The Serpent's Wisdom

Wisconsin Unions Call For General Strike

I didn't think I'd actually see this happen in the U.S. in my lifetime. And of course it hasn't happened yet, it's simply being threatened, but it is a very potent threat with a storied history.

To explain what that means, let's start with Economics 101 and the idea of the free market. Specifically, the free labor market. The first principle of someone with a trade skill who wants to earn what she's worth is, don't work for less than you're worth. This principle crashes against reality in two ways. Problem one: there's probably only one employer in your town. But even where that isn't true you run into problem two: there's usually someone else with your same skills who has a child to feed and who will take the salary you rejected as too little. So, chances are, if you try to hold out for what you're worth, your child will be the one that starves.

So, there isn't really a free labor market -- unless everyone in your town who has the same skill gets together and all refuse to work for less than you're all worth. This requires open collaboration and is known as "collective bargaining."

Collective bargaining has a storied history because once upon a time it was illegal. And actually in many places in the U.S. it's still illegal. This is interestingly dissonant with the idea that in the U.S. we have the freedom to speak our ideas and to peaceably assemble. When it comes to peaceably assembling with your trade peers and freely sharing ideas (such as everyone there making what they're worth), many Americans do not actually have that right.

Why should it be illegal? Because of the cynic's version of the golden rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules." If you're a capitalist, whatever difference there is between the wage you pay a worker and the marginal revenue product of their labor is money in your pocket. (Economic theory tells us that paying a worker less than the MRP of their labor is not efficient, but you don't need a theory to tell you this is wrong, just look at the ever-growing income disparity in the U.S.) Any law that makes collective bargaining illegal benefits the rich at the direct expense of everyone else.

During the Great Depression, the economic downturn was used as an excuse to cut wages and demand concessions. According to the laws in force at the time, the workers didn't really have any recourse. When they got together to discuss what was happening to them, their meetings or strikes were busted by the police, or private goons known as "Pinkertons," or sometimes the National Guard. What happened then was sometimes a massacre, sometimes a bona-fide battle.

In 1935 President Franklin Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act. It wasn't perfect, but it did end the bloodshed.

A lot of the violence occurred in the 'rust belt': Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York. People there literally died for the right of collective bargaining. Some of the protesters in Wisconsin today may even be descendants of people roughed up or killed in attacks on picket lines. And Governor Walker -- who, after less than two months in office may soon be facing a general strike, could easily earn the title for most divisive politician in America today -- is the spiritual descendant of the strikebusters.

We are witnessing the emergence of a South American superpower. There's barely any mention of it in the U.S. media of course, but the governments of several South American nations just recently formed the Bank of the South, a leftist-Socialist answer to the neo-colonialist IMF and World Bank, and are talking about creating a unified South American currency.

A conservative beat a socialist in the election in France, and many are using this as an opportunity to declare socialism dead in Europe.

The reality is much more complex than that. The last hurrah of state socialism notwithstanding, what is actually happening is a revolution within the revolution, which is precisely as it needs to be.

It's fair to say that a century of experiments have demonstrated that top-down, state-imposed socialism doesn't work. Economies and societies are too complex to be run from the top. Bureaucracies are too slow, too entrenched, to react to changing conditions. And we have seen, to our great disappointment, that there is no edifice we can establish as one generation's solution that cannot be undermined by unscrupulous cronyism and mutate into the next generation's problem.

But, at the heart of the problem is this: it is just not feasible in the long run to achieve the central goal of socialism within the state aparatus. There are some things, like accountability for wrongdoers, which will probably always require government. But the heart of socialism -- unraveling the web of control so we can be free -- is only hindered thereby.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, writing in the middle and late nineteenth century, envisioned the global scheme of exploitation inevitably hitting a kind of rock bottom, causing ire among the working class to conflate to the point of violent revolution. They could not have foreseen the effects of technology between then and now; the effectiveness of advertising and television in numbing people to the inhumanly cannibalistic nature of the global economy -- nor could they have foreseen the widespread consciousness-raising potential of the internet.

