Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

The pseudo-science of neoclassical economics, part 123

They didn't get anything right in 2017.  But since they talk the language of capitalism, we will no doubt continue to hear from them in 2018.

Plutocracy watch: inherited fortunes should be confiscated to maximize utlity

A case study.

Happy Xmas to Xmas-celebrators.  And to the non-Xmas celebrators, God bless you!

What tax "reform" in a plutocracy looks like

This sums it up quite well and methodically.  And, one of the real goals, namely, to justify cuts to social welfare programs, is already rearing its head.   Although Trump hasn't killed us all (yet anyway), he has emboldened the imprudent wing of the ruling class in ways that promise either the ruin of the country or secession by the remaining civilized states.

There are hardworking people who clean toilets, thank goodness

Another gem from Robert Paul Wolff, a true man of the old left.   The list of "liberal" academics who treat people doing manual labor as invisible is long.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, neoliberal

This seems right to me.  To his credit, Cornel West has become more not less radical with age and correctly sees that the race issue is inseparable from the capitalism issue.

Nepotism, a glorious tradition at the New York Times

It continues.

Plutocracy watch: richest 1% now owns 40% of the nation's wealth...

...the most in the last 50 years.  And the government is currently run by billionaires looting the country under the guise of tax reform.  Go figure?

Plutocracy watch: tax "reform" edition

Somehow there were no last-minute tax breaks for working-class or poor people.  Go figure.

Philippa Foot's journey away from emotivism

This is a nicely done, "popular" essay on Philippa Foot and bits of 20th-century moral philosophy.  It caricatures emotivism in the usual ways that have become fashionable, and because of its British focus, it says nothing at all about  Charles Stevenson.  The author notes that,

Moral judgments, according to the then-dominant view [when Foot's career began], weren’t the sort of thing to be true or false, because they didn’t describe the world. They were trying to do something else – express emotion, prescribe actions, or something else of the kind. They were matters of choice, and to think otherwise was to deny that most basic of truths: that human beings construct their values.

Of course, this remains the correct view, but the author is right to position Foot (and others, like Anscombe) as reacting against it.  Why did Foot and others abandon this way of looking at thing.  The author's explanation is striking:

On guilt, shame, and bourgeois child-rearing..

...at The New York Times of course.  They all need to read more Nietzsche.

Reaction formation watch: Roy Moore edition

Reactionary Bible-thumping, holier-than-thou zealot has a penchant for sex with underage girls.

Against "the Trolley Problem"

This is amusing, and makes a couple of sound points, especially this:

In the actual world, decisions do not occur in this kind of vacuum, and it’s just as important to pay attention to the factors that structure individual choices as the nature of those choices. For example, we can ask whether it’s morally justified for me to steal a block of cheese in order to feed my starving, cheese-addicted child. (It is.) But if we focus on hashing out that question, debating how individuals should balance their obligation to follow the law with their obligation to their loved ones, we miss the far more crucial one: why am I even in this situation? The whole reason I am faced with an unpleasant set of choices is that I live in a highly unequal society in which children are deprived of the basic cheeses they need in order to survive. If we zero in on the question of what I should do once my choices have been set for me, we fail to ask whose actions caused me to have those particular options available to me, a.k.a. How Did I End Up On This Fucking Trolley To Begin With? If am forced against my will into a situation where people will die and I have no ability to stop it, how is my choice a “moral” choice between meaningfully different options, as opposed to a horror show I’ve just been thrust into, in which I have no meaningful agency at all? Let’s think a bit more about who put me here and how to keep them from having diabolical power over others. (Some might say this makes the trolley problem the perfect philosophy question for the “neoliberal” era, since it reduces everything to individual choice and tells us there is no alternative to existing power structures. Since the word “neoliberalism” is banned from the pages of Current Affairs, though, we ourselves would not say this.)

This is, as I've argued, indeed the defining feature of bourgeois practical philosophy.

UPDATE:  This is apt!  (Thanks to Nic Koziolek for the poinnter.)

