Peter Frase

In the July 15^th New York Times, Louis Uchitelle has an excellent piece about some truly disgusting people. They're the richest Americans, emblems of what Uchitelle calls the “new gilded age”. Read the whole article here, and marvel at billionaires who compare themselves to Derek Jeter and pine for the days before there was an income tax.

Other bloggers have already noted that the people in this story—like Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill and hedge fun honcho Kenneth Griffin—come off as egotistical jerks. But there's a deeper lesson here about how irrational capitalism can be.

Apologists for capitalism like to say that without massive income inequality, people wouldn't have any incentive to work hard or take risks. This implies that money is the only thing that motivates people. But how many doctors, or lawyers, or CEO's, would say that they're only in it for the money?

As to the last category, Uchitelle's article would suggest that the answer is “not many”--unless, that is, they're trying to come up with reasons why they shouldn't have to pay high taxes. Take Griffin. First he says he's not working just for the money:

Kenneth C. Griffin, who received more than $1 billion last year as chairman of a hedge fund, the Citadel Investment Group, declared: “The money is a byproduct of a passionate endeavor.”

Mr. Griffin, 38, argued that those who focus on the money — and there is always a get-rich crowd — “soon discover that wealth is not a particularly satisfying outcome.” His own team at Citadel, he said, “loves the problems they work on and the challenges inherent to their business.”

Surely, then, Mr. Griffin wouldn't mind if we took just a little of that billion dollars to fund pressing social needs? Think again:

“The income distribution has to stand,” Mr. Griffin said, adding that by trying to alter it with a more progressive income tax, “you end up in problematic circumstances. In the current world, there will be people who will move from one tax area to another. I am proud to be an American. But if the tax became too high, as a matter of principle I would not be working this hard.” [emphasis added]

As a matter of principle? So, even though you don't really do it for the money, high tax rates would violate your deeply held moral belief that billionaires shouldn't have to share their loot with the common people? Stay classy, economic royalists.

To be fair, there are a few people in this story who don't come off as grotesque elitists. Former American Airlines chief Bob Crandall argues that massive inequality is a bad thing and makes the sensible point that “The way our society equalizes incomes is through much higher taxes than we have today. There is no other way.” And Costco's James Sinegal observes that, despite Mr. Griffin and his “principles”, CEO's would probably work just as hard if they made “$10 million instead of $200 million.” But as long as they can grab more money, they will.

I don't think this argument applies only to CEOs. Many of the highest paid jobs in our society are things that people do because they are intrinsically enjoyable, not because they are high-paying. (Conversely, the most dangerous and unpleasant jobs often pay the least.) The reason income is so unequal is not because of some objective truth about the workings of “the market”. It is simply that the rich have the power, and the poor do not. The only way to change that is to agitate and organize. And that's why, as much as this article made me want to throw up, it also made me happy—because if you wanted to provoke a populist backlash in favor of taxing the rich, you couldn't do much better than these jackasses.

Michael Moore's “SiCKO” is, in certain respects, a perfect political movie. One film isn't going give us single-payer universal health care in this country, but this one might just move us a little closer to it. In its portrayal of a perverse health care system that places profits before patients, “SiCKO” manages to do the two things that any effective piece of agitprop must.

The first, of course, is to inspire outrage. And there is plenty of outrage to be had. The guy who had to decide which finger he could afford to get reattached; the old folks living in their daughter's storage room because they sold the house to pay medical bills; the woman whose daughter died because the hospital refused to treat her. At various points in the movie, I was teary-eyed with rage.

But it's not enough to just upset people. This is a common mistake made by leftists—middle class white ones especially. They think that people will rise up if they find out how much they are being screwed. But it turns out that many people are perfectly aware that they are being screwed; they just don't think there's anything they can do about it. So after you get people riled up, it's vitally important that you show them how things could be different.

And that's where SiCKO really shines. Health care was really a brilliant choice of subject. Not just because, as many reviewers have pointed out, insurance companies make an excellent villain. The genius of it is that when it comes to our awful health care system, things not only can be better, they are better in every other rich country in the world. The strongest part of the movie was the parts talking about the Canadian, British, and French systems, which guarantee free health care to everyone. It really is that simple—just rip off the French!

