising messes up the gig.

In any case, in the real world, unfortunately, it is not envy of the expropriators that rules, but envy as a driver of, for instance, creating fan bases for parity products. Wipe out envy and where is the housing market going to be? And how are we gonna sell pepsi, or SUVs?

Whenever you see an economist who is quite comfortable with greed and the most egregious forms of human exploitation suddenly become all Ten Commandments about envy, you have caught a glimpse of the ideology of the beast. The apologists of capitalism can’t help themselves.

tradition: we dream each other's dreams

It was, I believe,  T.S. Eliot who said that every strong writer creates the tradition that he then proceeds to follow. By this he meant that literature is not sequential, even if its chronology, by mundane necessity, is. A writer picks out, from the vantage point of those instincts found in his scribblings, those of his predecessors who tended towards him. Blake thought the same thing - Milton dreamed of Blake, and then Blake dreamed of Milton. Mixing memory and desire indeed. 

Well, the same can be said, as we all know, for economic history. When bubbles are blowing, the historians turn a revisionist eye on previously dissed speculators. In the nineties, there was an outpouring of sympathy for, of all people, J.P. Morgan. So cultured! So right, so often! This acquisitive weasel, this man whose name was rightly cursed by every farmer and Pullman porter in the 1890s, the classic photograph of whom, stick raised, WC Fields proboscis burning, pig like eyes shining with malice and outrage, was muckraking enough. This culminated in Strouse prize winning bio, which gave us a nineties J.P. For Strouse dear Pierpont turns out to be less ogre than Clinton Democrat avant la letter, managing us into the tiered prosperity we so knew and loved during those boomiest years. 

Economic history is, at the moment, turning a more puzzled eye on 90s verities. Or some economists are. For instance, it was proven as a fact by 90s economists that globalization, free trade for all, was our ticket to utopia. If any of the Morlocks became discontented or dis-employed, during this time, it was all due to technology. And you can’t say anything bad about technology! It just requires smart smart smart smarts – people like, say, degreed economists. Since then the Morlocks have got poorer, they’ve lost social status, they are in debt, and instead of blaming themselves for not having sold Grandma and gone to Harvard, they are blaming their rulers. This is called populism, and man is it bad! First they came for the billionaires, and soon they are against gay marriage. This, at least, is how decent centrists, who want, really want to help the Morlocks but just don’t have time at the moment, see it.

Adrian Wood has a gentle piece in VoxEU wondering whether perhaps, perhaps those economists who cheerled us into the trade pact globe of today were being premature, or even uncaring about the Morlocks. Maybe globalization did have a little bit to do with job loss, wage stagnation, and downward shifting tendencies among those who don’t have personal bankers. It is written in a nice, gingerly manner, all soft voiced, which makes for some unintentional comedy. For instance, Wood notices how much weight was put on  

Heckscher-Ohlin trade theory to show that offshoring manufacturing to cheaper labor oasis wouldn’t touch a hair on the chinny chin chin of the Morlock class. And he comments:

“In hindsight, researchers were blinkered by HO theory. Not enough attention was paid to other mechanisms by which trade might affect wages. HO also assumes that  labour mobility within countries is costless, and this unfortunately caused economists to forget that particular localities often bear most of the social costs of expansion of trade.”

Oh, those Morlocks! They just won’t pick up in their masses, abandon their homes where they grew up and where their parents grew up, and move to where the work is! My gosh, no wonder they take to opioids! Which isn’t to say anything bad about how wonderfully profitable the Sackler family has made Purdue Pharmaceuticals – wonderful people, and so artistic too!

Centrism is, by all accounts, losing its grip on everything but the media and governing class elite. Centrism is the very dream of the economics department. They don’t get everything like they want it – wouldn’t it be nice to privatize the streets in cities and such – but they get good compromises that inflict fatal wounds on the social insurance compacts that formed in the 30s and held up through the 90s. And now nobody likes it!

Time, I think, for tradition to jump the tracks. Let’s go back to the progressive economists of 1900, a much sounder lot.

Drew Cloud - a fraud for our time

News on the fake news front:

This Chronicle of Higher Education piece that unmasks an 'expert" on student loans, Drew Cloud, as a simulation - or fraud, depending on your lexicographic preferences - created by a student loan company is interesting.

"Drew Cloud is everywhere. The self-described journalist who specializes in student-loan debt has been quoted in major news outlets, including The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and CNBC, and is a fixture in the smaller, specialized blogosphere of student debt."

Now, I am wondering if the Washington Post will have a report on how, how, how they came to quote a fraud as a genuine source of expert opinion on student loans. The Chronicle of Higher Education article is very deadpan, which makes the explanations from various scroungers working for Student Loan Report, LLC , a company that wants to suck your blood after the first serving of your blood has been sucked by some other loan company - oops, I mean, a company which wants to explore exciting options in credit extension with former students! - very very funny. It turns out that making up a profile and persona was just a way of serving the public even better! "And on Monday, as The Chronicle continued to seek comment, Cloud suddenly evaporated. His once-prominent placement on The Student Loan Report had been removed. His bylines were replaced with "SLR Editor." Matherson confirmed on Tuesday that Cloud was an invention.

