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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
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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.
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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?
****
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.
***
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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This is Part 3 of a Series of Posts specifically on The New York Times and the Writers' Strike:
Part 2: The New York Times and the Writers' Strike: Part 2 - General Reflections
Part 1: How Weird is The New York Times?: NYT Assigns Former Producer to Cover the WGA
Here is the new narrative line in a nutshell
HOLLYWOOD UNDER THREAT!
RADICALS IN SAG ARE PUSHING WRITERS TO CONTINUE A POINTLESS STRIKE
Radical Writers at a Web Site called "UNITED HOLLYWOOD" are Disrupting Quiet Negotiations
Radical writers and SAG told to sit down and keep quiet
Here are my Brechtian rewrites of the headlines for these non events:
The Los Angeles Times and Variety Develop a New Narrative on the Writers' Stike In Which They Warn Us That the Real Radicals are SAG and the Hot-Heads at United Hollywood
Michael Cieply, at The New York Times follows the lead of the New Narrative and gets it all wrong:
Cieply Fullfills Role as Ventriloquist Dummy for the Hollywood Deal-makers, Signals Change of Propaganda Line Michael Cipley's article for The New York Times 31 January 2008, is "Recent Moves by Guild Leaders Rattle Writers' Talks".From the headline to the final paragraph Cieply proves himself adept at voicing the point of view of the studio executives and their bosses, the CEOs. He is also adept in propagating a new narrative for those who oppose the writers and the WGA. Michael Cieply, is The Times reporter on the Hollywood business beat and a former producer for Sony. He is also the main Times reporter of the current struggle between the writers in the Writers Guild of America and the media conglomerates controlled by the likes Rupert Murdoch, General Electric, Sony, Viacom, etc. The New York Times, as I have noted previously, does not acknowledges the conflict of interest of assigning a reporter to cover a strike who was once an executive for one of the companies involved in the strike; nor does The Times do its readers the courtesy of informing us of this conflict of interest. Blame The Times not Cieply. Cieply is simply doing his job as a "business journalist." Like practically all business journalists he is articulating what the business executives say for other business interests. Cieply's article of the 31st of January is another step in his endeavor of articulating the "larger business interests" involved in the writers' strke. In this article he has indicated the new propaganda narrative that the moguls and the corporate media are likely to follow as long as "closed door negotiations" continue. The previous "narrative" set down by The New York Times and other papers has been the following: The WGA is led by "ideological" hot-heads and people who are "not professional." Patric Verrone and his "lieutenant," David Young (according to the original narrative) are singled out for their "outsider" status, and their inability to comprehend the subtleties of deal-making. The old narrative then turns away from the leadership and focuses on "cracks" in the union. Without any evidence Cieply and the other reporters of the corporate press tell us that there is a great divide in the WGA. The officially designated (but mostly unnamed) "moderates" who are not in the leadership are more powerful than the "radicals" such as Verrone and Young. It must be understood that in the anti-union rhetoric of the corporate press the idea of a "moderate" is meant to designate anyone who is willing to make the deal that the bosses want; and the idea of an "ideological" radical is meant to designate anyone who is for a strong union movement. According to the old narrative, the moderate dissidents will triumph in the end but only if the WGA leadership is ignored. Therefore, only when a deal with the responsible and more "collegial" Director's Guild is a made will the moderates in the WGA have room to force their union into "serious" negotiations. In this narrative the dissident "moderates" will put pressure on the leadership to take the DGA deal. Unfortunately, writers haven't been following the conglomerates' narrative. In spite of all the searching and scrutinizing for signs of disunity among the writers, the membership of the WGA has remained remarkably unified. The WGA is a democratic organization, so there are bound to be plenty of disagreements. But my experiences on the picket-line, and in email contacts with writers, have been evidence of unusual unity among a union three months into a strike. Further after seeing everything that the corporate media has failed to produce as far as evidence for this disunity among the writers, I have to conclude that the "disunity" campaign is a myth. Since this conclusion seems to be general the narrative must change.
And the narrative does change. I have suffered through every single one of Michael Cieply's articles in The Times in the past three months and have read them carefully. Cieply has been one of the main proponents of the old narrative. Now the propaganda line has changed. The switch has happened, as if on cue, in the whole corporate press. But nowhere is there a more tortured attempt to hide the ball than in Michael Cieply's New York Times. What is the new narrative coming from The Times, Variety, The Los Angeles Times, and The Hollywood Reporter?
According to the new narrative it is the SAG leaders who are the ideological hot-heads and who are spoiling the party. Also there aresome people within the WGA who are being painted as the radicals and who are trying to scuttle the super-secret peace talks between select CEOs and the WGA leaders. The unexamined implication in all of these articles is that the deal with the DGA is in the best interests of "Hollywood" and the negotiatons must conclude quickly with the acceptance of the DGA deal. In the new narrative the lines about WGA leaders, Patric Verrone and David Young has also changed. Now there are two kinds of leaders in the WGA and the question is where does Verrone stand. Some of these leaders the "executives" can deal with and the others may rattle the cages in the zoo. In this narrative it might just be possible to make a deal with Verrone and Young, but only if they learn how to play the game. The implication is that "the executives" and "Hollywood" are not quite sure about these two. But maybe the collective minds of "the executives" and "Hollywood" might be proven wrong about the initial condemnatory judgments they made about Verrone and Young. The question that is posed by the new narrative in these articles is essentially, "Has the WGA leadership learned its lesson or not? If they have learned their lesson can they 'control' their union and tell the 'radicals' to shut up?" Or to quote Cieply: "Production companies representatives… said the comments [by those who don't want to accept the DGA deal] had added the difficulty of making a deal with a guild torn by conflicting demands." In other words, union democracy is bad. Why isn't Verrone controlling his recalcitrant members? The new propaganda line that the media is picking up has the following story to tell: There are radicals in the Writers' union; some of those radicals sit on the board but are not currently at the negotiating table. There are also moderates in the writers' union who want to make a deal. The moderates are being respectful and are shutting up and not making noise. According to the new narrative, that is what good people in a union do; they shut up and don't make noise for their position. But bad people like these radicals are not shutting up and if they don't shut up they will scuttle a good deal for "Hollywood". Patric Verrone, in this narrative, is balancing in between the unnamed "moderates" and the hot heads. According to Cieply the hot-heads are at a "Web site called United Hollywood." Will Patric do the right thing for "Hollywood" or will he follow the hot-heads? (A digression on word use: The newspapers and the Moguls now use the word "Hollywood" with similar meaningless connotations to the way the neo-cons use the phrase "the national interest." In fact where ever the proper noun "Hollywood" is used to designate "the interests of the industry" try substituting the phrase "the national interest" and you will see with what intent the word "Hollywood" is used in these cases. Always be suspicious of very amorphous "key words" that are meant to designate "the general interest" of a group or a nation. Such key words are usually terms of art used to designate "the particular interest" of a preferred group. In this case the amorphous term "Hollywood" is being used to equate the corporate interests of the entertainment industry with the general interests of everyone in the industry.) Tomorrow I will look at Michael Cieply's article piece by piece. (I cannot do it today because I am late for a WGA benefit in the City.) I think a detail look at this article is proper because it will give the careful reader tools for reading anti-union articles in newspapers, such as The New York Times in the future. But for now let me say that my first message is that Cieply has been an unusually lousy reporter when it comes to his articles on the writers' strike. I am not blaming him for how lousy a reporter he is in this case. He simply does not have the tools to cover a union action. He only knows what the business executives say and how they act and talk. In all the articles of his that I have read that were written previous to the writers' strike, he has been adept in articulating the Hollywood deal-maker's point of view to other business executives. It is his special talent and he has no other. I think he is too much of a burnt-case to learn anything about the union movement. And as a former Sony executive he probably has imbibed the same anti-union attitudes and misconceptions as most of his fellow corporate executives.
So when I complain of Cieply's bad writing and lousy reporting it is because I think that in this case they are not mere slips; that the lousy writing signifies. The bad reporting is a function of Cieply's bias and is therefore meaningful. I have read close to 60 of Cieply's articles in the last few weeks. He is not a bad writer when his writing meets his expertise.If he is a bad writer in his articles on the WGA, SAG and the writers' strike it is because he doesn't understand unions and he doesn't care to understand the workers point of view and The New York Times does not care to understand the workers point of view.
More tomorrow.
Jerry Monaco
31 January 2008
New York City
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New York is a union town. Or at least it used to be.
During the transport workers' strike in December 2005 the most common type of response I heard from those who opposed the strike was, "They have health care benefits and a decent salary. I work hard at my job. I work sixty hours a week and they call me a temp and I don't have health care benefits. Why shouldn't they pay more for their health care? Why should the transit workers get more when I won't get more?"
The response could have been: "Maybe if I had a union I'd get good benefits and a half-decent salary also. I'm glad they got some of theirs; I wish I could get some of mine."
Both responses share a similar ignorance about the world. Both responses reveal an unawareness of history and how difficult it is to fight for one's self, for and with other people. The reality is that it is always easier to lose than to win and when you win you never win as much as was given in blood, sweat, and thought. It is not easy to win a good union and a strong union that will fight for all and still hear the voice of the individual. It is hard work, and both responses are ignorant of this work and the risks involved.
And here is the crossroads of these two ways of thinking. Ignorance cannot be the only reason for a person to articulate the first response rather than the second. There is something deeper in the current cultural conjuncture that makes the first response common, even among working people.
The followers of Marx would claim that the above two responses show the level of class consciousness. I do not want to deny the essential truth of this even on an elementary level but I think that a traditional Marxist analysis can only take me halfway into my essay on the reasons for the above two responses. When I was in Norway many years ago I heard doctors and lawyers insist that they were part of the broad working class. For sure, these doctors and lawyers were socialists but it was not an unusual response among the professional classes in Norway to look at themselves as workers and think of themselves as involved in the same struggles as factory workers. Here in the United States everybody from Donald Trump to the unemployed who live in the worse slums claim that they are "middle class." These are simple matters of cultural identification yet they are significant because they articulate in the form of broad-brush self-labeling a level of cultural awareness. Working class traditions and middle class traditions are not the same. The tradition of working class solidarity, the sense that "we are all in this together and must stick together against the bosses" is much different from the tradition of middle class striving and individuality. I do not mean to idealize either tradition. Working class solidarity often enough turns into a suspicion of individuality and into forced conformity. On the other side, middle class striving and individuality often enough turns into social-climbing and selfishness. I do not believe that solidarity and individuality are mutually exclusive but there is a certain tension between the two. But what I am saying is that there is something deep in our culture, beyond even class consciousness, that brings people to identify with values of social striving and individuality, over and against solidarity and cooperation, and this is part of the reason why people will prefer to self-identify as middle class rather than working class.
The lack of solidarity with fellow workers only partially covers the reason why so many people prefer the first kind of ignorance as opposed to the second kind of ignorance. It should be obvious that I prefer the second kind of ignorance to the first. I believe the second response allows for the possibility of learning about others; it fosters curiosity into ways of thinking and doing of other groups that the first kind of response blocks from view. I want to emphasize here that this is a matter of "mere belief," a secular faith, that is rational but cannot be proved. In short the second response shows a generosity of the heart, a lack of narrowness and meanness when regarding ones' fellow humans that the first response does not show.
And this "generosity of the heart" is also a matter of "faith."
In my leftist and atheist way I come in this essay to an insight made by radical religions. The opposite of faith is despair, and neither of these responses are opposed to rationality or are necessarily irrational.
I think a deep individualism of despair is part of the social consciousness of our time. I believe that examples of this despair are everywhere. It can be seen in the lack of generosity of the heart in most fundamentalist "faiths." I think it can be shown that "fundamentalist" religions of all kind are not reactions of the "faithful" but reactions of the despairing. They are social expressions of despair. This is the opposite of the faithful and solidaristic reaction of many religions during the rise of Protestantism, for example. Fundamentalist religions are the inside-out expression of resentment and individualism, a collective focus on narrow salvation and a deep belief in the end of the world.
I only use fundamentalist religion as one outward expression of social despair, because these religions are not the problem I wish to focus upon. I think that the generation of despair is an ignored factor of why solidarity is not a value among us. Many people have stopped believing that their actions can make things better. They don't believe that they can cooperate with others in ways that can improve the lives of all. They believe that the world will get worse and individual lives will get worse so that the only way to improve one's own life is by holding on against others. This despair is not new or unique in history. But I think that one reason it is so strong is that there is a material basis for it in everyday reality. It is despair fostered by social conditions, this is true, but environmental conditions and the possibility that humans are destroying themselves on a global scale also fosters such despair. There is not only a lack of revolutionary optimism -- the belief that society will improve with the radical transformation of the whole -- but also a lack of simple capitalist optimism -- the belief that the economy will bring prosperity and that this will mean that individual lives will improve. I think that this despair is fundamentally a lack of faith in collective betterment and in the possibility of working with others. If I am correct then this means that despair is independent of individual psychology. A person can be personally optimistic about his or her life and still exhibit this fundamental lack of faith.
New York was once a union town. When workers were on strike, anywhere, there was a knee jerk reaction among working class New Yorkers that the strikers should stick it to the bosses because if the strikers lives improved there was a better possibility that every one's life would improve. The reaction was local and personal.
