Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy, & Culture

South End Press | New Releases

2009-06-14T15:05:13Z

South End Press is still the best publisher for radicals.

http://www.southendpress.org/latest (via shareaholic)

The Difference Between FDR and Obama = FDR Madison Square Garden Speech 1936

2009-04-22T17:21:36Z

This is a link to a recording and transcript of Franklin Roosevelt's1936 campaign speech where he says of the rich and powerful "They are unanimous in their hatred of me and I welcome their hatred." The difference between an Obama and a Roosevelt can be seen clearly. Obama wants to be liked by everyone, even the rulers and the rich. Roosevelt knew the rich would hate him if he tried to do anything to change the rules of the game. Roosevelt saved capitalism in spite of the capitalists who opposed him. But he knew the ruling class from the inside and knew that to do something decent he would provoke the hated of the rich, even if his actions were ultimately to the benefit of the system from which the rich benefit. It takes a person who knew the ruling class intimately to oppose them in this way. Obama on the other hand is needful of the respect of the rulers and will never welcome the hatred of the rich, even though this is exactly what a reformer needs to do in order to win reforms.

Below the cut find the text of the speech.

FDR campaigning in 1936

President Franklin D. Roosevelt

October 31, 1936

Madison Square Garden Speech

Senator Wagner, Governor Lehman, ladies and gentlemen:

On the eve of a national election, it is well for us to stop for a moment and analyze calmly and without prejudice the effect on our Nation of a victory by either of the major political parties.

The problem of the electorate is far deeper, far more vital than the continuance in the Presidency of any individual. For the greater issue goes beyond units of humanity‹it goes to humanity itself.

In 1932 the issue was the restoration of American democracy; and the American people were in a mood to win. They did win. In 1936 the issue is the preservation of their victory. Again they are in a mood to win. Again they will win.

More than four years ago in accepting the Democratic nomination in Chicago, I said: "Give me your help not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people."

The banners of that crusade still fly in the van of a Nation that is on the march.

It is needless to repeat the details of the program which this Administration has been hammering out on the anvils of experience. No amount of misrepresentation or statistical contortion can conceal or blur or smear that record. Neither the attacks of unscrupulous enemies nor the exaggerations of over-zealous friends will serve to mislead the American people.

What was our hope in 1932? Above all other things the American people wanted peace. They wanted peace of mind instead of gnawing fear.

First, they sought escape from the personal terror which had stalked them for three years. They wanted the peace that comes from security in their homes: safety for their savings, permanence in their jobs, a fair profit from their enterprise.

Next, they wanted peace in the community, the peace that springs from the ability to meet the needs of community life: schools, playgrounds, parks, sanitation, highways‹those things which are expected of solvent local government. They sought escape from disintegration and bankruptcy in local and state affairs.

They also sought peace within the Nation: protection of their currency, fairer wages, the ending of long hours of toil, the abolition of child labor, the elimination of wild-cat speculation, the safety of their children from kidnappers.

And, finally, they sought peace with other Nations‹peace in a world of unrest. The Nation knows that I hate war, and I know that the Nation hates war.

I submit to you a record of peace; and on that record a well-founded expectation for future peace‹peace for the individual, peace for the community, peace for the Nation, and peace with the world.

Tonight I call the roll‹the roll of honor of those who stood with us in 1932 and still stand with us today.

Written on it are the names of millions who never had a chance‹men at starvation wages, women in sweatshops, children at looms.

Written on it are the names of those who despaired, young men and young women for whom opportunity had become a will-o'-the-wisp.

Written on it are the names of farmers whose acres yielded only bitterness, business men whose books were portents of disaster, home owners who were faced with eviction, frugal citizens whose savings were insecure.

Written there in large letters are the names of countless other Americans of all parties and all faiths, Americans who had eyes to see and hearts to understand, whose consciences were burdened because too many of their fellows were burdened, who looked on these things four years ago and said, "This can be changed. We will change it."

We still lead that army in 1936. They stood with us then because in 1932 they believed. They stand with us today because in 1936 they know. And with them stand millions of new recruits who have come to know.

Their hopes have become our record.

We have not come this far without a struggle and I assure you we cannot go further without a struggle.

For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! Powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent.

For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace‹business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me‹and I welcome their hatred.

I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.

The American people know from a four-year record that today there is only one entrance to the White House‹by the front door. Since March 4, 1933, there has been only one pass-key to the White House. I have carried that key in my pocket. It is there tonight. So long as I am President, it will remain in my pocket.

Those who used to have pass-keys are not happy. Some of them are desperate. Only desperate men with their backs to the wall would descend so far below the level of decent citizenship as to foster the current pay-envelope campaign against America's working people. Only reckless men, heedless of consequences, would risk the disruption of the hope for a new peace between worker and employer by returning to the tactics of the labor spy.

Here is an amazing paradox! The very employers and politicians and publishers who talk most loudly of class antagonism and the destruction of the American system now undermine that system by this attempt to coerce the votes of the wage earners of this country. It is the 1936 version of the old threat to close down the factory or the office if a particular candidate does not win. It is an old strategy of tyrants to delude their victims into fighting their battles for them.

Every message in a pay envelope, even if it is the truth, is a command to vote according to the will of the employer. But this propaganda is worse‹it is deceit.

They tell the worker his wage will be reduced by a contribution to some vague form of old-age insurance. They carefully conceal from him the fact that for every dollar of premium he pays for that insurance, the employer pays another dollar. That omission is deceit.

They carefully conceal from him the fact that under the federal law, he receives another insurance policy to help him if he loses his job, and that the premium of that policy is paid 100 percent by the employer and not one cent by the worker. They do not tell him that the insurance policy that is bought for him is far more favorable to him than any policy that any private insurance company could afford to issue. That omission is deceit.

They imply to him that he pays all the cost of both forms of insurance. They carefully conceal from him the fact that for every dollar put up by him his employer puts up three dollars three for one. And that omission is deceit.

But they are guilty of more than deceit. When they imply that the reserves thus created against both these policies will be stolen by some future Congress, diverted to some wholly foreign purpose, they attack the integrity and honor of American Government itself. Those who suggest that, are already aliens to the spirit of American democracy. Let them emigrate and try their lot under some foreign flag in which they have more confidence.

The fraudulent nature of this attempt is well shown by the record of votes on the passage of the Social Security Act. In addition to an overwhelming majority of Democrats in both Houses, seventy-seven Republican Representatives voted for it and only eighteen against it and fifteen Republican Senators voted for it and only five against it. Where does this last-minute drive of the Republican leadership leave these Republican Representatives and Senators who helped enact this law?

I am sure the vast majority of law-abiding businessmen who are not parties to this propaganda fully appreciate the extent of the threat to honest business contained in this coercion.

I have expressed indignation at this form of campaigning and I am confident that the overwhelming majority of employers, workers and the general public share that indignation and will show it at the polls on Tuesday next.

Aside from this phase of it, I prefer to remember this campaign not as bitter but only as hard-fought. There should be no bitterness or hate where the sole thought is the welfare of the United States of America. No man can occupy the office of President without realizing that he is President of all the people.

It is because I have sought to think in terms of the whole Nation that I am confident that today, just as four years ago, the people want more than promises.

Our vision for the future contains more than promises.

This is our answer to those who, silent about their own plans, ask us to state our objectives.

Of course we will continue to seek to improve working conditions for the workers of America‹to reduce hours over-long, to increase wages that spell starvation, to end the labor of children, to wipe out sweatshops. Of course we will continue every effort to end monopoly in business, to support collective bargaining, to stop unfair competition, to abolish dishonorable trade practices. For all these we have only just begun to fight.

Of course we will continue to work for cheaper electricity in the homes and on the farms of America, for better and cheaper transportation, for low interest rates, for sounder home financing, for better banking, for the regulation of security issues, for reciprocal trade among nations, for the wiping out of slums. For all these we have only just begun to fight.

Of course we will continue our efforts in behalf of the farmers of America. With their continued cooperation we will do all in our power to end the piling up of huge surpluses which spelled ruinous prices for their crops. We will persist in successful action for better land use, for reforestation, for the conservation of water all the way from its source to the sea, for drought and flood control, for better marketing facilities for farm commodities, for a definite reduction of farm tenancy, for encouragement of farmer cooperatives, for crop insurance and a stable food supply. For all these we have only just begun to fight.

Of course we will provide useful work for the needy unemployed; we prefer useful work to the pauperism of a dole.

Here and now I want to make myself clear about those who disparage their fellow citizens on the relief rolls. They say that those on relief are not merely jobless‹that they are worthless. Their solution for the relief problem is to end relief‹to purge the rolls by starvation. To use the language of the stock broker, our needy unemployed would be cared for when, as, and if some fairy godmother should happen on the scene.

You and I will continue to refuse to accept that estimate of our unemployed fellow Americans. Your Government is still on the same side of the street with the Good Samaritan and not with those who pass by on the other side.

Again‹what of our objectives?

Of course we will continue our efforts for young men and women so that they may obtain an education and an opportunity to put it to use. Of course we will continue our help for the crippled, for the blind, for the mothers, our insurance for the unemployed, our security for the aged. Of course we will continue to protect the consumer against unnecessary price spreads, against the costs that are added by monopoly and speculation. We will continue our successful efforts to increase his purchasing power and to keep it constant.

For these things, too, and for a multitude of others like them, we have only just begun to fight.

All this‹all these objectives‹spell peace at home. All our actions, all our ideals, spell also peace with other nations.

Today there is war and rumor of war. We want none of it. But while we guard our shores against threats of war, we will continue to remove the causes of unrest and antagonism at home which might make our people easier victims to those for whom foreign war is profitable. You know well that those who stand to profit by war are not on our side in this campaign.

"Peace on earth, good will toward men"‹democracy must cling to that message. For it is my deep conviction that democracy cannot live without that true religion which gives a nation a sense of justice and of moral purpose. Above our political forums, above our market places stand the altars of our faith-altars on which burn the fires of devotion that maintain all that is best in us and all that is best in our Nation.

We have need of that devotion today. It is that which makes it possible for government to persuade those who are mentally prepared to fight each other to go on instead, to work for and to sacrifice for each other. That is why we need to say with the Prophet: "What doth the Lord require of thee‹but to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God." That is why the recovery we seek, the recovery we are winning, is more than economic. In it are included justice and love and humility, not for ourselves as individuals alone, but for our Nation.

That is the road to peace. Text and mp3 from the Miller Center of Public Affairs Scripps Library Roosevelt Presidential Speeches

FDR and New Deal and Fireside Chats of Franklin Roosevelt Type your cut contents here.

A Reflection on the Philosophical Use of Movies

2009-03-14T17:56:54Z

From Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews - 2009-03-10
Dan Flory, Philosophy, Black Film, Film Noir, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008, 348pp., $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780271033440. Reviewed by Angela Curran, Carleton College

There is also a question as to whether this critical philosophical reflection is detachable from the viewer's experience of the film -- something she may or may not do -- or if Flory thinks that this reflection is part of every thoughtful viewer's experience of the film, properly understood. Is philosophical reflection something that the film or the viewer does, and is some special sort of philosophical background or knowledge of philosophical methods required for the viewer to philosophize? These are questions Flory briefly touches on, but does not examine in any detail.

Flory argues that black film noir philosophizes, "in just the ways that philosophers do" (175). There has been a great deal of fruitful debate recently on whether films can philosophize and if so, how. Flory, for the most part, seems to opt for the model of how films philosophize provided by Stanley Cavell and Stephen Mulhall. According to this view, films can philosophize because they can prompt viewers to "serious reflection" about fundamental questions of human existence, such as the nature of humanity. Other philosophers have argued that for film to philosophize, it must make use of some specific philosophical methods, such as counter-examples, thought-experiments or perhaps even arguments. Flory gives little attention to the specific philosophical methods that the films he discusses employ. Most often he just says that the film prompts "reflection" and a re-examination of beliefs (316) without considering the specific methods -- counter-examples, thought-experiments, and so on -- that each film uses. Some interesting differences might emerge between these films -- which all seem to become a bit alike in Flory's treatment of them -- if he had examined the different philosophical strategies that each film uses to imaginatively engage viewers in reflection on philosophical issues.

Flory's main argument -- that sympathizing or empathizing with marginalized black characters can prompt philosophizing on the nature of black humanity -- leads me to wonder about the role that emotional engagement with characters can play in prompting philosophical reflection. Flory argues that sympathy or empathy with characters in black film noir makes possible a kind of imaginative access to a new point of view outside the white viewer's experience. Is this method of prompting viewers to re-examine their everyday practices and the moral and epistemic norms that guide them comparable to the traditional methods contained in a philosophical work on race? Or is there something different about the way film prompts philosophizing precisely because it does this through emotional engagement rather than philosophical argumentation? These are interesting questions raised by Flory's treatment of black film<

Flory's book opens up many new lines of inquiry for philosophers interested in examining how films can philosophize and the role that the emotions play in prompting such reflection. Because of Flory's extensive knowledge of contemporary film aesthetics and critical race theory, there is much we can learn about these areas from reading his book. It is a work suitable for use in mid-level and advanced undergraduate classes as well as graduate classes on aesthetics, philosophy of film, and critical race theory.

The idea that film in general (or some films more than others) are inherently philosophical has always struck me as special pleading. At most films can be used for philosophical purposes, but beyond that they must be taken on their own aesthetic grounds. The same, of course, can be said for all artifacts of the human hand and imagination. So my question is "Why philosophy & film?" Why is there no movement for philosophy and poetry? There is plenty of writing about philosophy and poetry, but no special pleading and no academic movement?

Let's call those who encounter works of art through hearing, viewing, reading, etc. "auditors," avoiding, among other mistakes, the silly idea that movie watchers "read" the films they view.

Any strong work of art can prompt or spark "deep thought" and self-reflection in an auditor. But it is necessary for the auditor to be more than merely thoughtful. She also must be knowledgeable, both self-regarding and other regarding, and willing to work with herself in relation to the artifact she experiences. But more than the above the auditor must also be "open" -- receptive, playful, empathetic, wondering -- to the art-work she experiences.

All of the above are necessary. but not sufficient, conditions for a work of art to provoke philosophy. What further must be added to this mix is a desire to draw fundamental conclusions through reasoned thought and/or discussion, and to put the work of art to use as a means (or medium) of philosophical thought.

Is film special? Is film more effective than Greek or Elizabethan drama in provoking philosophical thought? True, for its own aesthetic reasons film is different than other media, but is it more particularly philosophical than say a Grecian urn or Keat's poem "Ode to a Grecian Urn". Didn't Keat's use the Grecian urn as a means of philosophical reflection in poetry? And is this any more unusual than using any other visual or popular art as a philosophical spark? Is it particularly easier or more inherent to the medium to use movies as a means or spark to philosophical work than "Anna Karenina" or "Bleak House" or "Lolita" or "Absalom, Absalom", to name four novels I believe give special access to philosophical wonderings and wanderings? One can argue whether Marcel Duchamp or Michaelangelo is better suited for philosophical prompting, but is sculpture less useful than painting, or painting less useful than moving pictures? I doubt it.

When such caveats and cut-outs begin to unravel these academic practices (because such "movements" as Philosophy & Film, Law & Literature, Art & Perception, etc., are practically exclusively practiced on university campuses) the whole project begins to seem constructed on the ground of academic politics or, perhaps, as a means of escape from the boredom of the major subject as constituted by the Department of Philosophy or the School of Law. There is nothing inherently dispositive in this but it causes me to wonder: If there were no academic departments would there be any need for these "movements," which are largely a rebellion against the artificial departmental separations of specialized philosophy, law, art, etc.?

And this brings me to other artificial separations that we assume before any of our inquiries begin. Take the separations of genre and the problems of authorship. For some reason, in the Philosophy & Film movement, genre films are more often used for philosophical reflection than other kinds of films. So the movement begins with work on Screwball comedies and film noir and on such auteur directors as Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock. Why is this? I think this is because there are rules and boundaries that can be derived from these movies and directors and such rules and boundaries establish a baseline around which trends and outliers can define the nuances of "philosophical argument." Also the establishment of a genre to investigate or a director to operate upon with one's philosophizing, allows the philosopher to both talk about and avoid the philosophical issues of "sets" of genre and construction of authorship (and the hidden issues of ones own academic life that such "sets" and "constructions" displace). But more than that, I am not sure on the face of it why Hitchcock is so often written about by movie philosophers but Bugs Bunny and Warner Brother's cartoons are largely ignored, except by post-modern types.

Or to bring it another step: Why is there no movement around "Philosophy and Rock & Roll" or "Law and Rock & Roll". Potentially, Elvis Costello's albums "Armed Forces" and "This Year's Model" or Radiohead's "O.K. Computer" are as ripe for philosophical and legal riffing as Preston Sturges' "The Lady Eve" or Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice." Elvis Costello and Radiohead are left to those academics who "do" popular culture (and again are often labeled pomo) mostly because the stodgy Departments of Philosophy and Schools of Law can only take so much of this kind of unserious rambling from the main purpose of their disciplines. Unfortunately, the pomo types who work on popular culture are more likely to "do" Madonna than Elvis Costello. From this point of view the special pleading for movies behind the "Philosophy & Film" movement and for literature by the "Law & Literature" movement is exclusive of other art forms and genres not because film is especially philosophical or novels and plays are especially legal, but because exclusivity increases the chances of being taken seriously. Radiohead's song "Paranoid Android" is not less philosophical than any particular scene from Terry Gilliam's "Twelve Monkeys" and Elvis Costello's song "Oliver's Army" is not less legally profound than any particular passage from Bertolt Brecht's "The Threepenny Opera." But a philosopher or law professor is more likely to win the battle of academic recognition by conferring "high seriousness" upon "Twelve Monkeys" or "The Threepenny Opera" than on "O.K. Computer" or "Armed Forces". It is the battle over creditability that is foremost in the academic struggle and "seriousness" is necessary to insure survival in academic politics.

There is something amusing here. Why is there no Philosophy & Poetry movement? Because there is no need. Philosophy and poetry have been intertwined from the birth of philosophy as a separate social practice. This is partially because both poetry and philosophy find their roots in religion and myth. But no philosopher has to first argue that he is serious when he takes poetry seriously as a philosophical practice or a spark for philosophical reflection. The interpenetration of philosophy and poetry is either considered a blessing or a curse by philosophers, but no one has to start a movement to recognize that poetry can do philosophy and philosophers can reflect on poetry. It is only when confronting "modern" art genres, practices and media that a philosopher has to make special arguments over the seriousness of her philosophical reflections upon the resulting art works. Why is this? Because most of the modern art genres are either more popular or more democratic or both. And here is the one successful argument for the "Philosophy & Film" movement. Movies are a part of a broad shared culture and they provide a set of references easily recognizable by many. At the same time "film" as an art medium has been recognized by most intellectuals as a potentially serious endeavor.

