OLD NEWS

In his oft-quoted poem, To a Louse, Robert Burns offers the importunate plea: “O, wad some Power the giftie gie us/To see oursels as ithers see us.”  I find it especially difficult to keep firmly fixed in my mind the obvious truth that others do not know my writings quite so intimately as I know them myself.  If somewhere in the torrent of words I have poured onto the page in the last fifty-five years I have said something, no matter how obscure the publication, I imagine that everyone with the slightest interest in my opinions must be completely familiar with it, making it unnecessary for me to repeat myself.  The truth, alas, is otherwise.

The failure of the world to attend to my maunderings, comical as it is, has a more serious social correlate.  There are many truths, at one time well and widely known, that have now almost passed out of the collective mind, so that it is well worth the effort to repeat them, even though in doing so one is simply rehearsing old understandings.

This thought, perhaps appropriate to one in his autumnal if not indeed in his wintry years, occurs to me often as I read with dismay the ignorant and foolish things about socialism that appear in America’s public discourse, said even by those who genuinely ought to know better.  Recently, our loss of collective wisdom about the nature and meaning of socialism was highlighted in an exchange on this blog, and just two days ago, it was brought home to me forcefully by a moving, heartfelt, but deeply misleading Op Ed essay in the pages of the NY TIMES written by the great Czech film director Milos Forman.

The purpose of Forman’s essay was to defend Barack Obama against the bizarre charge, endlessly repeated by Republicans of all stripes, that he is a socialist.  Drawing on his horrendous experiences of the Soviet-imposed tyranny in his native land that wrapped itself in the honorific “socialist,” Forman assured his readers that nothing Obama has done or sought to do bears the slightest resemblance to the “socialism” under which he and his friends and associates suffered in Czechoslovakia. 

Forman was of course quite correct on both counts.  Obama is no socialist, however you interpret that term, and what Obama seeks for America bears no relation to what was done during the Soviet era in any part of the Eastern bloc.  It is also completely understandable that Forman should be forever averse to any regime or movement announcing itself as socialist.  Each of us is more indelibly formed by the experiences of his or her life than by a theoretical understanding of terms drawn from Political Economy. 

I am reminded of an email exchange I had with a young man in Czechoslovakia thirty years ago.  Some things I had written in In Defense of Anarchism spoke to him, prompting him to contact me.  When I told him that I was then engaged in a deep study of the thought of Karl Marx, he was appalled by the information.  To him, “Karl Marx” was a hashtag for “oppression, exploitation, and corruption,” and he could not imagine how the author of In Defense of Anarchism could find anything of value by following that link.

Nevertheless, there is an important body of social knowledge and insight that is lost to us by this corrupted use of a once quite well understood term, and I believe that we will be better positioned to move beyond our present unsatisfactory stage of socio-economic development if we recapture that knowledge and insight and use it to form a critique of contemporary America.  What I will say in the next paragraphs is so far from originality as to deserve the epithet “banal,” save that even such intelligent and knowledgeable writers as Paul Krugman seem completely to have forgotten it.

Markets, like the poor, have always been with us, at least for the past five or six thousand years, and perhaps for much longer than that.  Quite ancient writings from the Middle East give evidence of a sophisticated system of exchange involving some form of money and accounting systems to keep track of it.  The existence of markets goes hand in hand with a division of labor, for as soon as systematic agriculture and the domestic of animals begins [roughly ten thousand years ago, judging from the archeological evidence], the need arises for some regular exchange between the growers of crops and the tenders of flocks or herds, not to speak of those whose specialized activity produces clothing, shelter, hunting implements, and the weapons of war.