The Internet and the crisis of epistemic authority

This is an excerpt from my Paolo Bozzi Prize address, "Realism and Moralism in Political Thought," last week in Turin at the conference on "Post-Truth, New Realism, and Democracy"; I'll put the whole paper on-line before long, but perhaps this bit will be of interest to some readers:

            Most of what we think we know about the world is due to reliance on epistemic authorities, individuals or institutions that tell us what we ought to believe about Newtonian mechanics, evolution by natural selection, climate change, resurrection from the dead, or the Holocaust.   The most practically fruitful epistemic norm of modernity, empiricism, demands that knowledge be grounded in sensory experience, but almost no one who believes in evolution by natural selection or the reality of the Holocaust has any sensory evidence in support of those beliefs.   Instead, we rely on epistemic authorities—biologists and historians, for example.   The dependence on epistemic authority is not confined to ordinary persons—most engineers, for example, do not have sensory evidence in support of the laws of Newtownian mechanics as applied to ordinary physical objects, but they have been told by their basic physics teachers that this evidence exists and that it is true (even as they have been told by their advanced physics teachers that Newtonian mechanics is false at the quantum level).

               Epistemic authority cannot be sustained by empiricist criteria, for obvious reasons:  salient anecdotal evidence, the favorite tool of propagandists, appeals to ordinary faith in the senses, but is easily exploited given that most people understand neither the perils of induction nor the finer points of sampling and Bayesian inference.   Sustaining epistemic authority depends, crucially, on social institutions that inculcate reliable second-order norms about whom to believe about what.  The media of mass communication were crucial, in the age of mass democracy, with promulgating and sustaining such norms.   Consider the most important newspaper in my country, the New York Times, which has long been an ideological mouthpiece for the more-or-less prudent wing of the ruling class in America, a newspaper that supported, for example, the imperial war of aggression against Vietnam in the 1960s and supported the neoliberal Hillary Clinton against a social democratic challenger for the 2016 Democratic nomination for President.  Notwithstanding that, the New York Times has served as a fairly good mediator of epistemic authority with respect to many other topics:  it has provided a bulwark against those who deny the reality of climate change or the human contribution to it; it has debunked those who think vaccinations causes autism; it gives no comfort to creationists and other religious zealots; and it treats genuine epistemic authorities about the natural world—for example, members of the National Academy of Sciences in America--as epistemic authorities in its journalism.  Genuine epistemic authority cannot exist in a population absent epistemic mediators like the New York Times.

               The Internet is, as we all know, the great eliminator of intermediaries.  This was its virtue for all those excluded, justly or unjustly in the past, from public discourse.  But as cyberspace, with its lack of mediators and filters, has become the primary source of information for most people in the economically advanced nations, its ability to undermine epistemic authority has become alarmingly evident.  The Internet is the epistemological crisis of the 21^st century:  it magnifies ignorance and stupidity and is now leading hundreds of millions, maybe now billions, of people to act on the basis of the fantasy world it constructs.

Nanay: Don't "know thyself"

This essay by philosopher Bence Nanay (Antwerp) makes a couple of amusing points, but I was struck by this:

[M]ost changes happen gradually and under the radar. A few mechanisms of these changes are well understood, such as the ‘mere exposure effect’: the more you are exposed to something, the more you tend to like it. Another, more troubling one, is that the more your desire for something is frustrated, the more you tend to dislike it. These changes happen gradually, often without us noticing anything.

The problem is this: if we change while our self-image remains the same, then there will be a deep abyss between who we are and who we think we are. And this leads to conflict.

To make things worse, we are exceptionally good at dismissing even the possibility that we might change. Psychologists have given this phenomenon a fancy name: ‘The End of History Illusion’. We all think that who we are now is the finished product: we will be the same in five, 10, 20 years. But, as these psychologists found, this is completely delusional – our preferences and values will be very different already in the not-so-distant future.

Why is this such a big issue? It might be okay when it comes to ordering the espresso. Maybe you now slightly prefer cappuccino, but you think of yourself as an espresso kind of person, so you keep ordering espresso. So you’re enjoying your morning drink a little bit less – not such a big deal.

But what is true of espresso is true of other preferences and values in life. Maybe you used to genuinely enjoy doing philosophy, but you no longer do. But as being a philosopher is such a stable feature of your self-image, you keep doing it. There is a huge difference between what you like and what you do. What you do is dictated not by what you like, but by what kind of person you think you are.