Pressed on whether he regretted deceiving news organizations with a fake source, Matherson said Cloud "was created as a way to connect with our readers (ex. people struggling to repay student debt) and give us the technical ability to post content to the Wordpress website. "Cloud had an elaborate back story. Before being scrubbed from the website, he was described as having "a knack for reporting throughout high school and college where he picked up his topics of choice." Since graduating from college, the site said, "Drew wanted to funnel his creative energy into an independent, authoritative news outlet covering an exclusive and developing industry.""

Read the article. Then preserve it. We need to put it in a time capsule so that our unfortunate descendants will be able to understand just how fucked up we were.

who planted the apple seeds? a slam against the rich

Jerome Zerbe was, if not the original café society photographer, at least one of the most celebrated from the 30s to the 50s. He had a regular gig at the Morocco, which was the classier version of the Stork club in New York. He was born into wealth, although not Mellonian wealth, and as time went on and his Dad died, the wealth decreased – which is how he came to take up café society photography.

So, he was around a lot of rich people. In an article about him by Brendan Gill in the New Yorker, he tells an anecdote about WWII, where Admiral Nimitz took a shine to him and made him his photographer. Zerbe wanted to be promoted to lieutenant, and Nimitz sent several messages to FDR to have this done by presidential decree, as it was a promotion that required executive order. FDR asked his son, who knew Zerbe, whether he should do it. His son said, “don’t give it a second thought. Jerry [Zerbe] already lives like an officer…”

Gill asked Zerbe whether he remained friends with Franklin, Jr., and Zerbe gave a classic response: “Friends,” said Zerbe, but I’ve never forgiven him for what he told his father.  It’s what we talk about whenever we meet. Like all rich boys, Frank had no idea what the commission whould have meant to me in pay, pensions and the like. It wasn’t the rank I wanted, but the emoluments. I’ve never been rich, and all my life I’ve gone around with the rich, and I find that they lack imagination when it comes to how anyone less rich than they are gets along. They always mean to be interested, but somehow their attention wanders.”

Indeed. I thought of this anecdote when I read the howler of a column by Morgan Bank’s “global strategy expert”, Ruchir Sharma, in the NYT opinion page the other day. Like most opinions by people hired by banks to have opinion, it is all about how the rich have problems imagining how “anyone less rich than they are gets along.” Sharma starts out by pointing to the fact that things are so good economically we all should be dancing. The evidence for this is higher employment rates – after a decade of low ones – and low inflation. So, why aren’t we? Well, there’s nationalism, and populism, and people who aren’t rich turn out to be such haters that leaders like Trump, Macron and Merkel aren’t popular.

“Perhaps the most persuasiveexplanation is the rise of angry populism, built on a rejection of theestablished order and a growing focus on issues of culture and nationalidentity, rather than practical economic outcomes.”

Absolutely absent from Sharma’s article are such things as wealth inequality, lifestyle debt, declining public investment, structural racism, and the effects of allowing the wealthy to inflect – or perhaps I should say corrupt? - the justice system, elections, and anything else in their path.

After all, to the eye of the Sharma’s of the world, all us underlings are “living like officers” – no matter that to keep up the lifestyle, we have to make up for minimal wage increases, losses of status that translate into losses of economic power, the end of job security and pensions, and the consciousness that the business cycle is not only sharp and pointy, but that the people who cause the downturn – the people who employ Sharma – get rescued when their games all fall apart, while the hundreds of millions they screw remain screwed.

“Practical economic outcomes” can be translated as – bonuses for the CEO class.

When the worms in the apples think they planted the apple seeds, it is time to upset the applecart. For “practical economic reasons.”

Great books are not for finishing

My private criteria for sorting the great works from the less great is that the less great are built to be finished. I have read many a fine novel that tied up all its ends in a completely satisfying way. I’ve reviewed them. They are made to be reviewed. When one can say, without compunction, that I have finished x novel, then it is ready to be praised, reviewed, put in a list – 100 greatest books – and so on. Such is its fate, and I bear these books no grudges, and sometimes love them. But there are other books that lodge in me, much like, oh, the apple that was thrown at Gregor Samsa and that lay in his shell, rotting. I’ve never finished any novel of Beckett’s. I’ve read, it is true, Ulysses maybe ten times in my life, but each reading has given me  different book. To finish Ulysses would be like finishing looking at Notre Dame. There are, of course, the small, fierce books that one can finish, but that take a lot of moves from the unfinishable works. For instance, Kafka’s stories. Poems that I love are built on the unfinishable principle as well. Perhaps this is why I love waste literature – Lichtenberg’s scribble books, Rozanov’s fallen leaves, Ludwig Hohl, Wittgenstein. Waste is something thrown away and thus supposedly finished – but the waste book takes as its principle the idea that you can repress it, but it will return. It will return from the hind end and erode everything that is finished in a text, from the paragraph to the sentence to the punctuation.