The eighteenth and nineteenth century laisser-faire theorists, whose unacknowledged social role was to justify the devastating impact of the new economic order on English society, portrayed capitalism as simply rational economic activity cleansed of the stultifying superstitious constraints of feudalism.  Buying and selling in the market, the production of commodities for exchange rather than for use, and the startling accumulations of great wealth that resulted, were presented as nothing more than simple rationality manifesting itself in society.  Previous socio-economic forms – slavery, imperial appropriation, and feudalism – were characterized as different ways in which irrationality infected the economic activities of society.  Once these corruptions were cleared away, leaving human reason to express itself fully, the natural result was capitalism.  The resulting social dislocations – peasants displaced by the enclosure of lands, slums peopled by unemployed proletarians, cycles of economic boom and bust – were justified as inevitable and quite temporary blemishes that would disappear once the full rationality of laisser-faire capitalism conquered the last redoubts of feudal superstition and privilege.

The early critics of this voracious new social and economic order – the authors whom Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels dismissed disdainfully as “utopian socialists” – saw clearly the evil consequences of the new capitalism, and were endlessly creative in imaging alternative ways of organizing the economic activities of a society.  But they lacked any coherent theoretical response to the claim of the laisser-faire liberals that capitalism is simply human rationality writ large.

It was left to Karl Marx to develop just such a theoretical response.  Marx understood that capitalism is no more, and no less, than one stage in a series of developmental economic stages that are distinguished from one another not by their degree of rationality, but by the identity of the social class that controls the means of production and the socio-economic forms that result from that control.  The defining characteristic of capitalism is not rationality freed of the constraints of superstition, but rather a monopolization of the means of production by one class, which then forces the rest of society to convert its capacity for creative productive labor into a commodity sold to the owners of the means of production, for whom all economic activity is merely the production of commodities sold in the market for a profit.

Marx quite well understood the explosive force of this new way of organizing human productive activities.  He himself described capitalism as the most revolutionary force yet to appear on the historical scene, and he was right in that assessment.  Capitalism vastly expanded society’s ability to produce goods and services, while however immiserating those whose labor was the source of this cornucopia of commodities.

With profound insight, Marx argued that the transition to a new and more humane organization of society’s productive activities could take place only when capitalism had advanced so far in its rationalization of production that production for human use could effectively and efficiently replace production for the private profit of the owners or controllers of the means of production.   For this reason, Marx expected the push for socialism to come in the most advanced sectors of the most fully developed capitalist economies.  Instead, a regime claiming to take its inspiration from Marx and calling itself “socialist” appeared in feudal Russia, a backwater of the capitalist world in which scarcely any of the elements of even the first stages of capitalism had matured.  The result, not at all surprisingly [and fully anticipated by some of the early Bolsheviks], was a brutal, inefficient command economy that bore no discernible relation to what Marx conceived socialism to be.

However, as someone might have said but I think did not, the victorious get to write the dictionaries, and so “socialism” came to mean, in the twentieth century, whatever Stalin and his henchmen were up to.  The success of a peasant revolution in China which also wrapped itself in the mantle of Marx pretty much sealed the fate of the word.  The collapse of the Soviet empire then permitted the beneficiaries and celebrators of advanced post-industrial and financial capitalism to proclaim the world historical victory of capitalism over socialism.  Socialism, it was said, was dead, save for the effete and incomprehensible dithering of some European folks who, since they spoke foreign languages, could be conveniently ignored. 

The effect of this series of historical conjunctures was to take us all back to the period of the early nineteenth century, when capitalism was equated with rationality simpliciter.  And by a rather devious, not to say diabolical, maneuver, capitalism was equated with the rule of markets.  To criticize capitalism was thus to suggest that markets were unnecessary.

But all of this is arrant and ignorant nonsense.  Marx’s critique of capitalism had nothing whatsoever to do with the desirability of markets for final goods, which is to say for the goods and services consumed by the members of society.  His critique concerned the private ownership and control of social means of production – factories, farms, fisheries, forests, and their accumulated representations, financial capital.  The capital that gives Capitalism its name is the product of the collective productive efforts of the men and women who do the work in society, and it ought to be controlled by them and put to productive uses that serve their needs and desires.

Those who now control capital will resist to the dying breath of the hired thugs any attempt to deprive them of their control.  For a number of reasons that I have explored in my essay, “The Future of Socialism,” it is quite unclear whether that control can ever be wrested from the hands.  [There I go again, imagining that everyone is familiar with my writings. Oh well.]