When Mike Quill, one of the founders of the Transit Workers Union, was served with an order that found the 1966 Transit Worker strike illegal his response was, "The judge can drop dead in his black robes." Many fellow New Yorkers accepted the inconvenience of the 1966 transit workers' strike and admired the audacity of Mike Quill. This was partially because most of these workers had memories as deeply rooted in tradition as Quill. Quill remembered the "illegal" strikes in Ireland during the struggle for independence. Probably the single most important action leading to Irish independence was the illegal sympathy strike action by the transport workers union in Ireland in the period of 1919-1921. The railroad workers refused to carry arms or troops, thus depriving the British of a safe way of bringing troops to bear on rebellions through out Ireland. The demonstrable strength of unions to improve lives, to act together for political and social ends, was obvious to Mike Quill and most of his fellow workers. It was obvious because, even when specific historical details were not known, this kind of solidarity was a living tradition. It was also obvious to many New Yorkers of every background that solidarity was preferable to despair and that those were the two choices, because many had memories similar to Mike Quill's in their own experiences in life.
Such memories either become living traditions that are practiced or else they disappear. Once such traditions disappear then they are felt as a hole, as something lacking, as a longing, and often the response to this "hole" is helplessness and despair.
We have reached a state that even on the left such traditions of simple solidarity are not obvious. It is this observation about the left that inspired these thoughts in the first place.
I have written a lot about the writers' strike in my journal. In doing so my original intention was to try to explain to some of my fellow leftists why this strike was of some importance. I assumed that leftists would hope for the best for the WGA strike, but might not see that this was a crucial strike for the labor movement. I assumed that most leftists would not know the history of the writers' union or the importance to Southern California of the Hollywood unions in general. I assumed that they would not know the broader issues of this strike that made it different from any strike in Hollywood for the last 60 years. I did not expect them to reject the writers because they are supposedly well-off and "middle class." I did not expect reactions from leftists along the lines of "I hate television so I really don't give a damn about this strike." Such reactions are more than ignorant when expressed from a supposed leftist. They show a certain amount of despair along similar lines of the first reaction above. This reaction is also the most common reaction I find posted in the readers' comments sections on the websites of papers such as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. The sense of such comments is: "The issues that these workers care about are nothing to me, can be nothing to me, since I don't get anything out of them myself." I simply did not expect some leftists, even if they are a small minority of our tribe, to echo the corporate controlled media on the writers' strike. Basically, this is the same kind of solipsistic despair that I expect from non-leftists.
Recently I watched the Ken Loach and Paul Laverty film The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a film that I highly recommend to all. It fascinated me greatly so I listened to the commentary given by Ken Loach and an historian. At one point Loach said (I can only paraphrase) that it is extraordinary how much hope, faith, and belief in others that people can bring to a cause, even under extreme circumstances. He continued, by saying that it is in the interest of rulers to hide from people the very fact of their collective power, and especially the power of workers when they stick together for the future benefit of all. His example was the very same transport workers strike in Ireland that Mike Quill experienced as a teenager. The lesson for me was that history, memories, and traditions are the living integument of faith and hope. One cannot live with them alone. These traditions are not locked in one's brain. The kind of faith in collective action and the possibility (never the certainty) of change for the better comes, at some point in one's life, from doing, and can come from nowhere else. The rulers and owners of our society are the ultimate enemy. But to some great extent it is the politics of despair that we confront everyday when we ask people to rebel. In a phrase he borrowed from Erich Fromm, Martin Luther King, Jr. in his "Why I Oppose the War In Vietnam" speech in 1967, called for "a revolution of hope." He did not leave the notion of this revolution unspecified and abstract. He spelled out how hope and solidarity must go together and must be built and lived and remembered.
At the end of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad says,
I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be there in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be there in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they built - I'll be there, too.
This is an echo of Eugene Debs' statement to the court upon being convicted and sent to jail for opposing World War I.
Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.
The faith in others and the hope for the future it takes to believe such statements is not merely a matter of what the "religionists" call "grace." It is a matter of daily work and lived experience.
Jerry Monaco
24 January 2008
New York City
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| » Jurisdiction Over Animation & Reality and the Question of Victory or Defeat |
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In a recent post @ Working Life Jonathan Tasini wrote something that I completely agree with.
As I wrote the other day in looking at the deal reached with the Directors Guild of America, the question of future jurisdiction is crucial. I understand why the Guild has agreed to drop the demand that the contract cover reality and animation--there is pressure to make a deal. But I also understand, and agree wholeheartedly with the Guild leadership, why the Guild stuck with this proposal for so long. The more work that stays non-union, the worse the long-term prospects are for Guild members in five, ten, twenty years. It is self-evident to me, and I assume most people who have been around labor for long enough, that if you don't keep your jurisdiction at a high level, then, you will obviously get hurt at the bargaining table.
As a comment on this I want to talk about "victory." The end of most strike battles are muddy. It is never clear immediately who has won and who has lost. Only time can tell on some issues and especially on issues of organizing the unorganized. If the WGA comes out of this strike invigorated and believing that they have had an effect on their industry then it can become the spur for a transforming experience for the WGA and, perhaps, even for other Hollywood Unions.
I have tried to make this point in one of my posts at my journal:
First, of course, the writer's strike is important to the union movement in Southern California. It should be obvious to all people who know the history of the labor movement that the Southern California union movement often follows in the wake of the successes or failures of the Hollywood unions. This has been the case since the 1930s. At first, this was so, because the organization of the Hollywood unions was the big break for the union movement in an area of the country that was open shop, anti-union, and a locus for brutal union busting by the metropolitan authorities. Later, Hollywood workers' organizations were often a model for union success or for union failure in other industries. But one of the biggest reasons that Hollywood union success can spur on success in the Southern California region is because the Hollywood labor force includes among its members representatives from all important crafts in the economy as a whole -- carpenters, electricians, painters, designers and skilled workers of all sorts. Thus, for example, if painters organized a union with-in the studios in the 1930s this organization often spread to other painters in Southern California outside of the studios. If carpenters get a raise in the Hollywood unions this puts pressure on employers of carpenters through-out the region to raise wages.
What is not largely recognized, at least by those outside the industry (and unfortunately by many IATSE members), is that the writers' union has always been a wedge union in Hollywood. It was a target of the studio bosses in Hollywood's classical period, it was a major target of blacklisting in the '50s, and it has often been the union that the corporate bosses first took aim at when intending to undercut "below the line" unions. In the immediate post-war years below the line unions showed the potential to form an industry wide union. It was the SWG [Screenwriters Guild], among all of the creative unions, which was most supportive of below the line militancy, and paid the heaviest price for its support. In the vision of those days the IA progressives and the SWG were united in a perspective for an industrial union that would include the creative workers, from writers to painters. In this fight against an industrial wide union the bosses considered the SWG a major threat to the moguls' creative control. The leadership of the SWG was the most militant supporters of the striking carpenters and painters at the heart of the struggle.
What has not been recognized as an important consequence of the WGA strike is that for the first time since 1948 members of major unions in Hollywood have been talking about the need for an industry wide union. This has not happened since the union upsurge in the immediate post-war years in Hollywood, and at that time members of the old Scriptwriters Guild were leading the way. The fact that I have heard many writers say things similar to what David Latt said at United Hollywood:
What's needed now is clear-headed, strategic thinking. We've always known that we are one Guild among many and that, unlike other American corporations, the Hollywood congloms get to speak with one voice, using their superior resources to obstruct our objectives. Structurally, that puts us at an incredible disadvantage. What if all the Hollywood unions were, like the United Auto Workers, negotiating with one voice, picking off the studios, one at a time? What kind of deal would we have then?
The specific details of the deal the WGA agrees to at the conclusion of this strike will be argued over no matter what its contents. But if the need for stronger and united unions is recognized by thinking union supporters in the WGA and SAG, and can make some headway with other unions in the industry. then the long term victory of Hollywood workers will be traced back to this strike and to the current perspective of the WGA leadership, from Verrone to the strike captains at United Hollywood on down to the guys and gals who walked the picket line.
The reason I say this in a forum for non-WGA readers, is that it is not generally recognized how unclear the aftermath of a strike can look. There has been a lot of energy produced by fans of the writers in support of the WGA. I do not wish for that energy to be dissipated in a misplaced sense of defeat. The writers will not win the organization of animation and reality writers as a result of this strike, and I, like Tasini, believe that this was a righteous goal. But as an observer I am not yet willing to admit there has been a lack of a victory even on this issue. If this strike raises the consciousness of other workers in the entertainment industry it could have effects far beyond this strike and in fact far beyond Hollywood.
Jerry Monaco
24 January 2008
New York City
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Jan. 24th, 2008 @ 12:01 pm
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| » The New York Times and the Writers' Strike: Part 2 - General Reflections |
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The New York Times, Unions and the WGA: Part Two
Part One of this post How Weird is The New York Times?: NYT Assigns Former Producer to Cover the WGA
In one respect the writers' strike is unusual for The New York Times; "the paper of record" has been printing frequent, if not substantive, articles on the strike and the strike leaders. If this were any other strike by a union of comparative size we would have been privileged to receive three or four reports on the course and consequences of the strike, no more. But this is a Hollywood and New York Strike, effecting the very industry that The New York Times is close to, so we are cursed with a surplus of riches. Instead of three or four generally pro-industry articles from The Times we get a dozen and more.
This strike is unusual for The Times in another way; it has a regular reporter assigned to the strike beat. Michael Cieply is the reporter's name and he is an old hand at his job, who did a stint as a producer for Sony, which is of course one of the companies that is opposing the WGA. As noted earlier it treads close to an ethical line to assign a reporter to cover a strike who was once worked as a "producer" for one of the companies being struck. But more on Mr. Cieply later. I want to emphasize that this note is not about Michael Cieply or any other single reporter. He is only important here to the extent that he is the usual New York Times filter through which flows "all the news that is fit to print." He would not be in the position he has obtained if he were not able to articulate the usual anti-union world-view of the business leaders.
The coverage by The Times of the writers' strike has followed the usual pattern of corporate media coverage of union politics. The major media rarely covers strikes or the labor movement without marginalizing the union leaders involved, and trying its best to isolate the strikers from the rest of society. The New York Times treats unions and their leaders with the same template that they treat third world countries and their leaders. Union leaders are presented as either incompetent, unrealistic, or criminals. These leaders may be radical or moderate or pragmatic depending on whether they are helping the business classes or pursuing an independent course. Strikers are made to fall into at least one of three categories. They are either; (1) too uneducated or limited in their view to realize their own best interests and therefore marching toward mirages when they strike; or (2) coddled and lazy workers looking to extend their undeserved privileges; or (3) violent thugs who only have themselves to blame when respectable society cracks down on them.
The New York Times is our preeminent liberal newspaper and they will not be caught out advocating iron-fisted union busting; such a stance wold alienate their liberal middle class readership. So given the above three categories the next move of Times strike coverage is to find inside the union the true voice of the rank and file. They will find or invent a clique of union members who represent the mature leaders and pragmatic union leaders, or the union leaders who are realistic about the need to rationalize an industry and throw off dead weight, or the union leaders who are responsible and law abiding.
Reduced to its essentials the coverage of strikes by The New York Times is not much different than the kind of coverage we receive from the Murdoch owned New York Post. If either deigns to cover a strike we mostly see the strike from the point of view of "the innocent bystander" (consumers, non-striking workers who have lost their jobs, the investor), the business leader, or the union dissident. The main difference between The Times and The Post is that The Times tries to articulate the views of that section of the business class that wants "labor peace" for the long run and the Post just says what it is for, straight out with-out grace notes or business facts. The Post will simply call strikers clowns, rats, or thugs where the Times will condescend in the kind of Times-speak it usually reserves when covering a Third World country and the "underclass." Thus there is a sense in Times' strike coverage that strikers are somehow like children -- they are out of their depth in the real world; they are crying over their loss of the warm spot; or they are acting out of misplace nostalgia for a time of union militancy and socialist dreams. Besides all that, strikers, unlike respectable businessmen, argue among themselves and are mired in dissension. Occasionally, the mask of middle-class liberalism drops and strikers are told to get in line or get crushed.
In the above the reader will find the usual contours of newspaper coverage of unions and strikes. So it must be understood that when I dissect the Times' treatment of the writers' strike I am not claiming that the WGA leadership or the writers on strike are being treated worse than other groups in the labor movement. They are being treated about the same. Any quirks in treatment mostly have to do with accidental circumstances and the fact that we are, after all, dealing with an industry of celebrities.
The latest examples of anti-union reporting of the writers' strike follow a familiar pattern with a few twists. The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter are the major papers to look at when considering the WGA strike. (As usual The Wall Street Journal is an exception that would have to be dealt with on its own. Its coverage has been bluntly and honestly anti-union but without the usual cliché assumptions.) All of them have taken the exact same line from the beginning of the strike. Stated simply their line is as follows: The leadership of the WGA is unrealistic. The WGA leaders are amateurs who have lost touch with reality. The WGA leaders have a personal "ideological agenda", that can only hurt the industry.*
What all of these newspapers harp on again and again is dissent within the WGA. They look for it everywhere and in every article. When one prominent writer decided to scab on the strike he was given full, and repeated coverage. (One would think that he was not an individual but an army.) There are rumors that "A-list" screenwriters have broken ranks with the WGA, but none are named and none have come forward. In short, all four newspapers have invented a dissident faction of the WGA that is ready to break into the open and bring the current leadership down..
Thus you get headlines such as the following:
Writers’ Strike Tests the Mettle of 2 Outsiders By MICHAEL CIEPLY (Published January 19, 2008, The New York Times)
In Writers Strike, Signs of Internal Discontent Over Tactics By MICHAEL CIEPLY, (January 11, 2008, The New York Times)
Directors' Deal Could Split Striking Writers By Carl DiOrio (A Reuters piece, Published January 17, 2008, in The New York Times but also picked up by The Hollywood Reporter, The Washington Post, ABC.net, and a number of other newspapers. With the aid of google I looked around a bit and of the Reuters stories on the WGA picked up by other news venues this is the most popular.)