I love that creeping corruption.

out of the woods - Dante, Rousseau, Marx

   

  “All European culture – intellectual not less than material – came out of the woods.” Werner Sombart, Moderne Kapitalismus, Vol. 2  

The symbolic key to Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of inequality is found in the circumstances of its writing, as Rousseau described them in the Confessions:  

In order to meditate at my ease on this great subject, I made a trip of seven or eight days to Saint-Germain with Therese, and our hostess, who was a good woman, and one of her friends. I count this excursion among the most agreeable ones of my life. The weather was beautiful. The good women took upon themselves the trip’s expenses and organization. Thérèse enjoyed herself with them, and I, without a care, I spent happy hours at mealtime, and for the rest of the day, plunged into the forest, I searched, I discovered there images of the first time, of which I proudly traced the history. I put my hands on the little lies of men, I dared to strip their nature naked, follow the progress of time and things which defigured them, and comparing man with natural man, show them, the true source of their miseries in their so called perfections. My soul, exalted by these sublime contemplations, was elevated to the side of the Divinity; and seeing from there my likenesses, followed, in the blind route of their prejudices, that of their errors, of their sorrows, of their crimes, I cried aloud to them in a feeble voice that they could not hear. Foolish men, who ceaselessly complain about nature, learn that all your woes come from you yourselves!”

The return to the forest makes the Discourse one of the great European forest books. In the vastness of its scale – that of universal history - Rousseau’s book resembles another book that also begins in a forest:

“Midway through the journey of life/I found myself in a dark wood/for the straight way had been lost”.

Dante’s story encompasses universal history as well, but it is not seen as such – rather, it is seen as a cosmological story, unfolding the great Biblical, classical and Christian events in the afterlife. In Dante’s beginning, the sign that the straight way had been lost is the dark wood; in Rousseau’s, of course, the sign that the straight way had been lost is outside of the forest of Saint German.

In Charles Olson’s reckoning with Moby Dick, he begins by highlighting the material importance of whale hunting to the economy of the United States in Melville’s time. An exhaustively materialist reading of Rousseau’s Discourse could, perhaps, due with an introductory treatise on the importance of forests to the economies of France and other countries in Europe in the 18th century. As Jean Nicolas’ sweeping history of peasant rebellions in that century makes clear, forest rights were no longer the central issue in village jacqueries – but in the 17th century, they clearly had been. Even so, wood, along with clothing and food, stood at the center of European life in Rousseau’s time.

Nor was Rousseau the last of the writer’s of forest books. We think of certain classic American writers as creatures of the wood – Cooper, for instance, and, supremely, Thoreau. This makes sense: one of the driving commercial forces in the European expansion into North America wa all that forest, yearning to be chopped down, burned, made into ships, houses, pulped up as paper, etc. But back in Europe Marx, too, begins his real career by entering a forest – or at least entering into the issues that swirled around forest property rights, as he saw them being reshaped in Köln. Wood theft, according to the two scholars who have studied it in the German context (Blasius and Mooser) was one of the central crimes against property in the 19th century, from the 1830s to the 1860s – over about a generation. Marx’s five articles about the laws concerning wood theft are not, then, about an eccentric issue. And, as much as wood “theft” is an issue in the history of crime, it is also an issue in the creation of property –which is how it opened Marx’s eyes, as much as they were opened in his classes in property law at the University of Berlin.

It is here that we find Marx dealing with the kind of enclosures that were central to Polanyi theory of the Great Transformation. Private property was not, on this account, merely guarded by the state – the still reigning liberal myth. Rather, it was through the state that private property was defined. To separate the state from the private sphere is to move from historic fact to ideological myth, since they overlap, they are imbricated together, and it is impossible for one to exist without the other. Why that myth is important is another matter. What Marx saw happening was important in the way he came to see understand class, rather than remaining with Stand – a word that is hard to translate. Status, station, estate – those are the English equivalents.   In 1858, in the preface to the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economics, Marx wrote:

My major was jurisprudence, that I nonetheless only took up as a subordinate discipline near philosophy and history. In 1842-1843, as the editor of the "Rheinischen Zeitung", I was embarrassed for the first time to have to discuss so called material interests. The Rheinische Landtag’s treatment of Wood theft and the parceling out of land properties, which opened up an official polemic between Herr von Schaper, at that time the president of Rhein province, and the Rheinischen Zeitung over the situation of the grapegrowers, debates finally about free trade and tarrifs, gave me a first occasion to deal with economic questions. On the other hand the good will to go further into this further made up for a lot of special expertise, and a weak philosophically colored echo of French socialism and communism could be heard in the Rheinischen Zeitung. 

I find it significant that Dante, Rousseau and Marx, setting out to write, on the broadest of scales, the history of human civilization, begin in the forest. Surely this must be an intersigne, an exchange happening in the basement below universal history, where all the dealers in codexes are busy cutting them up and mashing them back together. One way to look at Capital – a bleak way, granted – is that it is the first European book to envision a world completely out of the woods, a human world which has put the woods behind it.