But what happened in Eastern Europe or Mainland China in the twentieth century was not socialism.  And markets are not, and have never been, the differentia specifica of capitalism.

PROGRESS REPORT

Ca marche, as they say over here.  Ten committed faculty at Bennett College have volunteered to participate in the first year of our new program.  Letters have gone out to sixty in-coming first year students inviting them to enter the program.  Six of the ten faculty members have already responded to my email letter of greeting, and when I return to Chapel Hill in a week, I shall set up a meeting with as many of them as are available during this vacation period.  Dania Francis, the Duke University advanced doctoral student, has almost completed a draft of the Research Protocol that we shall submit to the Spencer Foundation for approval.  Not too bad for a slow summer period when it is so difficult to get anything done in the Academy.

These are early days, of course, but thus far, we seem to be on schedule.

URBAN MYSTERY

Our tiny apartment here in Paris sits midway down the one-block street called rue Maître Albert [named after Albertus Magnus, the teacher of Thomas Aquinas], between Place Maubert and Quai de la Tournelle in the 5^th arrondissement.  Place Maubert is a lovely space bisected east to west by Boulevard St. Germain and crisscrossed by no fewer than seven other streets.  In the middle of the Place is a very small triangular park, with a little patch of grass and a fountain.  On the east side of the park sits our café, Le Metro [so named because next to it is the Maubert-Mutualité Metro station on the Number 10 line.]  Whenever we are here, Susie and I spend a good deal of time sitting in Le Metro, drinking a kir or a café noisette and a déca allongé, and watching the world go by.

On one of the other sides of the little park are several benches, and for years now, we have watched a little old oriental lady sitting on one of the benches, hands crossed primly in her lap, sensible hat atop her head.  She has been as much a fixture as the fountain.  On rare occasions, she tosses some crusts of bread onto the grass for the pigeons, but for the most part she just sits.  She is the first person we look for when we return to Paris.

At the end of rue Maître Albert, just where it empties into the Place, is an oriental grocery shop offering an exotic assortment of fresh and dried or packaged foods, one of which – cinq épices -- is an essential ingredient in my hazelnut encrusted rabbit loins dish.  It is, or has been, called Thanh Binh, and since this is actually the heart of the Vietnamese district in Paris, it is one of a great many Vietnamese shops and restaurants in a five block radius of our apartment.  Fifty yards away, facing Thanh Binh on rue Lagrange, is another Vietnamese grocery store, Thanh Binh Jeune [i.e., Thanh Binh Junior].  Pretty clearly, when Thanh Binh’s son grew up, the old man set him up in his own shop.  Susie and I conceived the fantasy that the little old lady on the bench is Thanh Binh’s mother [and Thanh Binh Jeune’s grandmother], and was just keeping an eye on things.

The last time we were here, Thanh Binh was closed for major renovations.  Peering inside, we could see that all the shelves and display racks had been removed, new flooring was being put in, and a staircase was being constructed from the interior of the shop to the floor above.  Now, six months later, we have returned, and Thanh Binh is no more.  A new shop has opened, announcing itself as carrying Japanese and Oriental delicacies. 

Now comes the urban mystery.  The little old oriental lady is gone.  No longer does she sit on her park bench, watching Thanh Binh’s shop.  Her place has been taken by a different little old oriental lady, somewhat fuller of figure and rounder of face, but wearing very much the same sensible hat.

Can it be that the property that changed hands included sitting rights on that park bench, so that Thanh Binh’s mother was forced to vacate, making place for the mother of the new shopkeeper?  Alas, the rules of urban politesse, combined with complex language barriers, keep us from finding out.

SECOND THOUGHTS

I was in London in 1964 when the Beatles' first movie, A Hard Day's Night, was released.  I actually saw it in a theater in Trafalger Square -- pretty cool.  I loved it [indeed, I even loved the music, believe it or not].  My very favorite line in the movie is delivered by the harrassed TV producer tasked with putting on the show that is the frame for the movie.  He grows increasingly desperate as showtime approaches and the gallivanting lads have not returned to the studio. Finally, in exasperation, he cries, "If they do not show up in ten mintes, I am going to be doing "The News in Welsh."