What is the real news of this strike? It is the unusual unity so far of the writers. I have rarely seen a strike where the workers turn up at the picket line in high numbers three months after the strike has begun. Picket lines often dwindle to 5 or 10 people this long into a strike. At the most recent picket line I went to at Viacom near Times Square in New York City I heard lively political debate and economic analysis. I heard debate over strategy and there was high level of consciousness of what this strike is about. And there were more than 200 people on the picket line.
What is The New York Times and Cieply's explanation for all of this? Perhaps it is the "Woodstock atmosphere" on the picket lines.
In the 1980s, when I was part of the Central American solidarity movement the Times would dismiss every large protest as "reminiscent of the sixties." The idea was that "those people" who are concerned with the lives of people in distant lands were motivated by nostalgia and we should ignore them. Cieply uses similar rhetoric in his analysis of the WGA strikers. He uses (sometimes weird) variations of oft' repeated anti-union clichés. Some of these cliches I noted in a previous post where I stated, "If ... picket lines are old fashion sorts of affairs that people won't cross, they blame unions for being thugs. If picket lines largely act as a moral reminder that people should stick together for the good of all who work, then the picketers are called cry-babies or people who are not serious." In this Cieply simply echoes the propaganda of the AMPTP. Early on the conglomerate mouthpieces complained of the "alternating mix of personal attacks and picket line frivolity" referring to "the WGA's continuing series of concerts, rallies, mock exorcisms, pencil-drops and Star Trek-themed gatherings."
Such complaints are clichés that seasoned union veterans have come to expect from The New York Times -- strikers are petulant children, or misguided idealists, or ideologically motivated reds, or thuggish criminals.
* Footnote: The ideological agenda of the WGA leaders is never defined precisely, but the phrase is used to refer to the goal of the WGA leadership to organize the unorganized and to maintain union solidarity. If this is "an ideological agenda" then the whole idea of having a union, and believing in worker solidarity and collective action has to be considered "an ideological agenda." The phrase "ideological agenda," which The New York Times has repeated uncritically is a code phrase for "these guys are "reds". One should expect old fashion red-bating every now and then. But in this case it hides something far more sinister. The idea that "organizing the unorganized" among Hollywood writers is itself an ideological agenda should signal to all unions that the conglomerates no longer intend to let unions expand within the movie and media industries. If other Hollywood unions listen carefully they would hear a union busting agenda from the multinational corporations now running things in Hollywood.
Jerry Monaco
22 January 2008
New York City
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Jan. 22nd, 2008 @ 04:12 pm
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| » How Weird is The New York Times?: NYT Assigns Former Producer to Cover the WGA |
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Since the run up to the strike I've been hoping that one of the writers from the WGA would do a thorough analysis of the coverage of the strike by the major newspapers and the industry press. The corporate media has done a good job of propagating the cause of their sister corporations. But in the last few weeks the articles in The New York Times have become more and more pro-management and, frankly, quite weird.
I quote the latest bit of strike "analysis" from The New York Times:
Dennis Palumbo, a screenwriter-turned-psychologist whose practice includes a number of Hollywood writers, said guild members - many of whom have come to regard the companies as negative parental figures - appear to see Mr. Verrone and Mr. Young as friendlier alternatives. "Which parent do you go with, the big, bad parent that you know, or someone who's presenting himself as an Alan Alda parent?" Mr. Palumbo said.
All of this in an article called Writers' Strike Tests the Mettle of 2 Outsiders by MICHAEL CIEPLY (published: January 19,
2008.)
I am sure that Patric Verrone and David Young will gladly accept the compliment that they are in the image of nice Alan Alda... Instead of... what? Which character actors can be cast in the part of evil corporate daddy... Crazy Joe Pesci in Good Fellas? Dennis Hopper in Land of the Dead?
But in truth this is another anti-union cliche. What can't be imagined by the august New York Times is that it is possible for people to fight for themselves and for the future of their industry. What can't be imagined by The New York Times is that strikers are not children, but people who have thought seriously about what they are doing and why they are doing it.
Michael Cieply is The New York Times reporter who wrote the above words. I doubt he ever reported on a labor dispute from the union side. Cieply is a business reporter and he knows Hollywood business practices well. He should since he worked as a producer for Sony Corp. The fact that Michael Cipley was once a producer for Sony is the first piece of information that any reader of Cieply's coverage of the writers' strike should be aware of. This fact should be presented as a caveat before every story he writes about the WGA, Hollywood union leaders, Patric Verrone, and David Young, etc.
Cipley started his career as a business journalist for Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, and The Los Angeles Times. Hollywood was his beat. The moguls were his meat. He has always been adept at articulating the thoughts of the deal-makers to themselves. He has practiced this expertise throughout the writers' strike. The NYT poached Cieply from the LAT in 2004 and moved him to the Big Apple. Apparently he could not adjust to the Byzantine bureaucracy of the Big Ship, nor could he comfort himself with the less sunny pleasures of the Big Apple, so he moved out of the New York Times' editors' desk and back to reporting in Los Angeles. This occurred in January 2007, and was probably part of The New York Times' long range preparation for the possibility of a writers' strike. Since he moved back to L.A. Cieply has specialized in profile pieces on studio execs and the usual fair of insider analysis-lite of Hollywood business trends. He knows the strange business customs of the Hollywood deal-makers, that is for sure. But he has never shown any knowledge of the long and sometimes tangled history of the Hollywood labor movement. He has also never displayed any knowledge of the history of unions or the labor movement in general.
I have a question for the Times. Why don't they assign ex-union organizers or ex-union leaders to cover unions and strikes? The answer to this question is simple: If they did the bosses would complain of bias and threaten to withdraw advertising dollars. Assigning an ex-producer from Sony as point man for the coverage of a labor dispute where producers from Sony are among the main contestants on the bosses side treads the line of good ethical practice.
I am working on a much longer analysis of The New York Times' dreadful and condescending coverage of the WGA and the writers' strike and will post the rest soon. The above is just a taste of what is to come.
Jerry Monaco
Jan. 20th, 2008 @ 05:14 pm
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| » Anti-Union Cliches: A clearly written example of self-contradiction |
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I usually don't reply to posts such as the one below. But the writer at The Word Wrangler in his weblog entry, Why I Don’t Support the Writer’s Strike, states his position so clearly that it is easy to see through the usual cliches. There is the usual cliche that somehow joining a union is a way to get around "personal responsibility". There is the cliche that we live in a competitive market, on a level playing field and all you have to do is go out and create your own business to compete with the corporations.
On the other hand there is the usual fatalistic notion that people shouldn't cooperate to change their situation. The corporations set the rules and all you can do is follow their rules or go out and create similar rules that others follow. The Word Wrangler writes in his post , "For those that think they’re getting screwed by the corporations - which they probably are - go off on your own. Start your own company. Make your own future instead of crying about your present." Basically, this reduces to the following choice, "Screw or get screwed," either get exploited or do some exploiting yourself. There is no perspective that the basic situation might be changed, or at least made better for those who come after. ( Another possibility of course is that you will hope that your business will be somehow "different." Many have tried, through cooperatives, share-alike business organizations, etc. These forms are good, but unfortunately in our society very unstable.)
There is also the usual silliness, and yes it is silliness, that people that are out on strike, fighting for themselves and others are somehow "cry babies." Having known people who have gotten beaten up by company goons while on picket-lines, I find it kind of childish that a person compares a picket line "to a child holding his breath until he gets what he wants." Union haters are mired in self-contradiction, in this respect. If the picket lines are old fashion sorts of affairs that people won't cross, they blame unions for being thugs. If picket lines largely act as a moral reminder that people should stick together for the good of all who work, then the picketers are called cry-babies or people who are not serious. The conglomerates have said this about the current WGA picketers over and over again. The anti-union types will often go back and forth between these two complaints depending on the strike and the type of picket line.
I use the above phrase "anti-union type" gingerly, but I don't want to be too mean to The Word Wrangler because it seems to me that he doesn't see that his cliches are such and are in many ways self-contradictory. He writes clearly, and not like a hardened intellectual who can hide the contradictions in his thought. For this precise reason his expressions are useful.
So after this post I reply at length: (Note: I left a shorter and non-proofread version of my reply at The Word Wrangler. Word Wrangler replied very politely.
Why I Don’t Support the Writer’s Strike
Posted in January 18th, 2008
by The Word Wrangler in Rant
I’ve been avoiding talking about the writer’s strike for a couple of reasons. The first one being that I don’t support strikes, nor do I support unions. The second one is that I believe that people should take responsibility for their own lives. If you think you’re getting a raw deal at your job, then change jobs. Change careers if you want. But don’t stand around with a sign on a picket line, which is the adult equivalent of a child holding his breath until he gets what he wants.
Anne Wayman from the Golden Pencil posted a link to a piece on the Writer’s Resource Center giving three reasons to support the strike.
So I’m giving my reasons why I don’t support the strike.
The rules are set by the corporations - If I went to work at Marvel Comics as a writer or artist, I know going in that the company is pretty much going to own whatever it is I create. If I create the next Superman - and Marvel makes millions of dollars in TV, toys, movies and comic books - chances are I’m still going to be compensated based on our original agreement with Marvel coming out on top. And Marvel certainly isn’t going to give me the rights to the character that’s earning them that much scratch. I know this going in. If I don’t want to play by those rules, I can choose not to.
It’s their game so don’t whine about it when you come out on the bottom of a deal.
Personal responsibility - I admit that I lean pretty far to the conservative side of the political spectrum. My father is a no-nonsense guy and an extremely hard worker. He always preached about controlling your own destiny instead of it controlling you. Make choices - both good and bad - and live with the consequences. And if you’re in a situation you don’t like, pull yourself up out of it and move on.
I realize we live in a society that doesn’t like to hear that. We don’t want to work hard for what we want. We think we’re entitled to everything and when we don’t get it, we whine. We think the companies we work for owe us all. Well, I got news for y’all, it ain’t like that.
For those that think they’re getting screwed by the corporations - which they probably are - go off on your own. Start your own company. Make your own future instead of crying about your present.
The marketplace has changed drastically over the past decade. There are more opportunities than ever for creative people to get noticed, make money AND keep the rights to their material than ever before.
Instead of trying to change someone else’s rules, why not just go and make up your own?
Word Wrangler,
We have so little common ground between us, that a discussion between us would probably be difficult. But because you state your view so clearly it is also easy to see the alternatives that you leave out.
You say that there are a couple of reasons you don't support the WGA strike: "The first one being that I don’t support strikes, nor do I support unions. The second one is that I believe that people should take responsibility for their own lives."
You state this right out without giving reasons. You also seem to connect "personal responsibility" and being anti-union. Later you say that corporations set the rules. So let me ask you the following questions.
1) What is a corporation but a state-sanctioned and legally protected union of investors and owners? Why do you support the kind of union of owners that is a corporation, but not a union of employees? The business institution we call a corporation was not created whole cloth and neither is it a "natural phenomena" that has always been with us. In your post you in effect assume that both of these situations are true, both that corporations suddenly appeared as arbitrary institutions and that they are natural phenomena that no one can change. The rules are the rules. But corporations were created through heavy state intervention and enabled by laws created by lawyers and judges. Why should you support laws and state-intervention to enable corporations but be opposed to people getting together in unions? My suspicion is that you believe in corporations and not unions because the business institutions are the dominant form in our country and as John Dewey said, business is simply the political air we breath.
So this is the first contradiction that I find in your post: You are in favor of unions of owners and investors, corporations that are the height of the lack of personal responsibility because this lack of personal responsibility is encoded in the law under the guise of "limited liability." But you are opposed to cooperation between employees in collective bargaining.
2) If people cooperate with each other to get things done, do you consider this something that is counter to "personal responsibility"? Why shouldn't employees cooperate to bargain with their employer? Why shouldn't employees try to improve the work situation that they are in? Why is cooperating with others to improve your situation, or the situation of your industry, somehow an abnegation of personal responsibility? I don't really understand how personal responsibility and cooperation with others contradict each other. In fact, I consider the idea that "personal responsibility" and self-help through cooperation with others are mutually exclusive another example of how you fall into self-contradiction.
3) You state "the rules are set by corporations", as if this is something we should just accept. (Are you always advocating the same kind of acceptance? A slave says: "The rules are set by slave owners. Accept it.") What rules are you talking about in this case?
Well, in the next breath you speak of copyright rules. You point out correctly that the people who created Superman for Marvel DC comics were little compensated for their creativity. The Marvel DC company made millions and the creators made very little. Then you say that writers can choose not to cooperate with the company or go do something else. In the case of the actual creators of Superman and others of that generation [from what my friends tell me of their lives] this was not exactly much of a choice. They could have been accuntants, lawyers and doctors instead but they chose to be creative. In their case, and in many cases, doing something else usually means simply giving up on their own creative ideas.
Maybe in giving up on working with a corporation that can help to distribute your creations you will have other ideas, or maybe you will just put all ideas in a drawer. I have known many poets, some of the with money and jobs and some of them living catch as catch can. But I have rarely met a poet with business sense. The same is true of many artists. Why should we construct a scoiety where the only people who have decent lives ar those that run their own businesses? Are these the only choices you wish to offer? Why isn't participating in a union also a choice?
Why not expand your choices through trying to cooperate with others in changing the rules to a system that would be better for workers and creators? Corporations changed the rules because they cooperated with investors and hired lawyers and twisted the arms of judges and bought politicians to get the copyright laws that favor them and not the creators. One reason why writers need a union is so they can get together and higher people who are expert in bargaining and twisting arms of judges and lobbying to get copyright laws favorable to individuals. There was nothing inevitable about the copyright rules we have now. Why shouldn't they be changed by us all in favor of the creator. I look at this as a minimal reform.
