a third possibility

I fired the brush pile by the creek
and leaping gargoyles of flame
fled over it, fed on it, roaring,
and made one flame that stood
tall in its own wind, snapping off
points of itself that raved and vanished.

The creek kept coming down, filling
above the rocks, folding
over them, its blank face dividing
in gargles and going on, mum
under the ice, for the day was cold,
the wind stinging as the flame stung.

Unable to live either life, I stood
between the two, and liked them both.
.
.
by Wendell Barry
from A Third Possibility
Oxford University Press, 1997

Doug Henwood responds to Paul Mason's piece in The Guardian about the end of capitalism, in the Left Business Observer:

Paul Mason has a breathless piece in The Guardian making grand New Economy claims that sound like recycled propaganda from the late-1990s—though he gives them a left spin: postmateriality is already liberating us. I wrote a book that was in large part about all that ideological froth, published in 2003, and so far I’ve been struck by the nonrevival of that discourse despite a new tech bubble. Uber and Snapchat don’t excite the same Utopian passions that the initial massification of the web did.

I’ll pass on refuting Mason’s article, because I already did that twelve years ago. But I do want to comment on one point that Mason makes—one that’s ubiquitous in a lot of economic commentary today: capitalists don’t need workers anymore. As he puts it:

Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.

I can’t make sense of the “currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences”—has capitalism ever skipped an innovation because of its social consequences?—but there’s no evidence that info tech is “hugely diminish[ing] the amount of work needed.” Sure, wages and benefits stink, but that’s about politics and class power, not because of the latest generation of Intel chips or something fresh out of the latest TechCrunch Disrupt.

Expressing this argument in some economically quantifiable way probably means something like “the relation between GDP growth and employment growth has broken down.” If that’s what proponents mean—the presentations are usually light on precision—then it’s just not true.

More here.

Dirk Laabs in The Guardian:

It was 25 years ago, during the summer of 1990, that Schäuble led the West German delegation negotiating the terms of the unification with formerly communist East Germany. A doctor of law, he was West Germany’s interior minister and one of Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s closest advisers, the go-to guy whenever things got tricky.

The situation in the former GDR was not too dissimilar from that in Greece when Syriza swept to power: East Germans had just held their first free elections in history, only months after the Berlin Wall fell, and some of the delegates from East Berlin dreamed of a new political system, a “third way” between the west’s market economy and the east’s socialist system – while also having no idea how to pay the bills anymore.

The West Germans, on the other side of the table, had the momentum, the money and a plan: everything the state of East Germany owned was to be absorbed by the West German system and then quickly sold to private investors to recoup some of the money East Germany would need in the coming years. In other words: Schäuble and his team wanted collateral.

At that time almost every former communist company, shop or petrol station was owned by the Treuhand, or trust agency – an institution originally thought up by a handful of East German dissidents to stop state-run firms from being sold to West German banks and companies by corrupt communist cadres. The Treuhand’s mission: to turn all the big conglomerates, companies and tiny shops into private firms, so they could be part of a market economy.

Schäuble and his team didn’t care that the dissidents had planned to hand out shares of companies to the East Germans, issued by the Treuhand – a concept that incidentally led to the rise of the oligarchs in Russia. But they liked the idea of a trust fund because it operated outside the government: while technically overseen by the finance ministry, it was publicly perceived as an independent agency. Even before Germany merged into a single state in October 1990, the Treuhand was firmly in West German hands.

More here.

Andrew Grant in Science News:

For nearly 140 years, scientists have tried to rule out the backward flow of time by way of nature’s preference for disorder. Left alone, nature transforms the neat into the messy, a one-way progression that many physicists have used to define time’s direction. But if nature prefers disorder now, it always has. The challenge is figuring out why the universe started out so orderly — thereby allowing disorder to grow and time to march forward — when the early universe should have been messy. Despite many proposals, physicists have not been able to agree on a satisfying explanation.

A new paper offers a solution. The secret ingredient, the authors say, is gravity. Using a simple simulation of gravitationally interacting particles, the researchers show that an orderly universe should always arise naturally at one point in time. From there, the universe branches in opposing temporal directions. Within each branch, time flows toward increasing disorder, essentially creating two futures that share one past. “It’s the only clear, simple idea that’s been put forward to explain the basis of the arrow of time,” says physicist Julian Barbour, a coauthor of the study published last October in Physical Review Letters.