What I would like the "Philosophy & Film" writers to do is recognize that there is nothing exclusive about their methods and that all art can be used as a spark for philosophy and all art media can be created for philosophical ends, especially if the philosopher-auditor has the wit and the wisdom. As for the rest, all the universe can be turned into poetry, if the poet has not only wit and but the wide writ of the imagination.

The Sociology of Berlusconi's Political Movement

2009-03-06T20:12:14Z

Today Berlusconi is incontestably the icon of the Second Republic. His dominance symbolises everything it has come to stand for. Few secrets remain about the way in which he acquired his riches, and how he has used them to gain and preserve his power. The larger question is what, sociologically, made this career possible. An obvious answer would point to the unbroken sway of Christian Democracy in the First Republic, and see him essentially as its heir. The element of truth in such a reading is clear from the underlying electoral balance in the Second Republic. Proportionately, in all five elections since 1994, the total centre-right vote, excluding the League, has exceeded the total centre-left vote, excluding Rifondazione Comunista, by a margin varying between 5 and 10 per cent. Italy, in other words, has always been, and remains, at bottom an extremely conservative country. The reasons, it is widely argued, are not hard to seek. Fewer people move away from their areas of birth, more adult children live with their parents, average firms are much smaller, and the number of self-employed is far higher, than in any other Western society. Such are the cells of reaction out of which a body politic congenitally averse to risk or change has been composed. The sway of the Church, as the only institution at once national and universal, and the fear of a large home-grown Communism, clinched the hegemony of Christian Democracy over it, and even if each has declined, their residues live on in Berlusconi’s following.

The deduction is too linear, however. Berlusconi has certainly never stinted appeals to Christianity and family values, or warnings of the persistent menace of Communism, and Forza Italia certainly inherited the bastions of DC clientelism in the South – most notoriously in Sicily. But the filigrane of Catholic continuity in his success is quite tenuous. It is not only that the DC zones of the North-East have gone to the League, but practising Catholics – the quarter of the population that attends mass with some regularity – have been the most volatile segment of the electorate, many in the early years of the Second Republic voting not only for the League but also the PDS. Nor is there a clear-cut connection between small businesses or the self-employed and political reaction. The red belt of Central Italy – Tuscany, Umbria, Emilia-Romagna and the Marche – where the PCI was always strongest, and which the PD still holds today, is rife with both: family enterprises, flourishing micro-firms, independent artisans and shopkeepers, as well as the region’s co-operatives, a world not of large factories or assembly lines, but of small property.

Berlusconi’s real lineage is more pointed. Fundamentally, he is the heir of Craxi and the mutation he represented in the Italian politics of the 1980s, rather than of the DC. The descent is literal, not just analogical. The two men were close contemporaries, both products of Milan, their careers continuously intertwined from the time that Craxi became leader of the Socialist Party (PSI) in 1976, and Berlusconi set up his first major television station two years later, funded with lavish loans from banks controlled by the Socialist Party. The relationship could hardly have been more intimate, at once functional and personal. Craxi created the favours from the state that allowed Berlusconi to build his media empire: Berlusconi funded Craxi’s machine with the profits from it, and boosted his image with his newscasts. A frequent guest at Berlusconi’s palatial villa in Arcore, where he was liberally supplied with soubrettes and haute cuisine, in 1984 Craxi was godfather to Berlusconi’s first child by the actress Veronica Lario before he married her, and best man at the wedding when he did marry her in 1990. On becoming premier in 1983, he rescued Berlusconi’s national television networks, which were broadcasting in defiance of a Supreme Court ruling, from being shut down, and in 1990 helped ensure Berlusconi’s permanent grip on them, with a law for which he received a deposit of $12 million to his account in a foreign bank. At the pinnacle of his power, Craxi cut a new figure on the postwar Italian scene – tough, decisive, cultivating publicity, in complete command of his own party, and a ruthless negotiator with others.

Three years later, with the revelations of Tangentopoli exposing the scale of his corruption, Craxi had become the most execrated public figure in the land. But he was not finished. His own career in ruins, he passed his vision of politics directly to Berlusconi, urging him to take the electoral plunge at a meeting in Milan in April 1993.

An Entire Order Converted into What It Was Intended to End
Perry Anderson

The Crash of the Left in Italy

2009-03-06T20:03:36Z

If the League has been the principal nemesis of that part – the majority – of the PCI which made a pilgrimage from Communism to social liberalism without so much as a stopover at social democracy, the fate of the minority that sought to refound a democratic Communism has been largely self-inflicted. Instead of keeping clear of Prodi’s coalition in the elections of 2006, as it had done to good effect in 1996 – when a pact of mutual desistance had allowed it to enter parliament as an independent force in rough proportion to its electoral strength, and lend external, but not unconditional, support to the ensuing centre-left government – Rifondazione Comunista signed up as a full member. Its leader, Fausto Bertinotti, was rewarded with the post of speaker of the Chamber, nominally the third personage of the Italian state after the president and prime minister, and replete with official perquisites of every kind and automatic access to the media. This empty honour went, as hoped, to his head, ensuring that the RC became a docile appendage in the ruling coalition, unable to secure any substantive concessions from it, and inevitably sharing in the disrepute into which it fell. In keeping with this performance, the party voted in favour of war credits for Afghanistan not long after Bertinotti had explained that the great mistake of the left in the 20th century had been to believe that violence could ever be an instrument of progressive change – only its complete renunciation for an ‘absolute pacifism’ was now politically acceptable. Predictably, the combination of co-option and abjuration was suicidal. Facing the polls in a last minute cartel with Greens and the remnant of the DS that could not abide the dropping of even a nominal reference to the left in the PD, Rifondazione was annihilated. Voters in their millions abandoned a party that had scuttled its own identity.

An Entire Order Converted into What It Was Intended to End
Perry Anderson

The Piazza di Saint' Ignazio: A Theatrical Street-Scape

2008-06-16T18:46:36Z

This is a view of the Piazza di Saint' Ignazio from the steps of Saint' Ignazio church. Filippo Raguzzini was the designer of the piazza and like so much in Rome there is a feeling that what the designer really had in mind was stage-craft and not street-scape or architecture. Modern architects could well learn that one craft is not separate from the other. The buildings at the time of Raguzzini were working class and craft-makers' apartments and not the usual aristocratic town palaces that one finds on such piazzas. But Raguzzini places the apartments around the square with a realization that the square is made for viewing people. The shapes of the building seem to be part of a moving set, each piece fitting into the next. The square when viewed from the steps of the church reveals five buildings and six streets which makes for eleven entrances and exits. One can already imagine the vast comic farce or opera with people pouring in and out of every entrance and always missing each other except at crucial times. If you ever have a chance to go to the Piazza di Sant'Ignazio stand on the church steps and imagine the windows opening, people shouting, men and women coming on stage from the doors and going off stage into the streets. A movie is ready for filming and the piazza is ready for its close-up.

The first time I stumbled onto this square it was at night and I wasn't looking for it. But as soon as I stepped onto the set of this piazza I knew that this was a place I had marked out in my mind to look at and imagine. There are places in our world, whether human artifact or natural, that must be filled with imagination in order to see them clearly. This is one of them. Think of the thousands of people who pass through this square without a second look. There are no spectacular fountains and no great palaces and the Church, that gives the piazza its name, looks like a bad imitation of the Gesu from the outside -- a neo classical Baroque at its most plain. (Inside the Saint' Ignazio bursts with the theatricality of Baroque art, especially Andrea Pozzo's ceiling fresco.) But lend your mind to this piazza which Raguzzini built as a homage to the complications and intersections of urban working class life and you begin to see what was once considered radical and dangerous about urban street-scapes.

It is Bloomsday and though Leopold Bloom never seems to have set foot in Rome I think that a walk through Rome with one of the great city-walkers in all fiction would have been a pleasure. He, surely, would have been able to enjoy the comedy of this theatrical street-scape.

Jerry Monaco

Jerry Monaco
16 June 2008
New York City

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work by
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Bananas, Monoculture, Capitalism, Imperialism

2008-05-26T16:41:26Z

The following is from the Scientific American podcast, "Science Talk," the episode from 23 April 2008 entitled "Can Science Save the Banana." The interviewer is Steve Mirsky, the regular host of "Science Talk". The person answering the questions is Dan Koeppel, author of the book "Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World."

It is possible to select any key commodity of world capitalism and write a micro-history of that commodity that will reveal much about capitalist exploitation and growth. In writing such a history it will inevitably turn into a macro-history of world capitalism. Such commodities in the pre-capitalist age would include spices and dyes. But in the age of capitalism we would include carbon-based energy, steel, cotton, the major grains (wheat and rice before 1945, corn after 1945), and the products of international agribusiness such as, coffee, bananas, cocaine, opium, etc. The history of each of these commodities, if investigated with an open mind and with skepticism towards the delusions of the "free market" would reveal the same process of state-intervention, subversion of democracy and the rule of law, violent repression of worker's self-organization and intervention by the state in order to maintain profits. The ideology of capitalism, with the propaganda on how capitalism thrives in democratic republics where "free markets" are the norm, is always subverted by the actual facts of history.

Steve: One of the big dangers with any kind of monoculture agriculture is if one of them is going to get it, they're all going to get it because they are clones of each other.

Koeppel: Right. And that's what makes the banana so wonderful: In a way that banana was the first fast food, you know? Every single banana is exactly the same as every other one. They are totally reliable, they ripen at the same rate; they taste the same. This is what made the banana so practical. I mean, if you think about it, bananas are cheaper than apples, yet they come from thousands of miles away; and the reason for that is that bananas have these tremendous economies of scale because they are all the same and they require the same shipping methods. They don't require six different kinds of techniques, the way the six different apples we eat do. So a banana is just the, sort of, perfect thing for cheapness. And, you know, but because each banana is identical, each banana is susceptible to the same disease. This Cavendish banana in Pakistan is susceptible to the same disease as this Cavendish banana in Guatemala. And so once the disease hits, it spreads very quickly, and that's what's happening with Panama disease right now.

Steve: Now there are some scientists who are working to try to figure out what the next banana is going to be or to stop the Cavendish from going extinct; and the world capital of banana research is in a very unexpected place, tell us about that.

Koeppel: Right! The world capital of banana research is unexpected on the surface. It is Belgium of all places, and that is where most of the work on genetic engineering of bananas is being done: in a laboratory at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, which is right outside of Brussels. And the reason for that actually is because the most important bananas in the world and the bananas that are subsistence bananas where people actually rely on them for their primary source of nutrition is in Africa. And Belgium had a great colonial interest in Africa to [through] much of the 19th century, and that colonial interest has transferred in the 20th century to a scientific interest, and so Belgians are the great banana experts of the world.

Steve: It's a fascinating artifact of colonial history. Other artifacts of colonial history, they are not even artifacts, they're still going on. Talk a little bit about the relationship between the banana and Central American politics. I mean, it's not even a relationship, the banana has been the Central American politics for [a] lot of the century.

Koeppel: Right and you know, banana companies, in order to keep bananas cheap, had to really control the cost of labor and land. By control, I mean, control. You know, they had to have no cost for labor and land. They have to have slave labor and free land and they had to take over countries and that meant brutal tactics. They had to use the U.S. military and massacres and all sorts of terrible things. Over 20 times, there were interventions whenever there were attempts to unify banana workers or have fair prices for land and these countries that were taken over by banana companies, that's where the term "banana republic" come[s] from. Interestingly, from a scientific perspective, all these needs for takeovers spring from Panama disease. Because as these banana lands go fallow, you can't grow new bananas in them once they're stricken by disease. The banana companies have a desperate need for new lands to grow their bananas and so the more the disease spreads, the more they need land; and this is why they have to take over countries and become ever more brutal because there is this geometric progression of fallow land and this desperate need to maintain their profit margins, all spreading from this advancing malady, Panama disease.

Steve: And we're talking about what Guatemala, Honduras what else?

Koeppel: Almost every nation in Central America and then spreading down to Columbia, Ecuador, and even into some of the Caribbean nations, Cuba and early on into Jamaica; you know, almost anywhere that you will see, if you go into your super market, you will see a sticker with the country of origin on it, on that banana, it was a banana republic at one point. And in some cases it still can be: [In] Ecuador, one of the perennial candidates for president is the head of the biggest banana company that is not Chiquita or Dole.

The Shiny Confidence Game of "Postmodernism"

2008-05-07T08:57:51Z

This is a quote from Jean-Francois Lyotard, "On the Post Postmodern," Eyeline 6 (Nov. 1987). Lyotard is talking about his book The Postmodern Condition.

I told stories in the book, I referred to a quantity of books I'd never read. Apparently it impressed people, it's all a bit of a parody.... I remember an Italian architect who bawled me out because he said the whole thing could have been done much more simply.... I wanted to say first that it's the worst of my books, they're almost all bad, but that one's the worst... really that book relates to a specific circumstance, it belongs to the satirical genre.
Whatr do you say to something like this? "Oh well, I knew it was a joke all along, too bad so many people took it so seriously." How is that for a reply? Or possibly: "It was just a way to make the rent. What did you expect? Integrity? Philosophy? Clear thinking?"

Some Noam Chomsky Quotes

2008-05-02T15:04:11Z

Because I haven't posted anything lately:

"If the Nuremberg laws were applied today, then every Post-War American president would have to be hanged."

"Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state."

"Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media."

"The United States is unusual among the industrial democracies in the rigidity of the system of ideological control - "indoctrination," we might say - exercised through the mass media. "

"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."

The Fiction of Institutions: the Institution of Fiction

2008-03-17T12:10:15Z

In an unusually entertaining article for The New York Times on the fall of Bear Stearns F.D.R.’s Safety Net Gets a Big Stretch
By FLOYD NORRIS , the following quote occurs.

'As Walter Bagehot, the British financial journalist, wrote in “Lombard Street,” a 19th-century book on the monetary system, “Every banker knows that if he has to prove that he is worthy of credit, however good may be his arguments, in fact, his credit is gone.”'

A good amount of philosophical, psychological, and sociological cogitation could be stirred to life by that quote. One could also imagine an evolutionary psychologist inventing a nice story about how social intelligence and deception combine to make a 'person' worthy of credit.

What I would like to observe is something else. Walter Bagehot touches on an aspect of all human institutions that philosophers count on and historians ignore.

As far as we know humans are the only life forms evolved on our planet who have developed flexible and changeable institutional structures, such as states, bureaucratic entities, organized religion, voluntary associations, and, most importantly today, business institutions, such as the modern corporation. Such institutional entities are always a "fiction." They are not "fictional" in a trivial way but "fictional" to some important extent that says something about human society, history, and how we come to understand and misunderstand the world we have created for ourselves.

I put the word "fiction" in quotes here to signal the idea that I believe that these institutional entities are not un-"real" social structures, but that they are social structures created by human beings and treated by us "as if" they were natural and/or monstrous phenomena. These institutions are socially constructed "as-ifs": "as if" the business institution of the corporation is a person or an "agent"; "as if" the institution of the Monarchy was the sovereign King and all aspects of the monarchy were an extension of the King-himself; "as if" the "Pricipate" of Augustus restored the Republic and as if the Imperator Augustus were the "Son of God" and "the Prince of Peace;" "as if" the "free market" were an imitation of Darwinian naturalism. These "as-ifs" can be extended to all historical periods and all human institutions back to our existence as hunter-gatherers. Each "as if" then becomes part of an interconnected chain of "as-ifs"... "as if" the institution were an agent with a personality; as if the agent owned a physical "bank"; as if the bank contained the money in a box; as if the money were backed by "gold" and "silver"; as if gold and silver were worth anything; as if gold could buy your life by the hour or the day. I use the term "fiction" as a placeholder for these chains of "as-ifs" that are assumed and "forgotten" when we encounter social institutions. I use the term in the same sense as the term "legal fiction" is used by lawyers.

Calling an institutional "fictional," and at the same time recognizing those institutions as part of the structure of our social reality, seems to me to capture the counterfactual nature of many aspects of complex society. These "as-ifs" are part of a collectively written fiction about ourselves, our history, and our society. Yet these institutional "as-ifs" only come about when society develops complex settlements. Hunter gatherers don't need institutional "as-ifs"; they simply have stories and myths about the world around them. These stories are not meant to justify their own institutions "as if" the institution was created by nature, but to justify life and nature itself, "as if" the human story were a narrative and we could make sense of the world. Hunter gatherer societies simply do not have the same kind of institutional "entities" that agricultural settlements develop out of necessity.

The joke is on us. The way ancient humans misattributed personality and agency to natural phenomena, we misattribute personality and agency to institutions. Ancient humans did not understand and could not control natural phenomena; yet we act in relation to our own historically developed institutions, "as if" they were a phenomena of nature that we do not understand and cannot control. Institutions do not act. People act. A corporation does not "do" anything. People do things, individually and collectively in the name of the corporation. But the agency of the corporation is something that we accept because it is structured into our society at every level of economics and law. We even use "branding" in totemic and semi-religious ways, "as if" we could assume the attributes (coolness, power, abundance, success, sexual prowess) of the shared corporate "personality" by wearing or displaying the brand. The institutions we have created have become as Gods and Monsters to our own eyes. They seem to have created us. And the more this "seeming" is not within our individual control, and we do not organize ourselves for collective control, the more we attribute to those institutions the personality and activity that is in fact our own.

At times of crisis, when institutions or parts of institutions crumble, the fictional aspects of such institutions suddenly seem obvious. The idea of the divine right of kings seems absurd to us now. It seems an obvious fiction in order to justify the larger institutional structure of Monarchy. And yet old fictions often reappear when sophisticated institutions breakdown. Aspects of the divine right of kings reappear in the United States all the time, under the guise of manifest destiny and nationalism of course, but more directly in the idea that a President, whether McKinley or Bush, confers with God when making his decision on the best way to kill and conquer foreign peoples. When the current fiction of institutions breaks down what we tend to find are older fictions reappearing. (Sometimes you wonder whether reality itself is just fiction all the way down.) But it is the weight of my argument that we actually perceive these institutional fictions as a sort of "unreality" and "absurdity" of these institutions. It takes a fair amount of self-deception and (continuous) postponement of disbelief to go along with these institutional fictions. Some people are in fact better at self-deception than others and it is these people that fit in best with the corporate institutions.

What I have been writing about here are aspects of ideology. When talking about the "as ifs" of institutions I am digging into some of the social aspects of the fiction of ideology. These social constructs must at some level merge with cognitive structures of our brain. When we move to such concepts as self-deception I fear I am bringing the circle around to evolutionary thinking. As Robert Trivers has said, the ability to decieve oneself can confer advantage in some circumstances; because those who are best at deceiving themselves are also best at decieving others about themselves. The fiction of institutions merges with the ability to deceive others and oneself about the institutions we work with and within. Thus begining with the idea of "credit", we can end with the idea that "credit" in our society, for massive institutions especially, is a kind of evolutionary arms race between deception and discovery, where self-deception plays a large part.