Still, it is not quite true to say that these rules were set by corporations. The rules for copyright were set, not by corporations, but by Congress as enabled by the U.S. constitution. These rules of copyright are a state-granted monopoly for a limited amount of time (supposedly "limited", but not if Disney keeps getting its way) giving the creator use and disposal of the creative work. There is nothing natural or inevitable about these rules and what is certain is that the founders of our country only envisioned patents and copyrights being owned by individual people and not by corporations. The idea that fictional people (corporations) could own fictional property (copyright and patents) is a very recent phenomena in history. It is a recent phenomena that we allowed to happen because we have neglected the public domain and allowed corporations and states to run rough-shod over (in this case) individual rights. The reason this phenomena came about in the first place was through acts of judicial activism, i.e. supreme court decisions argued by corporate lawyers in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century. The situation where most writers don't control their own copyrights was only codified in law by congress in the 1970s. And it was only through lobbying by corporations to pass new copyright laws that we are in the current mess we are in.
So once again back to unions. If creators of songs, stories, movies, and comic books had as much bargaining power as corporations in the early part of the 20th century the situation would have been different. In other words, back then the best way to protect individual rights would have been through forming a union or some sort of cooperative organization to save individual control of copyright. Later in the century if individuals had as much political influence over congress as rent-seeking businesses, "for hire" ownership of copyright would never have come about.
Personally, I think that it is the epitome of personal responsibility to risk some of one's own personal comfort to form collective organizations to cooperate to make better rules in this part of the world
Jerry Monaco
P.S. Word Wrangler's reply:
The Word Wrangler said,
in January 18th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Thanks for the comment Jerry. First, let me start out by stating that I don’t have the level of education regarding copyrights and their history that you do, so I really can’t address that issue.
One question you asked was: “Why is cooperating with others to improve your situation or the situation of your industry somehow an abnegation of personal responsibility?”
The answer is: It isn’t.
I’ll go back to my Marvel Comics example. Back in the 90s, when comics were hot, there were a few very talented creators who worked either for Marvel or DC. These creators became sick of the ‘work for hire’ business practices at the big corporations and - rather than forming a union, striking or picketing - they went off and formed their own company Image Comics.
Image’s business model was based on the notion that creators could publish under the Image umbrella, but still retain all rights to their characters and maintain independent studios.
That’s a good example of people cooperating to change the way business works. Image became so successful that Marvel and DC started treating their talent better because they didn’t want them going off on their own.
Instead of trying to hold a company hostage in order to get what they wanted, they went out and got what they wanted on their own. They changed the rules by making their own rules.
The world is changing in such a way that offers global opportunities for creators. I think we’re moving towards a time where creative types won’t need unions or corporations to find success. And I think that’s in everyone’s best interest.
My reply to this was to say was that a cooperative model for creative writers and a union of employees are not mutually exclusive. (You can read my full comment at The Word Wrangler's site.)
Postscript: Because of the WGA strike I have read comments by Brian K. Vaughan who believes that the comic book industry would be much better if the comic book creators had a decent union.
This brings up another subject -- the issue of industry customs and standards. The reason that companies that make movies and comic books in general control the copyrights of the creative workers is a matter of industry custom and standards. Consider the following: In the industries that were created before modern copyright existed the creators have substantial control of their copyrights. In many of the industries created in the 20th Century creators lost control of their copyrights. This was mainly because of economic "power", and the rise of vast networks of distribution. Historically, if a creator did not have access to the networks of distribution, which were usually held as oligopolies by three or four companies, then the creator lost control of the uses and reuses of his creation.
The division between creative workers and ownership was especially true in industries where several creators worked on one product. More often than not the company would try to maintain a high-level of competition between creators and category of creators. Thus in the movie business editors were set against directors, set designers against the wardrobe designer, wardrobe designers against make-up artists, writers against directors and unit producers, and directors were set against every one. It was precisely such situations that unions were meant to resolve. Unfortunately, because of manipulation by the bosses and defeats on the line the unions often exacerbated this situation. All of this is part of a longer story....
Jerry Monaco
Jan. 18th, 2008 @ 03:42 pm
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| » My Favorite Traitor: Philip Agee vs. the Nationalist Superstition |
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There has been a recent spate of books to add to the atheist's library. They all speak out against religion and the belief in God. This is not a new battle and in many ways the battle has already been won.
Why do I say that the battle against religion has been won? Because religious institutions are not the dominant institutions even in places that we think of as dominated by religion -- Iran, the United States, or Pakistan. The nation-state is the dominant institution. Multinational business entities, which nation-states serve in the great industrialized nations, follow closely behind. I current societies religious institutions are a distant third in their ability to control and dominate. The grounds on which religious bigotry could be a powerful force-of-itself have been transformed by the European powers and the creation of the nation state. If we look across the world today religious bigotry may be a motivating or aggravating factor in many areas, but religion only exists as a powerful force in relation to nationalism and the nation-state. Often religion as an institution tries to influence the nation state as a reactionary way to control the cultural side-effects of the dominance of multinational business entities in the state domanin. On the other hand, nationalist movements, whether covered by a velvet glove or masked by religious bigotry are always iron fisted and bold-faced, when seen clearly. The nation-state has been the superstition of the two of ages of reason and industrialized war, and though at times multinational corporations have attempted supplant corporate patriotism for nation-state jingoism, nationalism still remains the most dangerous ideology the world has ever known. The nationalist superstition is more dangerous than religion has ever been or ever will be, killing millions and millions of people in the great Europeans civil wars of the 20th century and motivating the European peoples to spread the nation-state form to all parts of the globe. If Richard Dawkins wishes to fight the most dangerous superstition he will entitle his next book, The Nationalist Delusion.
So we come to the death of Philip Agee. Agee was stationed in Latin America by the Central Intelligence Agency where he witnessed U.S. approved assassination, torture, and coups d'etat. He decided that he could no longer accept what he considered the secret betrayals of the U.S. government of the peoples of the Americas. He quit the CI A and instead of aiding and abetting the "official" enemies of the U.S. (Russia) he decided to give aid to the real enemy of the U.S. Government, the peoples of the Americas. He gave his information to reporters he aided in starting magazines that would expose CIA treachery, and he wrote a book in which he recorded what he saw. I was a subscriber and avid reader of Covert Action Information Bulletin through the 1980s and consider it a great contribution to exposing the institutional anti-republican forces that exist in our own government. In all of Agee's activities I think he did more to fight the most dangerous superstition than the good Richard Dawkins could ever do.
At least that was my personal experience.
When I was in high school I was the kind of kid who read spy novels, along with private eye novels, and some science fiction. I loved the tenebrous ambiguity of the best spy stuff. The labyrinth of mirrors was a place where I could wander freely in my mind. I always felt like a bit of a spy in my own house, so spy novels were the perfect metaphor for the thirteen year old boy who was asked to play the double-agent between between divorcing parents.
The spies of my imagination made me curious about the real world of spies. I already considered myself a socialist at 16, but I was still too much of a patriot to be a fully fledged anti-imperialist.
In 1975 I picked up Agee's book "Inside the Company: A CIA Diary" because it was about spying, not for its anti-imperialist content. What I read gave a face to imperial skulduggery as it was practiced in Latin America in the 1960s. Agee's book certainly did its job with me. I saw that secret intelligence agencies were not compatible with the basic principles of a (bourgeois) republic.
During the Valerie Plame affair Agee was much on my mind, since the underlying law that may or may not have been violated of exposing a CIA agent to public view could have been called "Lex Anti-Agee." (See, "The Rule of Law" and Secrecy: CIA Prisons and the Plame Affair, Chomsky on the Plame Affair and the posts here.) For me the Plame Affair provided two opportunities: exposing the hypocrisy of the Bush-Chaney clique, but more importantly exposing the anti-democratic nature of a law that essentially protects a secret society of brutal murderers and their support bureaus of intellectual clerks. As far as I am concerned the name of every CIA agent should be published and posted in the squares, markets, and forums of every town and city in the world.
Phillip Agee deserves credit for bringing light to one small part of a dark world.
Jerry Monaco
10 January 2008
New York City
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Jan. 10th, 2008 @ 02:46 pm
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| » The Social Economy of a Hollywood Strike, Part 1: What is at Stake! |
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[Note: The following post grew from responses to contributions at the must read weblog United Hollywood. Alfredo Barrios's "The Strike Is a Lawyers' Game: How to Play to Win" is an explanation of the current negotiation situation between the WGA and AMPTP. BTL Guy's "Modest Proposal: Truce?" was a thoughtful proposal to get people back to work immediately and still let the WGA negotiate its own contract. The limits of "the lawyers' perspective" on the writers' strike (or any strike) and BTL Guy's union negotiation perspective inspired me to write a broad explanation for the "irrational intransigence" of the majors in the AMPTP. In order to understand what is going on in this strike it is necessary to realize that for the corporations there is more at stake than the economics of the entertainment industry or compensation of unionized workers. Personal Note: I am not a member of the WGA. I am not employed in the entertainment industry. I am pro-union and my politics should be obvious to anyone who reads my posts. Jerry Monaco] The Social Economy of a Hollywood Strike, Part 1: What is at Stake!
What is at Stake for the WGA, for Hollywood, for the Labor Movement, for the Corporations, and for the Rest of Us in the WGA Strke or the Importance of the Writers' Strike: The importance of the writers' strike to the multinational corporations can be summed up in a few sentences: The corporations that dominate the entertainment industry are fighting a battle for control of labor and creative products. In this battle they are the vanguard of a fight in which many other corporations also have a stake. All corporations in the so-called "post-industrial" economy look at the battle of the "The Hollywood Industry" as their battle. What makes this fight crucial for the owners and managers, is that what is on the line is not only the corporate interests of Viacom and Sony, but, to a large extent, Microsoft and Monsanto.
The implications of the WGA-AMPTP strike for the union movement in the United States deserves a longer explanation. It must take into account the changing economy in Hollywood and through-out the U.S. The significance of the writers' strike goes far beyond the workers in the entertainment industry. Sometimes I think the writers on strike and the workers in the industry do not themselves know the importance of this battle to the labor movement as a whole and to all creative people in our society. Unfortunately, my brothers and sisters in the union movement have also not recognized the full implications of this strike for the future of our movement. First, of course, the writer's strike is important to the union movement in Southern California. It should be obvious to all people who know the history of the labor movement that the Southern California union movement often follows in the wake of the successes or failures of the Hollywood unions. This has been the case since the 1930s. At first, this was so, because the organization of the Hollywood unions was the big break for the union movement in an area of the country that was open shop, anti-union, and a locus for brutal union busting by the metropolitan authorities. Later, Hollywood workers' organizations were often a model for union success or for union failure in other industries. But one of the biggest reasons that Hollywood union success can spur on success in the Southern California region is because the Hollywood labor force includes among their members representatives from all important crafts in the economy as a whole -- carpenters, electricians, painters, designers and skilled workers of all sorts. Thus, for example, if painters organized a union with-in the studios in the 1930s this organization often spread to other painters in Southern California outside of the studios. If carpenters get a raise in the Hollywood unions this puts pressure on employers of carpenters through-out the region to raise wages. What is not largely recognized, at least by those outside the industry (and unfortunately by many IATSE members), is that the writers' union has always been a wedge union in Hollywood. It was a target of the studio bosses in Hollywood's classical period, it was a major target of blacklisting in the '50s, and it has often been the union that the corporate bosses first took aim at when intending to undercut "below the line" unions. In the immediate post-war years below the line unions showed the potential to form an industry wide union. It was the SWG, among all of the creative unions, which was most supportive of below the line militancy, and paid the heaviest price for their support. In the vision of those days the IA progressives and the SWG were united in a perspective for an industrial union that would include the creative workers, from writers to painters. In this fight against an industrial wide union the bosses considered the SWG a major threat to the moguls' creative control. The leadership of the SWG was the most militant supporters of the striking carpenters and painters at the heart of the struggle. It is important to know why the bosses have targeted the writers' union in the past, and are doing so now. Writers are at the heart of the central contradiction of the Hollywood system. Creative work is necessarily a free-flowing process that does not follow the rigid rules of business management. At the same time business management insists upon standardization and labor discipline. The prime motive of the business managers is profit and control. The prime motive of writers is often enough to create something that compels them. Writers, whose skills are not bounded by the specialties of screenwriting and television writing, are at the same time necessary to all forms of story-making of the movie and television industries. This often makes writers the weakest link in the business manager's plans. It is my contention that all members of the entertainment industry suffer from this same conflict between craft and creativity, on the one hand, and the effort of the owners and managers to impose labor discipline, on the other hand. For the managers and the owners of the Hollywood industries, the writers are at the heart of this conflict, and thus the writers' union has often been the main target of the Hollywood bosses. The current situation in Hollywood has more than regional importance. It is important nationally, and, because of the companies involved, internationally. Unfortunately, the labor movement across the U.S. has not discovered the importance of this strike to their interests. To put it simply, many of the peculiarities of the "Hollywood" economic structure have become standard for the U.S. economy. One example is the economic stratification of the star-system. Star-system economics often looks like a three-tier system -- the great stars at the top, followed by a lot of people hanging on to employment at the bottom, and below them the economically disenfranchised trying to grab on to the first rung of the ladder. This system of economics was basically modeled in the U.S. by Hollywood and transferred, from there, to the corporate sector. The real stars in today's economic system are the CEOs. All the rest who may think of themselves as stars, are mere celebrities, who, as far as the CEOs are concerned, are fit for Hollywood Squares, and can be traded like properties. Another example of Hollywood peculiarities becoming the national economic standard relates to the problem of what is amusingly called "intellectual property." The very term "intellectual property" has to be questioned because rights to ownership of these intangibles are a result of a socially granted monopoly for a supposedly limited number of years. Intellectual property is "property" in the same way that