More here.

Paul Mason in The Guardian:

Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which will break through, reshaping the economy around new values and behaviours. I call this postcapitalism.

As with the end of feudalism 500 years ago, capitalism’s replacement by postcapitalism will be accelerated by external shocks and shaped by the emergence of a new kind of human being. And it has started.

Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years. First, it has reduced the need for work, blurred the edges between work and free time and loosened the relationship between work and wages. The coming wave of automation, currently stalled because our social infrastructure cannot bear the consequences, will hugely diminish the amount of work needed – not just to subsist but to provide a decent life for all.

Second, information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last. By building business models and share valuations based on the capture and privatisation of all socially produced information, such firms are constructing a fragile corporate edifice at odds with the most basic need of humanity, which is to use ideas freely.

More here. [Thanks to Sahabzada A. Samad Khan.]

Murtaza Hussain in The Intercept:

In 1999, Wadie Said was finishing his graduate studies at Columbia Law School, unsure of the direction he wanted his career to take.

A year earlier, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by a little-known terrorist group called al Qaeda. The lawyer for Muhammad al-Owhali, accused of organizing the bombings, reached out to Palestinian-American academic Edward Said for help in communicating with his Arabic-speaking client, as well as in understanding the politics of the region. Said suggested that his son might provide assistance.

“Sure, I guess,” was Wadie’s somewhat nervous reply at the time.

The experience was formative, setting Wadie, now a law professor at the University of South Carolina, down a path of legal practice and activism in the field of post-9/11 terror cases.

“I really absorbed from my father the idea of standing up for people who were persecuted or otherwise down-and-out, and wanted to apply that lesson in a different way, hence my initial decision to become a public defender,” Said says in an interview. “I was fortunate enough to start my career working on a high-profile prosecution like that with political overtones, and I came to the belief that it is always important to try and get the client’s message across, especially given how the overwhelming official hostility towards anyone with the status of terrorism defendant can subvert the legal process.”

More here.

Hal Hlavinka at The Quarterly Conversation:

The art movement was one of the early twentieth century’s great revelations. In conditions of war and economic collapse, of revolution and social engineering, artists and writers increasingly banded together under common manifestos to promote an aesthetic agenda. The romantic image of the lone creator, progressing an artistic craft out of a singular style, gave way to the collective. Of course, more personalities also meant more confusion, especially where Tristan Tzara’s and Breton’s camps were concerned. As –ism piled upon –ism, it became increasingly difficult to keep everything straight: What are the rules? Is anyone in charge? Who’s a member? And are they sexually available? Indeed, there’s an aspect of the Rabelaisian carnival at the center of the early manifesto era; the exchange of ideas, urges, and bodies unifies the collective, making it whole and self-aware through pleasure, pain, and laughter. For Enrique Vila-Matas, somewhere in the tangled network of Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, and their attendant bodies is A Brief History of Portable Literature.

Throughout his work, Vila-Matas bends literature, and the literary persona, back onto itself. His essayistic tone, encyclopedic recall of authorial ephemera, and focus on literary failure and erasure (those writers of the “no”) put him in a curious camp of contemporary authors not just openly indebted to their modernist predecessors but overtly obsessed with them. From the turn of the century onward, Vila-Matas’s narrators (and, one might conjecture, the author himself) have fallen under the spell of what he terms “Montano’s Malady,” or “literature sickness.”

more here.

Rebecca Lemov in The Hedgehog Review:

The protagonist of William Gibson’s 2014 science-fiction novel The Peripheral, Flynne Fisher, works remotely in a way that lends a new and fuller sense to that phrase. The novel features a double future: One set of characters inhabits the near future, ten to fifteen years from the present, while another lives seventy years on, after a breakdown of the climate and multiple other systems that has apocalyptically altered human and technological conditions around the world. In that “further future,”1 only 20 percent of the Earth’s human population has survived. Each of these fortunate few is well off and able to live a life transformed by healing nanobots, somaticized e-mail (which delivers messages and calls to the roof of the user’s mouth), quantum computing, and clean energy. For their amusement and profit, certain “hobbyists” in this future have the Borgesian option of cultivating an alternative path in history—it’s called “opening up a stub”—and mining it for information as well as labor.