Maybe that's why Moore's message is finding such a receptive audience. Even Oprah waxed social democratic after seeing it. Boing Boing (via TPM Café) reports that even in Texas, the movie can inspire spontaneous organizing. Meanwhile, the movie has apparently scared the crap out of the health insurance industry. And on right-wing TV, they’re reduced to arguing that universal healthcare causes terrorism. Unfortunately, SiCKO has not yet inspired any of the leading Democratic candidates to come out in favor of true single-payer universal coverage instead of some partial compromise position (Dennis Kucinich does support single payer Medicare-for-all, however).

It's also worth noting that this movie is about a lot more than health care. Some of the more perceptive critics have noticed that Moore is just using health care as an entry point to a much broader social democratic vision. He wants to promote a vision of the country in which people look out for each other—and the government looks out for them—rather than our current ethos of ultra-individualism. That's why Matt Yglesias—who is no socialist—suggests that the reaction to the movie is a sign of the “anti-capitalist folk instincts” of many Americans. “The crux of the matter”, he argues, “is that ordinary people think that if there's a sick person, and you're in a position to help the sick person, that you ought to help the sick person. This is what us socialists might call the principle of solidarity.

Is this right? Do Americans have “anti-capitalist folk instincts”? And if so, how do we tap into them and direct them toward political action?

We live at a time when advances in technology make possible an easing of the burden of work by a reduction in working hours, and a tremendous expansion of human freedom. A moribund capitalism prevents us from realizing this potential, by turning productivity into profit instead of free time, and by trapping the creative potential of human knowledge in the form of private monopolies enforced by the state. Two pieces of data illustrate this point.

The first is this graph, which comes from a report of the President's Council of Economic Advisors (PDF):

Forget what you heard about outsourcing. The manufacturing sector in the U.S. produces eleven times as much as it did in the 1940's, but employs a far lower percentage of the population than it once did. All that increased productivity could be turned into reduced hours for all; instead it is turned into profits for a few, unemployment and uncertainty for many.

The second datum comes from a remarkable study that was reported today. An analyst at a private firm looked at American companies in order to determine where their value came from:

Cardoza said his research showed that tangible assets, like plants, equipment and inventory, represented four-fifths of the market value of U.S. companies 30 years ago. The other fifth came from intangible assets like brand name, reputation and other factors. Now, he said, the ratio has flipped, and intangibles, which he valued by subtracting tangible assets from a company's total market value, make up four-fifths of the pie, with the largest slice made up of patents, copyrighted material and other forms of intellectual property.

In other words, state-granted monopolies over knowledge, rather than the production of commodities, are now the basis of American capitalism. The money that accrues to the holders of these monopolies is what, in the economic tradition, is known as a rent. Unproductive extraction of rent was something that was associated with the landowning nobility during the transition to capitalism, and bourgeois thinkers raged against it. Now the capitalist class is the unproductive, rentier class. But who will overthrow them?

To get a sense of the case against patent and copyright law--from both a left and right perspective--see this fascinating blog, where I first spotted the link to this article.

A few prominent bloggers have taken to calling themselves the "netroots", and imagining themselves to be a prominent force in shaping national politics. Leaving aside an horrible neologism and some delusions of grandeur, what is the political content of this Internet "left"? Economist Max Sawicky gets off a great polemic, calling them "a mostly brainless vacuum cleaner of donations for the Democratic Party".

This hits the mark I think. And the infantile response to Sawicky's intervention certainly suggests he hit a nerve. The depressing thing about MoveOn.org, the Howard Dean campaign, and so much besides, has been the lack of coherent political analysis or principles. For all the talk of imitating the right's tactical acumen, there's too little on the Democrat side to compare to the ideological rigor of the more devout neoconservatives, libertarians, or evangelicals. All too often, it just seems to be about winning elections and raising money.

A number of dangers arise from this. One is that with Democrats in power, a politically rudderless constituency will allow them to get away with backsliding into Clintonian centrism. Another, specific problem that Sawicky raised is: if we don't have firm anti-imperialist principles, what's to stop us from falling for the next insane war proposed by the Democrats?

And finally, there's Barack Obama. Sheesh. I volunteered on his senate campaign in 2004, and at the time I was optimistic that he could become a genuine progressive leader like Paul Wellstone or Jesse Jackson Jr. Boy, was I wrong. Turns out, he's a middle-of-the-road, vague-principles, Clintonian pain-feeling kind of guy. The media and the netroots have latched onto this guy the same way they glommed onto Howard Dean--because he looks like a winner, not for any substantive political reason. And frankly, I wouldn't mind if Obama's campaign came to the same ignominious end as Dean's. Much as the guy personally rubs me the wrong way, John Edwards looks like the best of the presidential pack at this point. His domestic policy talking points are pleasingly social democratic, and he's the only one with the guts to call for a withdrawal from Iraq. Obama may have had the better position on the war back in 2002, but Edwards is out in front in 2007.