corporations are "producers" of movies; in both cases what we are dealing with are legal fictions that are taken for reality. The fact is that Hollywood has led the charge for the constant expansion and lengthening of the idea of intellectual property. There are some aspects of the current WGA strike that can be called the "Sonny Bono Lockout." Because of Sonny Bono and Mickey Mouse, corporations now own the copyright to a work for 95 years. If a corporation "creates" a work "for hire" today the corporation will hold the copyright until 2113. Consider that there is not a human being on this earth that can predict which works created today will be valuable tomorrow or 25 years from now and certainly not 75 years from now. Further, no corporate prognosticator can predict what types of media will be the modes of transmission in 25 or 50- years. Again writers' who traditionally expected to own the copyright to their work are at the heart of this struggle. The wish of the current corporate moguls is to treat today's cohort of writers in the same way that the old blues artists were treated -- buy a bunch songs today for $20 and hope that tomorrow they will be worth something. In the meantime the "owners" take all the credit leaving nothing for the artist. The important point is that in the emerging "intellectual property" regime this is the fate of all creators of work, whether they are computer programmers, comic book artists, or workers in the Hollywood industry. If the major corporations in the AMPTP are intransigent it is because they realize what they are fighting for, i.e. "properties" that will be their exclusive monopoly for almost a century. The fight over new media is not the fight over new media alone, it is in fact a fight for control and ownership of all new "properties." It is a fight that every single corporation involved in making "intellectual property" "for hire" has an interest in winning. The owners and bosses of these corporations believe that the creative work of others is their property alone, and any limits imposed on the fee simple of ownership is a "socialistic" encroachment on their property rights. This last point cannot be emphasized too much; the Hollywood model of the division between "creativity" and "ownership" has become the model for all sectors of the economy dominated by corporations. Major coporations are scrutinizing this strike carefully and there is a high level of support for the intransigence of the AMPTP majors amng the corporate classes. Such support is not merely symbolic but a realization that the fight of the AMPTP multinationals is the fight of all corporations. The level of importance of this strike are parallel on both sides of the picket line. The AMPTP majors are fighting a battle that is important to all corporate owners and the WGA is fighting a battle that is important to all Hollywood unions, a battle that should be important to the whole of the labor movement. The difference is that the bosses of the multinational corporations seem to know what is at stake for them while the union movement has not realized the full importance of this strike. Alfredo Barrios correctly tries to answer the question "why are the studios acting so insanely? Our demands are reasonable. Don't they understand that they have a lot to lose? Surely, it's the hardliners [at the WGA] who are holding things up, right?" But the answer to this question, is not only a matter of negotiation strategy or even of simple economics, but rather of the overall interests of the corporations represented in this dispute. Legally, incorporated businesses are not supposed to consider the interests of the owners of corporations in general. Legally, they are only supposed to focus on the interest of their stockholders to the exclusion of all other stake-holders, such as employees or communities, etc. But legal obligations and practical policies often do not coincide. This is one reason why looking at a strike strictly from the point of view of legal negotiations severely limits both the importance of the strike to everyone involved and the strategy and tactics needed to win. In order to understand why these specific corporations are acting seemingly against their immediate economic interests it is necessary to understand what is at stake from their point of view. Given the above discussion of the crucial division between the creators of "intellectual property" and the owners of that property it is necessary to bring up an impolite criticism of the Hollywood unions, and especially of the "creative unions." The very divide between "creative unions" and "below the line" unions is artificial. Most of the workers in Hollywood are "creative" in one way or another and deserve to be considered so. They also deserve "creative" ownership of the collective work of movies and television shows, etc. This notion of creative ownership needs to go beyond the simple funneling of residuals into the health and pension funds of below the line workers. Such a battle for the expansion of creative ownership to "below the line" workers cannot be won with this strike but all of the "creative" unions should take up this fight. As a practical matter it is necessary to unite all Hollywood unions in order to deal with the massive multinational corporations who own the entertainment industry. The rank and file of IATSE and other below the line unions must be won over to the fights of the creative unions, and vice-versa, or else any gains in this battle will always be under threat. Ultimately, the aim should be to create an industry wide union containing everyone from the great stars to the maintenance workers. The so-called "creative" unions must take some of the first steps to spread the idea that creative ownership is shared by all who work on a movie or show. I come to the conclusion about the artificiality of the divide between creative and below the line workers after studying the history of set designers and their attempts to unionize in the old Congress of Studio Unions. When the set designers were most powerful in their union -- roughly during the period of World War II -- they asserted real creative influence over the movies they were involved in and could be considered one part of a "collective of authors." (I have written about these subjects at length at my weblog. In short the "auteur theory" is mostly a description of the result of an historical struggle which acknowledged the "managerial" cult of the director-as-unit-foreman instead of investigating how collective authorship could be credited to all creative workers.) In other words, if copyright exists in creative works produced by the entertainment industry, then all workers should share in the continuing benefits of those copyrights during the whole life and in all the uses of that copyright. But all of that is only a perspective for the future. So let us be clear, the fight here is not merely about compensation it is about control. Recently, while reading about the history of Hollywood unions I came across the following quote, about why the moguls have always been adamantly opposed to any union for writers. The blood-letting between studio management and the SWG, which endured for nine years, showed where the real conflict in Hollywood lay, not over money, but over the control of moviemaking. The producers willingly paid gargantuan salaries to the best actors, directors, and screenwriters, but steadfastly resisted any encroachment on creative decision-making. (The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-60, Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund)
The (non)negotiating strategy of Counter and Company, is not merely a result of a lawyer's "over-promising" to his clients; it is also a result of twenty years of change in The Industry. One aspect of that change is the integration of all entertainment industries into the multinational corporate system. This is where the anomalies of Hollywood business practices have come into conflict with corporate standards. In other areas Hollywood has acted as a model of how to obtain control of the products of creative workers. But in the area of how deals are made Hollywood is a model of anarchy, at least from the point of view of the multinational CEO. Consider the following: What happened to Las Vegas in the 1980s also happened to the entertainment industry in the same time period. The pre-1930s way to finance movies was to go to a bank to structure loans. The banks financed a bet on the future year of movie releases. Studios made movies in the same way that farmers grew crops. In the 1930s, when banking money dried up, the casino owners view of financing took over and much of the liquid financing came from "underground" investments from essentially tax-avoidance and money washing operations. (A little known aspect of depression era studio financing is how much of it came from the underground economy, especially bootleggers and gamblers.) But in the same ways that multinational corporations bought out the gangsters in Las Vegas, the multinationals bought out the deal-makers in Hollywood. The big executives at the multinationals might have understood the old studio-system business model, because essentially the studio system was a "Fordism" model, where the factory was based in Los Angeles and the business operations in New York. But to the CEO of General Electric the current Hollywood "deal making model" must look as if he were putting a number of free-wheeling middle managers in charge of mergers and acquisitions of 250 million dollar factory units. Further more these factory units are run by mad men and women - creative types and bohemian wannabes. And the crowning absurdity is that each factory unit is as temporary as a nightclub pick-up band, gathering employees and equipment and sets for eight months or five years and then breaking them down again. It must look to these new bosses as if a traveling three-ring circus has been hired by General Motors to assemble their cars on a year-to-year basis. It just doesn't make sense to them. In the long run their intention is to find a way to rationalize the political economy of deal making. And in this attempt at rationalization the Hollywood unions stand directly in the way. So another aspect of the intransigence of the bosses in this fight is a long-term institutional conflict between the corporate owner-financiers and the way creative teams are assembled to do anything in the entertainment industry. In many aspects the formation of creative teams for the making of high-priced collective entertainment has not changed since Shakespeare's day. Making a movie or putting on a show is a matter of picking up an ensemble, from here and there, mostly through social networking. The project of this ensemble is based on the more or less intangible "narrative" of a creative individual or a team, often a writer or writers. None of this is "rational" from the point of view of the corporate bottom line. In the old entertainment industry the "investors," the money-men, were always "external" to those who ended up "owning" the movies. One result of the finalization of corporate dominance in the '80s and '90s has been that the owners and the investors in the entertainment industry are now a part of the same business conglomerates. (In Roald Coase's terms investment functions have been "internalized.") This internalization of investment has brought out in fine relief the divide between the owners and the collective creators of entertainment. Much of the history of Hollywood can be written as a tug-of-war between the creators and owners of the works of entertainment. But when the investors were external to the companies to the companies who owned the movie studios, and the companies presented themselves to the investors as borrowers for the next year's crop of movies, the investors did not have to concern themselves with the "irrationality" of creativity. "That is just the way they do things in those industries," the investors could say. The owners, and deal-makers, could themselves take a patronizing attitude to the creative types they gathered under the tent. But now that the owners, investors, and often enough, the sponsors, are all a part of the same interconnected companies, this kind of irrationality is unacceptable. And again, the great roadblock to rationalizing this system is the old craft and trade unions. Barrios states correctly: "CEOs hate uncertainty. They run their businesses based on long-range plans that are based on long-range assumptions." But he fails to see all of the long range plans of the big conglomerates. The moguls are not only willing to inflict economic pain on the workers in their industry, especially the below the line workers, but they believe that this pain is necessary to enforce labor discipline. General Electric, Sony, Viacom, Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp, have a perspective that goes far beyond this strike. Their perspective is that they wish to do to the WGA what Reagan did to PATCO, because the WGA must be held up as an example to all unions. Their perspective is that if they let the writers win here they will be opening the door to similar victories beyond the entertainment industry. Their perspective is that they can afford to lose a few billion dollars in order to stop the writers from earning a few pennies because more than short-term profits in this small industry are at stake. Their perspective is that they must enforce their new "rights" to all forms of intellectual "property" and that to give into workers here would be to allow a trespass on these new forms of "property". Their perspective is not limited to the entertainment industry; it is not only national it is also international. They believe that if they let creative artists and workers have a piece of the action here, then workers in other sectors of the economy, and in other places in the world, will also be looking for their share of these new forms of "property" that they have invented. Barrios fails to see that among the long range goals of the current CEOs in charge of the multinationals is maintaining control of the creative process itself. From the point of view of people such as Murdoch or Iger, the creative types inside the old "entrenched" unions are like the skilled workers who resisted industrialization. If the economic process is to be rationalized the creative types must be brought in line. For the Murdochs of the world, the long-term battle is to find a way to force these meddlesome unions to give up on any idea that people may actually own the works they create. The CEOs look at themselves as the masters of the universe, and the WGA especially threatens that mastery.
[In my next post, I will attempt to show a perspective that can win this strike. It is important to be optimistic in our everyday actions but also to be realistic about the strength between the parties in conflict. I will sketch out how the above perspective of what is at stake leads to more than negotiating strategy for winning this strike.]
Jerry Monaco
9 January 2008
New York City
[Caveat: I am not a member of the WGA, nor do I speak for any of the officers or members of that union or any other union. I have been a member of other unions in the past and I am a supporter of a stronger union movement in the United States. J.M.]
This work is licensed under a Creative
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Jan. 9th, 2008 @ 07:10 am
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| » Auteurs and Managers: Class Struggle, Blacklists, Business Models, and Film Theory |
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Auteurs and Managers: Class Struggle, Blacklists, Business Models, and Film Theory -
A Worker's Movement Perspective on the Authorship and Ownership of Creative Works
This is a post about unionization and artistic control in the Hollywood system. It is also a post about "film theory," and specifically about the ideological context of the auteur theory.
It is my contention that the auteur theory is essentially a managerial theory of film production. It is a theory of industrial production that masquerades as a theory of artistic creation; it is a description of executive authority which masquerades as advocacy for freedom of authorship. It seems to me that all of the important Hollywood struggles, including the current WGA strike, have been about "ownership" of the creative process. The constant battles by the so-called "producers" (studio executives, unit managers, and directors-as-foremen) to keep labor in line are actually class struggles over who will control the "stories" Hollywood tells.
When the Studios controlled the labor process completely, the real auteurs were the unit managers and producers. Then, as labor militancy increased, the Studios were forced to shift to a cooperative way of film-making. But with the decline of the studio system the struggle over who would control the creative process heated up again. As labor militancy declined, strong unions were gutted by blacklisting. Writers, camera operators, editors, set designers, were "brought into line" and became tools of the director, losing creative control in the cooperative labor process of movie making. The unions were purged, allowing the director to become the main "unit manager," the Hollywood equivalent of industrial foreman. I believe that any detailed look at the rise and fall of the various ways of production of movies and television, and their relationship to the social strength of working groups who created the movies and television shows, will reveal that the auteur theory is both justification and description of a certain kind of management style, that has been "necessary" since around 1946 in Hollywood. The necessity has been dictated by the needs of the owners to maintain control of their workforce.
These thoughts were suddenly triggered when I read a comment expressing the professional animosity between the director and the writer, at the essential writers' strike weblog United Hollywood:
January 3, 2008 6:02 PM
Jake Hollywood said... Oh c'mon. It's okay to admit that the DGA always operates in their own self interest. They toss writers under the bus all the time. I mean, after all, they're the "authors" of every film ever made, right? Writers are essentially just glorified typist as far as the DGA is concerned--they're not unlike the AMPTP in this view of writers as, "schmucks with Underwoods". If the film is great or merely good, it's the director's "vision" that made it so; if the film is bad, it's always the writer's fault--"...you can't always fix a bad script." This is the WGA's fight. And it's a battle we writers must win, if for no other reason than to regain what little respect the industry tosses our way.
I wonder if the writer with the nom de blog Jake Hollywood, realizes the full significance of stating his objections to the auteur theory in the context of a labor struggle. It is a little-considered aspect of film history.