Jerry Monaco
10 March 2008
New York City

This
work by
Jerry Monaco is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The Nature of Athenian Democracy: An Answer to a Reader's Question

2008-03-10T23:24:52Z

The Nature of Athenian Democracy: An Answer to a Reader's Question

A reader asks in a comment on my post The Character of Socrates and His Bad Arguments: The anti-democratic dialectic:

March 8th, 2008 - 08:16 pm
"Jerry,
"A couple of questions:
"1) When Plato uses the term democracy does he refer to the practice of Athenian government (which I take it was something like the government envisaged by the American founders, a government of the "right people" who own property)? Where could he have gotten a more radical concept of democracy from?
"2) Though the allegory of the cave is supposed to be a metaphor about knowledge (the difference between opinion and true knowledge), it does present a suggestive picture of an actual political state. If so, what state is it meant to depict? Seems unlikely that Plato would depict an ideal aristocratic form of government in this way, though that is what it seems to be.
This discussion is further confused by current opinion that Strauss and the neoconservatives were inspired by Plato's idea of a ruling class of philosopher kings."

I will answer the first question in your comment in this post. But I urge the reader, whoever he or she is, to spur me to go on to the second question because it is the more complicated question. To answer the second question involves an evaluation of the place of philosophy in a democratic society. It requires literary judgment about the place of Plato's "allegory of the cave" within the Republic. It urges a contrast between our current philosophical interpreters of Plato and Socrates with the historical interpreters of Athenian society that produced Socrates and Plato. (In our specialized academic factories the philosophers rarely talk to the historians, except in the most trivial ways.) Finally your question can be properly back-lit by a contrast between Karl Popper and Strauss, who came to complimentary conclusions about Plato but for opposite reasons. When dealing with the political web of the allegory of the cave and its many connections a short answer is simply not enough. This is true if for no other reason than that the allegory comes in the context of explaining who and what a philosopher is and how he (for Plato a philosopher must be gendered "he") can guide and guard the state. So dear reader, please hold me to my promise to go down into this cave and come back out with a bit of explanation.

As for your first points, let me state bluntly that the premises of your questions are wrong. What I offer below is an explanation of the radical nature of Athenian democracy and a historiographic explanation for why the nature of Athenian democracy has been ignored or slandered.

Periclean Athens was a democracy of all citizens. Athens remained a democracy for more than 300 years and I would argue, at its height, was one of the most radical democracies in history. After the Age of Pericles Athens continued to be a democracy, except during brief periods of political unrest and Spartan sponsored tyranny. Even after Alexander conquered the city, and ended Athenian independence, internal affairs were run democratically until Athens organized a rebellion against Macedonian rule.

The time of Socrates and Plato was part of the most expansive periods of Athenian democracy. If you were a citizen you were a person who could, and probably would, serve on the administrative and policy making councils of the Athenian demos. Practically all of the important political positions were filled by lottery. All citizens in good standing were eligible for the lottery. Important issues were put to the vote in the assembly of all citizens. To maintain control of the aristocratic classes individuals of the upper classes were encouraged to bring law cases against other members of the upper classes, and the judges of those cases were large juries chosen by lots. Aristocrats were rewarded for ratting on other aristocrats for nonpayment of religious dues to maintain public festivals. If an aristocrat became too powerful he would often be ostracized.

Modern day societies could learn a lot about control and punishment of rulers and owners by studying Athenian methods. Imagine if Corporation X could be rewarded by forcing another Corporation Y to pay Corporation X's taxes if X discovers that Y is violating health and safety rules, or is polluting, or is not paying its taxes. Such a situation would mean that "trial lawyers" would constantly be hired by one corporate entity to make sure that other corporate entities do not violate the commonweal. This was essentially the situation between aristocratic families in democratic Athens. Also, imagine if every five years or so we could vote to confiscate the property and send into exile any CEO that we choose by a simple majority vote. That might help keep the CEOs in line and stop them from laying off or transferring factories to non-union environments.

Athens was, of course, a limited democracy, but what limited the democracy was the exclusivity of citizenship, not economic restrictions within Athens. Some of the richest residents of Athens were non-Citizens, called "metics," who had been invited to Athens because of their expertise in some craft or trade. Cephelus, who the reader meets in the first book of "The Republic," is reputedly the richest man in Athens and yet he is not a citizen and neither is his son Polemarchus, who was probably born in Athens. Foreigners and their descendants, no matter longer how long they lived in Athens, nor how successful they became, could not become "Athenians." Women were not considered citizens, nor did they have many legal rights, or rights of property. There is also the historically contentious problem of slavery, and the debates of slavery's relation to democratic Athens. Citizens could not become slaves, because of the reforms at the root of the democracy. But there is a good argument that imperialism fed slavery, and that slavery allowed for leisure even among citizen-tradesmen.

Still, those who served on the assemblies and committees that amounted to the Athenian governmental apparatus were selected by lot. There was no property qualification for citizenship and no property qualification for being selected by lot to serve in the government apparatus. *[See bibliographical note below.]

My questioner is wrong to say that Athens was a government of the owners of property. And the questioner is mostly wrong to point to Athenian democracy as a model for the Revolutionary generation of the American colonists in the future United States.

For that last statement I would like to make some qualifications. Some of the more radical revolutionists anticipated some of the more radical "romantics" and did indeed look back to Athens as part of the "republican" tradition that they aspired to. The challenging radicalism of Athenian democracy was never accepted in all of its messy "populism". Thomas Paine is one such radical, but there were others. These were mostly "localists" (my term). It must be emphasized that many of these "radical democrats" were not themselves aware of some of the more radical aspects of the Athenian constitution. A list of aspects of the Athenian polity they were unaware of were "punishment" of powerful aristocrats through the encouragement of law suits, annual votes of ostracism, and other anti-aristocratic measures that might have transformed "radical republican" thinking into "radical democratic" thinking. In the debate over the Constitution these "localists" became anti-Federalists.

Of those who drew up the U.S. Constitution, the evidence shows that James Madison was influenced by the Roman Constitution as a model, or rather the Roman Constitution as they knew it through Polybius and Montesquieu. The concept of separation of powers, with each power as a check on the other was from the Roman constitution. The concept of "mixed" government -- monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy -- balanced in a republican form of government, was also considered a reason for the success of the Roman Constitution and was copied by Madison. *

Even given the mistakes in the premises of the above questions they are still good questions. Such questions and misconceptions get to the heart of a long debate in the literature on the basic nature of Athenian democracy. The debate has taken place on both the left and the right. But the debate has not been over the nature of the Athenian constitution, per se, or over whether all citizens could vote in assemblies. The historians are certain of these aspects of the Athenian city-state. The debate is over whether Athenian Democracy was merely a democracy, de jure, but a de facto oligarchy.

There are three political traditions that have through the ages framed the debate over the nature of Athenian Democracy: (1) The radical democratic supporters of democracy; (2) Conservative and reactionary critics of all democracy as a form of mob rule; (3) Liberal and social-democratic critics of ideology and propaganda.

It will not surprise most readers that until the late 19th Century most historians fell into the second category of conservative and reactionary critics. The people I am terming "radical democrats" were mostly left out of the "official" historical debate. Thus you would find the radical democratic arguments among non-historians such as Romantic poets, or in the speeches of politicians, or as a negative reflection of the arguments of philosophers. It was not until the generation of 1968 found made its long march through U.S. and British universities that notions of radical democracy found its reflection among professional historians. Liberal and social-democratic historiography appeared late on the scene and was mostly concentrated in Germany. Most of the social democratic historiography only survived for a short period and found its demise with the rise of fascism.

All three of these traditions divided among themselves along similar lines. Was Athenian democracy a façade for elite or oligarchic rule or was it the real thing? If it was the real thing was Athenian democracy a form of terror inducing and redistributive "mob rule" or was it a stable form of "rule of law" with norms for elite control of the mob and democratic control of the aristos? Was the "slave mode of production" and imperial domination essential to the success of the "democracy" (thus making "democracy" a façade for the exclusive domination of Athenian citizens over others) or was Athenian domination of others simply a side-effect of the strength and patriotic unity of the democracy? Along with these questions a number of subsidiary questions formed: for instance, was some amount of equality imposed upon the aristocratic classes at the expense of liberty? Was the demand for equality in Athens simply a façade used by some factions, or individuals, of the aristocratic classes to politically defeat or ostracize other aristocrats?

What might seem a bit strange is that the debate over Athenian democracy was crystallized around contemporary evaluations of the rise of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini. But I think most readers with a working knowledge of 20th Century history can see how the problematic aspects of Athenian democracy could be worked out around the multiple crises (and failures) of revolutionary socialism between 1917 and 1939, i.e. the rise of Fascism in Italy, Germany and Spain, and the triumph of the Stalinist dictatorship. In a sense, the question of whether Fascism was a form of mob-rule, and thus a deformed form of democracy, was the same as the question of whether democracy in Athens was the rule of the "demos" or a façade for the dictatorship of the demagogues. The question of whether Stalinism was the dictatorship of the proletariat or the terror regime of the nomenklatura was posed in similar ways in the historiography of Athenian democracy.

It is also a bit strange, to me at least, that the main polemical statement articulating the negative side of the debate over Athens was in a book about the fall of the Roman Republic and the rise of the Principate of Augustus. The book is one of the best classical histories written in the 20th century and rewards reading by historian and non-historian alike, Ronald Syme's "The Roman Revolution." It was published in June 1939 and Syme wrote under the pressure of the events in Italy, Germany, Spain and Russia during the darkest period for liberals and social democrats. Syme stated that "The Roman Revolution" was both a historical and political intervention against the dominance of Stalinism and Fascism.

Near the very beginning of Syme's elegantly written book is what has been termed "Syme's Law."

"In all ages, whatever the form and name of government, be it monarchy, republic, or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the façade." (p. 7)

That sentence is the statement of Syme's Law. Once stated, many historians, for good and ill, and on the left and right, recognized the truth of Syme's Law.

But is it a universal truth? Put it this way. It can easily be seen that our Republic here in the United States, for a long time, was simply a Republic that was acknowledged as a national oligarchy with some local democracy. As John Jay said: "Those who own the country should rule it." But are all democratic forms actually a façade for the rule of a small group of "men"? Is this true of all small towns as well as the country as a whole. Is there any tug of war between oligarchic dominance and democratic institutions?

Apply some of these questions to the Athenian city-state. The history of the rise of democratic forms in Athens is the history of the suppression of family based alliances in favor of economic-based alliances. The rise of democracy involved the suppression of the arbitrary rule of family-dominated clans who exercised sovereignty over land and slaves as if they were proto-states, in favor of small landowners who farmed their own land. These smaller landlords increased their social power by making alliances with a small group of tradesmen, skilled and unskilled. This final point, the rebellion against the arbitrary rule of richer landlords and their family alliance, is what we usually call the formation of "the rule of law."

The rebellion against family rule and the formation of the rule of law is paralleled in the city-states that under went a military revolution based on the hoplite phalanx. It seems that the military revolution that occurred around the same time in these city-states promoted small landowner unity against the rule of the big man or big family -- the chief, or the king and his allies. This occurred because the phalanx was the best military formation yet invented for a relatively small city-state. In order for a phalanx formation of hoplites to work, a high-level of training and trust must be maintained within the formation. The training of an army of citizen-farmers and the necessary high level of solidarity between those farmers led to group formation and group consciousness against the aristocrats who were mostly on horses. Thus around the 8th and 7th Centuries B.C.E. in many of the Greek cities throughout the Mediterranean legal rules were first formed and eventually individual rule was replaced by collective rule. Athens was unique both for the relative low quality of its land and the resultant size of its trading classes. This made the base for the transformation to collective rule much wider in Athens than in other city-states. Add to this the necessity of training a citizen-navy further increases the social weight of the citizens necessary to create a democratic city-state. Eventually collective rule encompassed all citizens. Simultaneously a number of "limiting" rules were instituted to prevent the reassertion of oligarchic rule of any kind, most particularly the choosing of government administration through a lottery where all citizens participated.

But it was mostly the political and ideological influence of Syme's Law that pushed the debate from 1939 onward. The debate over Athenian Democracy in the post-war period paralleled the debate over the difference between "stable" democratic societies, that respect the rule of law, and private property, and "mob rule" that aims at revenge against minorities or confiscatory redistribution of wealth.

Plato recognized the radical challenge of Athenian Democracy to the rule of "the best," the rule of the nobles. Was politics really only the rule of the strong? Do the strong set the definition of what is called justice? It challenged him to question the nature of every political construct and constitution. It led him to realize that the "rule of the best" and the "rule of the strong" did not coincide, especially since he had before his eyes the example of the strong "demos" and the weak aristocracy. How could an "aristocracy" become so weak? That was the next question. And the answer was because the aristocracy was in truth not made up of the best men, of the "true" elite. Plato further saw that all of the "best" aristocrats (Pericles for instance) had adapted themselves to the democracy by taking up "speech-making" and it was the job of those faux-philosophers "the Sophists" to teach the aristocrats how to make speeches. The Sophists gained the enmity of Plato because they taught the aristocrats, the "natural" ruling class, to accommodate itself to democratic forms.

But the main reason why Plato opposed democracy is that he saw clearly that its "truths" were formed in the market place, the agora. The coin of the political "market place" was not gold or silver. The coin was rhetoric. In the view of Plato, rhetoric created values, false values from his point of view, but false values that could be exchange in the dirty politics of bartering for power. In the Assembly and in the Law Courts the Athenian's philosophy, a philosophy of the masses, was formed everyday. Plato believed that this was a false philosophy, what we would call today an "ideology". But he did not deny its power and he did not deny its origins in the democratic practice of debate, of give and take. Ultimately mass juries of citizens formed the power of democratic ideology in the crucible of "judging" guilt, innocence and punishment in the open courtroom of the agora. And as a result of the rhetoric of debate in the agora mass assemblies of citizens gathered and made political "decision" that turned "ideology" (this "false philosophy") into the reality of power.

It is precisely at here, at the crossroads of mass power and debate, decisions and rhetoric, that Plato's "Philosopher Ruler" and the "allegory of the cave" can be seen as a solution to this mess of mob rule. Plato would oppose the false philosophy of the masses making decisions as a collective with the true philosophy of the eternal thoughtfulness.

* Bibliographical note: A book that goes through the arguments over the nature of Athenian Democracy is Josiah Ober's "Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens." I highly recommend Ober's book for those interested in the technical issues of the status of democracy in classical Athens. Ober, in my opinion, is a bit of an old fashion "radical democrat" in his point of view. He is not a Marxist in his method. Ober writes from within a tradition of American pragmatism as he reinterprets it through John Searle's "Speech Act Theory." I am heavily indebted to Ober's work though in the end I would emphasize the "exclusivity" of the citizenship requirment as a crucial factor in Athenian cohesion.

A historian who argues for a conclusion similar to Ober's is Ellen Meiskins Wood in her book "Peasant, Citizen, & Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy". She writes from within a Marxist tradition. It is especially interesting how the class analysis tradition of Meiskins Wood contrasts with the elite-mass analysis if Ober.

Both of these books are interventions in a long argument about the nature of Athenian democracy. Thus one of Wood's point is that the great Marxist historian G. E. M. Ste. Croix was wrong to emphasize that Athens relied heavily on slavery in his great book "The Class Struggle in the Ancient World." Ober's book argues against what might be called "the American functionalist view" that Athenian democracy was a facade for elite or oligarchic control. Meiskins Wood argues against some in the Marxist tradition of interpreting Athens as if slavery and slavery alone could define its mode of production.

For a general introduction to Athenian Democracy I would suggest two short and easy books, "Athenian Democracy" by A. H. M. Jones and "The Birth of Athenian Democracy: The Assembly in the Fifth Century B.C." by Chester G. Starr. Both of these books can be found cheaply and the Jones book is usually available at good libraries.

For more on the Roman Republic and the U.S. Constitution see Paul Rhae's "Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution." Also see William Everdell's "The End of Kings" and for an old succinct article that I think I can email to anyone to see, The Influence of Rome on the American Constitution, R. A. Ames, H. C. Montgomery, The Classical Journal, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Oct., 1934), pp. 19-27. There have been many books written on this subject but this short article sums up the view of the influence of the Roman Constitution in a few short pages. I think one conclusion United Statesians should draw from this is that in order to understand the origins of their constitution they should read Polybius.

In the main body of the text I bibliograph Ronald Syme's "The Roman Revolution". I suggest that the reader look at the book for himself. But if there is a need to know the extent of the impact of Ronald Syme's book on classical historiography I suggest looking through Between Republic and Empire: Interpretations of Augustus and His Principles edited by Kurt A. Raaflaug and Mark Toher. Most of the essays reflect directly upon the impact of Ronald Syme.

Jerry Monaco
10 March 2008
New York City

This
work by
Jerry Monaco is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The Character of Socrates and His Bad Arguments: The anti-democratic dialectic

2008-03-04T13:12:21Z

I tend to agree with Roslyn Weiss' characterization of Socrates as presented in her book The Socratic Paradox and Its Enemies, or at least with how her books is epitomized by the reviewer Sung-Hoon Kang. The reviewer himself disagrees with Weiss. I have not read Weiss' book so I can only comment on the review itself.

I will state my controversial theses (and apparently Weiss"s also) about Plato's Socrates at the beginning. Plato's Socrates, is not a pretty fellow as presented in the dialogues. An open minded and "unphilosophical" reader should notice the following three aspects of Socrates way of arguing: (1) Socrates used "bad arguments," instrumentally, in order to win; (2) Socrates was extremely confident in his beliefs and controlled and manipulated his interlocutors; (3) Socrates cheated in his arguments in the name of what he called justice. (Note: I think, One reason why first time readers often find Plato's dialogues difficult to read is that they see the obvious manipulation by Socrates of his interlocutors and yet the first time reader is directed to ignore these obvious aspects of Socrates way of arguing by most professional philosophers.)

I think any common sense reading of the dialogues should bring an open minded person to these conclusions. The fact that most philosophers, with a few exceptions, avoid these conclusions is what needs to be interpreted and criticized. As I will make clear below, I believe that the main reason for this avoidance of the obvious by professional philosophers is the refusal to set the dialogues, as well as Socrates himself, in their historical and political context. Socrates believed that virtue and justice must have (did have) a foundation or ground and that the political form of democracy was, not only without foundation, but, was anti-foundational in all aspects. Thus Thrasymachus in the first book of The Republic and Callicles in The Gorgias both present a parody of democracy; i.e. democracy cannot provide a "grounding" for justice but only a relativistic definition of justice which varies according to who has power.

So (if the reviewer of Weiss is correct in his characterization of Weiss's interpretation of Socrates) I agree with the general characterization of Socrates as presented below while disagreeing with how to interpret this characterization. Practically all professional philosophers, even those whose politics are democratic, are invested in the "anti-demos" foundation of Plato's Socrates, without necessarily being able to make Socrates's anti-democratic views explicit, because the political context of Plato and Socrates in democratic Athens is left out of the interpretive vision. This prevents them from recognizing the absurd, the bad, the instrumental, manipulative, and the cheating aspects of Socrates's arguments, or when recognizing those aspects they are prevented from interpreting them vigorously and "benevolently," because they don't understand Socrates's prejudice, hatred even, of "the people". From what I can gather Weiss is clear-eyed about Socrates's arguments, but she is unable to see the political hatred of all aspects of Athenian democracy that makes those ways of arguing necessary.