A number of rather serious philosophers (more serious, certainly, than the latest p-hackers in the increasingly beleaguered field of psychology) have advanced the view that character--who one is--is quite stable over much of one's life.  Schopenhauer may be the most famous modern proponent of the idea, but Nietzsche, notwithstanding the narcissism of small differences of which he was often guilty, agreed.  This passage is typical:

At the foundation of each of us, the "real bottom," there is clearly something unteachable, a brick wall of spiritual fatum, of predetermined decisions and answers to selected questions.  With respect to cardinal problems, an immutable "that I am" speaks up. (Beyond Good and Evil, 231)

The defect in the literature Prof. Nanay alludes to is that it can't distinguish between the changes that are just "noise" and those that are foundational to who the person really is.   In addition to the p-value disaster currently afflicting psychology, there really is a serious (dare I say it?) "philosophical" problem, namely, that these folks are not at all clear about what it is to be the person that one is.  They need to read some Schopenhauer and Nietzsche!

Imprudent wing of the ruling class not getting its way...

...so will stop paying bribes.  Serious trouble for the Republican Party!

Who could fail to take pleasure in the revelation that this right-wing SOB--who wanted to steal medical care from the needy--has been indulging himself...

...on public money?  Of course, that's what the entire ruling class does, but not so obviously!

Thus spake Heinrich Heine

As memorably quoted by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents:

Mine is a most peaceable disposition. My wishes are: a humble cottage with a thatched roof, but a good bed, good food, the freshest milk and butter, flowers before my window, and a few fine trees before my door; and if God wants to make my happiness complete, he will grant me the joy of seeing some six or seven of my enemies hanging from those trees. Before their death I shall, moved in my heart, forgive them all the wrong they did me in their lifetime. One must, it is true, forgive one's enemies -- but not before they have been hanged.

Plutocracy watch: Koch Brothers demand results from legislators before bribes will be paid

Details here.

Tyler Cowen, representative of the "complacent intellectual class"

Philosopher-turned-journalist David V. Johnson skewers the economist's latest book, and makes several nice points along the way, e.g.:

Cowen shrouds his core thesis, which is a causal claim: America’s stasis and stagnation is caused by the complacent class. It is because people make the choices and behave the way they do that our society lacks dynamism. Is this causal claim true?

I believe that it is false. In fact, I would maintain the converse is true: It is because our society is suffering from stagnation—a stagnation upheld by vast inequalities of wealth and income that empower the preferences of the wealthy at the expense of everyone else’s power—that people behave in ways that Cowen labels “complacent” but which are more accurately described in different ways, depending on the class of people in question. People who are in the “stuck” class are people who lack money; they tend to “choose” not to move to more economically robust parts of the country, for example, because they don’t have the money or social capital to move. “Dug in” people don’t launch new businesses, for example, because the risk of failure in a society without an adequate safety net and an economy dominated by powerful monopolies is too great. “Privileged” people actively make choices that uphold the status quo. They may be overlooking the social upheaval that may result from stagnation, but they may be betting—like so many elites before them in history—that their money and power can keep such upheaval at bay.

Perhaps I am wrong about the causality here. But I haven’t written a book on it. The important point for Cowen is that he needs to argue for his causal claim, rather than rhetorically confuse his basic terms in ways that make his bold thesis seem intuitive when it actually goes unargued—and laughably so. On a superficial read, Cowen’s book may seem like a substantive bit of economic, social and cultural criticism, but it really amounts to the worst form of sophistry....

Cowen delights in making bold claims without argument or evidence that are transparently ridiculous. And shockingly for an economist, they often involve what I have elsewhere labelled “sentimentalism”: the tendency to attribute structural economic and social problems to moral and psychological causes—in this case, complacency.

Capitalism is the problem

A younger generation is noticing.  The quote from Nancy Pelosi, spokesperson for the more-or-less prudent wing of the ruling class, is priceless.

"Chicago Carnage" from the Rebel Pundit

This is bracing, and makes a couple of good points:

UPDATE:  Philosopher John Casey (Northeastern Illinois) points out to me that "Rebel Pundit" is a front organization for a Breitbart wacko named Jeremy Segal, whose purpose is obviously to suppress African-American voting.  Unlike most of the Breitbart crew, this guy isn't that stupid, since he manages to work in some sound points.  But this explanation now makes clear to me why there were only "a couple of good" points and that some of it seemed quite weird.

 

On Cedric Robinson

This is interesting, from the always interesting Boston Review.  It does involve some misunderstandings of Marx, however.

Haley Kossek has a message for Chelsean Clinton...

...and it's priceless.  Please dear God, even if you don't exist, banish these Clintons from our lives.

Jeffrey Sachs on Ronald Reagan

This, of course, is quite right, though it does suggest he reads this blog!

Thus spake Rousseau

"Jealousy, suspicion, fear, coldness, reserve, hate and fraud lie constantly concealed under that uniform and deceitful veil of politeness."