The WGA strike has spurred me to think through some of my ideas on film "theory" and history. I have always been opposed to the "auteur theory." For those who don't know, "the auteur theory" is the notion that the director of a film is its "author." Gore Vidal once referred to the "auteur theory" as the "brother-in-law" theory of Hollywood movie making. With certain exceptions (Alfred Hitchcock, for one), the directors were, at worst, brothers-in-law; at best, bright technicians. All in all, they were a cheery, unpretentious lot, and if anyone had told them that they were auteurs du cinéma, few could have coped with the concept, much less the French. They were technicians; proud commercialites, happy to serve what was optimistically known as The Industry. (Who Makes the Movies? By Gore Vidal, New York Review of Books, Volume 23, Number 19 · November 25, 1976) I have always looked at movie making and narrative television as a cooperative art. Ideally the artistic works in these media would always be gathered under "collective authorship." In my view the proper "authorities" on any film or narrative television show are the writers, directors, cinematographers, editors, set designers, and then all the other technicians, not necessarily in that order. There are instances when a choreographer or set designer or (nowadays) a special effects designer can contribute more to a narrative work than the director.
Unfortunately in the United States system of movie making you also have to add the "money men," also known as "the producers".
The studio system was a factory system, with the factories on the West Coast and the business headquarters mostly in New York. This was a business model that bankers understood and thus they were willing to front the Studios the money to raise their yearly crop of movies. During the depression most of the bankers' capital dried up and the Studio heads turned to organized crime (bootleggers were overflowing with money), rent seeking from politicians, and union busting to make up the difference. After the high times of World War II the studio system was busted apart by anti-trust actions and by television. By the time of the late 1950s the money men and women were often "the stars" of one type or another. By the late '70s The Industry had progressed to the point that the money was mostly gathered by agencies and their banking consorts who put together the deals. The wags have always said that deal-making is the true art of Hollywood. And if you look at how the deals get made you will know the relation between the capital collectors and the creators of narrative in Hollywood. The structure of these deals will often determine who the "authors" are in Hollywood.
Variations of the deal making business model have continued since the decline of the studio system. But multinational corporations now own The Industry. To them this model looks inefficient and quite suspicious.
What has to be understood is that what happened to Las Vegas in the 1980s also happened to Hollywood and New York entertainment. The pre-1930s way to finance movies was to go to a bank and structure loans. Studios made movies in the same way that farmers grew crops. But in the 1930s the Las Vegas view of financing took over and much of the liquid financing came from "underground" investments from essentially tax-avoidance and money washing operatons. But in the same ways that multinationals corporations bought out the gangsters in Las Vegas, the multinationals bought out the deal makers in Hollywood. The big executives at the multinationals could have understood the old studio system business model, because essentially the studio system was a "Fordism" model. But to the chairman of General Electric the Hollywood "deal making model" must look as if he were putting a number of free-wheeling middle managers in charge of mergers and acquisitions of 250 million dollar factory units. Further more these factory units are run by mad men and women - creative types and bohemian wanna-bes.. And the crowning absurdity is that each factory unit is temporarily picking up employees and equipment and sets for eight months or five years and then breaking them down again. It must look to these new bosses as if a traveling three ring circus has been hired by General Motors to assemble their cars on a year-to-year basis. It just doesn't make sense to them.
Part of the current crisis of Hollywood is a conflict between the creators of works and the new multinationals that don't believe that anything is created except for their profits and the "properties" they own. Peter Chernin of News Corp., Roger Iger of Disney, Barry Meyer of Warner Bros., Brad Grey of Paramont, Harry Sloan of MGM, Jeff Zucker of NBC Universal, and Michael Lunton of Sony are perfectly willing to let the public think that "directors" or "show runners" or "writers" or actors or any number of other people are creators. They even don't mind if those same people think of themselves as "creative". But they know that such people create nothing that is real. And what is real is what is profitable; what is real is what is "property" and "capital". These big boys consider themselves the people that build the products and obtain the properties ("intellectual property" in this case) for themselves and for the future corporate investors. For them the primary issue is control; control of the capital, the resulting "product," and the "(intellectual) property" that can be bought, sold and built upon. Their capital and their property must suffer no interference. Creative types are potential interference once they look at themselves as more than just employees. Now that corporations own the copyrights to "their" "intellectual property" for almost 95 years the stakes have become higher for them. They must have authority and control and they must teach everyone a lesson who gets in their way. Eventually the intention is to change what they consider the antiquated production process of the "deal making system". But in order to do this they must first neutralize or destroy the people who are in the best position to take control of a new creative production methods in Hollywood in New York. This is primarily the writers, but also directors, actors and, for the first time in a long time, below-the-line workers.
It is good to remember that it took almost fifteen years for the old studios to recognize that the writers could bargain as a group. It was only because the U.S. was in the midst of World War II and the Franklin Roosevelt administration was worried that Hollywood would not be ready for the propaganda effort to win the war that the Labor Secretary of the Roosevelt adminstration insisted that the studios recognize the writers union. So what was it about? Why were the studios so resistant to recognizing the old SWG? It is because they realized that since the coming of sound the writers were the creative fulcrum of Hollywood. The blood-letting between studio management and the SWG, which endured for nine years, showed where the real conflict in Hollywood lay—not over money, but over the control of moviemaking. The producers willingly paid gargantuan salaries to the best actors, directors, and screenwriters, but steadfastly resisted any encroachment on creative decision-making. (The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-60, Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund) By the end of World War II the most important creative person in Hollywood was the writer and not the director. Directors who were also writers had an advantage but a director like Cuckor was nothing without the good script. Some writers such as Preston Sturges, Joseph Manckiewicz, and Robert Rossen became sick of having their scripts butchered by the brothers-in-law club and made bids to direct their own films. By the end of World War II the studios were losing control of the stories. The strength of the Hollywood unions meant that the unit producers were having less and less influence on the set and over the creative process as a whole. The decision making for the creation of movies, for the first time since the early days of United Artists, was more and more in the hands of a cooperative group of writers, directors, camera operators, set designers and editors. The writer was recognized by most as the creator of the story and thus for the director-story teller like Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock the most important aspect of their work was to supervise the script from origins to filming.
In a thoughtful article at a socialist website David Walsh states: "Since the early days of sound films writers have been perceived as a potential threat by their employers." He continues:
Writers and other film artists with integrity are impelled to report on life honestly. Such work is inevitably socially critical, sympathetic to the exploited, hostile to the rich and arrogant, outraged by injustice. It must always contain an element of protest. In the end, these sentiments and qualities are incompatible with the industry executives’ drive for profits and need to conceal the harshest social realities. The record of the struggle between these two imperatives, now out in the open, now concealed, is the history of Hollywood. (A socialist perspective for the film and television writers strike, by David Walsh, 5 January 2008.) This states the situation clearly. It is a conflict between those who create and those who look at those creations as their property, and all who work for them as tools to serve the purpose of profit without disruption of the social structure. Granting creative power to writers is a threat to the bosses'] world view. In 1945 the writers had begun to gain some measure of control over the creative process. So what changed?
Gore Vidal says
Then out of France came the dreadful news: all those brothers-in-law of the classic era were really autonomous and original artists. Apparently each had his own style that impressed itself on every frame of any film he worked on. Proof? Since the director was the same person from film to film, each image of his oeuvre must then be stamped with his authorship. The argument was circular but no less overwhelming in its implications. Much quoted was Giraudoux's solemn inanity: "There are no works, there are only auteurs."
Vidal goes on to say that soon young intellectuals, art historians, and graduate students were interviewing directors and treating them as "authors" while the writer fell by the side. There is some truth in this but all and all this gets the reception in the United States of the "auteur theory" a bit backwards. There was a point in Hollywood history of about seven years, during the period of classical Hollywood cinema when writers were the effective "authorities" of story telling in Hollywood. That changed because first some of the below-the-line unions were broken and purged of "reds." For the studio bosses the term "reds" was not a designation of people who were socialist or communist but of all people who wanted to maintain some control over the industrial (creative) process. The Congress of Studio Unions was the first union to go, and the set designers as members of this union were the first of the creative people to lose their part in decision-making in films.
In 1945 the bosses of business across the U.S. were complaining that they had lost control over the shop floor. The shop stewards were the main authorities on the shop floor and the foremen simply watched over the shop stewards. In the movie business this meant that the unit producer and director had lost control over the production unit and had to act in true cooperation with the creative people. The bosses attempted to stop this trend. And the model for stopping it came out of Hollywood in 1945 and 1946 when the militant Congress of Studio Unions was busted. Gerald Horne says it best in his book Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950.
Executives all over the nation were complaining about the perceived erosion of management's rights and repsonsibilities, but the jurisdictional spat between the CSU and IATSE gave Hollywood's version of this story special resonance. By ridding itself of the CSU, the moguls were able to reassert almost absolute control over the production process and thus to make the movies look the way they wanted them to look, while avoiding the restraints imposed by "union auteurs".
And then the writers' union was purged of any person who was in favor of a militant union. The main issue was supposedly "communism." But the greater issue was whether the business men would control the creative process. The purging of the writers' union meant a decline in overtly socially conscious writing. Fudamental social criticism was censored from Hollywood production for almost a decade, occasionally finding release in allegory.
The Hollywood studios made a deliberate decison to put directors in charge of their production units. Directors were, after all, close to management. Directors were often the equivalent of factory floor managers or foremen. This coincided with the decline of the studio system as a factory model and the rise of the deal-making model of Hollywood production. The director as "auteur" is a contingent fact of the history of the industrial process. It is neither inevitable nor desirable. The auteur theory is the ex post facto justification of this contingent fact.
I am not saying that the auteur theory is completely wrong. My belief is that in the narrative arts "telling the story" is the most important aspect of movie making. How you determine who is responsible for "story making" and "story telling" is a question not of principle but of empirical investigation. It is also contingent on historical and economic struggle. The reason that the auteur theory appropriately came out of France is also contingent. The structure of the industrial process of film making in France gave some reality to the idea that directors were "authors" in that country, and in most countries in Western and Central Europe. Directors in France, by force of circumstance, also had to be unit managers, fund raisers, executive producers, and often enough editors and writers. The reception of the auteur theory in the U.S. was also contingent on social circumstances. It became a description of reality, behind the back of the promoters of the theory. But in fact it became a description of the results of a industrial process that was created through strike breaking, union busting, purges, blacklists, marginalization of workers, and other methods of bosses to impose control over "their" factories.
Let me close with some more promised quotes from Gerald Horne's book Class Struggle in Hollywood:
"Nevertheless, as Thomas Guback has reminded us, moviemaking is a collaborative, labor-intensive industry; film analysis often stresses only content -- which it ascribes solely to member of the "talent guilds," notably directors and actors and screenwriters, ignoring production relations. However, factoring the latter into the equation 'shifts the terms of analysis from what we see to the social relation that are implicit in the industry and that govern the terms on which the industry operates.'
"An analysis of production relations inevitably prompts an analysis fo labor, the too often forgotten 'actor' in the production of films. Michael Nielsen has observed that 'if one single quality distinguishes Hollywood's product from the bulk of world cinema productions, it is the quality of unobtrusiveness -- the refusal of the film to draw attention to the process of filmaking itself by weaving a seamless whole that engages the viewers' attention completely. The quality is rooted in the craftmansship [sic] at every level of production.'"
I highly recommend Class Struggle In Hollywood, 1930 – 1950: Moguls, Mobsters, Stars, Reds, & Trade Unionists by Gerald Horne for anyone who wishes to gain an historical perspective on the current situation that led to the WGA strike and in union movements in general.
Jerry Monaco
5 January 2008
New York City
[Caveat: I am not a member of the WGA, nor do I speak for any of the officers or members of that union or any other union. I have been a member of other unions in the past and I am a supporter of a stronger union movement in the United States. J.M.]
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Commons License.
Jan. 5th, 2008 @ 12:53 pm
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| » New Yorkonomics: For a study of New York occupations |
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New York magazine has an amusing series on doing business in New York City
The Profit Calculator: The wild risks, unexpected niches, and day-in-day-out grind behind making a dollar in New York...for everyone from a drug dealer to Goldman Sachs.
The series is a great idea but I think it should have been extended and filled out in more detail. It should be a regular series. For instance there is a section called "The Drug Dealer", which sets out the risks and profits of the trade. A detailed parallel comparison between "the Drug Dealer" (Nick) and "The Drug Company" (Pfizer) would have been helpful.
A continuing series concentrating on niche occupations in New York would be an important cultural contribution. For instance a history of the rise and fall of the Italian-American run fruit and vegetable wagon, and how that niche occupation was replaced in the 1980s by the Korean-American run green grocer, would provide insight into New York City economics, immigrant waves, and family structures. A similar insight would be provided by an account on how Albanians came to replace Italians in ownership of small Pizza shops in Manhattan.
One could compare various levels in the same occupation. For instance, vibrant neighborhoods, such as mine in Astoria, Queens have dozens of small law offices scattered around. How do these law offices keep in business and how do these neighborhood law offices compare with the small law suites located near the courthouses in Manhattan, and the big law firms located in midtown? One can also make a comparison of street prostitution with high-level "escorts," the small neighborhood shoe store with the big manhattan shoe store, etc.
A concentration on unique New York occupations would be a helpful insight into how the city works. Why those occupations are unique to New York would help us to understand the special needs of the city. One rather unique New York occupation ( or rather an occupation unique to all cities where people walk a lot) is the shoe repair shop. There are two shoe repair shops within ten blocks of my apartment. I believe the density of these shoe repair shops has decreased dramatically in the last 25 years. The economics of shoe repair is an interesting New York subject. Of course another occupation rarely found in other U.S. towns is the street food vendor. Out on Steinway there seems to be at least one vendor sausages or shish kebobs or honey-roasted peanuts on every corner.
Soulvaki Stand In Astoria, Queens -- Why do New Yorkers need so much street meat?