Here is the reviewer's evaluation of Weiss, and followed by my critique.

First of all, Weiss’s Socrates unabashedly uses bad arguments. Admittedly, Plato does have Socrates use bad arguments, if by "bad arguments" we mean invalid ones. But bad arguments in themselves may not be so bad ad hominem. Contexts may help us fill in some hidden premises in the arguments, often ones that only the interlocutors are committed to. I believe one important job of commentators is to reveal such hidden premises. (And, as I understand it, this is the principle of charity combined with taking contexts into account.) Weiss takes a slightly but significantly different approach. On her account, too, Socrates' bad arguments are not "bad" ad hominem; they are good for winning against the opponent.^[3] Weiss's Socrates is not so much concerned about whether or not his argument is a non-sequitur. His main concern is whether or not it is effective for his purpose.
This brings us to the second feature of Weiss's Socrates: he is not a genuine seeker of truth. With regard to moral questions, he thinks he knows pretty much everything he needs to know and has it all figured out. So finding out the truth is not among his motivations for discussing with his interlocutors. This Socrates is a dogmatist who is so confident in his beliefs that he controls, manipulates, and cheats his interlocutors. It is worth noting that, if Socrates is assumed to be a genuine seeker of truth, he can be presented to hold different (tentative) views in different dialogues. In that case, we can say that Socrates holds some core moral beliefs, such as that justice is an essential element of a good life, but tries hard to justify those beliefs by figuring things out through discussion with various people including, of course, sophists. This would be a nice alternative to Weiss's Socrates, who is not interested in justification and cheats in order to win.
What is most disturbing about Weiss's Socrates is that he does wrong (cheating) in the name of justice. As I understand it, a just person is not a person for whom winning is everything: how to win is more important for him/her. Perhaps Weiss is right that Socrates as a just person cannot afford to lose against the enemy of justice. Still, that doesn't mean that he would use any means to achieve his goal. On the contrary, he would be all the more concerned about the means because resorting to unjust means is already a way of losing to the enemy of justice. On the familiar traditional picture of Socrates, of course, he would think that he doesn't have to resort to unjust means because he firmly believes that justice (and truth) does have power in itself and that injustice never pays. Indeed, resorting to unjust means would be a stupidity according to what he preaches through the Socratic paradoxes. On the new Weissian picture of Socrates, he would think that he ought not to resort to unjust means because he is a Kantian who believes that one ought not to do wrong even if it pays. So either way, resorting to unjust means cannot be endorsed by Socrates.(from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008-03-01 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews: Roslyn Weiss, The Socratic Paradox and Its Enemies, University of Chicago Press, 2006, 235pp., $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 0226891720. Reviewed by Sung-Hoon Kang, Seoul National University)

***
This view of Socrates may be disturbing but I believe it contains much truth.

First, we have to understand that this is Plato's portrait of Socrates and to some extent it coincides with other views of Socrates.

Second, we have to understand that Socrates is fighting a battle, a battle against what he believes is the abomination of democracy. It is not necessary to dismiss everything that Socrates or Plato says with the realization of the anti-democratic thrust of philosophy, it is only necessary to keep the political context in mind when interpreting what Plato writes about Socrates.

Third, it is through the aristos vs. demos context of Socrates's statements that we can understand why he fights his enemies the way he does. Socrates has to be a bit sly and obtuse in order to avoid being accused of betraying the Athenian city-state itself. (The reader should only be reminded of Socrates' enthusiastic admiration of the Spartan political system in Plato's presentation of Socrates and that the Spartans attempted to destroy Athenian democracy during the same period.) Thus Socrates doesn't attack the demos, the people, directly but rather attacks those "philosophers" among the people who divert the aristos from their calling as rulers of the city-state. He attacks those who train the upper classes in making arguments, i.e. in manipulating the people. He attacks those who wish to help accommodate the aristos in making compromises with Athenian democracy. Thus Socrates attacks his main philosophical enemy the Sophists. If he uses the methods of the Sophists to attack the Sophists, it is because those weapons are the only ones that the Sophists themselves will listen to, and only then will Socrates be able to win over a small coterie of aristos to his philosophical virtue.

Fourth, it is necessary to understand how Socrates uses his dialectic and the nature of the Socratic method of examination (the elenchos or elenchus); but more importantly, how the dialectic relates to the anti-democratic thrust of the Platonic dialogues. Most professional philosophers understand the dialectic but they don't account for the anti-democratic nature of the dialectic. Socrates is not merely lying or cheating in his arguments, he is also trying to trap his interlocutors in their own confusions. Here's his problem from the anti-democratic point of view. He needs to provide a foundation for "justice" and yet he himself does not necessarily know what that foundation should be. The people he is arguing with are suffering from several illusions; that justice needs no foundation; that justice has a foundation in "the natural world" of the city-state; that whether justice has a foundation or not has nothing to do with the political form of democracy; that the democracy that bore and bred them has had no influence on their illusions. Note, what Socrates wants to do is find the ground of justice. In order to find the ground he must have people who are willing to search for it with him. In his view these people, the aristos, don't even realize that justice has no ground and that democracy is by nature anti-foundational. The very idea of democracy either means that there is no truth or that truth is relative to the power of the majority. Thus Socrates must reveal the anti-foundational nature of mob rule in order to even begin the process of searching for the foundations that he desires to find. And he has to do this every time he begins a dialogue. This puts Socrates in the postion of imitating the "anti-truth" seekers of democracy in order to reveal to them that what they are seeking is no truth at all. Once he is able to "turn around the souls" (think of the parable of the cave) of his interlocutors, then and only then, can he reverse the process of his manipulation and cheating and begin the search anew. In this view the elenchos is not only a method of examination and argument, but a kind of therapy, a way to bring the interlocutor who is willing to "turn-around" to a recognition of a need for self-punishment, guilt and shame. For those who are not willing to listen, the unreconstructed Sophists and/or "democrats", the elenchos is simply punishment and nothing else. To them the method can seem like lying and cheating and manipulation but it is really only their just deserts. Either way, from the anti-democratic point of view the seeming "injustice" of lying for the sake of the truth turns out to be a form of justice.

Jerry Monaco
4 March 2008
New York City

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William F. Buckley & Funerary Gossip: Death of a Racist, Homophobic, Intellectual Bully

2008-03-03T01:04:53Z

I read and occasionally write on Doug Henwood's list-serve, lbo-talk. I am not proud but I find that this list serve gets my blood moving in the morning and so I find it useful.

Sometimes I look away from the list and when I come back I am surprised that the "conversation" has been taken over by subjects that seem to me in no need of thought. The Obama-phenomena is analyzed endlessly, or some piece of gossip is magnified into a world-historical event. So what do I do? Do I ignore the needless noodling over meaningless mites? No, of course not, I jump right into the fray.

So instead of ignoring the fact that so many on the left were offering praise to William F. Buckley as if he were an old friend -- a little bit cranky, a little crusty and full of harrumphs and grumps, perhaps, but still someone that will be missed -- I filled myself with my own harrumph and cranked my way through a few posts. So here I reprise, pretty-up, and expand my warranted invective against William F. Buckley. I salute the news of William F. Buckley's disappearance from the world of the living and hating. This is my anti-obituary for a man who we should have never had paid attention to in the first place.

***
It is said that we should speak well of the dead or not speak at all. Such beliefs are enforced by superstition though they are more than superstition. It is not simply because we are afraid that speaking ill of the the dead will bring the haunting spirit back to plague us that such norms exist. You can gossip about the living but gossiping about the dead, at least soon after their death, can bring bad tidings in a tightly knit society.

Think of it this way. Historically, when city-states were first emerging from the rule of a single family, or alliance of families, into a political formation that looks like the establishment of "the rule of law," some of the first laws recorded are usually concerned with funerals. Funerary Legislation were part of Solon's reforms in the forms that followed on the establishment of the Republic in Rome. When we have information on the laws pasts by emerging city-states they often contain Funerary Legislation. Why? Because the political alliances in a small city usually revolve around extended families. The main "coin" of family rule is reputation; reputation of particular family traits and characteristics and, especially, the reputation of the character and greatness of ancestors. An emerging "Republic" or "Democracy" needs to contain the rule of aristocratic families and the potential for "civil"l war between feuding families. Funerary rites and celebrations were often occasions for violence, reaction, and reciprocal revenge between feuding family alliances. Thus it was necessary for the stability of emerging city-republics to introduce regulations on funerary rites, limiting the amount that could be spent on funerary games, the size of funeral processions. The introduction of the rule of law into emerging city-states always began with ways of limiting family rivalries and family dominance. There were also substantial laws that would limit privilege in other ways.

Along with the funerary laws there were also restrictive social norms against speaking bad of the dead for much the same reasons that the funerary laws existed. Gossip is important in a small society, but the main thrust of gossip about the dead was to denigrate a family as a whole In such a situation speaking of the dead could begin a cycle of revenge that could tear apart a small society. Gossip in a small society is often a regulatory mechanism but it was important to wait a decent interval when gossiping of the recently deceased in order to separate the gossip that was specifically about the person and gossip that could rebound onto a whole family. The problem of honor and reputation of a dead family member was not merely a "personal" problem. Honor and reputation, and the gossiping that circulated around such attributes, were essential sources of public "knowledge" about who to trust and who to follow in such small societies. Gossiping in such a society was the act of a citizen. It was "news", it was the grease of that facilitated the circulation of knowledge about reputation.

Gossip in mass society functions in a much different way We are allowed to have the illusion, the feeling of gossip as a controlling mechanism and a public act, but in fact it has become its opposite. In mass society celebrity gossip gives us the illusion of control and intimacy without actually providing the real thing. Gossip in fact has become a private act.

Perhaps it is a hangover from the old ways that so many liberals have found it in their heart to praise William F Bucklwy or to gossip about his urbanity. Or perhaps it is mistaking the intimacy of gossip for the public acts of rhetoric.

Katherine vanden Heuvel writes in Newsweek:

But rather than rehearse our many ideological differences, I come to NEWSWEEK not to bury Buckley, but, believe it or not, to offer some respect for the man and the editor. More important than any of the particular ideas in which Buckley believed was his belief in the power of ideas themselves. When the audacious, young Yale grad founded National Review in 1955, he hoped to accomplish more than anyone really expected a magazine to be capable of. He sought not only to rejuvenate the conservative movement, but also, simultaneously, to remake it.
***
Despite his uncompromising conservative beliefs, Buckley reveled in transpartisan friendships, most notably with the late John Kenneth Galbraith. (One of Galbraith's favorite phrases—"Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue"—may well have been coined to describe his skiing partner Buckley.) While he could deploy a sometimes vicious wit—which could descend into cruelty—Buckley disdained the kind of partisan shoutfests that too often pass for political debate on our TVs today.

Doug Henwood said on his list:

Hey, he used to be one of my heroes. And he was pretty influential. So I'm interested in the old bastard's passing.

His son Christopher was in my college class. My class listserv is having an outpouring of grief over WFB's death. They're almost all liberal Dems - many to the left of Clinton. But he's one of them, or us, or whatever. The NYT said today that while he hated liberal ideas he never hated liberals. He was, you know, civil, unlike now.

There is a feeling that I get from most of the liberal meditations on the death of Buckley that this is a family drama of the intellectual elite. They all went to Yale or Harvard, they all lived through the time when Bill Buckley was a witty guy on the other side. So they are losing an old friend.

There is no reasons for liberals to be polite about a man such as William F. Buckley. I think that any kind of admiration for this man is a kind of malfunction of liberal intellectual culture. On the LBO list I said:

Buckley was a racist, a sexist, homophobic, and an extreme militarist. He was anti-worker, anti-working class, and anti-union. He was an unapologetic supporter McCarthyist witch hunts. He felt personally insulted by anyone who questioned privilege. As far a I know he never apologized for supporting segregation, or for in fact believing that Jim Crow was a good thing in his youth. In short he was a model intellectual. Why would anyone admire him at all? He was occasionally amusing and if he could have done stand up on the page the way his son Christopher Buckley does, at least I would say he earned his living.

Questions: Why should anyone on the left pretend he was anything but a bad influence on U.S. intellectual culture? Why should anyone admire him in any way whatsoever? He was also bad for intellectual Catholicism.

P.S. Buckley's spy novels were the worse of the genre and I have read them all. I am glutton for spy novels.

Doug Henwood asked after this tirade, "Who does pretend that [he was anything but a bad influence on U.S. intellectual culture]?"

Well, vanden Heuvel, for one. But also Doug himself who diverts himself from the ugliness of William Buckley by speaking of his personal relations with him. Everybody who would rather talk about his poise and his poses, his grace and mannerism, and the wonder that is the great personality of William F. Buckley instead of focusing on his role as right wing enforcer of intellectual reaction. Everyone who praises the gestures of his "private" life instead of the fact that he was a supporter of murder regimes, terrorist dictatorships, and deathsquad republics in every part of the world. Pretending that he was anything but a supporter of mass murder in, say, El Salvador is accepting his own public persona as his real face. It is to confuse public with private, which as I will explain, is the political function of celebrity gossip.

In the context of the usual sober celebrations of his life in the bosses media, for leftists to contribute to the misapprehension of William F. Buckley is quite annoying. At least Ann Coulter was half-honest about why she liked Buckley -- she states plainly that he was a vicious intellectual enforcer of privilege and an advocate of U.S. dominance, and that she admires him for it. She leaves out his racism and support of Jim Crow, but such old fashion marks of "conservatism" are no longer mentionable in polite society.

If liberals or leftists pay attention to Buckley at all why not analyze his role as intellectual enforcer and trainer of intellectual bullies? Why talk about how nice he was to have a conversation with? His ability to mix a great martini is irrelevant to his role in society. I am savvy to the idea of trying to understand the individual psychology of a Ku Kluxer or a Podhoretz by understanding how he treats his wife and family but that is not what is happening with the liberal appraisal of Buckley. There is no attempt to understand him as a contemptuous intellectual bully who established around him a coterie of college boys who looked up to him. There is only talk about "how good he was to his dog". (The fallacy that it matters that immorality or evil is more "interesting" because the evil person loves dogs or treats his children well is the usual liberal substituting of the personal for the social.)

Gore Vidal called William F. Buckley a crypto-Nazi. He later corrected himself and said he meant to say that Buckley had a "fascist mind set." This is perfectly true. Alexander Cockburn quotes Buckley as saying the following:

Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.

As an example of his white supremacist world-view, how about this from William F. Buckley in 1957?

The central question that emerges is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes--the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is by no means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes', and intends to assert its own. National Review believes that the South's premises are correct. The great majority of the Negroes of the South who do not vote do not care to vote, and would not know for what to vote if they could. Universal suffrage is not the beginning of wisdom or the beginning of freedom The South confronts one grave moral challenge. It must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve the Negro as a servile class. It is tempting and convenient to block the progress of a minority whose services, as menials, are economically useful. Let the South never permit itself to do this. So long as it is merely asserting the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races, and so long as it does so by humane and charitable means, the South is in step with civilization, as is the Congress that permits it to function.

Maybe Pinochet was good to his dog but who cares? Why should those of us on the left treat Pinochet as a dog lover instead of anything but a brutal dictator? To treat the personal humors of Buckley as serious, to treat him as a dog lover, is to confuse the public and the private. To treat Buckley as someone good to his servants is to confuse his public role as an intellectual in the forefront of anti-working class intellectual propaganda with his private role as pater familias.

Sometimes the excuse for all of this talk is that it is good gossip.

I too love gossip but part of the function of gossip is to make us believe that we are still in a small village society with few class divisions. That is what gossip does for us in mass society. It helps us to confuse the private and the public in such a way that we forget the public role, the ruling class role, of this very public intellectual. So yes, I would prefer that leftists treat him as a public intellectual who did all in his power to harm the bourgeois commonweal as well as the working class. But instead even among people I would prefer to think of as comrades this despicable reactionary man is treated as an object for gossip. I agree that gossip is fun. But this systematic confusion of public and private should be addressed by those of us on the left because it is how the U.S. rulers run their elections and make their entertainment. Instead of being analyzed it is imitated. It is imitated even by those who should know better.

I certainly agree with John Thorton's sentiments. He says:

I don't see [Buckley] as an intellectual. He was a pompous pseudo-intellectual. The gift of an expansive vocabulary along with a certain level of polish does not make WFB an intellectual. What original idea did the man ever have? What insight did he show into anything?

I'm one of those people who has an instrumental definition of intellectuals -- Anyone who does intellectual work can qualify. (Thus all lawyers qualify, as do all teachers and all journalists and pundits. Writers and artists too.... and even accountants.) I generally agree with Sartre's division between classical intellectuals, technical intellectuals, and ruling class ideologists. (Somewhere in among these classifications there is room for the working class intellectual.)

So I would prefer to say that WFB was pseudo-intelligent but none-the-less an intellectual. I am not saying he wasn't intelligent but part of his public persona was to imitate intelligence by literally tipping back his head and looking down his nose at anyone who questioned ruling class privilege. He rarely used his intelligence, but substituted for thinking the gestures of intelligence to enhance his intellectual bullying. And this is where the problem of gossip comes in again. One can accept him on his own terms and talk about Buckley's gestures and masks, the acting persona he used to enhance his role as ruling class intellectual bully, but to do so is simply to subtly give into the legitimacy of his class role.

John Thornton also said:

As an ex-Catholic I believe Catholicism itself would be bad for intellectual Catholicism so I'm uncertain how much damage WFB could do in this area.

As far as what I said previously about his influence on Catholicism I would like to explain a little. (Warning: I am an ex-Catholic and an atheist.)

Buckley lived through a transformation of Catholicism during the Second Vatican Council. Vatican II convened in 1962 by Pope John XXIIi attempted to drag Roman Catholicism kicking and screaming into the 19th century and it nearly succeeded. Buckley was part of the intellectual reaction to the transformation of the Catholic Church. He wished to keep the Church back in the 14th century. Basically Buckley had a 14th Century mindset about who should rule and who should be ruled and he looked at the Church as one of the props for the ruling class. In the 1980s one of the few consistently liberal elite groups left in the U.S. was the Conference of Catholic Bishops. During this time Buckley kept right-wing reactionary Catholicism alive. His campaign to organize right-wing Catholics to oppose the Catholic Bishops helped to undermine the Bishop influence on public policy. The Conference of Catholic Bishops was one of the few mainstream groups to consistently oppose U.S. policy in Central America in the 1980s which produced mass slaughter of whole villages. Buckley supported the terror regimes in Central America and Brazil, regimes that murdered more Catholic church supporters -- priests, nuns, and lay practitioners -- than any governments since the Catholic Church has come into existence. He supported the reactionary torturers and murderers of priests and nuns and he never once even acknowledged that this was anything but a "good." When liberal bishops in this country spoke out against the murder of their brethren in Brazil or Central America he condemned them, and provided intellectual cover for all Catholics who would prefer to look the other way instead of confronting mass murder. In short William F. Buckley made it respectable for right wing Catholic intellectuals to justify mass murder.