                    --Rousseau, First Discourse

Reaction formation watch: anti-LGBT state senator in Oklahoma arrested for solilciting sex with underage gay prostitute

Ralph Shortey, Dr. Freud is waiting for you.

The first critic of "identity politcs": Karl Marx in "On the Jewish Question"

A propos the long excerpt from political theorist Adolph Reed I posted two weeks ago, a PhD student in German philosophy elsewhere wrote with this very apt analysis of Marx's own contribution to the debate in this famous, early essay:

Marx's surprising claim in OtJQ is that, while calls for equal treatment of disenfranchised ethnic and religious minorities may seem to subvert the prevailing social and economic order, they are actually often welcomed by it for reasons having to do with the logic of capitalism.  Calls for the emancipation of German Jews in the 1840s merely seem revolutionary, and, to a certain extent, are revolutionary - especially because of the prevailing Christian anti-semitism of the times, an anti-semitism only abetted by the Christian state. Anti-semitism is a real phenomenon, and its abolition urgently needed. What could be more obvious than that? However, these calls for emancipation are, in another respect, regressive. The extension of formal legal equality to disenfranchised groups is perfectly in keeping with the logic of capitalism, which seeks to erode all ethnic, national religious and ideological barriers among people so as to integrate them more effectively into a world market - one in which the only division left is the class division between laborer and capitalist (a division the market itself masks). Concretely, the ability to own property and participate in markets should be as widespread as possible for this to function, and that ability is unthinkable without legally protected rights of various kinds. So the call for emancipation, though partially emancipatory, is, in this instance, something of a capitalist ruse.  "Political emancipation", the granting of formal legal equality, and other less tangible forms of equal status to disenfranchised religious and ethnic minorities, would never be sufficient for true, human emancipation - a fact evidenced for Marx by the fact that the most formally egalitarian nation on earth (the USA) remained among the most religious, and therefore, most alienated (here, Marx is relying on Feuerbach's insight that the persistence of religion is evidence of frustrated human aspirations). True human emancipation would come about not through the inclusion of disenfranchised minorities into the prevailing social and economic order but, rather, through its revolutionary overthrow and the replacement of a mode of production driven by the interest of a particular class by one governed by the general will. 

The lesson for today: identity politics, though potentially emancipatory, risks unwitting complicity with the dominant capitalist order, since there is a natural, economically driven tendency in this system towards the inclusion of ever more excluded groups, not for the sake of liberation, but, rather, as a means of integrating them into the prevailing economic system.

"Strangers to Ourselves": Themes from German Philosophy and Cognitive Science

I'll be occupied with this conference my Center is hosting here this weekend, so there won't be much new until Monday.  (For those interested, the program:  Download Strangers to Oursevles German Phil Cog Sci--I predict this will be the new growth field!)

Reed on the identity politics "left," which is really part of the neoliberal right

Philippe Lemoine called to my attention another interesting piece by Adolf Reed, Jr..  I know some readers are sometimes puzzled by my position on the far left in rather obvious ways with my rather limited tolerance for "identity politics," "diversity" blather, and the like.  Reed's piece might help explain why; here's an excerpt:

[A]ntiracist politics is in fact the left wing of neoliberalism in that its sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the distribution of goods and bads in the society, an ideal that naturalizes the outcomes of capitalist market forces so long as they are equitable along racial (and other identitarian) lines. As I and my colleague Walter Benn Michaels have insisted repeatedly over the last decade, the burden of that ideal of social justice is that the society would be fair if 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources so long as the dominant 1% were 13% black, 17% Latino, 50% female, 4% or whatever LGBTQ, etc. That is the neoliberal gospel of economic justice, articulated more than a half-century ago by Chicago neoclassical economist Gary Becker, as nondiscriminatory markets that reward individual “human capital” without regard to race or other invidious distinctions....

A thread for further comments on the misconduct by the Hypatia editors and the defamation of Prof. Tuvel

MOVING TO FRONT FROM MAY 4--FURTHER DISCUSSION INVITED

I continue to get e-mail from readers related to this earlier thread; I think it will be more efficient to open a discussion thread here for further contributions.  Do look at the earlier contributions by Debra Satz, Jose Bermudez, Matt Kotzen et al. to get an idea what is sought.  I will moderate and edit for substance and discursive relevance.  Thanks.  (Signed comments only, valid e-mail address, which will not appear.)