Don't let your left hand know
what your right hand is doing
Don't let your right hand know
what your left hand is going through
-Lungfish, "8.14.2116"

The Los Angeles Times recently ran a two-part expose (1,2) on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest charitable foundation in the world. Like all foundations, the Gates foundation (founded by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates) invests its assets in stocks and bonds in order to generate the income it uses to fund its projects. These two tasks are intentionally kept apart, so that the investment arm can concentrate on making money and the charity arm can worry about doing good works. But the LAT found that even while the Gates Foundation is fighting AIDS or predatory lending with its public programs, the investment wing of its operation is investing in the very same companies that cause these problems. Millions of dollars of the foundation's money are tied up in companies like Ameriquest, which is implicated in predatory lending, and Eni, an oil company which is a major polluter in Nigeria. In the latter case, the Times profiled a child who had received a polio vaccination because of the Gates foundation, but had developed respiratory problems because of a nearby Eni operation.

This kind of hypocrisy leads many people to support the concept of "socially responsible investing", or SRI. The idea behind SRI is that foundations (and other large investors like state pension funds) should invest only in companies that have good records on issues such as environmentalism or labor rights. But there are a number of problems with SRI. Bradford Plumer in the New Republic gets at some of these in his commentary on the LA Times article. For one thing, no one agrees on just what constitutes "social responsibility"--so, for example, Coca-Cola ends up on some SRI indexes for its charitable works, which apparently make up for its support of union-busting Colombian death squads. For another thing, there's no clear evidence that SRI actually changes corporate behavior. The movement to divest from South African companies during the anti-apartheid struggle is often cited as the exemplary case, yet Plumer cites a study which suggests that the divestment campaign had little effect. In the cases where SRI has been successful, companies have concluded that they can comply with the demands of activists without too much harm to the bottom line. But it seems that when social responsibility and profits come into conflict, profit still wins out.

Plumer's conclusion is that "government action is often the only thing that can dramatically alter corporate behavior". And this is surely correct. But there is a deeper lesson here as well. The Gates foundation is the ludicrous extreme, but it demonstrates the limitation of all private charity. Since most private charities are dependent on foundation funding, they are ultimately dependent on private investments. And the goal of private investment has to be the maximization of profit. This leads to the specific problem of companies which do evil, as the LA Times showed. But even when the worst companies are screened out, it also leads the more general problem of encouraging the push to turn everything into a commodity and a for-profit business, even things that shouldn't be. This is related to the basic capitalist fallacy that if people have more money and have to spend more money, they are better off than they would be if they had less money but got more things for free (or cheap).

For example, the Times uses prescription drugs as one of its case studies. The Gates foundation subsidizes AIDS drugs in Africa, even as it invests in pharmaceutical companies that restrict access to those drugs with their monopoly pricing schemes. It would be in the interest of humanity for drugs to be developed by publicly funded laboratories (as many useful drugs already are) and then made available as cheaply as possible. This would entail the decommodification of pharmaceuticals, the elimination of many useless copycat drugs, a reduction of drug company profits, and therefore a reduction of the income stream that is available to private foundations. It would also look like a reduction in the Gross National Product, and would therefore be a Bad Thing from the perspective of bourgeois economics. But from a socialist perspective it is an advance in human freedom. Not more charity, but less need for charity, is what we demand...

So as Plumer's article asks, is SRI a sham? Well, it may be a useful tactic in some circumstances, but in general the time of activists is probably better spent building political power.

Critics of neoliberalism, from right and left, have often remarked on the nonsensical quality of Gross Domestic Product as a measure of societal wealth. Since GDP measures everything which is paid for on the market, it cannot distinguish between positive and negative forms of economic activity. A cure for cancer becomes equivalent to cleaning up an oil spill, so long as both cost money. On the other hand, helping your neighbor carry her groceries up the stairs has no economic value, while the production of cigarettes and the treatment of lung cancer become major sources of "wealth".