I am not a Catholic and I am not a Christian. But I see no reason why I should pay homage to any aspect of this man who helped to justify mass murder.

In my youth I could express much animosity toward the Church for its reactionary role. And William F. Buckley certainly represents the continuing attempt to return to this reactionary role of the Catholic Church. But over the years I have met many Catholic intellectuals I admire and so slowly I changed my mind about the overall function of religion while still remaining anti-religious in general and an atheist in particular. The people I met were Dorothy Day, the Berrigan Brothers, and a number of priests and lay workers in base communities in El Salvador and Brazil. Their examples and their writings have impressed me as radical and hopeful and their record of consistent support for working class and peasant solidarity and organization has impressed me even more. So I am not willing to condemn all Catholic intellectuals. Still the Church, with the help of the likes of Buckley, has mostly abandoned such people or persecuted them. I tell you though, one Dorothy Day is worth any number of Bill Buckleys.

Republicans, the Republic, and the Imperial Presidency: Clinton's Impeachment

2008-03-01T12:50:10Z

In The End of Kings: A History of Republics and Republicans, William R. Everdell points out the stark contrast between the reaction of Congress to Ronald Reagan's undermining of the Constitution through his funding of a "private" terrorist war in Central America (called "the Iran-Contra" scandal, though that is a misnomer) and the reaction to President Bill Clinton's lies about his own personal sexual affairs.

Twelve years after Iran-Contra, the issue of presidential power came up again, only this time Congress actually voted to impeach. This time the president was chief of the Democratic Party and the party of impeachment was the Republican, the party that had once endorsed Reagan. Small "r" republicans, one might think, should have been pleased at the Republican initiative, and the more republican they were, the less pleased one should have expected them to be that the impeachment process, which the Framers designed to check monarchical tendencies in the executive branch, had not proceeded all the way to conviction by the Senate. In the main, however, republicans disageed with Republicans . . .

Why was this so? Was it because the impeachment of William Clinton turned out badly, like that of Andrew Johnson in 1868 thus tarnishing the impeachment tool? This theory is unlikely is unlikely because the Senate's failure to convict Johnson did not, in fact, prevent impeachment from "working." Its effect was to cast an impeachment shadow over every subsequent presidency, and not until Grover Cleveland did a president indulge in the kind of unilateral action that had been characteristic of Lincoln and [Andrew] Johnson.

Everdell then points out reasons why other presidents should have been impeached but weren't. Lying, obstruction of justice, and aggrandisement of executive power are grounds for impeachment if the idea of the Republican form of goverrnment has any meaning. Going to war by executive order is grounds for impeachment if you adhere to the ideology of republicanism. There are very few republicans left in the commanding heights of the Republic. For republicans executive power is suspicious by its nature. In this light one might ponder the non-existence of republicanism in the Republican party. For a conservative republican the idea of the Imperial Presidency should be considered an abomination. By any definitiion, there have been very few leaders of the Republican Party since Thaddeus Stevens who have actually been republicans, and there have been very few leaders of the Republican Party since Robert Taft who have even tried to be conservative republicans. The name of "The Republican Party" has become like one of those real estate developments or geriatric care centers that are named Pine Estates or Lake View to make up for the complete lack of pine trees or lake views.

The impeachment tool was invented to curb the monarchical tendencies of executive power. At the time of the ratification of the Constitution, Federalists and anti-Federalists alike argued over whether their were enough safe-guards against the presidency turning into an elected monarchy, no matter for how limited a time. The thrust of Hamilton's arguments in Federalist #67 and #69 was that there were plenty of limits on executive power in the Constitution and impeachment was one of them. Hamilton, who was in favor of a strong executive, seemed to believe that Congress would be vigilant in protecting the Constitution from the president. There is evidence that the framers of the Constitution thought that impeachment and the subsequent trial would not be an exceptional tool but a threat that could be used to keep the president from over-reaching. Later this was certainly the view of the radicals in the Republican Party during the period of Reconstruction. Thaddeus Stevens believed that any excessive exercise of presidential power or refusal to use the executive branch to institute the laws passed by Congress should be an impeachable offense. Presidential lying to one of the other branches and to the citizens of the Republic should be impeachable in principle. Congress, as a separate branch of government, a branch of government entailed to protect the people from the monarchical tendencies of the executive, should use impeachment, trial, and conviction to curb such misdeamenors of the President as lying to the other branches of government and to the citizenry. So why, Everdell asks, did most consistent republicans consider the use of the impeachment tool against Clinton, who lied and obstructed justice, a misuse that brought discredit to the idea of impeachment? Everdell then compares Nixon's crimes to Clinton's crimes:

[I]f President Clinton obstructed justice, in the manner alleged by the House, it can only have been in order to avoid prosecution for perjury in a civil suit brought against him personally - a perjury alleged under a legal definition which his testimony hardly met - and Clinton seems to have scrupulously avoided using the public powers of his office to fend it off. By contrast, Nixon obstructed justice in order to cover up illegal activities deliberately designed and undertaken in order to undermine the constitutional powers of the other branches of government, and thus ultimately undermining the powers of the people who made that government in the first place. Moreover, he used the statutory powers of his own office to do it. Clinton's wongdoing, in other words, was a private offense, whose victim, if any, was an individual. Nixon's wrongdoing was public; its victim was not only the people but their polity. Nixon's was therefore a crime against republican government; and Clinton's was not. Widespread inability in 1998-99 to make the distinciton between these two kinds of wrongdoing was an indication that the republican concept of political "virtue" had changed its meaning. Many on both sides of the debate, it seemed, had lost sight of the public interest and a few had even lost the capacity to deploy the very concept of the 'public good.'

Reagan's activities, too, and those of his loyal appointees, had struck a blow at republican government. . . . Reagan's wrongdoing, too, was constitutional rather than criminal, not private but public. Fundamental to all these presidential cases is a confusion between private and public, personalities and powers, that still threates the Constitution; and the impeachment of President Clinton began by making that confusion worse.

The tradition of consistent republicanism, not to say radical republicanism (both in the post-civil war Republican Party version and in the revolutionary tradition of John Milton or Thomas Paine) was once a good bourgeois tradition. It could even be considered a tradition of a section of the capitalist ruling classes. There are perhaps still a few who are rooted in this tradition --Gore Vidal comes to mind -- but it is hard to think of prominent intellectuals or capitalists that consider themselves consistent or radical republicans in this old idea of the virtue of the commonweal, res publica, the public thing.

Why has radical republicanism so thoroughly disappeared from the Republic that was at one time its modern emblem? Part of the story has to do with the rise of industrialism and the modern working class. As the socialists used to say and as was recognized even by Romantics such as Percy Shelley, it is the working class that inherited the tradition of radical republicanism. The demand for universal suffrage for all men and women became a working class demand and along with it came the idea that the economy itself was part of the commonweal. The economy was a social as well as a political good.

But this is not the part of the story I want to concentrate on. Proudhon, Marx, and Engels long ago told this story much better than I can ever tell it. They understood the decline of radical republicanism among the creators of modern republicans from a socialist and class point of view. But I think it is useful to briefly assume the world view of an Old Roman Tribune. I don't mean a famous tribune such as Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus or Marcus Livius Drusus, the kind you read about in the history books who sought to reform the Roman Repubic, in the teeth of the rulers in the Senate, for its own good These tribunes were surely good republicans and deserve our respect. What I am thinking of is the kind of tribune who fought the everyday fight for the independence of the plebs as a group and gave protection to all those who were unjustly (and sometimes justly) accused of crimes. Think of Radical Republicanism from the Old Tribune's point of view and try to translate that ideology to our time.

What the Old Tribune would see is the following: The constitutional Republic has become a vast empire and in order to control an empire there is a need for a standing army that can respond anywhere in the world at a moment's notice. In order to control this standing army a strong executive authority is required. Thus the imperial presidency grows with every expansion of U.S. military and economic dominance in the world. The Old Tribune will understand that in order to protect economic dominance military dominance must follow. Economic dominance is either protected directly through domestically raised military forces that are then stationed at foreign bases or is maintained indirectly through client state military regimes that are bought and supplied. The Old Tribune would understand that a strong executive is needed for both of these kinds of regimes of military protection. In other words he would understand the rise of the Imperial Presidency quite well. If the Old Tribune had survived a bit into the Principate of Caesar Augustus he would also understand how a Republic can maintain its outward form but at the same time come to be ruled by a strong Imperial Executive. From the Old Tribune's view it would be easy to see that that is what we have now.

The Old Tribune would find it harder to understand other aspects of our political and social system. The existence of the business institutions we call corporations does not have any easy analogy with business groupings in the Roman Republic. The nearest he could come to by way of analogy would be the publicans and the colleges of business groups. But as far as legal relations are concern the idea of the Pater Familias combined with the Publicani and Colleges (collegia opificum) would be closer to the mark for the Old Tribune. For then the Tribune would see the enormity of the power of the modern Corporation. The biggest modern multinaional corporations are bigger than all but the biggest States. The multinationals corporations act as if they have their own special sovereignty. In this sense corporations are like heads of families in the Roman Republic. Each head of a family had his own sovereign domain separate from Res Publica, just as each corporation has its own legal domain separate from the commonweal. But the difference is that there is nothing "personal" about a corporation and nothing to stop it from growing immensely big. In this way a modern corporation will look to the Old Tribune something like an impersonal separate sovereignty, a Pater Familias without moral compunction, a combination of publicani with legal sovereignty, and a huge power center with separate loyalties like one of Caesars' armies.

Now if the Old Tribune comes to that realization he will understand what has happened to the Republic. It has disappeared under overlaying sets of separate sovereignties (i.e. corporations) and the overarching Imperial Presidency that has become necessary to protect the economic domination of those separate sovereignties. The Old Tribune would tell us that we no longer have much of a Republic.

Bringing this note back to the impeachment of Clinton. Strangely, the impeachment of Clinton had the effect of strengthening the Imperial Presidency, not weakening it. The one salutary effect of the Nixon presidency was to make the idea of impeaching a president a viable alternative that could limit presidential action. There was what might be called "A Watergate Syndrome" that was analogous to "The Vietnam Syndrome." The Reaganites, among them Cheney and Rumsfeld, spent much of the 1980s arguing for an expansion of presidential power and a full return to the imperial presidency. They blamed the "Vietnam Syndrome" on the fact that the U.S. president could not bomb and invade at will, but they also blamed the "weakness" of the presidency and Watergate, on the fact that the President could not ignore Congress at will. One unintended but welcomed consequence of the Clinton impeachment proceedings was to trivilize impeachment as a tool of republicanism. Bill Clinton was an imperial president. There is no way that a president can lead this country with its military reach without acting like an imperial president. But he was too nice of an imperial president. He believed in cooperation with Congress and with European allies. This was not the kind of President that they wanted at all. How to hurt such a preseident without hurting the furture of the Imperial Presidency? By diligent displacement of problems of personality onto questions of power; by a substitution of the trivial of the private for the good of the public.

As for those of us who still consider ourselves in the revolutionary tradition (republican or socialist, bourgeois or working class) we can at least honor the ideal of republicanism of those such as Thaddeus Stevens. Let us do so by imagining a counterfactual for U.S. history. Thaddeus Stevens and his supporters succeed in convicting Andrew Johnson in the Senate. The precedent is established that "advise and consent" over members of the president's cabinet gives congress a great amount of power over how those cabinet members exercise their duties. The President's cabinet, including the Secretaries of War and of State serve at the behest of congress. In such a situation no president would be able to make an end run around congress and go to war without an official declaration of war. Such a situation would resemble a parliamentary system with the President as elected figure head, more than an Imperial Presidency.

Jerry Monaco
1 March 2008
New York City

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Defend Creative Protest: 29 students punished after paying for $2 lunches with pennies

2008-02-29T22:22:36Z

29 students punished after paying for $2 lunches with pennies
2/29/2008, 2:13 p.m. ET

READINGTON TOWNSHIP, N.J.

Readington Township school officials gave 29 students detention after they used pennies to pay for their $2 lunches.

Superintendent Jorden Schiff says it started out as a prank. But as the eighth-graders began to get in trouble for taking up so much time, it turned into a protest about Thursday's shortened lunch period.

Schiff says the students were punished for holding up their peers and disrespecting lunch aides.

Schiff says some parents think a two-day detention went too far and others think it wasn't enough.

The school says it wants students to know they can express themselves without disrupting other people.

On the contrary the students were expressing themselves in a way that was nonviolent and creative and we should be proud of them. The students should be rewarded for their creative protest. In a democratic society we would promote, encourage, and honor such protests as a way for the otherwise powerless to promote their interest within the commonweal. These creative ways of getting bosses and authorities to listens, people who rarely listen to those less powerful than they are, should be taught to children as part of their preparation for citizenship.

As far as the story itself is concerned I have a few questions for the reporters: Were the students interviewed? Why should we take the word of the authority who metes out punishment? Why not ask the kids for their side? How long was the lunch period? How long does it normally take kids to get lunch and eat it?

Of course I know the reason why the kids weren't asked to contribute to this story. Their opinion really doesn't count. This is a small story and it is easier to get the story from the official, the bureaucrat, the authority or the boss, than to do the foot work and write the story as it should be written. The Associated Press certainly doesn't have the resources. But shouldn't some local paper have the resources? Shouldn't someone at least post the story of the kids on their weblog? Anyone out there in cyberspace know these kids? If you do interview them and post their stories. Maybe we have a couple of future union organizers among them.

So maybe the lunch period should be longer. And maybe the lunch should be free.

Pragmatism at the NYT: Reading the Newspaper

2008-02-25T23:54:08Z

The New York Times is very polite. Out right lies only come in the heat of the moment. The issues are framed so that all reasonable men and women can agree on the basic issues: that peace is a good thing, except when war is necessary; that the moderates should always be supported, because the radicals are always on the wrong side, and strangely, moderates always turn into radicals when they don't support the United States; that "pragmatism" is the world-view of the realistic politician, except when cynicism turns the pragmatist into a corrupt or radical supporter of our enemies; that the new era is always better than the old era where mistakes were made that we could not avoid, but luckily those bad things don't happen anymore; that torture is always a bad thing, except when it is not torture; and we are always in favor of democracy except when the irony of history finds us, with the best intentions supporting a murderous dictatorship; and that Americans are always "innocents" taken advantage of by wily foreign leaders who use our good will to do bad things we never intended.

In a moment I would like to write about the use of the words "pragmatism" and "pragmatic" and "radicaism" and "radical" in The New York Times But first a personal note: The writers' strike, and especially the biased "coverage" of Michael Cieply has brought me back to an old habit: reading The New York Times with an eye to detail. I intend to do an occasional ideological critique of the media to Shandean Postscripts and especially of The New York Times. I intend to select stories of which I have substantial knowledge and present a "correction." The correction maybe historical or philosophical, or simply a telling of what was left out of the story. I hope to provide over time a guide to "How to Read the New York Times." When I used to read the Times very closely I would concentrate on reports from Latin America. What should strike everybody who kept up with the writers' strike and who follows U.S. policy in Latin America is that union leaders are treated in a similar way that Latin American leaders are treated in U.S. newspapers. The union leaders are put in the position that they must justify their positions and actions as abnormal, unless they support the business view. The bosses are assumed to be in the right or simply to have made mistakes. The union leaders are presented as aggressive and over-reaching. Finally union leaders are divided into categories such as "pragmatic" or "ideological" or "moderate" and "militant."

PRAGMATIC and RADICAL in the Lexicon of The New York Times

It should be obvious to any regular reader of the New York Times that the words "pragmatic," "radical" and "moderate" are not neutral terms. They are used in Times "news" stories to classify and "value" people. A "pragmatist" is not a follower of Pierce, William James, or John Dewey, but a person who the United States can make a deal with; a deal that is advantageous to "us". (There is good reason to believe that John Dewey, who was a socialist, would not be called a "pragmatist by The New York Times if he led a Latin American country today. He would probably be labeled a "radical" and a friend of Hugo Chavez.) The words "pragmatic" and "radical" are used in contrast to each other but in the times lexicon they are not opposites. The word pragmatic is meant to provide shading and distinction. A pragmatist is not a person who is on "our" side but simply a person who is willing to bargain in a way that we like.

For instance in an article on the election of Evo Morales the Times reports:

Mr. Morales, a former congressman, is untested as an executive and known less as a pragmatist than as a fiery orator and protest leader. Several of his associates, including Vice President-elect Álvaro García and Carlos Villegas, who will oversee economic planning, are leftist academics with no experience in government.

"There could be realism and pragmatism in their policies, or they could allow ideology to guide them," said Roberto Laserna, a political analyst with San Simón University in Cochabamba, the city where Mr. Morales makes his home. "But we do not have a way to gauge their management experience." (Bolivia's Leader Solidifies Region's Leftward Tilt By JUAN FORERO and LARRY ROHTER Published: January 22, 2006)

In the same article a contrast is made between a radical and pragmatist: the radical is Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and the pragmatist is Lula da Silva, the President of Brazil. After observing that the seven leftists elected in Latin America are "a varied crop," the Times writers begin to make distinctions among those various weeds and flowers.

With the exception of Mr. Chávez, who is bankrolled by Venezuela's oil wealth, most of the continent's other left-leaning leaders, like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, have pursued pragmatic policies once faced with the real task of governing.

It is strange to read from the times that Lula da Silva is a "pragmatist" because I remember when the very same New York Times presented Lula as a dangerous "radical," who would destroy the fabric of the economy in Brazil. But that was when he first ran in 1989. At that time Lula's program was aggressively socialist and the United States went out of its way to see that he wasn't elected So what changed in the mean time? Luckily we have the Times to provide us with a narrative.

But Lula has proved a curious surprise to most everyone, taking only small, measured steps toward domestic reform and staying well within the accepted covenants of global capitalism. For an idealist, perhaps the ideal is to be in the opposition. Lula, finally in power, now has to contend with the many forbidding obstacles in the sightline of a genuinely egalitarian vision. Brazil, doubled over with debt, is beholden to lenders. The Workers' Party, with only a minority in both houses of Congress, is not a complete master of the public agenda. The apparatus of government, besotted with inefficiency and corruption, resists change. ''I don't have the power of God to do miracles,'' Lula says these days with unmasked frustration. He has become the lead character in another common fable: the dreamer who runs headlong into the cul-de-sacs of reality.

This is not an unfamiliar problem for leftist leaders throughout the world. Lula views Fidel Castro as an iconic presence; he dined with him in Brasília on Inauguration Day. But in Latin America, exhortations to a people's revolution today seem as out of fashion as the red-and-black flag of the Sandinistas. Leftists in developing nations find themselves working within the margins of the global financial schematic. Their urge for reform is most often constrained by a dependence on international creditors. Default would be a debacle. Investor confidence would plummet, capital would flee, the poor would take an abrupt beating. The left may criticize the so-called Washington consensus, an economic model that largely leaves the fight against poverty to the efficiency of free markets, but it is hard pressed to veer off the trodden course without facing uncontrollable consequences. Extremism is out; pragmatism is in. (Poor Man's Burden By BARRY BEARAK June 27, 2004, The New York Times Magazine.)