ADDENDUM:  Trying to moderate two threads, I've lost track about which permitted pseudonyms, which didn't.  I do still require a valid e-mail address, that won't be published, and please try to keep it substantive.

Does Trump suffer from narcissistic personality disorder?

A psychiatrist responsible for the DSM definition says he does not, but the reasons given are not very good ones.  (See an earlier discussion of this topic here.)  He claims that Trump does not suffer distress and impairment connected to his personality traits (note that the psychiatrist does not deny he manifests those traits).   He appears to confuse the fact that money and lawyers shield him from the worst consequences of his psychological peculiarities with the fact that he does not appear to be severely impaired in his profession.  But the impairment is apparent in other ways:  he doesn't appear to have real human relationships (he's on his third purchased wife), his relations with others are wholly instrumental, and despite inheriting a huge fortune and investing in New York real estate in the 1970s, he was never able to become a real player in the New York real estate market because others avoided him because of his problems.  (This bears emphasizing:  he was never one of the top ten developers in New York, and those folks would not deal with him.  Anyone familiar with the NYC real estate market knows this!)  We have less evidence about the distress he suffers, but it is hard not to interpret the bizarre tweeting and other outbursts as signs of serious distress, which he then tries to mend via public displays of various kinds.

Psychiatry is an epistemically feeble discipline, and the connotations of "mental illness" complicate things further.  Let's drop the question of whether his narcissistic personality disorder is a mental illness.  What's useful about the personality disorders, when they are useful at all, is that they do identify stable patterns of behavior that some people do exemplify.  Trump is one.  Having a narcissistic personality disorder may or may not be incompatible with being President--so far, the evidence is that he's quite impaired in his ability to govern, but that's all to the good given the mischief he would otherwise pursue were he more competent.

How Bannon thinks

We know how Trump thinks, and a distinguishing feature of it is that it includes precious few ideas, and no ideology:  it is driven mainly by personal relationships and loyalties, plus the quirks of his psychological disturbance.   Bannon, by contrast, has ideas and an ideology, and this is the best synthesis of what they are.  (See also this and this, and recall an earlier post about his speech to the Vatican traditionalists.) It is a strange brew, about what you would expect from a working-class Irish-Catholic kid without any real intellectual discipline or sophistication.  He notices real events--e.g., Wall Street bankers being bailed out after the 2008 fiasco while working-class Americans see their retirement savings or their property values collapse--but has no serious diagnosis about cause and effect, instead interjecting as an interpretive rubric various petty bigotries and prejudices that he probably learned in his youth with crackpot theories about the "real" trends of history.  He correctly sees that there are elites, but fails to see that he shares with them the most crucial commitment, namely, to capitalist relations of production.  He understands too little about capitalism to realize that his silly nationalist bromides are actually incompatible with the capitalism he cherishes, that the "Davos class" of elites he bemoans are the necessary consequence of the economic system he still supports.   This is apparent to other members of the ruling class, e.g., this billionaire investor:

“President [sic] Trump may be able to temporarily hold off the sweep of automation and globalization by cajoling companies to keep jobs at home, but bolstering inefficient and uncompetitive enterprises is likely to only temporarily stave off market forces,” he continued. “While they might be popular, the reason the U.S. long ago abandoned protectionist trade policies is because they not only don’t work, they actually leave society worse off.”

Bannon once professed that, like Lenin, he wanted to destroy the system.  He should read some more Lenin, and then he might even develop a coherent world view and understand the actual role of Republican policies in it.

Cassirer on fascism and "mythological thinking"

This is quite interesting.

(Thanks to Daniel Buk for the pointer.)

Philosophical parochialism on display while protesting philosophical parochialism

Philosopher Meena Krishnamurthy (Michigan) challenges the standard Anglophone narrative that nothing of note happened in political philosophy between Mill and Rawls--at least initially, the challenge is to the idea that nothing happened in "analytic political philosophy" of note between these two giants of the genre.  But later Professor Krishnamurthy drops the "analytic," leaving me a bit uncertain about the claim she is making.