I thought of that last evening as Susie and I idly surfed our now functional TV set, checking to see which stations we can actually get.  I am afraid I was unfairly negative when I wrote, on this blog, that there is nothing to watch.  In fact, we can get the news in French, the news in English, the business news in English, more business news in English, the news in Arabic, the news in Japanese, the news in Russian, the news in several other Slavic languages that I was unable to disambiguate, and fifteen regional news stations from every corner of France.

On one of the English language news stations [SkyNews?], I caught an interview with a distressed young member of la jeunesse d'orees nouvelles" -- a French version of a Wall Street wunderkind -- who was reacting to the announcement that the new socialist government plans to impose a tax of 75% on annual incomes above one million Euros.  "Seventy-five percent on over a million Euros," he said in manifest anguish, "what is the point of working hard?"

I wanted to put my fist through the screen on the off chance that it would connect with his pretty face.  "Right, you spoiled bastard," I screamed, "why don't you knock off after you have made a million and let someone else take over the hard work of screwing up the economy?"  I suspect he could not hear me.

SOCIALISM, CAPITALISM, AND YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD CABLE COMPANY

Since my postings about my struggles with FranceTelecom were intended as humorous [however far they may have fallen short of that mark], I do not want to go too deeply into the question of consumer satisfaction in a socialist state.  That would be a bit like mounting a full-scale Foucault/Barthes/Derrida analysis of a Groucho Marx routine [something, I am sad to say, that has on occasion been produced by otherwise unoccupied cultural critics.]  But on a lazy 4th of July morning, after an invigorating six kilometer walk at six a.m. through the streets of Paris, it might not be over the top to say just a few words about the comments provoked by my feeble attempts at humor.

First of all, my old friend Jim Smethurst is of course right about France and FranceTelecom.  I cannot speak authoritatively about Verizon, but I do have a good deal of experience with Time Warner Cable, and save for the fact that I am fluent in English, there is not much to choose between the two experiences.  Periodically my phone, internet, and TV service back home goes all weird, and the most helpful advice I get when I call the [to be sure toll free] tech assistance number is to unplug everything, wait two minutes, and plug it all in again.  This, I might say, is the exact same advice I received here in Paris, thus exemplifying the globalization of consumer dissatisfaction.

But seriously, folks:  Socialism has virtually nothing to do with retail merchandising and consumer satisfaction or dissatisfaction.  It has everything to do with collective control of the means of production, and the guiding of investment and social savings decisions by considerations of human need rather than private profitablity.  In the United States today, tens of millions of men, women, and children struggle in poverty while high-end gated communities sprout like toxic muchrooms.  That is a malapportionment of social resources that results from the capitalist organization of the means of production.

Some state run  bureaucratic operations run with astonishing efficiency in the complete absence of market regulation or the discipline of competition.  Two striking examples are Medicare and the United States Army, both of which I have experienced personally.  Some do rather less well.  The Treansportation Security Administration comes to mind [the folks who cheerfully pat you down and feel you up on your way to an airplane.]

In a socialist society, there is plenty of room for your neighborhood grocery store, and also for Steve Jobs and Bill Gates [both of whom, so far as I am concerned, deserve to be very rich just as much as do LeBron James or Lady Gaga.]

Well, I am perilously close to attempting a literary critical analysis of a Groucho Marx routine, so I shall knock it off and have breakfast.

SUCCESS HAS CROWNED MY EFFORTS!!

Faithful readers of this blog will know that I have been locked in a death struggle with FranceTelecom, my telephone/internet/television provider, in an effort to actually get something on my TV set beside a message that says, in French, "Welcome to Orange [FranceTelecom's new name for itself], Please be patient for several moments."