This critique is really two critiques, however, one of which has some radical implications. Merely pointing out that GDP valorizes things like environmental destruction and weaponry as forms of wealth leads to a tame (if salutary) reformism: such "public bads" should be taken off the books, or counted negatively against those good things which are produced for sale in the market. All this amounts only to a better accounting method, a better way of showing how much, and how efficiently, is being produced by the capitalist economy.

But the critique of GDP points to a deeper question: why should things be produced for money at all, regardless of whether they are good or bad? That is, do we really gain as a society when things which could be performed voluntarily and for free become paid jobs?

The standard response to this question is that, while it would certainly be nice if all production could be undertaken voluntarily rather than under the discipline of wage labor, such an anarchist utopia is totally impractical. And for many goods, this is a real and difficult problem. The same things that make production efficient--the division of labor, repetitive and tedious jobs--are the same things that make people not want to do them unless they get paid. To address this problem, we need some way of negotiating the trade-off between having more things and having more (and higher quality) free time. Of course, under the present fetishization of constant economic growth, it is impossible even to articulate such a trade-off, except in the language of consumer or worker "choice".

But let us set this set of problems aside for a moment. The tension described above is true primarily for physical goods, things like cars and shoes. But what is distinctive about the capitalism that has developed over the past few decades is the increasing preponderance, in the money economy, of commodities that are not physical objects, but intellectual property of one kind or another. Let us take a single example, from the computer software industry.

Microsoft is preparing to release the new version of Microsoft Windows, called "Vista". In the run-up to launch, the company is making every effort to persuade customers of the value of this new product. One of the most important targets of persuasian has been the European Union, which has been increasingly unhappy with Microsoft's monopoly business practices. To the end of persuading the EU to welcome Vista with open arms, Microsoft recently released this white paper. Its purpose is to outline the positive economic benefits which Microsoft Vista will supposedly bring to Europe. These, are, according to Microsoft:

• Within its first year of shipment, IDC expects Windows Vista to be installed onmmore than 100 million computers worldwide. More than 30 million computers inmthe region studied are expected to be running Windows Vista.
• In the six countries studied, Windows Vista-related employment will reach moremthan 20% of IT employment2 in its first year of shipment.
• While much of this employment will shift from Windows XP-related employment,mover 50% of the growth in IT employment will be driven by Windows Vista.
• For every euro of Microsoft revenue from Windows Vista in 2007 in the sixcountries studied, the ecosystem beyond Microsoft will reap almost 14 euro in revenues. In 2007 this ecosystem should sell over ?32 billion ($40 billion) in products and services revolving around Windows Vista.
• Within the six-country region, in 2007 over 150,000 IT companies that produce, sell, or distribute products or services running on Windows Vista will employ over 400,000 people; another 650,000 will be employed at IT using firms.

Billions of dollars in economic growth due to Vista! What wonderful news! But wait--what does this mean? One critic quickly saw through the gambit on offer:

The white paper may predict sales by the "Microsoft ecosystem" of over $40 billion in six of Europe's biggest economies, but what this figure hides is the fact that income for Microsoft and its chums is a cost for the rest of Europe. In other words, IDC's white paper is effectively touting an expense of over $40 billion as a reason why the European Commission should welcome Vista with open arms.As the paper itself mentions, half of this cost is down to the hardware. Some of these purchases would have taken place anyway; the rest represent upgrades from older hardware that cannot meet Vista's requirements. But if Vista did not exist (or, for example, if the European Commission were to block its sale for whatever reason), the old systems would not suddenly stop working: they would tick along for a few more years, gradually being replaced. The only justification for this hefty expenditure is to be able to run Vista: no Vista, no need to rustle up many extra billions on hardware upgrades outside the usual replacement cycles.

It's the same on the software side. The case for Vista itself is hardly strong. As the product's ship date has slipped, so more of its new features have been ripped out. Now it is not entirely clear what the benefit of upgrading is (apart from the evergreen "better security", of course). And without the need for hardware and software upgrades, the associated consultancy and service costs disappear too: most of Vista's $40 billion "benefit" is not only a cost, but an unnecessary one at that.

A product which imposes heavy costs on users, including accelerated hardware obsolesence, without clear benefits? Who would want such a thing? The economic growth being cited by Microsoft is evidently the kind of phony "wealth creation" cited by critics of GDP in the first sense mentioned above. But we can also ask the second question. Suppose that Vista did have discernible benefits. Certainly operating systems, generally, are useful things, and have to be upgraded sometimes. Even if Vista was a better piece of software, we might still ask: why should such a thing be made by a private company and sold for a profit? Why couldn't people just make it for free in their spare time, and then give it away?