The clearly correct claim she makes is that there was a lot of theorizing about questions of political and moral importance by Dubois, Ghandi, King, and others during this period; it is less clear, however, that the contributions of these writers were a contribution to "analytic political philosophy," at least as one might have thought that stylistic genre is defined with Mill and Rawls as reference points (she returns to this issue near the end of her essay).  But once we drop "analytic," then it seems even more parochial to notice Dubois and Ghandi, say, but not to notice Lenin and Luckas and Adorno and Marcuse.  Now the latter, of course, are all figures of note in the broadly Marxists tradition of political thought, ones that are heavily disfavored in both Anglophone philosophy and in Anglophone philosophy's recent cyber-romance with identity politics.  (The only identities that count are those related to gender, race, and ethnicity.)  Indeed, while many top 25 departments have made a significant faculty investment in philosophy of race in recent years, not a single one of these departments has appointed anyone working in the Marxian traditions during this same time period--and not because they already had large numbers of experts with primary appointments in philosophy on staff (the only ones I can think of are Peter Railton at Michigan, Tommie Shelby at Harvard, Elliott Sober at Wisconsin, Daniel Brudney at Chicago, Richard Miller at Cornell, and Allen Wood at Indiana--and most of these philosophers have  not written on Marx in ages, let alone on the Frankfurt School or other figures in the 20th-century Marxian traditions).  

ADDENDUM:  Professor Krishnamurthy writes (and kindly gave me permission to share):

First, I would like to thank you for engaging with my post. Second, as a point of clarification, I was focusing on “analytic political philosophy” throughout the post. Third, I would agree that Marxism has been ignored by analytic political philosophy to some extent, though I would argue this it is less so than the thinkers I mentioned. And, of course, I would think that the mechanisms underlying this exclusion are different. I’d be curious to hear from those who are more familiar with Marx about what these mechanisms might be. Why would Marxists be excluded? 

Parochialism  plays a role in both cases, I suspect; the lack of interest in Marxism strikes me as more startling, though, in part because many of the theorists noted above were clearly working in philosophical idioms, if not the usual analytic ones.  But I agree that different considerations probably explain the relative neglect in the different cases.  As the recent investment in philosophy of race by leading PhD programs, noted above, shows, it is a lot easier to be working on DuBois than Adorno these days in Anglophone philosophy!  (I am in favor of both; the obvious relevance of the Marxian tradition to recent real-world developments would be a good occasion for departments to invest as much in those areas too!)

ANOTHER:  A young philosopher (currently on the job market) writes with an interesting observation:

The people [Prof. Krishnamurthy] mentions are, I think, "philosophical", and so reasonably subject to discussion in a philosophy class without too much trouble, but not philosophers, so it's not surprise they are not discussed - it takes a lot of work to transform them into forms easily dealt with by philosophical analysis as main subjects or texts, and then you have to ask why to do so.  I mean, it's not that much different from the fact that very few political philosophy classes read Tocqueville, or Ben Franklin, or Thomas Jefferson, or Thomas Paine, or Hobhouse, etc. (to take just a list of people who are included in the Cambridge History of Political Thought books.)  So, I'm not sure that the sort of "parochialism" she has in mind is the clear explanation.  (I should mention that I have read, enjoyed, and learned from not only Paine and Hobhouse, but also du Bois, etc.  If we are going to complain about philosophers not reading or teaching du Bois, why not his teacher, Weber, who is also rarely taught in a political philosophy class?)

Trump is infantile--literally, not figuratively

Robert Paul Wolff explains.

Obama: friend of the capitalist ruling class

Shocking!  But the proof is in the policies.

(Thanks to Michael Swanson for the pointer.)

The future of (wage-slavery) work

It is grim.  Of course, it could also prove liberating if productive power were put in the service of human well-being rather than profit.

Cornel West on Obama's legacy

There's something to this.

Enough blather about the superstructure...

...let's take a look at what's going on with the relations of production in America (everything below comes from the linked article, no commentary of my own):

The percentage of workers engaged in alternative work arrangements – defined as temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract workers, and independent contractors or freelancers – rose from 10.1 percent [of all employed workers] in February 2005 to 15.8 percent in late 2015.

That is a huge jump, especially since the percentage of workers with alternative work arrangements barely budged over the period February 1995 to February 2005; it was only 9.3 in 1995.

But their most startling finding is the following:

A striking implication of these estimates is that all of the net employment growth in the U.S. economy from 2005 to 2015 appears to have occurred in alternative work arrangements. Total employment according to the CPS increased by 9.1 million (6.5 percent) over the decade, from 140.4 million in February 2005 to 149.4 in November 2015. The increase in the share of workers in alternative work arrangements from 10.1 percent in 2005 to 15.8 percent in 2015 implies that the number of workers employed in alternative arrangement increased by 9.4 million (66.5 percent), from 14.2 million in February 2005 to 23.6 million in November 2015. Thus, these figures imply that employment in traditional jobs (standard employment arrangements) slightly declined by 0.4 million (0.3 percent) from 126.2 million in February 2005 to 125.8 million in November 2015.