Why do New Yorkers need so many street vendors and what is the economics of it all? When I first came to New York many of the street vendors sold roasted chestnuts in the Winter season. I remember I used to buy a bunch and put them in my coat pockets to warm my hands on especially cold days and then eat them with lunch later. Now there are very few roasted chestnuts vendors around. What happened to them? Why did the Winter sales of roasted chestnuts decline?
In Long Island City, not far from the Queensboro Bridge, there is a district that seems to exist just to service hotels, parties, delis etc. There are industrial "bakeries" which make the kinds of muffins and cakes that I always see in the Korean green grocers; there are laundries that seem to do nothing but wash sheets, pillow cases, table cloths, and towels for hotels, hospitals, and restaurants; and there are "rental" places that do nothing but rent folding chairs, tents, etc. for parties, gatherings, and receptions. There are still many "small factory" districts like this in New York City. They seem to service mostly "local" needs. What are the economics of these various small factory districts?
There are also many old time bakers in New York, making bread all night. There is a good one on the corner of 31st Street and Broadway here in Astoria, Parisi Bros Bakery, an old time Italian bakery, the kind I remember from growing up in Schenectady -- hot bread every morning, and Italian cookies and biscotti. This bakery is right underneath the El train Broadway exit and it does get a lot of walk in traffic. But surely it can't survive on walk-in traffic alone. I assume that this kind of bakery must sell its bread to New York restaurants, and other retail outlets in order to make ends meet. How does this work? How are the deals made between the restaurant and the bakery? What are the transportation arrangements?, etc.
In short the series at New York magazine left me wanting more information and more thought on the information given. But sometimes I was a bit annoyed for example with this quote in the section on "A Publishing Company: Random House"
"New Yorkonomics: Printing and publishing has been a big industry in the city since the early 1800s, when New York publishers were the first American printers with access to pirated English best sellers. "
I would like somebody to point out sometime an historical point that is largely forgotten: the U.S. was a nation that regularly violated intellectual property and its economy expanded greatly by such violation of intellectual property rules. More precisely all our complaints against China for stealing "our" intellectual property" used to be British complaints against the United States for stealing patents and copyrights from them. Why do we never mention this history of U.S. patent and copyright piracy when we complain about the piracy of other countries? It is just the usual hypocrisy I suppose.
Even when U.S. violation of intellectual property is alluded to as here, it is only mentioned as a rather quaint joke. But there is a real economic point to this. Up and coming economies are always and everywhere havens for pirates, free-booters, and privateers. I don't think that there is an historical exception. For some reason piracy is part of what makes for a fast-growing economy. Yet the same free-marketeers who are for "free" markets in everything else are not for free markets when it comes to certain kinds of state guaranteed monopolies in intellectual property. Even though such hypocrisy is usual, it is annoying that it is rarely noticed.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
5 June 2007
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Jun. 5th, 2007 @ 01:41 pm
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| » Anti-philosophy, Self-Contradiction, and Gossip |
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At ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) anti_philosophy ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) yofaceizscrumpy comments on the whole idea of the anti-philosophical project:
self -contradiction
yofaceizscrumpy
2006-10-15 08:57 pm
Sorry for interrupting you this evening, but it seems like your community is a walking contradiction.
As any sophistica can see from dictionary.com, "the rational investigation of the truths and principles of being, knowledge, or conduct" is the definition of philosophy. To be anti-philosophy is a totality that claims truth.
I kindly request that you disband your entire community this instant.
Anti-philosophy is simply an attitude or approach of skepticism to the possibility of most or all philosophical projects as philosophers themselves define their projects.
There is a simple reason to take an attitude of "anti-philosophy." All great philosophers, from the very beginning of the conversation that we call "philosophy", have been in some sense anti-philosophers, rejecting the very idea that any kind of philosophy is possible or that all previous "philosophy" was philosophy at all. Whether Plato or Rousseau or Nietzsche or Wittgenstein, or even such an infamia as Heidegger, (and many more) the first original steps in their philosophical work was to question whether philosophy, or at least systematic knowledge as assumed by philosophy, is possible at all. Is it possible to "know" (or describe or find a method to produce) the structure of "reality," the conditions of knowledge, the foundation of "being" or "thought," or the grand historical movements of "spirit" or the inherent logics of "Mind", in the way that philosophers claim, or are the very claims a form of self-deception?
Further, any advance in "knowledge" (science, theoretical thinking, mathematics) has represented both a break from philosophical rumination and a crisis of philosophy. Every scientific advance has represented a reconception of philosophy because previous philosophy is found to be limited and unfounded... And yet rarely do the professional advocates of the philosophical project look at itself with humility. The whole dung-shifting machine just rolls along as if all previous speculation had not been thrown onto the heap. All philosophy, like all religion, becomes an illustration of shifting into the "holes" left by science and literature, a "God" of the gaps approach... where there is no "science" it is there philosophy shall fill in the gaps. And finally any "advance" in "experiential understanding" has been pre-philosophical and has largely involved the kind of experience we get from the visual arts, poetry, drama, novels, etc. In fact, basically, what we call philosophy has nothing to do with wisdom or knowledge... Philosophical practice is basically a parasite on the arts, out of which the discipline of philosophy grew, during the historical period when arts separated from religious ritual... And philosophical practice is also parasitic on science, from which philosophy reacts by constantly redacting itself and reforming itself as commentary on scientific practice.
To the extent that you can say that an "attitude" or "approach" is philosophical, only to that extent can you say that "anti-philosophy" is a philosophy, and thus represents a contradiction, or perhaps a systematic paradox. But this in-itself represents the kind of imperialism of knowledge that philosophy has been accused of by every great philosopher who started his/her philosophical career as an anti-philosopher. Philosophy seeks to dominate all forms of knowledge, seeks to be a term that is everywhere and nowhere. In this way it is a lot like the word "language" or "ideology". Everything becomes a "language" and thus every aspect of mind or communicative experience is filed under the category of language, thus we get "the language of music" and "the language of architecture", etc., etc. The same occurs with the term ideology.... Among some "thinkers", even some anti-philosophers, all thought becomes an example of ideology and thought-itself is not possible without "ideology". You can parade out as many dictionary definitions of philosophy that you like to prove that an "anti-philosophical" attitude is self-contradictory, but it doesn't negate the fact that the definitions themselves are self-contradictory, assuming that all thought is philosophical and that philosophy is both everything and nothing.
This is the way that many use the term "philosophy". Philosophy is not only some kind of "systematic thought" obtaining to wisdom, knowledge, and understanding of the world, but also something that we "have" implicitly, simply because we think at all. Thus it is impossible to be an anti-philosopher because by definition all systematic thought of any sort is philosophical, and if the thought is not systematic, then the implications of thinking, is itself philosophical. Thus the reasoning goes, "To think 'anti-philosophically' is an example of philosophical thinking." But this is like the Cretan who says all "Cretans are liars", the very fact of making the statement I am "anti-philosophical" is either paradox or contradiction. Well the former rather than the latter. Yet the possibility exists that it is neither. It is simply a double-bind statement created by the systematic gossip of philosophers themselves, those engaged in the intellectual circulation of gossip to the extent that they have imposed a dictionary definition that is totalistic and intellectually imperialistic. But let me suggest that like most double bind situations, this situation was produced by a category mistake or a problem of logical typing. It is possible to be "anti-thinking" in certain situations. If I am a baseball batter, I am not thinking at every moment about how to swing the bat. If my baseball coach tells me that you have to get "beyond thought" and "just swing" wjem you are in the batter's box, I know that he is saying that "conscious" thinking is harmful to my batting average in this situation. But to define his "anti-thinking" statement as also a "thought" and thus self-contradictory is a form of sophistry, the same kind of sophistry that practically all philosophers engage in at one time or another. They, the self-described lovers of wisdom, the philosophers, have propounded their definitions through intellectual gossip, so that you are a philosopher whether you know it or not and no matter what you do or think getting beyond philosophy is impossible.
But lets be real. A "Philosopher" is a professional category in our modern society. Propounding philosophy is what those rarefied "professionals" do. But before "philosophy" was a profession it was a denotation of a systematic orientation to life that was "positioned" outside of organized (western) religion. Philosophers were not so much anti-religious as un-religious. Philosophy had an historical beginning and it has historical limitations. It was born when literature began to separate itself from religion and it began to attenuate when science began to separate itself from both religion and philosophy. Philosophy as an historical practice has always shaded into literature and myth on one side and science and mathematics on the other. Philosophy is not "strictly" bounded or limited by these other experiential practices and ways of producing understanding, but philosophical practitioners have always ignored the fact that they are simply continuers of these other projects. At its best philosophical practice provides abstraction and meta-comment on literature and science. At its worse philosophical practioners pimp off of literature and science while at the same time pretending to dominate both of those practices and proclaiming the originality of their discipline. An anti-philosophical point-of-view is simply a point-of-view that recognizes the historical limitations of philosophy and hopes for the further attenuation of philosophy in the future. But let me emphasize, that It is only the arrogant imperialism of some philosophers that necessitate anti-philosophy. To the extent that any other field -- religion or even physics or biology -- exhibits this sort of arrogant yearning to dominate other fields, then they too should be called to task.
Then what is left of philosophy? Mostly gossip. The true subject of philosophy has always been gossip in one form or another. It is gossip taken to a higher level -- the gossip of complex society commenting on the fact that face-to-face society, where gossip truly matters, is no longer possible. Philosophy is essentially meta-gossip, on the form and function of complex structures of growing human society.
There is no "contradiction" in being an anti-philosophy philosopher: if you believe that philosophy is parasitic meta-gossip, then your function is to reveal how philosophy works as a form of meta-gossip. Yet we assume that this practice of critique of philosophy that I am calling "anti-philosophy", is also a form of meta-gossip. The snake eats its tail.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
27 May 2007
(reedited 28 May 2007)
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May. 27th, 2007 @ 02:06 pm
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| » Perseus and the Gorgon's Head - A Poem with Commentary by Jerry Monaco |
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"Pity the monsters" ...
those we destroy without loving
those we fear without knowing
the dead gods of other epochs
now made evil... "Pity
the monsters" for soon
the slayers of vengeance
the unyielding ministers
of pain, the furies of fear, will
be monsters for us
to slay in self-righteous
joy... swinging the head of
the Medusa to show our enemies
and turn them
like our hearts
to stone
... Medusa through Athena...
to the hegemony of Zeus...
Prometheus or Lucifer... for those
Christian enough to choose
Perseus to Brutus ... or shall we take
Caesar? but who prefers tyrants
to tyrant slayers.... then
Louis or Lenin? Saint Thomas
More or Saint Just?
Marat the Monster
and Corday the modern Judith?
Or Marat the martyr
and Charlotte the Vampire?-- How many monsters turned
to saints and back again? Yes
Monster's deserve pity
and all the ironies of history should not
negate the simple request
"Don't forget to show
my head to the people. It's well
worth seeing..."
for the crowd
it's the simple confirmation of death
the satisfaction of desire
for the new tyrant
(or is he our liberator?)
or the mere after thought of the condemned
that this head of mine
separated from that body
lying at your feet
will still
retain the power to turn those people
in the square
faces turned upward
hungry to see
to stone.
Benvenuto Cellini, 1545-1554. Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence
Notice that blood gushes from the head of the Gorgon. Imagine holding up the head of Louis Capet or of Danton to the revolutionary crowd standing before the guillotine. Why did Mark Antony have the decapitated head of Cicero nailed to the Rostrum in the Roman Formum? It was proof that the man had gone, and that he had not gone to ground or to the under world. This was truly propaganda of the deed, as the old anarchist phrase used to term it. The crowd saw the decapitated head and some monster was exorcised. But Perseus is showing his head for other reasons. The decapitated head of the Gorgon, Medusa, still had power, but it was a different kind of power than the decapitated head of a Cicero or a Robespierre. The head of Medusa was put into Perseus's pouch then brought forth to turn his enemies to stone... a very useful decapitation in this case. Similarly, the statue that you see here was a very useful piece of political propaganda. It was commissioned by the Medici after they returned from brief exile. While in exile they had been excoriated as tyrants, but now they were to make sure that their dominance would last. Cellini's Perseus is holding up the head, displaying it to the potentially Republican crowd, not to confirm the death of the monster, but to turn the crowd itself into stone. The message was that all enemies of the Medici will be destroyed with the seeming ease that Perseus turned his enemies to stone. Of course the Republican's had other ideas. See Judith below...
Detail of Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus Holding up the bloody head is a political act, meant to inspire fear, a lesson well learned by both tyrants and revolutionaries! (See the note immediately above and also the last note for Donatello's Judith and Holofernes below.)
Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus Beheading Medusa (from the perspective of sight standing below the statue at Florence (Firenza) the Loggia). Notice that from this angle you can see the body of the Medusa lying at Perseus's feet. Thus you can see that Cellini conflates two actions of the Perseus story -- cutting off the Medusa's head and showing the head to Perseus's enemies to turn them to stone.
Another angle, showing the statue, oxidation and all.
Antonio Canova, 1804-1808. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. A very modest Perseus -- fig leaf and no blood and gore. Mario Praz once described the art of Canova as that of an "erotic frigidaire" I suppose the turned sword is another delicacy, which unlike Cellini's does not draw attention to the penis by paralleling it. One suspects that Canova was worried that Cellini's Perseus might reveal too much human reality -- sex and blood, revenge and rape -- for the eyes of his middle class patrons. We must dismiss our desires and designs from before our eyes when we commit our atrocities at a distance, as the fine nineteenth century folk were learning to do. The Medici and Cellini were not in favor of such delicacies.
This for your amusement is a "still living statue." Yes , it is a human actor posing as a statue. Fortunately realism is not extended to the head which this Perseus hold's in his hand.
A limestone metope from a temple at Selinas (on Sicily), 530-510 BCE.
