Browsing PBH By Articles

A New Movement In America

The Article: The New Progressive Movement by Jeffrey Sachs in the New York Times.

The Text: Occupy Wall Street and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. They are most likely the start of a new era in America. Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings. We are at the end of the 30-year Reagan era, a period that has culminated in soaring income for the top 1 percent and crushing unemployment or income stagnation for much of the rest. The overarching challenge of the coming years is to restore prosperity and power for the 99 percent.

Thirty years ago, a newly elected Ronald Reagan made a fateful judgment: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Taxes for the rich were slashed, as were outlays on public services and investments as a share of national income. Only the military and a few big transfer programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and veterans’ benefits were exempted from the squeeze.

Reagan’s was a fateful misdiagnosis. He completely overlooked the real issue — the rise of global competition in the information age — and fought a bogeyman, the government. Decades on, America pays the price of that misdiagnosis, with a nation singularly unprepared to face the global economic, energy and environmental challenges of our time.

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Crisis & Urban Spaces

The Article: The Urban Roots of Financial Crises by David Harvey in the Socialist Register.

The Text: In an article in the New York Times on 5 February 2011, entitled `Housing Bubbles Are Few and Far Between’, Robert Shiller, the economist who many consider the great housing expert given his role in the construction of the Case-Shiller index of housing prices in the United States, reassured everyone that the recent housing bubble was a `rare event, not to be repeated for many decades’. The `enormous housing bubble’ of the early 2000s `isn’t comparable to any national or international housing cycle in history. Previous bubbles have been smaller and more regional’. The only reasonable parallels, he asserted, were the land bubbles that occurred in the United States way back in the late 1830s and the 1850s.1 This is, as I shall show, an astonishingly inaccurate reading of capitalist history. The fact that it passed so unremarked testifies to a serious blind spot in contemporary economic thinking. Unfortunately, it also turns out to be an equally blind spot in Marxist political economy.

Conventional economics routinely treats investment in the built environ- ment along with urbanization as some sidebar to the more important affairs that go on in some fictional entity called `the national economy’. The sub- field of `urban economics’ is, thus, the arena where inferior economists go while the big guns ply their macro-economic trading skills elsewhere. Even when the latter notice urban processes, they make it seem as if spatial reorganizations, regional development and the building of cities are merely some on-the-ground outcome of larger scale processes that remain unaffected by that which they produce. Thus, in the 2009 World Bank Development Report, which, for the first time ever, took economic geography seriously, the authors did so without a hint that anything could possibly go so catastrophically wrong in urban and regional development as to spark a crisis in the economy as a whole. Written wholly by economists (without consulting geographers, historians or urban sociologists) the aim was supposedly to explore the `influence of geography on economic opportunity’ and to elevate `space and place from mere undercurrents in policy to a major focus’.

The authors were actually out to show how the application of the usual nostrums of neoliberal economics to urban affairs (like getting the state out of the business of any serious regulation of land and property markets and minimizing the interventions of urban, regional and spatial planning) was the best way to augment economic growth (i.e., capital accumulation). Though they did have the decency to `regret’ that they did not have the time or space to explore in detail the social and environmental consequences of their proposals, they did plainly believe that cities that provide `fluid land and property markets and other supportive institutions ­ such as protecting property rights, enforcing contracts, and financing housing ­ will more likely flourish over time as the needs of the market change. Successful cities have relaxed zoning laws to allow higher-value users to bid for the valuable land ­ and have adopted land use regulations to adapt to their changing roles over time’.

But land is not a commodity in the ordinary sense. It is a fictitious form of capital that derives from expectations of future rents. Maximizing its yield has driven low- or even moderate-income households out of Manhattan and central London over the last few years, with catastrophic effects on class disparities and the well-being of underprivileged populations. This is what is putting such intense pressure on the high-value land of Dharavi in Mumbai (a so-called slum that the report correctly depicts as a productive human ecosystem). The World Bank report advocates, in short, the kind of free-market fundamentalism that has spawned both macro-economic disruptions such as the crisis of 2007-09 alongside urban social movements of opposition to gentrification, neighbourhood destruction and the eviction of low-income populations to make way for higher value land uses.

Since the mid-1980s, neoliberal urban policy (applied, for example, across the European Union) concluded that redistributing wealth to less advantaged neighbourhoods, cities and regions was futile and that resources should instead be channelled to dynamic `entrepreneurial’ growth poles. A spatial version of `trickle down’ would then in the proverbial long run (which never comes) take care of all those pesky regional, spatial and urban inequalities. Turning the city over to the developers and speculative financiers redounds to the benefit of all! If only the Chinese had liberated land uses in their cities to free market forces, the World Bank Report argued, their economy would have grown even faster than it did!

The World Bank plainly favours speculative capital and not people. The idea that a city can do well (in terms of capital accumulation) while its people (apart from a privileged class) and the environment do badly is never examined. Even worse, the report is deeply complicit with the policies that lay at the root of the crisis of 2007-09. This is particularly odd, given that the report was published six months after the Lehman bankruptcy and nearly two years after the US housing market turned sour and the foreclosure tsunami was clearly identifiable. We are told, for example, without a hint of critical commentary, that:

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Book Ideas

With successful electronic publishing a growing phenomenon, it’s never been easier to make a ton of money by writing a book. Feel free to rip off any of the book ideas below that are guaranteed to make you rich.

• Vampire/Werewolf Fuckfest – A Fight for Your Very Important Feelings
• The Secret of the Secret and other Secrets
• Dragons, Tits, and Magical Lands – An Elfpussy Saga
• Eat, Pray, Love, Repeat
• The Knock-Knock Murders (Orange You Glad I Didn’t Kill You)

I did the hard part. So now the only question is what will you do with all of your money? Like most wealthy Americans, I’m assuming you’ll stick your dick in a pile of snow crab legs. Just make sure to save some for me.