They also imagined that the state could be transformed into an instrument for carrying out the will of the people. They were no doubt influenced by the grandiosity of American and French Revolutionary language -- the proclamation of "we the people" as the granter of governmental authority "by consent of the governed" (implying that consent can be withdrawn) instead of brute force and coersion and fear. That's a wonderful theory but it never seems to work out in reality.

At the other end of it, it is not enough to brew up a new critical rhetoric, bash a wine bottle on the bow and send it off into the world. Time has demonstrated that there is no rhetoric which cannot be misappropriated. Revolutions of this sort really only have to be waited out. A while back i proposed the (admittedly not very catchy) term "hypostatic reverie" to refer to the conceptual apathy by which people, over generational time scales, forget the 'revolutionary' character of new institutions and ideologies, and accept them as part of the landscape. And with this apathy comes the opportunity for misappropriation.

In terms of class struggles, it's been a very educational 140 years. We've learned, foremost, that we can't take the easy way out when unraveling the control paradigm. There is no single route to undoing the ideological and institutional hold of sexism, classism, and racism on society. It can't be imposed from the top; it can't be achieved in an adversarial-style uprising. If it were that easy, it could have been accomplished by now. The control paradigm operates on every level; it is embedded in our brains, implanted during childhood and, figuratively if not literally, beaten into us by parents, peers, and adults in authority.

Views become entrenched, even within the revolution; and "the revolution" has become such a fixture that it now is itself an edifice against which people of conscience must struggle. "The revolution" has been misappropriated so that it now is just another cog in the great machine of violence that chews people up. It is only with hindsight that we can comprehend that the monster often takes the guise of two factions, espousing different ideology, who grind away at each other, with children and women in the crossfire paying the highest price.

The Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle reflects this shift in awareness -- acknowledgment of the need for those with socialist consciousness to greatly re-think the unraveling of control and domination.

The revolution has been changing. It has taken the form of an emphasis on individual efficacy, a fondness for observing with Gandhi that we should "be the change," to recognize one's own place in the pyramid of control and understand that actions carry repercussions.

For example, once you become aware of "fair trade" products, you are directly confronted with the reality of exploitation overseas. You are also confronted with the understanding that if you continue to buy products you can no longer pretend you don't know were made in sweatshops or by slaves, that no matter what political positions you espouse you are a cog in the machine.

It may be, because of limited income or family size, that you have no choice but to continue to buy the cheaper product -- which in itself bears interesting insights about the way the game works, the way we are all swept along with the tide and, scrabbling for our own individual survival, rarely take the time and energy to see the greater pattern.

That fair trade products cost more reflects to a degree the economies of scale, but also the reality that what makes many products affordable is wage exploitation, low labor and safety standards, and even slavery. The difference represents the degree to which it is profitable to have a global empire which does not care about oppression.

But this is the level on which the revolution needs to happen -- not "us versus them" antagonism, but waves of lightbulbs lighting up in individuals on every level of the pyramid. If you're reading this, you're probably pretty close to the top of the pyramid, like me. The closer we are to the top, the more effect our individual choices can have as they propagate down the line. As each of us makes more and more humane choices, this change progresses until it becomes a building wave, a ripple which sweeps across the world.

The idea of "socialist government" is an oxymoron.

Human freedom, as defined by Marx and Engels, is essentially the freedom to "contemplate oneself in a world one has created." In other words, people are free if they have real say in the direction or future of society.

This goes beyond the popular idea of freedom which we have in the United States today. Americans have the freedom to do what they want to do with their time and to pursue what interests they want. But we do not have real freedom to shape the future, to make our voices heard against the ubiquitous ethical bankruptcy of our institutions.