It shows Perseus in the act of cutting off Medusa's head. Athena stands to Perseus's right, and Medusa holds Pegasus in her lap. The background shows traces of paint, as does Perseus' sword.
When looking at the composition of this relief compare it to some of the representations of Judith and Holofernes below. Ancient representations of Perseus and the Medusa, like Renaissance representations of Judith and Holofernes, often represented Perseus in the act of decapitation. It is good to think of the significance here. The ancient represented a Perseus who was in the act of slaying the monster, thus telling us that this act must be completed, must be continued. The implication is that these monsters must be killed in the present of the viewers of the work. The Renaissance representation's of Perseus do not depict Perseus in the act of slaying the monster, but in the act of displaying the monster's head to Perseus's enemies. The political significance for the use of this section of the myth was made explicit by the battle of artistic propaganda between the Medici and their enemies, between Perseus and Judith the Tyrant Slayer, in Florence at the end of the fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth century. Capturing Judith in the act of assassination shows the viewer a representative act of tyrant slaying, an act by implication that must continue in the present (see below). But if you show Perseus beyond the act of slaying the monster, and in the act of displaying the monster's head to his enemies, the artist has shifted the story from the necessity of destroying a monster to the necessity of inspiring terror in the enemies of the monster-slayer. This is the first step on the road of the monster-slayer becoming a monster.
As "realistic" representation Cellini is my favorite, and when seeing his statue in situ on the square in Florence it is impossible (for me, at least) not to feel the chill of history. But this is by far my favorite Perseus,. It shows that in its time this monster "needed" to be murdered, and that Perseus was the monster-slayer, preferred by those who lived by these myths.... The sense of ritual, the necessity to have a hero to protect the city from monsters, is inscribed in the stones of this old Greek town in Sicily.
The Head of the Medusa - Detail of a Caravaggio.
It took Caravaggio to imagine the Gorgon's decapitated head in "modern" terms. Here the decapitation is "real"; the head still alive and the eyes and mouth register shock, as if Caravaggio were anticipating all of those decapitated monsters during the French Revolution. Or perhaps the Revolution borrowed some legends from representations of renaissance painters.
The Medusa's Head - Bernini. The Medusa is still alive here, but Bernini forgot to include the rest of her body, perhaps the body is at the feet of the Perseus in the Loggia dei Lanzi.
The Gorgon at Corfu Museum
She is in her prime as a monster... but we miss her beauty, before Poseidon raped her.
Medusa by Arnold Böcklin, circa 1878 One of the few head's of the Medusa where we actually see that before she was cursed for being a wanton slut, she was a beautiful woman. Curses is what you get for being free and more beautiful than the ever-so benevolent current gods.
Danton - the great leader of the French Revolution: Perhaps his head could serve as a model for the modern Medusa. He said to his executioner as he stepped up to the scaffold to be tied to the plank and slid under the guillotine's blade, "Don't forget to show my head to the people. It's well worth seeing."
The Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat by David. A little more "fangy" than "knifefy" as Buffy Summers said... The implication that Marat was killed by a vampire is probably not out of David's ken. Nevertheless, Corday no doubt thought of herself as a modern tyrant slayer, a Judith, for our times. But this did not stop the revolutionaries from seeing her as a vampire or a monster.
Judith with the Head of Halophernes, by Christophano Allori, 1613. Judith can show the head to the viewer of the painting. Is there regret here or satisfaction? This beautiful slayer of tyrants was of course a wonderful whore also. So it is perhaps she who is reversing the role of Perseus, and finding revenge for her spiritual mother the monster or goddess Medusa, the raped and scorned, and beautiful Medusa.
Judith Beheading Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi (1612-21) Oil on canvas, 199 x 162 cm Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. When I saw this painting in the Uffizi, I thought to myself that this truly must be a self-portrait of Artemisia. If anyone can represent the revenge for the slaying of the wrong monsters surely she can.
Judith by Jan Massys, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp.
This Judith is fresh from the act of seduction which allowed her to gain entry to the tent of the General and allowed her to approach the carnal body of Holofernes. But such a portrait as provided by Massys is too intimate for the political act that the Donatello's statue represents (see below). We cannot help but see the details of desire that led to the act of bloody decapitation. Such a representation of triumph over tyranny by the personification of justice would frighten a burgher republican aristocracy more than any possible tyrant. Any woman in your bed - wife, concubine, slave - could perform such an act of decapitation-castration. This Judith is too much the sister of the Gorgon already. Her beauty is as much an aspect of the monster as the snakes in Medusa's hair. And as we know from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in order to fight the forces of darkness, it is necessary to interiorise some powers of the demon, even if such powers find their origins in a primal rape. (Is Judith a Vampire Slayer?)
Judith Beheading Holofernes by Caravaggio (c. 1598; Oil on canvas, 56 3/4 x 76 3/4 in; Galleria Nazionale dell'Arte Antica, Rome). One of my favorite paintings. The prissy-ness of Judith is not a distraction in this case. Her servant, the old witch eagerly standing by, is just letting her apprentice get used to the blood before graduating to the proper vampire status of Charlotte Corday.
Judith and Holofernes -- Donatello, 1460, Florence, Palazzo Vecchio.
This I give to continue the propaganda battle of the sculpture (see above). One monster slayer kills a tyrant and then another monster slayer kills the liberator who is now a new tyrant. The statue was commissioned by Cosimo de' Medici, but when the self-appointed monster slayer Girolamo Savonarola expelled the Medici and set up an austere republic the statue was moved to the he side of main door the Palazzo Vecchio to represent the Repubics desire to slay such monsters and tyrants that may present themselves before the wrath of the single and purest God. Savonarola was of course overthrown himself and slowly roasted alive, not simply burned at the stake as it is usually said. The Medici regained control of Florence and moved the statue of Judith and Holofernes to the courtyard inside the Palazzo Vecchio, to repress the memory of the bad years of Savonarola. But the memory of the monster slayer Savonarola did not die in the hearts of all. The Piagnoni kept his memory alive and briefly expelled the Medici again, restoring the statue once again to public view. This Republic lasted even a shorter time than Savonarola's Republic. When the Medici once again returned they had enough of the sympathetic magic of Donatello's Judith and Holofernes and decided to get some sympathetic magic of their own. They commissioned the statue of Perseus by Cellini (see above) to show that all future monsters, like Savonarola and his mob in the square will surely be turned to stone. So which monsters do you prefer?
Περσεύς
Jerry Monaco
New York City
26 May 2007
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
May. 26th, 2007 @ 10:14 pm
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| » Nationalism and Patriotism are forms of Superstition |
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Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons. ~ Bertrand Russell
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it. ~ George Bernard Shaw
Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind. ~ Albert Einstein
Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind. We love the land of our nativity, only as we love all other lands. The interests, rights, and liberties of American citizens are no more dear to us than are those of the whole human race. Hence we can allow no appeal to patriotism, to revenge any national insult or injury. ~William Lloyd Garrison, the great abolitionist , the Declaration of Sentiments of the Boston Peace Conference, 1838
Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched. ~Guy de Maupassant
It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind. ~Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary
May. 21st, 2007 @ 02:25 pm
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| » Atrocities, Imperialism, Hypocrisy: A Hypothetical |
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In the United States the intellectual priesthood will focus on the atrocities of official enemies while ignoring or downplaying the atrocities and act of terror that are committed by the state they support. The following hypothetical was constructed in such a way as to try to imagine the moral situation of a person in an imperial country, who is deeply moved by the suffering of an oppressed minority, but at the same time cannot see the much larger suffering that her actions support. The immediate context of the hypothetical was a debate over how and when we in the U.S. might have moral authority to criticize human rights violations in Cuba.
The hypothetical:
Julius Caesar is in Gaul, slaughtering whole villages, and killing people by the thousands for his own glory and the glory of Rome.
In the course of Caesar's human hecatomb in Gaul, Vercingetorix surrounds a village and kills or expels all of the Romans in that village. Vercingetorix also suppresses Roman ecstatic mystery cults and their sexual practices in the areas of Gaul he still controls. Julius Caesar writes home to the Senate and the People of Rome about Vercingetorix atrocities. Because Caesar is particularly open minded, he includes in his report the suppression of the Roman mystery cults and its sexual practices.
Meanwhile back in Rome is a leader of the Bacchic cult. The cult and its practices has been occasionally suppressed and persecuted by the Roman patriarchal rulers, but now is continuing in relative openness, because significant members of the ruling classes and their wives belong to the cult.
Now the leader of the Bacchic cult , is outraged at reading the contents of Julius Caesar's letter. How dare Vercingetorix suppress the Bacchic cult and its sexual practices! How dare this evil and closed minded regime even exist! It is what she talks about when she talks to people who oppose Caesar's war against Gaul. It is what she talks about when she speaks to senatorial orators who support Caesar's war of slaughter and massacre in Gaul. She is for solidarity with the all of the practitioners of the feminine mystery cult. The mystery cult cuts across class lines and undermines patriarchal values everywhere, and that is why its sexual practices are being repressed by the war lord Vercingetorix. She believes that this war lord must be stopped.
Meanwhile Julius Caesar continues his slaughter and expands it. His slaughter shows a salutary equality of treatment. The people murdered by Caesar are murdered only because they resist the Roman suppression of Gaul and it doesn't matter to him if such people they have the sexual practices of the mystery cults or not. This is called bringing Roman values to benighted Gaul.
Thousands murdered in Gaul. And back in Rome our leader of the mystery cult talking to the perpetrators of these murders about the suppression of her mystery cult in Gaul. All of this is an amazing exercise in solidarity with the people of Gaul and a wonderful example of a political moral choice in how best to stop atrocity.
Why a hypothetical?
Hypotheticals often clarify moral situations. The idea is to abstract certain conditions and events from the political contentions of the time and to ask what is the proper moral choice in a particular circumstance.
Not only is the moral situation often made obvious by the use of hypothetical situations; but how the moral situation intersects with power politics can come to the fore. I set this hypothetical in ancient Rome in hope that the distance of time, place, and culture, would abstract the situation from current ideological confusions. If the "human rights intellectuals" in the United States can't answer the questions in my hypothetical, it is not because they don't understand their point it is because they don't want to reflect on themselves and their own preening and posturing about "human rights."
For instance it is reported today that National Intelligence Director John Negroponte will resign to become deputy secretary of state. The news is delivered to us by the New York Times in proper and serious tones. The only question that is considered important to address is whether Negroponte is being "redeployed" because of the Bush Clique's disappointment with his job as National Intelligence Director. In other words the main pointman in the "war on terror" is being transferred to the State Department. No where is it mentioned that Negroponte is/was himself a leading terrorist... or perhaps it is better to call him a war criminal. Let me point out here something that is rarely mentioned in the U.S. War crimes are considered more serious than acts of terrorism and for good reason. Terrorism can be massive and atrocious, but they are crimes committed against individuals. War crimes are committed against whole nations and peoples. There is a good argument that Negroponte is a war criminal.
In the 1980s Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras. As ambassador he presided over the largest CIA station in the world and the second largest U.S. embassy in Latin America. Why was this huge "ambassadorial" complex located in the small Central American country of Honduras? Because the Honduras embassy was the U.S. terrorist base for Central American operations. Negroponte, as ambassador to Honduras, condoned, covered-up, and lied to Congress and the U.S. people about massive atrocities committed by the Honduran military against its own people -- atrocities that should be compared to Saddam Hussein's atrocities against the Kurds, during the time period we were supporting Hussein. The Honduras military was funded and supported with U.S. tax dollars, so the responsibility for the Honduran government's large-scale state terror is, in some good part, our responsibility. The reasons for Negroponte's support of Honduran state terror are also interesting. They of course had to do with U.S. support for a favored regime in Honduras, a regime that was completely malleable to the U.S. government and corporations. But the main reason was because Honduran support was crucial to running a terrorist army to attack Nicaragua, an army that was instructed by the CIA to attack "soft targets" such as clinics, farm cooperatives, and undefended villages.
Not a few days ago it was reported that Saddam Hussein was executed. His war crimes and his crimes against humanity were reviewed in obituaries and editorials. Today it is reported that John Negroponte will move from his post as National Intelligence Director to the State Department. Will their be any mention in the national press, that by any objective legal standards, he is a terrorist and a war criminal? Is it even within the range of acceptable thought that such a thing is possible, that our leaders are terrorists and war criminals? Why is it so easy to "see" the war crimes, the crimes against humanity, and the terrorism of our enemies, but we can't seem to even acknowledge the possibility of those we commit, support, or fund, or those committed by our "leaders"?
In the meantime we have supported and committed massive terrorist acts against Cuba. We support and still harbor people who blew up Cuban civilian airliners; we have distributed biological agents in Cuba to destroy crops and live-stocks; we have invaded Cuba and threatened invasion several times; we have attempted to assassinate its leaders many times over. If the same acts were committed against the United States what would be considered the legitimate response by our leaders?
All of those who live in the U.S. and criticize human rights in Cuba are in the same moral and political situation as my hypothetical Roman. The inability to confront the intersection of morality with politics is the classic situation of the emergence of hypocrisy from ideological thinking. Human rights intellectuals in the U.S. who cannot even conceive that criticism of Cuba might actually perpetuate or even increase the atrocities committed by their own government in Cuba, and elsewhere, are simply playing games of hide and never seek with reality. Human rights intellectuals in the U.S. who don't even admit to themselves that their government is a major perpetrator of terrorism in the world, including terrorism in Cuba, are unable to understand that their first responsibility is to stop the terrorism that they help to perpetuate and that they fund. Unless we can understand our own responsibilities and for whom and for what we are responsible, it is no use taking on the useless and empty burden of criticizing some foreign government whose people we are attacking. It should be simple. But it is not.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
4 January 2007
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Jan. 4th, 2007 @ 11:38 am
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