Left Behind: Eternal Forces

Teens can get their kill on in a Christian way. Everyone wins except Satan! Unless you play as the Satanic forces. Slight bug there…

More Seriously, Zeitlin’s actual point in the above-linked commentary was that there is a [...]]]> There’s an easy solution to the controversy over evangelical churches hosting Halo Nights:

Left Behind: Eternal Forces

Teens can get their kill on in a Christian way. Everyone wins except Satan! Unless you play as the Satanic forces. Slight bug there…

More Seriously, Zeitlin’s actual point in the above-linked commentary was that there is a dearth of liberal community and few prospects for its revival. To quote:

Liberals, because of their disavowal of transcendence and pursuance of essentially rational, veil of ignorance defined politics and ideas, do not have a coherent core to build any of these social capital maximizing institutions around. Jonathan Haidt’s identification of liberals as those who value maximizing reciprocity and minimizing harm in their moral calculus — and do not consider purity, in group identification or hierarchy — gets at the core at why liberals are having difficulty building or maintaining any institutions comparable to the megachurch.

All of this to say: “liberal” is not a real term. In the electoral realm, we’re united in our desire to win against conservatives, but beyond that, want vastly different things out of government and economy. There’s not an obvious reason we should all be friends outside of campaigns. This isn’t to say that conservatives have ideological unity, but they seem to have a few major, identifiable divisions (christian vs. fiscal vs. hawk) where liberals have many, less individually significant schisms. In fact, if we could all agree on even something as vague as the ‘veil of ignorance’ as a decision-making process, that would be a big step forward.

Then, Zeitlin looks back to the golden days of the CIO as a time when these disadvantages were overcome, and widespread liberal community successfully formed.  However, this strikes me as wrong.  The 30s labor did not somehow overcome a set of community-formng disadvantages inherent to liberals — they simply didn’t have those disadvantages.  Instead they benefited from a shared, transcendent ideology: socialism.

To be sure there were divisions, but the non-professional unions were a bunch of radicals who had much more in common that current “liberals.”  That’s why when the Taft-Hartley act required (among other things) union leaders to sign statements that they were not “communists,” the CIO had to purge many members (to TNR cheers.  They’ve always been tools.)

So then, the question that community-lovers need to ask is:”How do we arrive at shared transcendent ideology?”

Union are one answer, though Zeitlin discounts them, saying: “as Andy Stern and his service workers are the most important union in the country, and since service workers are a more transitory and diverse workforce than the industrial workers of generations past, the labor movement will not be the locus of liberal community.”  This does not follow.  If the most important union has achieved success by organizing workers who are, because of the nature of their work, especially difficult to organize, that would seem to point to the great potential for a resurgent labor movement if other unions, who operate in industries with less structural disadvantages to organizing, copied Stern’s methods.

See, this is an important point that may not be obvious.  The success of SEIU and, to varying degrees, the other CTW unions has to do with how they organize.  They conduct strategic campaigns, targeting companies in markets they want to move into or who threaten the existence of workplaces they’ve already organized, rather than going wherever worker outrage is highest.  The normal union ratio of service reps to organizers is 3:1.  SEIU & co. reverse this, recognizing the necessity of growth in order to succeed against the ever-expanding companies they target.  They pioneered card-check as an organizing strategy and partner with (or create) community groups to pressure targeted companies on other social justice issues.  None of these tactics are somehow uniquely applicable to the service industries.  When (if?) these tactics are widely adopted within the labor movement, we’ll have a much better labor movement.

So even if service workers’ unions aren’t ripe sources of liberal community, it’s entirely possible to export SEIU tactics to unions where revived unionism would create community.  However, I disagree with the premise; SEIU and HERE have created community, it’s just not in places Zeitlin or I would tend to see it — unions don’t have Halo nights for the kids of their white suburban members, or Megachurch-like weekly meetings.   My anecdotal experience is that they do lead to lets of small gatherings and friendships, and the union house is still a place one can go and hang out, but that’s different from saying the union is a relevant community institution in latino and black urban populations.

Regardless, union relevance as a community would seem to be entirely proportional to union density.  Right now, one person in my friend-group is part of a union.  So it doesn’t seem relevant.  But if we all were housekeepers in a Santa Monica hotel, HERE would be an important part of our community infrastructure.

Which is to say, more and better unions is still a viable path to community.

A voice crying in the postmodern wilderness amidst the cacophony of bells, buzzers, whistles, flashing lights, flash videos, animated images, billboards, pop-up ads, [...]]]> is my newest blog find, discovered amidst the mixed bag that is the resistance tag at Technorati.  First, it too links to the ParEcon page.  Second, here’s an excerpt from its about page:

A voice crying in the postmodern wilderness amidst the cacophony of bells, buzzers, whistles, flashing lights, flash videos, animated images, billboards, pop-up ads, talk shows, talking heads, information vendors, disinformation, misinformed ne’er-do-wells, in the midst of all the so-called diversity, all corralled by the oneness of the global market;

whose sacred relics have been subordinated to our present-day capitalistic iconography;

whose hallowed symbols have been relegated to fascist propaganda;

in which the Imago Dei has been subjected to narcissistic iconoclasm:

Very poetic.  For all your pomo-christian-anarchist blogging needs, go check em out.