A couple years later The Wall Street Journal helps us to understand the deeper meaning of this use of the word pragmatism.

Mr. da Silva would carry some undeniable strengths into a second term, including ample credibility with financial markets earned after his success in taming inflation and paying off the International Monetary Fund loans ahead of schedule. He can also count on the goodwill of the U.S. Among the leftist leaders that have emerged in Latin America in recent years, Mr. da Silva's economic pragmatism makes him a bulwark against more-radical anti-American populists such as Venezuela's Hugo Chávez or Bolivia's Evo Morales. (Lula Is Set for Costly Victory Brazilian Leader's Election Strategy May Heighten Polarization By MATT MOFFETT September 23, 2006; Page A4 The Wall Street Journal September 23, 2006.)

But the only real question as far as Mr. Moffett of The Wall Street Journal is concerned is whether Lula can become a true "moderate" by attacking the poor.

To unlock Brazil's potential, economists say, Mr. da Silva needs to pass pension, labor and budget overhauls that would reduce a bloated public sector, which currently saddles Brazil with a tax rate comparable to that of a rich country.

Lula could also cut food subsidies, which benefit the poor but in order to do this he would have to get more political clout: "Mr. da Silva's supporters say he might have more clout in Congress if he could expand his base of support beyond poor Brazilians." For WSJ the true test of Lula da Silva's pragmatism is his willingness to cut himself off from the poor and policies that benefit the poor. The New York Times is more polite about such things. They would not ever actually recommend less food for the poor in so few words. They would call such policies "disciplining" the economy or "hard choices" or some such euphemism.

WSJ in its honesty gives us another clue to Lula da Silva's transformation from "radical" to "pragmatist," the emergence of even more dangerous radicals. In an article on the radicalism of Hugo Chavez, in the Latin American economic organization Mercosur: the Times reports,

“It was a tremendous error to allow Chávez into Mercosur, not only because he wants to control it, but also because he is Lula’s biggest rival,” said Felipe Lampreia, who was Brazil’s foreign minister from 1995 to 2001, referring to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “Lula is moderate and pragmatic, while Chávez is a revolutionary, socialist and international agitator who sees himself as the leader of Latin America.” Venezuela Wants Trade Group to Embrace Anti-Imperialism By LARRY ROHTER Published: January 19, 2007

When reading The New York Times you have to be aware of key words that are meant to frame the emotions of the published stories. The New York Times itself is a business institution, a corporation, that actually does not do anything. The people in the corporation serve institutional goals. By nature the Times is a profit making institution "protective" of other profit making institutions. If writers for the Times began to write favorable stories about states or organizations that threatened profit making institutions those writers would soon find the accuracy or balance of their stories questioned. So the smart journalist finds ways to frame the story that is always favorable to the business classes and critical to those who may threaten smooth gain of profit and power for the business class. In Latin America that means writing about "radicals" as if they are outlandish or crazy or threatening in some other way. It means promoting people who can counter the disruptive radicals. It means finding signs that the radicals are transforming themselves into pragmatists who might someday become moderates.

In this context the reader should remember how Michael Cieply for The New York Times portrayed the leaders of the WGA during the writers strike. David Young was a militant leader of the WGA and News Corp. president Peter Chernin was "protective" of business interests. John Bowman, chief negotiator for the WGA, was described as "flexible," a word that in the Times' lexicon is a synonym for "pragmatic." (See The Cynical Mr. Cieply: The New York Times and the Writers' Strike: #4)

Jerry Monaco
25 February 2008
New York City

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Toward a Long Range Evaluation of the Writers' Strike

2008-02-23T22:18:16Z

“The writers' strike has been the most successful strike in this country since the 1997 UPS strike,” WGA West President Patric Verrone said on a Los Angeles radio show. “What it's done is to show that collective action on the part of workers can actually have a successful result. This is historic.”

This I think is a realistic evaluation of the strike by Patric Verrone. It gives the due emphasis to collective action and solidarity without overselling the results.

I also think the comparison with the 1997 UPS strike is apt. It was a strike that gained public support in ways that surprised the company bosses. And it was a strike that gave hope to others in similar industries. A full evaluation of the writers' strike cannot be written yet, but one aspect of such an evaluation must be measuring the ripple effects on other unions, beginning of course with the entertainment unions.

Jerry Monaco

U.S. Imperialism, the British Empire, the Marshall Plan

2008-02-16T09:30:45Z

"After the programme, among the several conversations, were one or two remarks which might surprise you – they surprised me – one that after the Second World War, the Americans discovered a great affection for the British Empire, partly because it had many, many handy islands near to places that they wanted to invade or influence. Also, that the Marshall Plan was essentially a quid pro quo. The deal was that America would give help, provided that Europe would integrate. The integration of Europe, according to Kathleen Burk, is a direct consequence of American pressure."

Melvin Bragg, "In Our Time" Newsletter, 16 February 2008.

Quite true. During and after World War II one of our main goals was to make sure that the territory we wanted of the British, French, and Dutch empires fell under our control, one way or another.

As far as the Marshall Plan was concerned it was a brilliant post-war imperial policy. Back then the U.S. ruling class thought through post-war policy because they knew that the period immediately following a war is more important than victory on the battle field. It is a sign of a decaying ruling class that U.S. rulers can't even think through a post-war strategy in one medium sized country in the Middle East.

One aspect of the Marshall Plan, little discussed in the United States, is that it was a "stimulus package" for the U.S. economy.* There was a great fear that immediately after production for the war stopped the U.S. would fall back into a depression. It was only war production that had lifted the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression. The Marshall Plan, essentially was a transfer payment from the pockets of U.S. workers to the banks of Western Europe and from there to the manufacturing sector of the United States.

It is a curious fact that most of U.S. foreign and economic policy in the immediate post war years was focused on improving the manufacturing sector, often ignoring the financial sector. Oh, how times have changed! The financial sector is now the fourth branch of the U.S. government, along with its executive committee in the Federal Reserve. The financial sector is essentially able to veto any political-economic policy they don't like, whether propounded by city, state, or the federal government. Much of the New Deal era was spent inventing ways to regulate the financial sector and since the 1970s we have let banks and insurance companies get out of control and back into a place where they are the masters of the universe.

* Footnote: But see camlina's correction and my caveat in the comments section. What I mean here is that it was a stimulus package specifically for the manufacturing sector of the economy.

Jerry Monaco
16 February 2008
New York City

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A Message of Thanks to the Writers' on the Picket Line from One of Your Supporters:

2008-02-13T17:47:33Z

I am proud of the brothers and sisters at the WGA. You have done a good thing for the union movement. The level of solidarity of your unit is a lesson to us all. The use of new media to get your message out should be taken up as much as possible by all unions. The level of strike support by non-WGA members should bring hope to all of our union brothers and sisters.

A strike is never won completely. You can never know for sure when victory is yours. I have seen great contracts signed after a unified strike and the actual long term prospects that the strike gave access to lost by frittering away of unity. I have seen mediocre contracts signed in the midst of contentious union in-fighting with the result that the specific union and the union movement as a whole has come away stronger and ready for future struggle. A strike is not won or lost on the day the strike ends. It will be the future that will tell. If this fight leads to a Hollywood more united against the conglomerates, to a SAG and WGA in continuous collaboration, to greater connections with the union movement as a whole, and to a spread of the lessons of this strike to other unions in Southern California and across the country, then the victory will not be just in the here and now for this contract but a permanent victory that will grow.

So this is what I have to say: Start organizing now for SAG, for the Teamsters, for other Hollywood unions and for your future contract. Don't forget the lessons you learned in this fight. You are writers, you should write those lessons down. Create a collective history so others can see.

I have a few hopes for the future, the future of the writers' at the WGA, of the website United Hollywood, and the future of the Hollywood union movement. I will list the obvious along with the not so obvious. I hope at later times to write two longer posts on "the measure of victory" and "the lessons for other unions of the WGA strike."

1) Most immediately you need to support SAG and the Teamsters in their upcoming contract negotiations. Do not fall asleep on this, especially in regard to the Teamsters.

2) You need to find a way to unite all Hollywood unions in one bargaining coalition. (I do not yet hope that there will be a single industrial wide union but that should be an aim of the most conscious union members.)

3) Is there any possibility that some tech savvy writers might volunteer to help other unions in need? Damn it! there have been a few organizing drives that I have been involved with, and one major strike here in NYC, that your kind of righteous propaganda, use of youtube, picket line interviews, web log-rolling could have helped us to get the news out to the public that we are not "greedy" truck drivers or transit workers, but just brothers and sisters making a living. (Also star power would help.)

4) I would like to know more about rank and file connections between Hollywood unions and other unions in Southern California.

5) I would like to hear some respectful but clear eyed discussion of IATSE and how to incorporate IATSE into a "United Hollywood" movement.

Going forward will prove the success of this strike. Don't let victory slip through your fingers by relaxing. As Verrone said, you must build on your unprecedented unity. Organize the unorganized! Join with other unions.

The strike captains I read on the internet, heard in interviews, and the ones I met on the picket line in New York were the backbone of this strike. Don't let anyone tell you that this strike wasn't yours because you made it yours. In my 30 years of involvement in the union movement I have rarely met a more motivated group of strike and line captains. They made it a pleasure for me to show up at the picket line in cold, rain, and sleet. I want to thank them.

I want to thank your leadership and your rank and file for giving the union movement a win that can be built upon.

Jerry Monaco

The Last Picket Signs

2008-02-12T18:49:03Z

From 23/6

On the Ideology of the Incomprehensibility of Nazism

2008-02-12T11:27:48Z

Seventy-five years after the taking of power by the National Socialists in Germany the phenomena of the party led by Hitler and the enormous destruction wrought by his movement in the space of just over a decade still remain a source of mystery for many commentators.

In its special edition to mark the anniversary of the Nazi takeover (14 January 2008), the prominent German news magazine Der Spiegel headlined its main article “The Triumph of Madness.”
Writing in the January 24 edition of the London Book Review the veteran Stalinist historian Eric Hobsbawm struck a similar note: “The fact is that no one, right, left or centre, got the true measure of Hitler’s National Socialism, a movement of a kind that had not been seen before and whose aims were rationally unimaginable ...”

There can be no doubt that Hitler fascism was responsible for a degree of human depravation and brutality which quite rightly continues to shock and horrify today, but that does not mean his movement was incomprehensible. In fact, there has been a great deal of scholarship in recent years that has thrown important new light on the emergence and rise to prominence of National Socialism.

Utilising new sources, including important archives opened up by the fall of Stalinism in the former USSR and Eastern Europe, the British historians Ian Kershaw and Richard Evans have both published multi-volume works which considerably broaden our understanding of the social and political background to Hitler’s own rise to power—Kershaw’s two-volume biography of the dictator (Hitler: 1889-1936: Hubris, and Hitler: 1936-1945: Nemesis) and the three volumes by Richard J. Evans on the Third Reich (the third volume of the series is still to be completed).

A third very valuable contribution to the current wave of research into National Socialism is the volume by a British historian based at Cambridge University, Adam Tooze—The Wages Of Destruction, which is now available in German translation. In his book Tooze sets out to identify and examine the economic driving forces behind the National Socialist project and in so doing presents the first extensive investigation of this type for many decades. (From : Hitler’s “intelligible response” to the contradictions of global capitalism The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze a Review by Stefan Steinberg.)

There are ideological reasons to insist on the incomprehensibility of the rise of Nazism. But first let me state some of my assumptions about the intelligibility of history.

I assume, that as much as human actions are comprehensible to everyday reason, so are the actions of the Nazis and their minions. I also assume that as much as human history is comsprehensible, if not knowable in every detail, that the historical period of the rise of fasicsm and its consequences is also comprehensible. I do not assume that there can be scientific theories of human choice or of human history. Intelligibility does not necessarily imply a high level of certainty. But the limit of scientific theories, and the declining scale of certitude, does not imply some mystical "unknowability" about human actions. Human historical actions are comprehensible in "everyday ways" through rational thought, empathy, collective historical work, and hard work. I will not argue these assumptions here, but simply move on to what interests me, the ideological reasons for arguing that Nazism and its consequenses are "incomprehensible" and "exceptional."

There are many non-historians, "philosophers," and even a few historians who basically propound the idea that the rise of Nazism, and the atrocities committed by the Naziis, are in essence exceptional and fundamentally unknowable. The ideological point of such notions is that fundamentally unknowable and essentially exceptional phenomena cannot be compared with what is happening in the world made by our actions. Thus we can distance great atrocities from ourselves.

Another effect of such notions is that the very act of comparison between the rise of Nazism, along with the atrocities committed in its name, and current events becomes "empty" and without significance. The act of comparison between Nazisim and anything else becomes something either "unserious," "disgusting", or an indication that you are referring to the irresolveable "problem of evil." Such comparisons then end up denoting nothing, only connoting anger. A comparison with Nazi atrocities becomes like yelling curse words at the top of your lungs. Such yelling will have the connotation of anger but will have little, if any, denotation that you can relate to others

The so-called "problem of evil" is a problem mostly because we refuse to look at ourselves (our own actions and responsibilities) in analogous situations. If we make "evil" something mystical and supernatural it is much easier to avoid responsibility for how we, as citizens, contribute to situations where atrocities occur. I don't mean in this case atrocities committed by "them" or be "bad apples," I mean the atrocities that we commit in the world simply by doing what our nation-state does. There are direct atrocities, such as those that have occurred in Central America where the U.S. and its clients murdered hundreds of thousands, many simply dumped in mass graves. These atrocities, which were committed through our government in our name we have never attempted to rectify.

There are also more "indirect" atrocities that are consequences of the actions of the business institutions that mostly rule our foreign policy. I am not here writing about the obvious fact of wars and invasions that by any interpretation of international law should be prosecuted as war crimes. I have in mind everyday consequences of economic decisions. For instance, it is the policy of the U.S. that small countries in South and Central America should focus on export of commodities to the U.S. In practice this often means the shift of population from subsistence farming, where most resources are directed to feeding the family and neighborhood, to farming for export. (An unintended consequence of this policy is that the best export crops are often those that are refined into legal or illegal drugs, cocoa for cocaine, poppies for opium, grapes for wine, coffee beans for coffee, etc.) This also leads to a greater consolidation of land into the hands of the few who are often connected to foreign corporations. Another consequence is a loss of open access to local resources such as water for drinking. But the biggest consequence is the fluctuation of the availability of food. With subsistence farming, the farming family is usually guaranteed a bare minimum of food for survival. With the switch to export commodities the small farmer must have money to obtain food and this means he is at the mercy of the price of commodities. Decisions made in the markets in Chicago can cause the deprivation of food for thousands across the world. A corporation that does not make as great of a profit off of coffee this year can wait to next year to improve its situation. But a farmer cannot tell his or her children; "The price of coffee has fallen at the town market therefore we can't eat this winter."

My point here is not to make a one-to-one comparison between Nazism and this kind of economic imperialism. But it is to point out that one of the consequences of making "evil" an unsolvable "problem," and then pointing to areas of human history where evil reached "incomprehensible" proportions, is to allow ourselves not to see the consequences of our own decisions in the here and now as "evil". The reasoning goes something like this: "Our" decisions, whether good or bad, are comprehensible and normal, and since "evil" is incomprehensible and abnormal, our decisions cannot be "evil" by definition. Such reasoning allows us not to judge the decisions made in our system of society by their consequences, but only by their subjective "normality". We allow ourselves not to see the system of decisions that leads to atrocities. We don't have to see and we don't have to know about the atrocious consequences of the decisions made here as long as such atrocious things are not happening to us or do not come back to hurt us.

Jerry Monaco

The Cynical Mr. Cieply: The New York Times and the Writers' Strike: #4

2008-02-09T01:21:50Z

Below is my detailed analysis of the latest from Michael Cieply, The New York Timesman in Hollywood. Michael Cieply is an anti-union, pro-management former producer for Sony. I have read close to 70 articles by Cieply, so far, and I feel that I know his world-view, inside and out. Michael Cieply's specialty is articulating the point-of-view of Hollywood deal-makers to other businessmen. He is a business writer who shows no interest in unions, labor history, or even the history of the Hollywood union movement. All that matters to the cynical Mr. Cieply is how Hollywood makes a deal and does business. Any group or person who gets in the way of "deal-making" Cieply considers an "outsider" and a wrecker, who does not deserve respect. This is true of all of his articles including the articles he has written on the industry in general. He hates writers and has always shown disdain for writers in his articles going back more than twenty years. Cieply is typical of a type of journalist who has been in the industry too long and once tried to get out only to find himself back at the journalist's desk. He looks at his old bosses through the yellow eyes of a jaundiced failure. He both envies the success of his old bosses, and hates those who are not successful. He defines success in the exact way that the Hollywood bosses proclaim success and failure. In short, Michael Cieply is a burnt-out case. The New York Times has once again shown its contempt for workers who organize into unions by assigning Michael Cieply to report on this strike.

As with some of Michael Cieply's previous articles you have to read between the lines to get the most important point. In this article, and in the one entitled Recent Moves by Guild Leaders Rattle Writers’ Talks Cieply takes the point of view of Moonves and Chernin successfully. In his articles he "reads the minds" of Moonves and Chernin in such a way that his anonymous sources could only come from people close to Moonves and Chernin. The headline of both of these articles should have been "CEO Negotiators Break Their Own Blackout Ban." But it was obvious from the beginning of the "informal" negotiations that this is what would happen. Unfortunately in closed door negotiations the advantage is always on the side of the status quo.

In the following The New York Times article by Michael Cipley is indented. I highlight the keywords and phrases that I think the reader should pay attention to. Sometimes I highlight in blue or green, instead of yellow, to emphasize special points. My commentary is in brackets and in bold.

Jerry Monaco

Rescuers Script a Possible Ending for a Strike
By MICHAEL CIEPLY
LOS ANGELES — With Hollywood writers on the brink of ending a three-month strike, they can thank this city's time-honored way of getting things done: connections.

[According to Cieply the strike came to an end because "connections" were made. It has nothing to do with the union or the unity of the WGA. It was "rescuers" who know how to "make deals" through "connections" and nothing else. As usual, Cieply shows no understanding of how strikes work, nor of how unions work. He has is deliberately ignorant of how collective action may help people fight against the odds. He is contemptuous of the very idea that solidarity bring about a settlement satisfactory to a union, so he must concentrate on the traditions of Hollywood, the tradition of back-room deals by powerful "insiders."]

Over the last two weeks, Laeta Kalogridis, a movie and TV writer and a founder of United Hollywood, a pro-union Web site, emerged as an unlikely peacemaker.