To which Microsoft might respond: without the possibility of profit, there would be no incentive to innovate, and hence no-one would write operating systems. As against the cases of shoes and cars, however, a clear counterexample exists that vitiates this argument. The existence of free and open-source software is an excellent example of a post-capitalist form of production, in which social wealth is produced outside the system of economic (monetary) value.

The fact that the things like software can
be produced for free in the "social economy" does not mean that everything can be produced this way, as some of the more exuberant proponents of the "immaterial labor" thesis would have you believe. Yet by criticizing the facile equivalency between economic activity and wealth, we can begin to move toward a real critique of capitalism. This critique, if it is to reinvigorate socialism as an idea, has to take as its starting point this observation of Marx's, from volume 3 of Capital, one of the few places where he prefigures the communist future:

The actual wealth of society, and the possibility of constantly expanding its reproduction process, therefore, do not depend upon the duration of surplus-labour, but upon its productivity and the more or less copious conditions of production under which it is performed. In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.

Now the distinction between "freedom" and "necessity" is not as clear-cut as Marx seems to imply here, and it is not coextensive with "immaterial" and "material" goods. Fine wines and Sony Playstations are material goods, but are they necessary ones? This is, ultimately, a political question, but it is not one that can be resolved in capitalism. Defining the boundary between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom is, I would argue, the specific content of socialism as a form of society and a political process (rather than a telos, a utopia, or an end of all politics). Framing things this way explodes the false opposition between state planning and market anarchy. The aim of socialism is not to pull all economic activity under the control of the state. Rather, it is to push out as much as possible from commodity production in the market to socialized labor in the "free" sector.* Conversely, only where necessary, that is, where other ways of organizing production are not feasible, would production be pulled in to collective control by the state, workers collectives, or some other communal form.

This formulation opens a new horizon of possibility for the socialist project, a new vision of what society could be like. It also clearly rules out certain longtime "left" preoccupations as being basically anti-socialist. The Keynesian idea that we need more jobs and higher wages for everyone comes to seem dilatory, in this view: what we need instead are shorter hours and a lower cost of living. As a corollary, we need things like socialized health care and child care, which reduce individual dependence on wage-labor. Neither of these are anti-capitalist programs in themselves; yet they point away from capitalism rather, as with Keynesianism, toward an intensification of its logic.

Left untheorized, here, is imperialism, or more generally, uneven development (and by implication, racism). If too much wage-labor is the constitutive problem of European and North American societies, this cannot be said of much of the rest of the world--or even of the pockets of deprivation within the rich societies. Thus, the socialist project must entail a massive, internationalist, redistributive project along with the anti-capitalist project delineated here, if it is not to degenerate into the construction of elite islands of privilege in a global sea of misery. (In this, Hardt and Negri are right: a guaranteed income and global citizenship are the sine qua non of the left project today. Unfortunately, their naive postmodernism and reflexive anti-statism made them unable to connect this realization with a coherent political strategy.) Likewise, ecology and the reality of physical limits on human societies demand serious attention, if we are to give real content to Marx's comment about "the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature". And last but not least, what is described here is intrinsically also a feminist project: without a critique of unpaid women's labor, reduction of paid labor just reduces itself to a patriarchal ideology of the "family wage". But consideration of these dilemmas will have to wait for another time.

[* The free sector, or the realm of freedom, would be free in a double sense: its products would be available to everyone for free, like open source software; at the same time, the laborers themselves would be "free" in the sense that they work according to their own schedules and according to their own desires, rather than at the direction of a boss. The realm of freedom is thus, pace Stallman, free as in free spech, and free as in free beer.]

Capitalism gives rise to a unique and wonderful kind of nonfiction writing: the tale of the commodity. These are the accounts of how a product comes to be, illuminating the human stories behind an object's journey from raw materials to end consumer. The intent of the story is typically to shock the reader with the concealed suffering and drama that inhere in a previously context-less object. Commodity expose stories have a long history, and have produced some famous landmarks (Sinclair's The Jungle, for example), but globalization, outsourcing, and the growth of massive global commodity chains have enriched the genre tremendously.