Given that, surely no one would try to defend the regime…but wait here’s John O’Sullivan making an ass of himself in the Chicago Sun-Times back [...]]]> Pinochet was bad. Really, really bad. To recap:

• Minimum number of executions: 3,000
• Number of people imprisoned for their political beliefs: 27,000
• Number of elected governments overthrown: 1
• Years without democratic elections: 17

Given that, surely no one would try to defend the regime…but wait here’s John O’Sullivan making an ass of himself in the Chicago Sun-Times back in 2000. I know I’m borrowing trouble from way back, but this article is ridiculous. O’Sullivan’s main points?

• The left are evil hypocrites who will send Elian back to Cuba when they would never have sent a child to Pinochet’s Chile. Huh? Are you really criticizing the left for being Castro-apologists in a Pinochet-apologist article?

• 3,000 murders isn’t really that many. Besides the Black Book told me that evil leftists in other countries killed more. What? Two murders make a right? Besides, much of the Black Book of Communism was based on the Nobel Prize winning work of Economist Amartya Sen who compared deaths during the China’s Great Leap Forward to deaths in India do to lack of health care (as both represent structural problems of the countries economic model. Short story: communism was less deadly.

• If Pinochet hadn’t had a coup those evil commies would have. Even though said commies had already been elected to power?

I can’t believe that even simple statement like “evil dictators are bad” provoke argument. Right-winger hatred for the communist strawman surpasses all logic.

…my preference would be the version that doesn’t require murdering the ruling class and anyone else who gets in our way. At least we could fail humanely.

My alternative would be capitalism with limits — allow people to seek profits, but under serious guidelines and with tremendous, progressive taxation.  A hybrid of [...]]]> Mike Meginnis cracks me up:

…my preference would be the version that doesn’t require murdering the ruling class and anyone else who gets in our way. At least we could fail humanely.

My alternative would be capitalism with limits — allow people to seek profits, but under serious guidelines and with tremendous, progressive taxation.  A hybrid of Socialism and Capitalism — much like the one under which we already live, but tilted considerably away from facile Adam Smith-isms.

Mostly I think its funny that discussions of economic change require disclaimers that we don’t mean killin’ folk.  Such is the extent that non-capitalists have been smeared.  But I also have Serious Thought on economic systems:

A lot of wonderful writings on new economic systems can be found here.  There are hundreds of different proposals, of course, but the two big schools of thought are Participatory Economics and market socialism, compared well here.  To summarize:

The basic model of market socialism is that enterprises are cooperatives owned by their workers, who hire management and govern their business.  These coop businesses compete with each other in normal markets for goods and services.  The government (often in a very decentralized form) invests and provides venture capital to firms as well as performing its normal welfare state roles.  Many have proposed industry-specific guilds to set product standards and mitigate excessive competition among businesses.

ParEcon takes the market socialism devices and adds a Participatory Planning process to replace traditional markets.  Everyone is members of a consumer council (in addition to the worker council at their workplace).  These worker and consumer councils bid on the price and quantity of goods to be produced in an iterative process to arrive at an ideal production amount, eliminating overproduction, and various other market inefficiencies.  The process isn’t very complicated, but Albert and Hahnel (the creators) explain it better than I can here.

Generally, I think our reformist path to utopia starts with the kindler, gentler capitalism (more unions, higher wages, less hours, more workplace safety laws, etc.).  Then certain policies can transition us to market socialism (incentives/mandates for worker cooperatives, establishing state investment funds, progressively outlawing forms of corporate investment and ownership).  If markets are still a problem at that point, we can try to pursue participatory planning.  I doubt I’ll live to see the market socialist vs. ParEcon debate become relevant, so I don’t worry about it too much.

The important thing to note is that even a change of economic systems can happen via small, evolutionary changes.  No punctuated equilibrium necessary; no mass die-offs required.

One criticism though (and I only point [...]]]> Architecture + Morality has a good post from a bit back titled: The Panopticon of Celebrity: The Image of the City in the Age of Luxury Condominium Towers. Very impressive title, as it references both Bentham/Foucault and Kevin Lynch, all of whom I don’t fully understand; well played.

One criticism though (and I only point out because it’s such a common occurrence, I don’t mean to literally go after Corbu here). Poster Corbusier says:

It is ironic that Foucault wrote about the Panopticon as a way of defending the rights of the imprisoned and the insane but was personally in favor of a political system (socialist tyranny) that used it with brutal efficiency.

Now, I say this as a card-carrying anarcho-syndicalist (if you count lapsed IWW membership), who prefers Bakunin, and is continually annoyed at the self-described Marxists who participate in leftist movement politics:

        Don’t throw throw the Marxist baby out with the Stalinist bathwater.

Marx has much to stay about conditions of inequality under capitalism (which he talks about much more than communism) and has been enormously influential in all the social sciences. Surplus value, alienation are immensely useful concepts even if you’re not an adherent. And I’d be surprised if every academic Marxist was a closet totalitarian, and you smear a lot of people when you imply that is the case.

This smear is a really common one, and part of the classic right-wing equality: Democrats = Leftists = Marxists = Despots.  This narrative is repeatedly used to stymie reforms, even ones so mild as minimum wage increases.  Don’t participate in the destructive meme.