[Unlikely, why? Because she is a strike captain? Does the fact that you are a strong member of a union and that you believe in your union make you "an unlikely peacemaker"? Obviously, according to Cieply, it does. Does the fact that you might think that the business practices of the big corporations are in conflict with the interests of the workers in the industry make you "crazy" or against "peace"? Yes! According to Cieply, if you are a supporter of a union, or a founder of "a pro-union Web site" then you are not a peacemaker by definition. You are a troublemaker, and thus you are unlikely to be a constructive "deal-maker."]

Working the phones and e-mail during her forced hiatus, she operated as a conduit between David J. Young, a militant leader of the guild, and Peter A. Chernin, the News Corporation president, who was similarly protective of company interests.

[Young is a "militant leader" and Chernin is "protective" of company interests. Union bad! Company good! Union wants battle! Company is protective mother! Ask yourself why Michael Cieply and the editors of the New York Times would never reverse this kind of phrasing? They would never allow a reporter to write: "David Young, who is protective of workers' interest" and "Peter Chernin who is a militant [ravenous?] corporate president". Why? Because it is impolite to imply that a head of a corporation is out to bleed his workers as much as possible and calling Chernin "protective" is just granting him the respect due to the powerful? On the other hand, Cieply can label a union leader anything he likes because union leaders are obviously on the "other side" in the world view of the New York Times. Union leaders are always "outsiders" or enemies of peaceful industrial relations or troublemakers according to The New York Times and its anti-union hirelings. Only union leaders that don't fight for their members are regarded with condescending respect. ]

As Ms. Kalogridis joined those trying to resolve the dispute, players on both sides finally shifted ground, most importantly on the issue of new-media compensation. That cleared the way to a deal that will be reviewed by writers in meetings here and in New York on Saturday.

[The use of the word "players" is the key to Cieply's thinking. As usual he cannot conceive of a union that actually acts like a union. He can only conceive of "players" and "deal-makers." Because he himself is failed deal-maker he is a burnt-out case who can only look at the world through the sickly yellow eyes of the cynical confidence player.]

If all goes well, the boards of the Writers Guild of America West and the Writers Guild of America East could end the walkout as early as next week, allowing production of most television dramas and comedies to resume and tens of thousands of people to return to work.

[Never except during a strike do you hear so much lamenting from the business press about all the poor people out of work. When those same peopple are put out of work by layoffs and firings and "consolidation" and "redundancy, those unemployed millions are then talked about as people who should see reality for what it is. Corporations need profits and employing these people instead of firing them would just get in the way of rationalizing the economy. ]

The breakthrough occurred on what many writers regard as a make-or-break issue: Web streaming of TV shows after their initial broadcast, which they suspect will soon replace the reruns that have paid them tens of thousands of dollars an episode.

[When Cieply talks of the point of view of the Corporate bosses he is he not so circumspect. Never in their regard does he use contingent and point of view language. When talking about Chernin or any of the other corporate bosses it is always what they "say" or "do" or "produce", never what they "regard" or "believe" or "think." The reason I highlight this is so that a reader of the NYT will learn to read such articles like a literary critic or a philosopher. The writers' and the union representatives in this strike are passive "subjects" and not active agents. They have a "point-of-view" that is never "true" or "false" or "objective" but is merely something they "regard". On the other hand, Cieply writes about the bosses and CEOs as if they are agents. What they say can be objectively verified according to The New York Times invention of this strike story. ]

Under a compromise proposal, in the third year of their deal, writers would be paid 2 percent of the revenue. In the tentative contract that the Directors Guild of America agreed to last month, on which much of the prospective writers' settlement has been modeled, producers agreed to pay $1,334 for a first year's use, and a percentage afterward.
The arrangement offers bragging rights to writers, who can claim to have won what the entertainment conglomerates said they would never give: a residual based on their gross revenue from the Internet.

[According to Cieply also this is about -- an "arrangement" to save face; an offer that will let the writers "brag" that their strike was not in vain. The implication here is that writers didn't really win a damn thing, only a few cosmetic changes to make them feel better. The further implication is that you have to treat these workers in unions like children or else they will never do what they should do anyway. Notice also that the writers have "claims" where as when CEOs are talked about they are treated as if their claims simply are "reality" itself.]

Representatives of the production companies and the writers' guilds continued their news blackout Thursday and declined to comment for this article, as did Ms. Kalogridis. But interviews with more than a dozen people involved in the possible settlement described a process so fragile that many still think that Saturday's meetings could derail it.

[ It is Saturday's meeting of the writers that might derail. And by implication it is those writers that have to be treated as if they were fragile pieces of glass. None of this has anything to do with the actual contract, actual work conditions, and actual settlement. Zeus forbid that Cieply might actually take the issues seriously. ]

As recently as last Friday, producers were preparing a "doomsday scenario," in which they were ready to declare that the talks had failed, opening the possibility of an extended strike. That the collapse was averted owed much to Ms. Kalogridis, and diplomacy that turned an icy standoff into the kind of hot-and-bothered bargaining in which Hollywood deals are forged.

[ 1) The people who head up the AMPTP talks do not actually have the job description of "producers." The people who actually fill the job description of producers are in the Producer's Guild of America. They have remained neutral in this strike. People such as Chernin, Iger, Moonves are not producers and produce nothing at all, neither in the strange Hollywood sense of the word where producer has a certain job description, nor in the common sense meaning of this word where producers actually make things. Chernin, Iger, et. al. are corporate heads, CEOs, corporate presidents. They are executives and not producers. The main negotiators in the AMPTP call their organization an organization of producers but it is in fact an organization of business employers. We live in a time where newspaper writers can't even call things by their right names and Cieply is no exception here.

2) Notice that the corporate bosses were ready to declare that the talks had failed. There is no implication that anyone but the union would be at fault in such a case. The corporate executives are poor innocent victims of union obstinacy or amateurism.

3) The usual condescension is thrown in about "hot-and-bothered bargaining." This is Cieply's "ideal" world, the world of Hollywood deal-making. In his mind there exist two "ideal worlds"; the world of Hollywood deal making and the world of normal business. Read 50 or 60 of Cieply's articles and this is what you come up with. There is business and there is weird business that occurs in Hollywood and everything else is a deviation not worth speaking about. Thus unions and people helping each other and ideas of solidarity and sticking together are all inconceivable in the world view of Michael Cieply. ]

As is often the case in Hollywood, an agent was an important link. Rick Rosen is a partner at the Endeavor agency, which represents Ms. Kalogridis. Mr. Rosen is also a lifelong friend of Mr. Chernin, who had opened informal talks with the writers — along with Robert A. Iger, chief executive of Walt Disney, and Leslie Moonves, chief executive of CBS — immediately after the directors announced their agreement on Jan. 17.

[ The superhero is the deal-maker so enter the agent. ]

Before those informal face-to-face meetings, Mr. Chernin had advised the union representatives to hire a seasoned Hollywood lawyer. If this effort did not work, Mr. Chernin and others feared, the stalemate could easily extend into the spring, when the writers' strike might well merge with one by the Screen Actors Guild, whose contract expires June 30.

[ Fatherly, Chernin, gives advice to those little writers who need help in making a deal. Fatherly Chernin was afraid that this temper tantrum of the writers might extend the strike. And then the unexplained kicker. It would be really bad if the writers' strike was merged with an actors' strike. Why? This is not explained. It is just assumed that the more powerful unions are the worse it is for "everybody". In this case everybody only includes people who count. Writers and actors and for that matter practically everybody doesn't count. Who counts? Stockholders, owners, other executives and of course profits and compensation for the big boys. Those are the things that count. It is assumed that nothing else is worth mentioning.]

But at a meeting two weeks ago, Patric M. Verrone, the West Coast writers' guild president; the chief negotiator, John Bowman; and Mr. Young did not bring in a deal maker. Instead, they spent much of the session catching up with points in the directors' deal, to the frustration of Mr. Iger and Mr. Chernin.

[ Cieply here and in the previous paragraph is fulfilling his function as spokesman for the bosses. Cieply seems to read Chernin's mind. He has read Chernin's mind in past articles also. He might be Chernin's messenger for all I know. That at least seems to be his function. More likely somebody close to Chernin is one of Cieply's anonymous sources breaking the blackout and feeding leaks to the bosses man at The New York Times. Maybe Cieply, the burnt-out case, hopes to bounce back into the business world as a Chernin man.

Those stupid writer's. They are silly that they might not want a "deal maker" who usually sides with the bosses anyway. They are also very silly in actually taking a look at the directors' deal. Don't they know that they are just supposed to accept it as a template for their deal without asking questions? Everything else is pro-forma. Even acctually knowing what is in the directors' deal is not necessary. An explanation is due here. The DGA deal was only a sketch two weeks ago. It was not known in detail. If the deal was going to be used as a template it was necessary to know what Chernin and the CEOs thought the deal was about. If you are going to have a meeting of minds over a contract it is necessary, on an elementary level to know what the other side thinks is in the contract. Even if one side understands the deal there can be no mutual understanding on a deal unless you know what the other side thinks of the same deal.

Of course, what I have just said about the mutual meetings of the mind is only true in a deal between equals. But it seems, if Cieply's mind reading powers are correct, that Chernin was annoyed about the assumption of "bargaining between equals." There is not supposed to be a meeting of minds here. The writers' are simply supposed to accept the directors' deal without question and move on to see what face-saving deals that Cherin will deign to give the writers.]

Mr. Rosen — who, according to biographical sources, grew up in Harrison, N.Y., as did Mr. Chernin — was among several Hollywood insiders who stepped forward at that point. They lobbied executives and writers to make a deal. Mr. Young had at first resisted the push for outside help, but agreed to bring in Alan Wertheimer, a high-powered lawyer whose clients have included Ron Bass and Tom Schulman, both members of the guild's board.

[Again Cieply gives everything to pragmatic deal-makers.]

As the talks resumed, the participants began to compromise. Notably, Mr. Verrone — an architect of the tough stance taken by the guild from the outset — appeared to step back somewhat after the union dropped a pet demand of his, for jurisdiction over animation and reality-television writers.

["Pet demand." This demand has nothing to do with organizing the unorganized, people who wanted to join the WGA but were fired by union busting by companies Organizing the unorganized in animation and reality television is just a pet demand of Mr. Verrone's. And after that was gone he "stepped back." Not a serious boy, obviously. ]

In the meantime, Mr. Bowman, a well-heeled television writer, became more assertive.

[ The silk-suited CEOs are never called well-healed because it is obvious that they make 45 million dollars are year and should make this much money. And the fact that Bowman is "well-heeled" makes him a potential "insider" and being an "insider" is all important to Mr. Cieply, the man who always wanted to be an insider but failed.]

Mr. Bowman's emergence as an independent voice had long been sought by company representatives, who surmised even before the strike began that he would be a more flexible bargainer than Mr. Verrone and Mr. Young. But that would happen only if he were edged away from the guild president, a friend with whom he attended Harvard in the early 1980s.

The empowerment of Mr. Bowman was rooted in a brewing rebellion on the guild negotiating committee, where a rump group feared that a longer strike could lead to a split in the union. Some committee members began asking if Mr. Young, a longtime blue-collar labor organizer who had never settled a major entertainment contract, should be ousted from his leadership role. At the same time, they privately urged growing dissident groups within the guild to sit tight.

[ All of this is largely Cieply's fantasy of how a union works. A good union is a democratic organization. Unlike corporations which have bosses good unions actually have to listen to people. What ever the relationship between Verrone, Young, and Bowman, it is not the relationship that is part of Cieply's mind reading fantasy via the corporate bosses. Even friends argue and everyone knew from the beginning that a deal including animation and reality would be the toughest nut. ]

Even as Mr. Bowman became more vocal, Mr. Young was listening closely to Ms. Kalogridis, who had become a guild confidante. Described by associates as vibrant and impassioned, Ms. Kalogridis — whose credits include the "Bionic Woman" television series — had joined with a half dozen associates to make their United Hollywood site (unitedhollywood.blogspot.com) a rallying spot for striking writers. As recently as last week, the Web site shook the continuing talks by posting a strong critique of the directors' deal by Phil Alden Robinson, the writer and director of "Field of Dreams" and a board member.

[United Hollywood is the website of the strike captains. It is the elementary duty of a reporter for a major newspaper to know what he is talking about and to report on it. Cieply fails in this area as he has often failed. Either he doesn't know or doesn't care or considers the fact irrelevant but United Hollywood is the website of the strike captains. Cieply has never once reported this elementary fact. Not once. This is significant because these are the people who are the people actually getting people out on the (very well-peopled) picket lines. These are the men and women closest to the membership and talk to them everyday and report back to the leadership. They are a conduit from the leadership to the union leadership and vice-versa. They have been very open. They have thought openly, they fought openly, disagreed openly, and debated openly. This openness is incomprehensible to an anti-union pro-deal-maker and pro-management sort such as Michael Cieply. The very idea of open debate and disagreement looks silly to him. His contempt for union democracy drips from everything he has written. But United Hollywood has been more than this. It has been exemplary of new ways for unions to get the news out to the membership, of grass roots discussion and an example of uniting the rank-and-file through debate. By the way Cieply has mentioned United Hollywood disparagingly in the past. But this is the first time he has given the websites' URL. ]

Ms. Kalogridis and her friends, in fact, had become a pipeline to the guild members holding out for sizable gains, whose support would be needed if any deal was to be reached. And she, like Mr. Bowman, had become convinced that the current round of talks must not be allowed to fail.
Perhaps more important, Mr. Young came to share that conviction. On the company side, Mr. Iger and Mr. Moonves, as well as Barry Meyer, chief executive of Warner Brothers, appeared to coalesce around the same view. Meanwhile, Mr. Chernin, who left for London in the middle of the talks but was never out of touch, hung tough on the final point: the writers' demand that companies should pay a percentage, not a flat fee, for Internet streams.
Officials of the directors' guild had already signaled that they would not object if the writers appeared to one-up them on that matter. They reasoned that writers would need to show some gain from their strike, and concluded that actual income from the Internet would remain so small in the next three years, that a percentage payment in 2010 was likely to yield little.
Mr. Young put together the ultimate compromise — a flat fee for part of the contract's life, a percentage during the rest. Ms. Kalogridis, late last week, then found herself in the thick of a bargaining process that eventually won a handshake on the point. She stressed to Mr. Rosen and others that guild members would never approve a deal that did not have a percentage payment for Web streams. Mr. Rosen became an advocate with Mr. Chernin. Mr. Chernin, at one point, invited Ms. Kalogridis to communicate with him directly. And shortly afterward, he signed off.

Russell and Wittgenstein and the Practice of Anti-Philosphy

2008-02-05T00:37:25Z

In May 1913 Bertrand Russell was working on a manuscript called Theory of Knowledge. The project was abandoned in June when Russell decided that he could go no further. His theory was at a dead-end and he couldn't back out and start over. It was because of Wittgenstein's criticism in conversations with Russell that the manuscript was abandoned and Russell never attempted to publish his "theory."

This history is recounted in Russell and Wittgenstein on the Nature of Judgement by Rosalind Carey (Continuum, 2007, 150pp., $110.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780826488114. [That is right; $110 for 150 pages]). The technical reasons for Russell's failure are accounted for in this very expensive book. (Such books are produced for libraries and then mostly cordoned off from the general public on the shelves of security-guarded university establishments; establishments; which are, by the way, supported in one way or another at the public expense. Such is the state of knowledge in the corporate state. For the most part the general public does not feel the loss because these expensive published theses of 150 pages are mostly nests made by the academic squirrels. The historical nut-gathering that these nests are made to hold is often badly written, though sometimes interesting. But the academics themselves are not really to blame since they are fulfilling an institutional imperative -- publish or perish. Publication seems to be the university's way of accounting for the productivity of their professorial employees, like the aggregation of standardized tests are supposed to measure the health of our elementary schools. Call this the "Fordism" of the educational factories.)

For biographical, historical, and philosophical reasons I am interested in Russell and Wittgenstein in 1913 and thus this book would be interesting to me. But how am I to get hold of such an outlandishly priced piece of work unless I gather some friends to storm the Columbia Library while decommissioning the security guards in the process? So I must make do with book reviews and with my own knowledge, when discussing Carey's book.

Some squirrels do interesting things, and this book is a case in point. I think that someone should write a piece of fiction focusing on the lives of Russell and Wittgenstein from May to June 1913, the period of the writing and abandonment of Russell's Theory of Knowledge, and bringing into the novel the events of the subsequent six years, as if in a dream of history.

Within six years of the Russell and Wittgenstein conversations both were imprisoned; Russell for his opposition and protest against World War I and Wittgenstein as an Austrian prisoner-of-war in Como and Cassino. While Russell was in prison in 1918, he returned to philosophy after a long time writing only social and political works, and wrote Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, and began the book The Analysis of Mind, which was partially a tactical retreat from his attempt to create "a theory of knowledge." While Wittgenstein was a prisoner-of-war in Italy in 1918-19 he rewrote and rethought some of the portions of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which he had finished during his course of military service. (Someone should compile a list of the great men and women who were imprisoned during the period of the First World War. Russell, Eugene Debs, and Rosa Luxembourg come to mind immediately, but the list could be extended to hundreds of names. Does anyone know of a good book that gives a global history of resistance to World War I? If it hasn't already been written it should be written.)

The countries that Russell and Wittgenstein called home were fighting a war against each other and still, in the early part of the war at least, the two managed to exchange letters and post-cards.

In February 1919 Wittgenstein wrote to Russell,

I am prisoner in Italy since November, and hope I may communicate with you after a three-year interruption. I have done lots of logical work which I am dying to let you know before publishing it.

How did such posts get through the lines of war? Did they go by way of neutral countries? According to Ray Monk this post-card found Russell at Lady Ottoline Morrell's country house, Garsington Manor. A postman delivered the card to a place where Russell was not listed. Perhaps the British postal services favored the ruling classes because it beats me how a card gets from an Italian prisoner-of-war camp to a person of no certain address, unless that person got special attention paid to him by the postal services.

But in the Spring of 1913 all of this was in their future. Wittgenstein had not even published a major work when he froze Russell into place on his theory of knowledge. In fact Wittgenstein was in effect Russell's student, not a fellow teacher, and yet his influence, his ability to paralyze thought, was infamous.

This shows one of the great missions of Wittgenstein. In spite of the philosophers, because of the philosophers, Wittgenstein's mission was basically an anti-philosophical practice. He endeavored to get philosophers to shut up -- or at least to stop publishing so much of what they write on the "deep" philosophical subjects. He was against proclamations of philosophical "knowledge" and the propounding of philosophical theories. He was engaged in a philosophical practice that would in effect limit the very notions of what we call knowledge.

Wittgenstein's only published major work, the Tractatus, was anti-theoretical to the core. It did not present "a theory" of logic and its relation to language, or a "theory" of propositions. What it set out to do is to clarify certain aspects of language use and misuse from within a philosophical frame. The Tractatus attempted to set the limits of what any philosophical theory could accomplish. It did this by attempting to show that the capacity of language could only express through propositions what can be thought, and that there is much else that cannot be thought through propositions but can only be shown. On the level of propositions the Tractatus itself does not present a theory, but rather makes clarifications about the possibility of philosophical theories given the limits of language use. But on the level of "showing" the Tractatus as a whole is emblematic of a kind of anti-philosophy: we are shown the limits of human thought and knowledge. The limits of knowledge that can be made from propositions "show" from the book as a whole.