The American ideal, as it exists today (it was not always so) is government of the people, by the people, for the people -- not government that facilitates and provides a veneer of legitimacy or even respectability for the slow-motion cannibalism of the lower classes. The idea of government of, by, and for "the people" points to the "naive need" for society to have just and humane governance, governance which holds perpetrators accountable for injustices at all levels.

Suppose, on a naive level, that people come together to create an institution to facilitate the protection of some degree of fairness. People do so because they recognize that human nature is not at the point where people can be expected to just do the right thing. The problem with this scheme is that the authority of an institutional edifice depends upon its mission being respected by all people. Where the aristocratic class finds a way to undermine the mission of an edifice by appointing cronies as watchdogs -- and we can regard this outcome as inevitable -- suddenly people need to be protected against the edifice itself. It has become a proponent of the injustice which they intended it to prevent.

And so it goes with government of, by, and for the people. Any government established by and for "the people," including one founded on socialist principles, can be expected to be undermined by a cabal of cronies.

We cannot even achieve justice by rebelling against an unjust government, because rebellion is part of the imperialistic scheme. The faces at the top change, the words and ideologies change, but not the methods of imperialism.

The key may be changing human nature, but what do we do until that can be achieved?

The difficulty is in imagining something that will remain "naive" without becoming undermined by cronyism, but which is simultaneously protected against imperialism from outside.

One might contemplate mutual aid organizations that are designed to dissolve every so often, and this would be a decent scheme if it contained the means to protect itself simultaneously (1) against becoming a cronyist edifice, (2) against imperialism from without, and (3) against becoming a tool of injustice against minorities.

One might contemplate a sort of "perpetual radical movement" that replenishes every generation, but such movements have not been able to avoid the fate of being either (1) suppressed and forcibly silenced or (2) misappropriated and misdirected into tacit support for imperialism. (The aristocracy does not have to silence radicals if they can make our own words meaningless by drowning us out with a popularized "safe and sanitized" version of our own terminology.)

To succeed, a radical socialist movement would have to be global in its scope, would have to focus heavily on "values education," would have to minimize power centralization (while simultaneously maintaining a high degree of universal accountability), and would have to perpetually renew to avoid having its language misappropriated and diluted.

To what extent are we accountable to society for our decisions and actions? This is a question i've been wrestling with.

At the outset, i'm inclined to say we are not accountable at all. At heart i am an individual with free will, and not only is it my right but it is my duty to act in accord with my will.

Well, save that i shouldn't hurt anybody or steal from them and stuff like that.

However, accepting that kind of ethics means that to some extent i *do* feel accountable to society.

Suppose then i accept the bounds of not doing unto someone what i don't want done to me. (And i don't want to hear the 'what if you're a masochist' canard, because as a masochist i do not want to be hurt or harmed nonconsentually, and that is exactly how i plan to treat others.) Is that good enough? Can i do whatever i want, so long as i'm not harming anybody?

Well, the first difficulty there is what constitutes harm. Suppose i never harm a hair on anyone's head, but i am a slumlord and operate a sweatshop. Suppose i never harm a hair on anyone's head, and do not employ anyone exploitatively, but i *do* buy things which were made in a sweatshop. Where does accountability stop? Does it stop with knowledge and awareness?

But that is not the real difficulty. The problem i'm really wrestling with comes from the idea of entitlement.

Suppose someone offers me something, time, money, a gift, a favor, whatever. The offer comes at some expense to themself. Am i obligated to consider the cost to them before i accept the gift? Before you answer, factor in the reality that an offer may not be made as freely as it seems to be.

My first thoughts about this stem from the discussions we had last month about Silverstein's book The Giving Tree. I tried to imagine how we could express that the boy was acting unethically in accepting the tree's later offers, the offers that led to the tree's own diminishment. The answer i came up with reinforced the utilitarian ethic i've been playing with: the maximization of personal empowerment.

The way it cashes out, this ethic would require us to consider what the costs are of taking anything that we feel free to take.