Take a moment to let that sink in—and think about what that tells us about the operation of the US economy and the future for working people.  Employment in so-called traditional jobs is actually shrinking. The only types of jobs that have been growing in net terms are ones in which workers have little or no security and minimal social benefits....

There is a clear age gradient that has grown stronger, with older workers more likely to have nonstandard employment than younger workers.  In 2015, 6.4 percent of those aged 16 to 24 were employed in an alternative work arrangement, while 14.3 percent of those aged 25-54 and 23.9 percent of those aged 55-74 had nonstandard work arrangements.

The percentage of women with nonstandard work arrangements grew dramatically from 2005 to 2015, from 8.3 percent to 17 percent.  Women are now more likely to be employed under these conditions than men.

Workers in all educational levels experienced a jump in nonstandard work, with the increase greatest for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher.  “Occupational groups experiencing particularly large increases in the nonstandard work from 2005 to 2015 include computer and mathematical, community and social services, education, health care, legal, protective services, personal care, and transportation jobs.”

The authors also tested to determine “whether alternative work is growing in higher or lower wage sectors of the labor market.”  They found that “workers with attributes and jobs that are associated with higher wages are more likely to have their services contracted out than are those with attributes and jobs that are associated with lower wages. Indeed, the lowest predicted quintile-wage group did not experience a rise in contract work.”

The take-away

The take-away is pretty clear.  Corporate profits and income inequality have grown in large part because US firms have successfully taken advantage of the weak state of unions and labor organizing more generally, to transform work relations.  Increasingly workers, regardless of their educational level, find themselves forced to take jobs with few if any benefits and no long-term or ongoing relationship with their employer.  Only a rejuvenated labor movement, one able to build strong democratic unions and press for radically new economic policies will be able to reverse existing trends. 

It may be the end of "progressive neoliberalism"...

...as philosopher Nancy Fraser (New School) writes, but that's no guarantee of a better alternative, to put it mildly.

Here's what we can look forward to

An apt diagnosis, I fear.  An excerpt:

There is no sign that 2017 will be much different from 2016.

Under Israeli occupation for decades, Gaza will still be the biggest open prison on Earth..

In the United States, the killing of black people at the hands of the police will proceed unabated and hundreds of thousands more will join those already housed in the prison-industrial complex that came on the heels of plantation slavery and Jim Crow laws.

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Europe will continue its slow descent into liberal authoritarianism or what cultural theorist Stuart Hall called authoritarian populism. Despite complex agreements reached at international forums, the ecological destruction of the Earth will continue and the war on terror will increasingly morph into a war of extermination between various forms of nihilism.

Inequalities will keep growing worldwide. But far from fuelling a renewed cycle of class struggles, social conflicts will increasingly take the form of racism, ultra nationalism, sexism, ethnic and religious rivalries, xenophobia, homophobia and other deadly passions.

The denigration of virtues such as care, compassion and kindness will go hand in hand with the belief, especially among the poor, that winning is all that matters and who wins — by whatever means necessary — is ultimately right.

With the triumph of this neo-Darwinian approach to history-making, apartheid under various guises will be restored as the new old norm. Its restoration will pave the way to new separatist impulses, the erection of more walls, the militarisation of more borders, deadly forms of policing, more asymmetrical wars, splitting alliances and countless internal divisions including in established democracies.

None of the above is accidental. If anything, it is a symptom of structural shifts, which will become ever more apparent as the new century unfolds. The world as we knew it since the end of World War II, the long years of decolonisation, the Cold War and the defeat of communism has ended.

Another long and deadlier game has started. The main clash of the first half of the 21st century will not oppose religions or civilisations. It will oppose liberal democracy and neoliberal capitalism, the rule of finance and the rule of the people, humanism and nihilism.

If there's anything wrong with this diagnosis is that it understates the role of capitalist logic in everything that came before too.  And from the conclusion:

Neoliberal capitalism has left in its wake a multitude of destroyed subjects, many of whom are deeply convinced that their immediate future will be one of continuous exposure to violence and existential threat.

They genuinely long for a return to some sense of certainty, the sacred, hierarchy, religion and tradition. They believe that nations have become akin to swamps that need to be drained and the world as it is should be brought to an end. For this to happen, everything should be cleansed off. They are convinced that they can only be saved in a violent struggle to restore their masculinity, the loss of which they attribute to the weaker among them, the weak they do not want to become.