I have made five trips to the Orange "boutique" on Boulevard St. Michel, forming a strong personal bond with Jean-Francois Bucci, the young English speaking salesman.  I have swapped out my old "decodeur" for a new one, and swapped that one out for another new one.  I have unplugged the system and replugged it, I have ascertained the correct way to insert my personal card in the decoder box [a card which has, from an American's point of view, the rather unfortunate name "maligne TV," which in French means "my TV line" but in English sounds suspiciously like "malign TV," which fits perfectly my experience.]  I have been told, variously, that I need a new decoder box [done, twice], that FranceTelecom is doing work on the lines and will be done on July 9th [apparently a total fabrication invented by the telephone technician I reached on the "English" phone line], and that the computer thinks I have a high definition TV set, which I do not have, and so is sending the wrong signal to me.

Today, one week after swearing a blood oath not to relent until I get something, anything, on my TV set besides that irritating message, I unpacked the new decoder box, installed it, waited while it booted itself up twice, entered my ten digit client number and the last four digits of my nine digit account number, and ---  IT WORKS.  I have triumphed over the most intransigent redoubt of French bureaucratic incompetence.  I am exultant, proud, humble, grateful, relieved, exalted.

There remains only one very small problem.  With one hundred sixty-two channels at my disposal, there is not a single one worth watching.  Oh well.  Nothing is perfect.

A SUNDAY OUTING

Yesterday, the sun was shining, the breeze was warm, the streets were almost deserted on a Sunday morning, and so it seemed a good time for us to take our traditional Segway outing to the Jardin des Plantes, at the eastern edge of the 5^th arrondissement.  For those of you who are not acquainted with this bit of technological wizardry, a Segway is a two-wheeled individual people mover powered by a battery and stabilized by an ingenious system of gyroscopes in the platform on which one stands.  To move forward, one presses down with the toes, and the Segway, sensing the pressure, rolls forward.  Pressure with the heels slows it to a stop; more pressure makes it roll backwards.  Rotating the left grip turns the Segway on a dime left or right.  Susie suffers from Multiple Sclerosis, making walking increasingly difficult for her, but standing on the Segway, she floats along the sidewalk as though on a magic carpet.  When we take strolls around our quartier, I walk very slowly, holding her hand to help steady her.  When she rides the Segway, however, the slightest pressure from her toes has her moving forward at five or six miles an hour, so that I must trot alongside to keep up.

Our route takes down rue Maitre Albert and along the quais, past Rotisserie du Beaujolais, one of our favorite restaurants, then past the Institut du Monde Arabe and a branch of the Universite de Paris, until we come to the Jardin.  Since our Segway is classified as a bicycle, rather than as a wheelchair, say, we cannot bring it into the Jardin, so we chain it to the iron fence that fronts the entrance and proceed from there on foot.

The Jardin is a magnificently laid out botanical garden next to Paris’ zoo.  In addition to the formal gardens, it features a museum of evolutionary paleontology and of course a restaurant – La Baleine [the whale] -- which we have never actually tried.  I am a total naïf when it comes to plants.  I can spot a rose, a pansy, and maybe a Bird of Paradise [because of my trips to South Africa, where it flourishes], but Susie was trained as a botanist and has been a lifelong gardener, so for her a trip to a botanical garden is a coming home.  Like all of us who have reached our late seventies, she suffers the occasional “senior moment,” that distressing condition in which a word or name one has known all one’s life just will not come when called.  Rather charmingly, this means that she sometimes forgets the common name of a plant or flower, while yet being perfectly able to recall the Latin name conferred on it by Linneaus and his successors.

The Jardin has undergone something of a reorganization, a fact that we learned by stopping to read the helpful little signs and explanatory placards scattered throughout the gardens.  The enormously long rectangular central portion of the gardens is laid out so that as one progresses from start to finish, one is actually moving up the phylogenetic tree, from the earliest and simplest plants to more complex flowering plants and trees.  Like any total amateur, my eye was caught by the biggest and showiest plants, but Susie would pause at a little growth that seemed to me to have no redeeming value, pointing out its distinctive features, whether it was about to bloom, and what its relationship was to something I might actually recognize.

Meanwhile, an endless stream of joggers of all ages and sexes and stages of physical fitness trotted by on the gravel pathways that run between alleys of Sycamores around the perimeter of the Jardin.