It is an ethical restriction that many people will find naturally revolting. It flies directly in the face of the American way, which is to assume that any profit we can imagine is ours for the taking, that any frontier we want to cross is ours for the crossing, that any countryside we want to drive our SUV through is ours for the driving through.

It flies directly in the face of capitalist and libertarian ways of thinking.

It flies directly in the face of male privilege, too. What i have found is that many men accept the benefits of women's collective sacrifices without even being aware that the sacrifices are made. Then they wonder why women become so resentful of them. If however every man had to consider the cost to a woman in his life of the chores she does for him, for example, we come a step closer to breaking the cycles of male privilege.

It requires us to accept a burden that many of us have been trained to avoid taking, and yet, unless we take it on, we continue to benefit from awareness-censored layers of privilege.

A cartel is a group of legally independent producers whose goal it is to fix prices, to limit supply and to limit competition.

In Economics 101, you're taught that the cornerstone of capitalism is the free market. The theory goes, if you don't like what is being offered by one seller, you can go to another.

The problem with this theory is that the market is not as free as walking across the aisle to another stall. Exercising your consumer freedom involves an expenditure of time, energy, and perhaps money (if you have to pay to go to the next vendor). You have to spend time researching different products and vendors in order to get the best deal, and you have to have access to good information. These "free market costs" add up to leverage that can be used to the vendor's advantage -- but this kind of leverage is small compared to the leverage the vendor has if you are dependent on the product they are selling.

This leverage makes it possible for cartels to form. In a truly free market, a cartel would not be viable because a single vendor could undermine it by lowering his prices or increasing his supply. But the leverage which vendors possess makes it possible for vendors to band together and undercut the mechanism of competition by setting their own prices. Once a cartel forms, the consumer has nowhere to go to get this product without submitting to the cartel's terms -- and if the consumer is dependent on the product, the consumer cannot simply opt out of buying it.

Theoretically, when cartels are identified, the government forcibly breaks them up in the name of "preserving market competition." Another reason to break up cartels is that they often involve coersion and can lead to violence from efforts to keep the vendors or consumers in line.

The leverage which haves have over have-nots is the root of the "iron law of oligarchy," which states that "all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic or autocratic they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop oligarchic tendencies."

The fact that we have authorties charged with trust-busting means that those cartels which are allowed to continue existing are given tacit legitimacy.

Is it still a cartel if it spans the entire economy? The difference between an oligarchy and a cartel is like the difference between a religion and a cult: the only real difference is size and social acceptance, the veneer of "legitimacy." If the cartel's influence is lingering and ubiquitous, we arrive at a state where we cannot imagine life without it; it becomes standard reality, common sense.

So if i were to suggest that our labor market is ruled by an enduring and powerful employment cartel, i might be dismissed as a loon, but think about it for a moment. Your employer has a strong degree of power over you. The "free market cost" of seeking another employment vendor is often high -- and is probably kept that way -- thus putting pressure on people to keep or seek jobs, no matter how cruddy or humiliating or dehumanizing they are. Dependency is high; people without their own property do not have the freedom to visualize themselves in a world of their own design, and they are kept that way because oligarchy is more profitable for the landed class than democracy.

Economists have described the "natural unemployment rate" as an inevitable aspect of a capitalist economy. But those without jobs are held up as an example for those who have jobs, to keep our enthusiasm high for whatever drudgery that we do to pay our rent. The "natural unemployment rate" is a mechanism of coersion.

I've basically come to the conclusion that the most humane socio-political framework in which to enable the "ramping down" from Empire is socialist.

I'm under no illusion that this is an ideal solution, but I see it as the least of all political evils.

What I have in mind would be a socialist framework that would mistrust central government and view any successful step taken towards permanent decentralization as a victory. This framework would recognize that changes would have to take place over time, perhaps centuries. This framework would also recognize that there is danger in any established solution-edifice that it could itself become part of the problem in 2-3 generations.