Flynne, the remote worker, lives on one of those paths. A young woman from the American Southeast, possibly Appalachia or the Ozarks, she favors cutoff jeans and resides in a trailer, eking out a living as a for-hire sub playing video games for wealthy aficionados. Recruited by a mysterious entity that is beta-testing drones that are doing “security” in a murky skyscraper in an unnamed city, she thinks at first that she has been taken on to play a kind of video game in simulated reality. As it turns out, she has been employed to work in the future as an “information flow”—low-wage work, though the pay translates to a very high level of remuneration in the place and time in which she lives. What is of particular interest is the fate of Flynne’s body. Before she goes to work she must tend to its basic needs (nutrition and elimination), because during her shift it will effectively be “vacant.” Lying on a bed with a special data-transmitting helmet attached to her head, she will be elsewhere, inhabiting an ambulatory robot carapace—a “peripheral”—built out of bio-flesh that can receive her consciousness.

More here.

Jim Holt in The New York Times:

This 17th-century English physician and philosopher, living in provincial isolation from literary London, managed to cultivate the most sonorous organ-voice in the history of English prose. At a time when the prevailing plain style was growing dull and insipid (John Locke is an example), it was Browne who showed the way to new possibilities of Ciceronian splendor. In doing so, he became a prolific contributor of novel words to the English language. Among his 784 credited neologisms are “electricity,”  “hallucination,”  “medical,”  “ferocious,”  “deductive” and “swaggy.” (Other coinages failed to take: like “retromingent,” for urinating backward.) Browne’s influence led to a revival of the mandarin tendency in 18th-­century prose, culminating in the (sometimes turgid) pomposities of Johnson and Gibbon. Among Browne’s subsequent admirers can be numbered Thoreau, Melville, ­Emily Dickinson, Borges, Sebald and Virginia Woolf, who saluted his “sublime genius” and called him “the first of the ­autobiographers.”

Are you feeling guilty yet for not having heard of Sir Thomas Browne? Or, if you have heard of him, for not spending more time savoring his greatest work, an essay on funerary rites alluringly titled “Urne-Buriall” — where, amid much verbiage that is (to my plain taste) cloyingly grandiloquent, lurk gorgeous phrases like “man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave”? You shouldn’t, really. You are hardly alone. Browne is a “forgotten” man — so concedes what must be his most obsessive contemporary champion, the English science writer Hugh Aldersey-Williams. “In Search of Sir Thomas Browne” is Aldersey-Williams’s attempt to do something about this sad state of affairs. The book does not merely seek to revive Browne as a pivotal figure in the history of English prose: a minor writer with a major style. Its author also wants to convince us that Browne, with his intellectual curiosity, his good-humored skepticism, his civility and spirit of tolerance, stands as a model for us today. From Browne’s example we can learn “how to achieve a reconciliation between science and religion” and “how to disabuse the credulous of their foolish beliefs.”

More here.

Dangerous Astronomy

I wanted to walk outside and praise the stars, But David, my baby son, coughed and coughed. His comfort was more important than the stars  So I comforted and kissed him in his dark Bedroom, but my comfort was not enough. His mother was more important than the stars  So he cried for her breast and milk. It’s hard For fathers to compete with mothers’ love. In the dark, mothers illuminate like the stars!  Dull and jealous, I was the smallest part Of the whole. I know this is stupid stuff But I felt less important than the farthest star  As my wife fed my son in the hungry dark. How can a father resent his son and his son’s love? Was my comfort more important than the stars?  A selfish father, I wanted to pull apart My comfortable wife and son. Forgive me, Rough God, because I walked outside and praised the stars, And thought I was more important than the stars.