In this context, the most successful political entrepreneurs will be those who convincingly speak to the losers, to the destroyed men and women of globalisation and to their ruined identities.

In the street fight politics will become, reason will not matter. Nor will facts. Politics will revert into brutal survivalism in an ultracompetitive environment.

That sounds familiar.

One piece of good news at the end of an otherwise very bad year

Religion is on the decline in America:

Fewer American adults, especially those under 30, attend church — or even belong to a church.  They tell interviewers their religion is “none.” They ignore faith.

Since 1990, the “nones” have exploded rapidly as a sociological phenomenon — from 10 percent of U.S. adults, to 15 percent, to 20 percent. Now they’ve climbed to 25 percent, according to a 2016 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute.

That makes them the nation’s largest faith category, outstripping Catholics (21 percent) and white evangelicals (16 percent).  They seem on a trajectory to become an outright majority.   America is following the secular path of Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and other modern places.  The Secular Age is snowballing.

Good work capitalism!  Of course, the "nones" make up an even bigger part of certain elite institutions, such as universities.  I would guess the percentage of "nones" on the law faculty here, for example, is on the order of 75%.

Trump Psychological Disturbance watch: Adler weighs in...

...with the help of a mediary.

(Thanks to Howard Berman for the pointer.)

Why there will not be a socialist *revolution*

Robert Paul Wolff explains.

Capitalism in action

Chances of earning more than your parents in America used to be over 90% and declined to 50% by 1980 (I bet money it is even lower today).

(Thanks to Bill Edmundson for the pointer.)

The Frankfurt School, the "culture industry," and Trump...

...in The New Yorker.

Breaking news: turns out Trump will represent the short-term interests of his economic class after all

Shocking!

The real meaning of Trump's deal with Carrier in Indiana

Senator Sanders cuts to the chase.

Ruling class regroups after Trump victory

Another former Goldman Sachs banker will be Secretary of the Treasury.  Markets will rally tomorrow.  God Bless America!

(My real hope, I confess, is that he picks the retired Marine General James Mattis for Defense Secretary--this matters, because a career military officer like Mattis understands what nuclear weapons are, unlike Dopey Donald Chump.)

NY Times on Fidel Castro

NYT obituaries are often more informative about the ideology of imperialism and the American ruling class than they are about their subjects, and the obituary of Castro does not disappoint in that regard; the very first paragraph (the revealing parts in bold):

Fidel Castro, the fiery apostle of revolution who brought the Cold War to the Western Hemisphere in 1959 and then defied the United States for nearly half a century as Cuba’s maximum leader, bedeviling 11 American presidents and briefly pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war, died Friday.

Last I looked, Cuba was a sovereign nation not under U.S. control, so what can it possibly mean for the leader of that nation to "defy" the U.S., unless of course one assumes that a sovereign nation close to the U.S. must do the bidding of the U.S. as it had done under the fascist Batista.  Even more remarkably, it is Castro whose agency is credited with bringing "the world to the brink of nuclear war," not the "best and the brightest" of the imperial power whose self-serving provocations actually created the crisis.

If Castro had been a student of Marx, he would, shortly after overthrowing the fascist Batista, have created a social democracy, with robust private markets to fuel the development of productive forces in his underdeveloped nation and combined that with a generous welfare state to promote and protect human well-being.  He tried to do the latter, but could only sustain it with support from the Soviet Union (since the U.S. economic blockade deprived Cuba of it primary trading partner), which ended when the latter did.   As Marx had observed, communism "presuppose[s] a great increase in productive power, a high degree of development," which only capitalism can produce; this is, he said, "an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced," as, indeed, it was tragically in "communist" Cuba.

UPDATE:  Roger Albin (Michigan) writes:

The NYT obit doesn’t mention what was likely Castro’s greatest achievement- the important role played by the Cubans in the demise of apartheid.  Cuban military action, which included battles with the South African Defense Force, prevented the apartheid regime from maintaining a cordon sanitaire around South Africa.  This was a major factor in the De Klerk regime’s decision to seek some kind of accommodation.  Since our lazy media are committed to the facile view of the end of apartheid as an example of non-violent change, this will not be mentioned in any descriptions of Castro’s life.  Mandela knew better.  Shortly after his release from prison, he visited Havana to express gratitude to Castro.