Veterans Bring The War Home To Occupy Wall Street

The Article: At Occupy Camps, Veterans Bring the Wars Home by Tina Dupuy at the Atlantic.

The Text: We’re in a coffee shop near McPherson Square, the location of Occupy DC, and Michael Patterson, 21, and I are having hot cocoa on a cold November night. He’s wearing an Iraq Veterans Against the War sweatshirt and baggy shorts. It’s freezing outside. “I’m from Alaska,” he offers as an explanation. He’s been sleeping in a tent in D.C. for over a month now. I’ve traveled to five Occupations in two countries. In every demonstration (including the one in Canada) I’ve found a vet to talk to:

In Zuccotti Park, Army Specialist Jerry Bordeleau, 24, was sitting next to a table of IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) literature. On his sweater were two buttons: an Iraq Campaign metal and one from the IWW. He served two tours in Iraq and now says he’s unemployed and can’t find work for over $10 an hour. And he can’t live on $10 an hour. When I asked him why he’s at Occupy Wall Street he says, “I went and fought for capitalism and that’s why I’m now a Marxist.”

At Occupy Baltimore, I met 21-year-old Justin Carson, who tells me he served in the Army National Guard in Iraq from 2009 until this February. His nickname is Crazy Craze. He says he has PTSD and is bipolar but won’t “do pharmaceuticals.” Then he told me I should look into the Illuminati since I’m writing an article.

It was a surprise to meet Iraq war vets at these protests. There are only, after all, around a million Americans who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan in what was once dubbed the War on Terror.

Their presence became national news when Iraq vet and former Marine Scott Olsen’s skull was fractured by a non-lethal round fired by police in Oakland in late-October. A week later in New York, around 30 vets held a solidarity march from Zuccotti Park to the Stock Exchange. They had a rally at the park afterward where Bordeleau spoke. “This is the first major movement for social change we’ve seen in this country since the ’70s,” he said to me.

At Occupy DC, a painting of Scott Olsen in uniform is draped on the side of a tent. He’s become a symbol of the Occupation Movement — he fought overseas only to be injured when exercising his “freedom” of peaceful assembly at home. His name has become a shorthand to talk about why so many vets are at Occupy Wall Street.

“There’s a reason Scott Olsen got shot in the head,” says Patterson, looking down at his chain-restaurant hot cocoa. “Because he was out front.”

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Žižek On Occupy Wall Street And Future Alternatives

The Article: Six Questions for Slavoj Žižek by J. Nicole Jones in Harpers.

The Text: For a philosopher who claims to eschew the carnivalesque, Slavoj Žižek creates quite a circus wherever he goes. After his concluding remarks as host of a recent conference in New York called Communism: A New Beginning?, the Marxist thinker, whose marriage of pop culture and theory has made him possibly the most famous Slovenian ever, was immediately mobbed by admirers. Like a rock star, he headed for the back door, leading me through a meandering underground passageway before we emerged to the streets of Manhattan. As we made our way to a nearby café, he collected a new entourage around him — mostly autograph-seekers and undergraduate fanboys grilling him for term-paper advice. He obliged the autograph-hunters, asked that aspiring intellectuals email him with specific questions, and initially insulted a man who wanted a photograph, saying “One idiot more!” The man withdrew his request with polite apologies, and a strange tug of war ensued as Žižek then insisted on being photographed.

Žižek seems to thrive on contradiction. As we spoke, he veered from one stream of thought to another in his famously thick accent. Although he claimed at one point to prefer solitude, he delighted in making attention-drawing remarks — proclaiming with impish glee, for example, that Gandhi was technically more violent than Hitler, or advising me to tell panhandlers, “Yes I have some change. Fuck off!”

The week before, he had spoken at Occupy Wall Street, where he championed the movement and told a cheering crowd, “We are not dreamers. We are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare.” When we reached the café, I asked him about the experience, the prospects for the Occupy movement, and the new beginning he was pondering for communism:

1. When you visited Zuccotti Park, what did you think of the Occupy Wall Street protesters? What are they doing right, and what are they doing wrong?

It’s difficult to answer this question because I was tired, I had to work a lot, so I literally came there three minutes before I did it. I instantly disappeared. You know, this may be part of my character, but that’s how I function. There is a certain cliché about communists or radicals. They usually say, you like humanity in abstract, but you don’t like concrete people. You are even ready to kill them for humanity. Okay, fuck it. If this is it, then I am definitely a totalitarian. I like humanity, maybe great works of art, but the majority of the people I don’t like. I like to be alone. For example, you have seen it today, how my first reaction was just to disappear. I like so much to be alone. I just have a couple of friends.

So again also for theoretical reasons, I don’t think that mingling with them, whatever, would have brought any special, deep insight. I would probably have heard just these stupidities — “We want justice, ooh, one percent has so much money, blah blah blah.”

I do [sense] a readiness to question the fundamentals of the system. Even with radical liberal leftists, it was [formerly] within the existing system: less racism, more freedom to women, abortion, divorce. The basic insight I see is that clearly for the first time, the underlying perception there is a flaw in the system as such. It’s not just the question of making the system better.

2. The title of the conference you’ve just hosted is “Communism: A New Beginning?” I wonder if communism isn’t a devalued brand. Why not find a new word for it?

I’m well aware of this. The PR, public relations problem. Many friends are telling me, “Listen, we agree with everything, but why use this terrible term, which has such a horrifying connotation — gulag, whatever, no?” My reason is that, first, in the radical tradition, millenarian movements [were] egalitarian revolts, and I would like to keep fidelity to that tradition.

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