.
by Sherman Alexie
from Face
Hanging Loose Press

Sanjay Reddy over at his website (via Alex Gourevitch):

The explanation of creditor extremism which seems to me most appealing from a structural and not merely conjunctural point of view is this:

An important consequence of the Eurozone has been to help to institute pressures to increase ‘competitiveness’ through real as opposed to nominal means. These include lowering wages and taxes (which in turn has meant lowering the size of the state, especially through diminishing welfare expenditures, which are much larger in Europe than in the US) and increasing productivity, not least through increasing ‘flexibility’ in the labour market and creating consequent labour disciplines. Germany is the country to most deliberately introduce such reforms, under the pressure of reunification, but many countries have in varying degrees done so. It is also almost the only country to successfully face Chinese and to a much lesser extent other emerging country competition, because of its particular manufacturing niches and engineering expertise. This competition has in recent years challenged the viability of traditional sectors of industrial production almost everywhere else in Europe.

In the absence of nominal devaluation, labor cost reducing and tax slashing real devaluation as well as productivity enhancement are the only available tools to address such competition, but the institutional, social and political barriers to implementing them in light of European public attitudes and historical legacies are profound. Theexternal deficits of the peripheral European countries are ultimately driven not merely by the euro-raising effect of German external surpluses but also by the import increasing and export-competing effect of exports from China (and to a lesser extent other countries). The open and hidden internal imbalances in the Eurozone are indirect manifestations of the larger problem, which has not been dealt with and would have had to be addressed in any realistic economic strategy.

More here.

James K. Galbraith in Harper's:

Six months ago one could hope that SYRIZA’s electoral victory would spark a larger discussion of austerity’s failure and inspire a continent-wide search for better solutions. But once it became clear that there was no support for this approach from Spain, Portugal, or Ireland; only polite sympathy from Italy and France; and implacable hostility from Germany and points north and east, the party’s goal narrowed. SYRIZA’s objective became carving out space for a policy change in Greece alone. Exit from the Euro was not an option, and the government would not bluff. SYRIZA’s only tool was an appeal to reason, to world opinion, and for help from outside. With these appeals, the Greeks argued forcefully and passionately for five months.

In this way, the leaders of the Greek government placed a moral burden on Europe. Theirs was a challenge based on the vision of “sustainable growth” and “social inclusion” that has been written into every European treaty from Rome to Maastricht—a challenge aimed at the soul of the European project, if it still had a soul. No one in the Greek government entertained illusions on that point; all realized that Greece might arrive at the end of June weakened, broke, and defenseless. But given the narrow margins for maneuver, which were restricted both by SYRIZA’s platform and the Greek people’s attachment to Europe, it was the only play they had.

European creditors responded with surprise, irritation, exasperation, obstinacy, and finally fury. At no time did the logic of the Greek argument—about the obvious failure, over the past five years, of austerity policies to produce the predicted levels of growth—make any dent. Europe did not care about Greece. After resigning as Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis described the negotiation process:

The complete lack of any democratic scruples on behalf of the supposed defenders of Europe’s democracy. The quite clear understanding on the other side that we are on the same page analytically … [And yet] to have very powerful figures look at you in the eye and say “You’re right in what you’re saying, but we’re going to crunch you anyway.”

What Europe’s “leaders” do care about is power. They posture for their own parliaments and domestic polities. There is an eastern bloc, led by Finland, which is right-wing and ultra hard line. There is a model-prisoner group—Spain, Ireland, and Portugal—which is faced with Podemos and Sinn Fein at home and cannot admit that austerity hasn’t worked. There is a soft pair, France and Italy, which would like to dampen the threats from Marine Le Pen and Beppe Grillo. And there is Germany, which, it is now clear, cannot accept debt relief inside the euro zone, because such relief would allow other countries in trouble to make similar demands.

More here.

Lament for the Makers
.

Not bird not badger not beaver not bee

Many creatures must
make, but only one must seek

within itself what to make

My father’s ring was a B with a dart
through it, in diamonds against polished black stone.

I have it. What parents leave you
is their lives.

Until my mother died she struggled to make
a house that she did not loathe; paintings; poems; me.

Many creatures must

make, but only one must seek
within itself what to make

Not bird not badger not beaver not bee

•

Teach me, masters who by making were
remade, your art.
.

by Frank Bidart
from Star Dust
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005

Daniel Luban in The Point:

Francis Fukuyama was 36 years old in 1989 when “The End of History?” made him a star. At the time, there was little in his biography to mark him as anything more than another ambitious young Cold War technocrat. He had been hired by the RAND Corporation directly out of graduate school at Harvard (where he wrote a dissertation on Soviet foreign policy under the famous political scientist Samuel Huntington) and, aside from two stints at the State Department, had remained at RAND ever since, producing geopolitical analyses whose readership did not extend beyond the national security bureaucracy.