There are only a few philosophers who agree with this interpretation of the Tractatus, and fewer still who agree with the interpretation of Wittgenstein's work which would turn the work as a whole into an anti-philosophical practice. The underpinnings of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, his clarification of language use as putting limits on what we can call thought or knowledge, is itself an anti-philosophical practice to the core. Personally, I think that Wittgenstein is correct, when he insisted that nobody understood the Tractatus, when it was written, and few understand it now. It is because very few people can accept a work that is a set of propositions that say one thing and a book as a whole that illustrates what the set of propositions says cannot be theorized or philosophized by pointing the way to silence. The book is a form of practice. It practices what it preaches. If most philosophers set out to accept the anti-philosophical practice of the Tractatus, they could not write the articles and books, which are their bids for job security in the current academic system.

So Wittgenstein while writing from the prison camp in Italy continually complained, perhaps even whined, that Russell would never understand the Tractatus.

Russell wrote back:

Throughout the war I did not think about philosophy, until, last summer. I found myself in prison, and beguiled my leisure by writing a popular text-book, which was all I could do under the circumstances. Now I am back at philosophy, and more in the mood to understand…. Don't be discouraged, you will be understood in the end. (p. 162)

I think in the matter of understanding both men were wrong about the other. Wittgenstein has yet to be understood because philosophers have a hard time understanding books that are also practices. (Perhaps poets best understand such philosophical works.) And Russell understood Wittgenstein on an intuitive level that has never been acknowledged.

Back in June 1913, because of Wittgenstein's anti-philosophical criticism, Russell quit his Theory of Knowledge. And for the first time Russell himself began to think about the limits of knowledge and the limits of theory. Theory, after all, can only confront and provide knowledge of a very small part of the world.

More than thirty years later Russell came out with a book called Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits. It is my contention that this book is a strange bastard child of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In 1913 Wittgenstein planted the seeds of "theory-skepticism" into Russell's thinking and over the course of Russell's long life that skepticism grew. Unlike our modern skeptics, the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens, Russell's skepticism constantly turned around on itself and embraced nationalism, the social system of classes, philosophy and even science. Russell's skepticism did not limit itself to skepticism about religion. There came a time at the end of his life that he began to look at his own intellectual pretentions as also a form of superstition. Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits is not a "theory of knowledge" but an attempt to describe knowledge and how we come to know. In short, Russell's book is an anti-theory. It is not an anti-theory in the multiple ways that the Tractatus is an anti-philosophy -- propounding, illustrating, and practicing anti-philosophy all at once -- but an anti-theory in a much more everyday way. The goals of Russell's long book were modest, unlike the immodest idol-smashing goals of Wittgenstein's short book; one of the limits of human knowledge is that there can be no grand theory of knowledge, and no metaphysical ground to knowledge, but only local descriptions of how in a common sense way we as individuals, with these brains, can come to know limited parts of the world through specific theories. As Russell himself wrote at the beginning of Human Knowledge:

To scientific common sense (which I accept) it is plain that only an infinitesimal part of the universe is known, that there were countless ages during which there was no knowledge, and that there probably will be countless ages without knowledge in the future. Cosmically and causally, knowledge is an unimportant feature of the universe; a science which omitted to mention its occurrence might from an impersonal point of view, suffer only from a very trivial imperfection.

Oh Wasn't It All So Wonderful? Georgetown, Gentrification, Camelot - Morality, Myth & A.J. Ayer

2008-02-03T17:59:55Z

I want to bounce the ball of thought around a little. (Think of my brain as "a cooler" where Steve McQueen is locked away throwing the baseball against the opposite wall. Reference to The Great Escape, for those who don't know.) This was "written" at 4:30 on a Sunday morning with the single purpose of applying linguistic shock therapy to my brain. So forgive me for making sense where there is only non-sense. It helps to bring meaning into my life.

The truth of this mixed bag of a post is that it is only meant as a sort of bracket to mark the hold while I wait. I am waiting to see if my friends among the writers on strike have wrestled a half-decent deal from the conglomerated multinational corporations that endeavor to take control of our cultural life.

So some quotes:

It is sometimes forgotten that only thirty years earlier Georgetown had been a rundown, semi-bohemian section of town, where young cash-strapped reformers drawn to work for the New Deal took up residence in cheap flats and what are now called fixer-uppers. By the early 1960s, when the new generation ascended to power, the area had become the chief bastion of Washington social life, blending remnants of its down-to-earth (and even earthy) past with the grandeur of politics at the political capital of the Free World. To be sure, the intellectual level, except every now and then, was not exactly Augustan; Georgetown evenings during the Kennedy years had a snobbery and self-importance all their own. Still, it was a far cry from the gilded, media-mad place that Georgetown (including some of its surviving overseers from the Kennedy years) became in the 1980s.

From a Review in The New Republic(an)
By the good writer Sean Wilentz

Journals 1952-2000
by Arthur Meier Schlesinger

The Vital Centrist
A Review by Sean Wilentz

Yes, if you read the literature, novels, and memoirs from D.C. in the New Deal era what can be found is young New Dealers setting up shop for themselves in Georgetown living next door to fallen gentry and collections of slumming Harvard types in Washington for fun and power in the FDR administration.
****
The Camelot Myth and Intellectual Pretentions

There is also this:

Over the years, an anti-Camelot myth has arisen that portrays the Kennedy administration as a sybaritic private men's club whose members occasionally took breaks to attend to matters like the Cuban missile crisis. Schlesinger, according to the myth, was the Kennedy family's chief courtier and propagandist, and nothing he says about the family can be trusted -- including his denials that, as he once put it, "an unending procession of bimbos" marched through the Kennedy White House. The journals from the early 1960s contain no hints about Kennedy's unruly sexual waywardness -- which Schlesinger eventually conceded, adding that it did "not constitute John Kennedy's finest hour." Later his love for and loyalty to the clan, and his desire to believe the very best until it became impossible to do so, could get the better of him. But the journals do convey the ease with which high spirits and cultivated, even serious thought once commingled in Washington -- an aspect of the Kennedy years that the prurient revisionists have buried.
Hickory Hill certainly saw its share of inebriated high-jinks, but it was also the site of the so-called Hickory Hill seminars, in which Schlesinger arranged for various intellectual luminaries to rehearse their ideas before administration officials and specially invited guests in an informal atmosphere- -a freewheeling and unusual mixture of personalities as well as professions. (At one of these seminars, the philosopher A.J. Ayer gave a talk that attacked abstract propositions, only to have Ethel Kennedy, a devout Catholic, rise and challenge his rejection of "conceptions like truth and virtue and meaning.") The journals also describe a bygone world of Georgetown salons and dinner parties in which Schlesinger took constant pleasure. There are accounts of gatherings at the Alsops', the Bradlees', and the Harrimans', among others, that emanated political intelligence, elegance, and a certain moral sophistication. Parties do not have to be stupid.

Nothing in the review or the book reinvigorates the Camelot myth. Isn't the "anti-Camelot Myth" merely an unwillingness to accept Disney-like fairy tales as truth? I am not anti-fairy tale, simply opposed to systematic self-deception which is the motive behind the JFK Camelot story. The friendly fascist version of self-deception that is easily found in the Disney fairy tale is especially pernicious. The Disney-fairy tale should be contrasted with the Grimmer kind that always hints at something useful and truthful and uncomfortable. Truly, I am shocked at Sean for wanting to give back-handed support to the Myth of Camelot on the Potomac. There is no need.

As for the intellectual vigor of Camelot, it doesn't and shouldn't impress. Doesn't Sean think that the descendants of ex-Trots and rightwing vulgar Keynsians, those who make up the neo-con and neo-liberal ascendancy from the Reagan admin to the present, also have their study groups and book clubs? I am sure that in 1990 they invited Fukuyama to lecture to them on Hegel and "The End of History". The intelligentsia, whether of the type that once pranced around the Camelot on the Potomac or whether those who were a beacon on a hill in the Reagan administration always have their intellectual pretentions. I do wonder though if the Fundamentalist Christians, imported in mass by the Bush administration to run everything from Iraq to the Department of the Interior, read anything at night except for the Bible and the sci-fi weirdness of The Left Behind series. What would they have made of A. J. Ayer? What would A. J. Ayer made of them?

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The Everyday System of Violence and Moral Insight

Intellectual pretentions aside: What is missing in all of the reviews I have read of Schlesinger 's Journals, and from the book itself when I glanced through it at the library, is any consideration of morality. It is superficially assumed that the only moral questions for those in power are those that are either personal or those that lead one to want to change or not change the system. There is no thought on a deeper moral level how a system of violence can be justified. In a system of violence decisions that create violence are made as a matter of course and as if such decisions were "natural".

Let us put aide Vietnam and Southeast Asia in this discussion, because the line of the Camelot Mythologists now is that JFK would have gotten us out of Vietnam and thus avoided a disaster. But let us conisder the normal and "uncontroversial" decisions of the Kennedy Administration, The daily decisions involving Latin America, which Schlesinger witnessed, are simply not thought about as presenting a moral quandry. These are the years when the Kennedy Administration decided that the military in Latin American countries should be reformed in order to focus on "internal security." Thus the U.S. brought Latin American military officers here to the U.S. to be trained at places like the School of the Americas. These were the same officers that would later lead the armed forces, with U.S. help, in establishing military dictatorships across Latin America, resulting in mass death and torture. What was established by the Kennedy Administration in the 1960s was a framework that created a wave of state-supported mass murder, torture and terror for the next thirty years. It is only in the last few years that Latin America has emerged from this period.

These are just "normal" decisions that must be made to maintain U.S. power and domiinance. Such decisions create the system of violence I referred to above. But it is exactly these normal decisions, the everyday decisions that we make without looking, that are the ones that must be held up to moral scrutiny. I do not expect the likes of Schlesinger to perform this duty for us. He is too caught up in the bright social whirl, the seduction of fame and beauty, the vanity of power and the lust to be close to the "Stars" (in Washington, in Hollywood) but some of our secular public intellectuals (other than Chomsky) could try to point out that there are moral issues that are ignored by Schlesinger in his journal.

Who does this? Who points these morals issues out regularly and consistently? Who focuses on the moral issues of systematic violence? Who looks at the decisions in the everyday life of the powerful (both political and economic) and puts them up to moral scrutiny? Only left religious radicals -- groups similar to the Catholic Worker, some of the Mennonite left, and Quakers. The secular left can do this. But for some reason the secular left has not been able to hold on to this function for long. It is people such as the Berrigan brothers and Dorothy Day and Miles Horton and Bob Moses, religiously and philosophcally inspired leftists who have always been best at this kind of moral prophecy. And further back it was people such as William Lloyd Garrison, Thoreau, and Tolstoy and hundreds of radical Anabaptists, who fulfilled the function of moral prophecy. It is these people that often point out that violence is a part of everyday life; that violence is a standard that is daily committed by people in power to the people who do not have power.

Many of these people learned their initial way of thinking about systematic and everyday violence from the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. He saw that the violence of slavery does not occur once and only once. It does not occur only when the slave is kidnapped and put into bondage or when the slave is whipped for disobeying the rule of the master. The violence of slavery is daily and it occurs whenever the slave does something in fear that the violence of his master will ensue if he does not do what he is told. The violence occurs everyday the slave hurts himself morally or physically while performing services for his master or when the slave is unable to perform services for him/herself or his/her friends and family. People such as Garrison pointed out that the decisions for this kind of systematic violence were attenuated and abstracted in such a way that the people who actually made the most important decisions did not have to see the consequences of the decisions that they make. The important people are able to sit safely and comfortably in their political palaces and bourgeois brownstones while others bloody their hands. In this way, the system of violence is standardized and institutionalized.

Reading reviews of the Schlesinger book, I ask myself: Why has the secular left so often failed to hold on to the moral criticism of systematic violence? Such criticism is a proper "utopian" function of criticism of society. It is a criticism that implicitly contrasts what we can be as individuals and a society with the current failure and success of what we are. Is it because the secular left too easily disdains the poetry of everyday and integral utopianism (of living "the moral life") as antagonist to everyday political and economic organization and infighting? I have no real answer. I am not religious. But it was the insight of the early socialist movement that some aspects of "radical religion" were to be admired. People such as Karl Kautsky once wrote about how early Christians were a revolutionary movement with many admirable attributes. He sought to incorporate the insights of the early Christians into the socialist movement.

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A. J. Ayer and Ethel Kennedy: Logical Positivism and Catholicism

The most interesting meaningless fact in the review was the bringing together of Ethel Kennedy and the great philosopher A.J. Ayer in a debate that I am sure would have shook the philosophical community to the core, if the philosophers had only found out about it. We can all be happy that Ethel Kennedy opposed A.J Ayer. She was bright enough to know that philosophical skepticism of the logical positivist variety and the recitation of the Roman Catholic catechism could not co-exist.

I don't mean to snicker. I actually think that the conflict betweent A.J. Ayer and Ethel Kennedy is the same theme as the one between being able to see systematic violence and simply accepting the world as it is without looking. Only in this instance I am not sure that there is a side to take.

Jerry Monaco
3 Feb. 2008
New York City

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The Writers' Strike & the Presidential Race: Where Clinton & Obama Get Their Money

2008-02-02T11:04:53Z

The lengthy quote below is from the article, Why the writers’ strike never came up in the Democrats’ Los Angeles debate by David Walsh, 2 February 2008.

One of my goals has been to get my friends on the left to recognize some of the importance of the writers' strike. Among the few left-wing outfits covering the strike are the Trotskyists at the World Socialist Web Site.

The coverage by David Walsh at this site has been very good except for a few lacunas. Perhaps I will talk about those lacunas in another context, but I will list them here: 1) There has been no analysis about the significance of the idea of industrial unionism in the writers' strike. 2) A left-wing analysis, or any pro-union analysis, of the writers' strike must deal with the significance of IATSE, the problem with its leadership, and the need for a caucus of IA-progressives to support the writers. 3) The problem of relative social-power in the industry is never discussed by David Walsh, except in the context of the notion that the strike can't be fought well unless the fighting is done from a socialist perspective. (The sermons about socialism are the price you will pay for getting Walsh's decent analysis about the writer's strike. Just think of it as WSWS's version of product placement.)

The article quoted below is mostly about why Clinton and Obama did not have the guts to mention the writers' strike during their debate in Los Angeles.

A note by contrast should be added to the observations below. One reason why it was significant that Edwards turned up for a WGA demonstration in New York is because it took guts. By unambiguously supporting the writers' union in this strike a presidential candidate gives up a significant portion of Hollywood money, which has always been important for Democratic party candidates. (As a caveat to this I must mention that I don't support Edwards or any other presidential candidate and never have.)

The four big and consistent financial backers of the Democrats are (1) the big city real estate and construction interests; (2) the trial lawyers; (3) individuals in media and entertainment; and (4) unions. These four groups are rarely in agreement on goals and policies. The unions are usually the outliers, in this group, and are less significant financially than the other groups. Among the other three elite donors the only money that can be taken by Democratic presidential candidates with a clear conscience is trial lawyer money. If a Democratic presidential candidate alienates any of the first three of these financial groupings it is usually considered a disaster for their campaign. It is possible to alienate the unions and survive in the Democratic Party, but it is not possible to alienate the financial block represented by media and entertainment.

I usually don't write about the presidential beauty contest, because, frankly, I think most of what is talked about and written about in the context of this kind of pseudo-politics is irrelevant. But it is important to know where the money comes from for these people because those who give the moneys are essentially investors in a set of policies. The investment strategy of the economic elite, represented in this case by the flow of money to any particular politician, usually sets the boundaries that the candidate must work within.

The current bitter conflict pits the writers against a number of massive corporations, pillars of the US ruling elite. This Hollywood wing of the elite plays a particularly significant role in bankrolling the Democratic Party. While both Clinton and Obama released statements at the beginning of the strike expressing their support for the writers, that was merely for public relations purposes. In reality, the two Democratic hopefuls depend heavily on the largesse of film and television executives—at present stubbornly refusing the writers’ modest demands and smearing them in the media—for campaign funds.
Late last February, for example, during the Presidents’ Day recess of Congress, Obama’s campaign organized a $2,300-per-ticket Beverly Hills reception, attended by film stars, studio executives and others, which raised some $1.3 million.
Not to be outdone, in March 2007 the Clinton campaign raised $2.6 million at a Beverly Hills gala held at the estate of supermarket billionaire Ronald Burkle, also attended by Hollywood leading lights.
Like the Democratic Party establishment as a whole, the media and entertainment elite is divided in its loyalties, or still undecided. Clinton has the support of Rupert Murdoch of News Corp (Fox Television, 20th Century Fox) and National Amusements billionaire Sumner Redstone (CBS, Viacom), former Paramount Studios chief Lansing, Barbra Streisand, Spielberg, Harvey Weinstein and Hugh Hefner.
In his camp Obama has Spielberg’s DreamWorks partners Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, ex-Disney chief Michael Eisner (who denounced the writers’ strike as “stupid” n November), producer Norman Lear and Sony Pictures Entertainment Chairman Michael Lynton, among others.
After Thursday’s tepid debate, as one commentator noted, “it was off to even more important business, as Obama drove up the street to the Avalon nightclub and Hillary headed west toward the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, each to attend $2,300-per-ticket fundraisers.”
In the 2008 election cycle so far the television, film and music industry has provided the various candidates with $15,354,208 in contributions, 77 percent of that going to the Democrats (www.opensecrets.org). Individuals or Political Action Committees involved in movie production specifically have handed over $4,175,659—91 percent to the Democratic Party.
On the list of top industries contributing to the Clinton campaign, “television, music and movies” ranks 7th, having given $2.1 million. The same industry ranks 6th on Obama’s list, having contributed $2.2 million. Clinton has received $6.3 million from the Los Angeles-Long Beach, California area (with $565,525 coming from Beverly Hills), while Obama has taken in $5.1 million from the same area.
Among the top 20 contributors to the Clinton campaign organized by individual firm, along with banking and investment giants Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns, one finds Redstone’s National Amusements ($193,850), Time Warner ($124,150) and Murdoch’s News Corp ($99,350).
On Obama’s list, in addition to Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, UBS, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, one again comes across the names of National Amusements ($220,950) and Time Warner ($142,718).
The prominence of Time Warner on both lists is noteworthy, so too the personal contributions of Barry Meyer, chairman and CEO of Warner Bros (a division of Time Warner), to both the Clinton and Obama campaigns. The debate Thursday was broadcast on CNN, another division of Time Warner, and moderated by the cable network’s Wolf Blitzer. Warner Bros is one of the companies currently struck by the writers and Meyer is considered to be one of their most intransigent opponents.
Is it any wonder then that the writers’ situation never came up for discussion Thursday? No, it’s not.