But Fukuyama had always been philosophically curious—a bent nurtured by his undergraduate teacher, the Straussian guru Allan Bloom, and maintained throughout his time in the policy world—and the argument he made reflected that. Delivering the original lecture before a University of Chicago audience that included Bloom, he argued that the scientific revolution had unleashed unprecedented productive energies for satisfying human desire, energies that only capitalism could properly harness. On its own, this scientific-economic logic could lead “equally well to a bureaucratic-authoritarian future as to a liberal one,” as he put it in his book-length elaboration, The End of History and the Last Man (1992). But humans are more than just desiring creatures seeking material satisfaction; they are also valuing creatures seeking recognition as equals, and only liberal democracy could satisfy this drive for recognition. The demise of fascism and communism left no coherent ideological challenges to liberal capitalist democracy, which stood revealed as history’s endpoint.

More here.

Fisun Güner at The Arts Desk:

Light. Light banishes the shadows where monsters lurk and where ghosts rattle their chains. “Give me some light, away!” cries the usurping king inHamlet as his murderous deed is exposed by the trickery of art. What guilt plagues and seizes his conscience, and yet Claudius, conflicted, cannot pray. He must, therefore, remain a captive among the ghosts and the monsters where no light may fall.

What did light mean for Philip Guston? Not what it means for most painters, nor for those seeking the redemptive light. The naked light bulb that pops up in so many of his paintings is both the interrogator’s tool and the hangman’s noose. These are what that repeated motif reminds us of. And what a world it illuminates for the burdened artist confined to his studio/cell where he too is held captive by ghosts. Those dumb one-eyed potato-heads and hooded Ku Klux Klan figures are both self-portraits of sorts; tragicomic figures in a schematic universe filled with symbolic objects like any Renaissance painting.

more here.

Jessa Crispin at Boston Review:

The world is not a safe place. It harms us, jostles us, exposes us to burns and pricks. So we tell ourselves and each other stories to help us understand the what and the why. If we didn’t we would all be like Melzack’s dogs, unsure who is hurting us or what is to be done about it.

But it is easy to misdiagnose the source of the problem, and once you do, the proper treatment will also elude you. Universalizing our pain challenges the culture to protect us, but it diminishes our individual responsibility. These stories gain traction because they validate what we feel—vulnerable and tossed around—and give us simplistic reasons for why we feel this way. If we claim vulnerability is our natural state, there is nothing we need to change. The world needs to change for us.

Insisting we are distinct from men in our woundedness is an easy and soothing story. Men are the enemy who can redeem themselves by turning their nature to our benefit, by protecting us. But in the end we are estranged from our humanity. Here we are not participants in society; we are merely at the mercy of it.

more here.

Sadia Abbas in Open Democracy:

Both in and out of Greece, much has been made in recent weeks of the amateurishness of the current Greek government, of its brinksmanship, of its confrontational style, of its inability to understand rules, of it's squandering of trust. Let's grant all this for a moment. However, if we take this critique seriously, then EU officials look worse not better than before. They come across as petulant incompetents unable to deal with an unruly colleague (Yannis Varoufakis), annoyed at people who don't wear ties, intrusive in their insistence that Alexis Tsipras wear one, so unprofessional that they let the fate of nations hang in the balance, destroying societies and lives because they are caught up in a squabble with a few colleagues they don't like.

Moreover, the invocations of etiquette, codes, rules, and the repetition of cliches of fiscal rectitude and household thrift are part of the moral economy of a neoliberalism that manipulates people into thinking that nations can be run like households and life is a tea party, where all will be fine if one sticks out ones little finger while holding a teacup with delicate poise. One of neoliberalism's biggest successes has been to persuade people that if everyone just behaved with propriety and thrift, life would be better. If people have fallen for this story, it's because this gives them the illusion of agency in an environment where there is a premium on precisely that agency. Capitalism tells us that we are in control of our destinies and can invent and reinvent ourselves at will, making money into the bargain.

That this is not really borne out by current events is beside the point.

More here.