As a Marxist, I would somewhat unfelicitously call these "defetishizing" stories. The term comes from Marx's famous comment on "the fetishism of commodities" in Capital:

Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it. Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, we try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of our own social products; for to stamp an object of utility as a value, is just as much a social product as language. The recent scientific discovery, that the products of labour, so far as they are values, are but material expressions of the human labour spent in their production, marks, indeed, an epoch in the history of the development of the human race, but, by no means, dissipates the mist through which the social character of labour appears to us to be an objective character of the products themselves. The fact, that in the particular form of production with which we are dealing, viz., the production of commodities, the specific social character of private labour carried on independently, consists in the equality of every kind of that labour, by virtue of its being human labour, which character, therefore, assumes in the product the form of value – this fact appears to the producers, notwithstanding the discovery above referred to, to be just as real and final, as the fact, that, after the discovery by science of the component gases of air, the atmosphere itself remained unaltered.

The subjective effect of grasping the passage above is beautifully communicated by Wallace Shawn in The Fever:

People say about every thing that it has a certain value. This is worth that. This coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing worth some quantity of money, or some number of other things - one coat, worth three sweaters, or so much money - as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained somewhere inside itself an amount of value, like an inner soul, as if the coat were a fetish, a physical object that contains a living spirit. But what really determines the value of a coat? What is it that determines the price of a coat? The coat's price comes from its history, the history of all the people who were involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all of those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. "I like this coat," we say, "it's not expensive," as if that were a fact about the coat and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it, "I like the pictures in this magazine."

All of this is by way of lead-in to a wonderful piece of defetishizing journalism that just appeared in the Chicago Tribune. The PDF is here, and this is the lead-in:

What is the true cost of quenching America’s mighty thirst for gasoline? To answer that question, Pulitzer Prize-winning Tribune correspondent Paul Salopek did what has never been done: He traced the gas pumped at a single station to the fuel’s shadowy sources around the globe. The story begins at a glistening Marathon outlet on Chicago’s exurban edge and ranges from the fishless waters off the coast of Nigeria to the politically restless fields of Venezuela and beyond. Salopek’s journey, a travelogue of America’s addiction to oil, reveals how U.S. consumers are bound to some of the most violent, desperate corners of the planet-and to a petroleum economy so fragile that it may not last.

Oil is a particularly compelling subject for such treatment. Not merely because of the industry's global reach and sordid geopolitical entanglements, but because of oil's unique character as a commodity. It is an abstraction in a dual sense. Like any commodity, it takes on an abstract value, its price, which conceals the human relationships that go into its production. But it also embodies another abstraction, energy--the abstracted representation of our ability to shape the physical world to our human needs, the power and potentiality that grows our food, erects our houses, drives our cars, and animates our laptops. To grasp the social relationships behind oil, then, is to touch on a system of relationships that permeates the entire world economy.

Across America, a movement is stirring. People from all walks of life are feeling a newly awakened sense of outrage, and demanding accountability from their public figures. No longer content to stand by as lies and illegal behavior become normalized as acceptable strategies, no longer able to turn a blind eye to the corruption of one of our most important national institutions, ordinary citizens are fighting back. Their message is clear. While the causes and the culprits may be many in our national crisis, there is one man who must ultimately bear responsibility for the shocking transgressions of recent years:

Barry Bonds.

Follow the link to get a glimpse of the fevered state of Bonds-hatred in the world of baseball fandom. The anti-Bonds mania transcends the normal boundaries of sports partisanship, and outstrips even the vitriolic and spiteful fan-player relationships pioneered by fans in New York and Philadelphia. For many, it seems, the theme of this season is not root, root, rooting for the home team, but rooting against Barry Bonds.

How does the role of sports fan curdle from love and loyalty into demonization and hatred? And how can we explain the intensity of emotion, the depths of outrage, that Bonds provokes? How does a baseball player's use of steroids--at a time when they were not even banned by the league--constitute an existential threat to our deeply held cultural values? And how has Bonds become the singular representative of baseball's steroid era, which taints everyone from Mark McGwire to Sammy Sosa to Brady Anderson, and which was abetted by Major League Baseball's unwillingness to tamper with a home run derby style of play that was filling ballparks?

It's always dangerous to make grand analogies between a cultural phenomenon and a political one. Pattern-finding creatures by nature, humans can find elective affinities in the most improbable places, and the result has been not a few mediocre dissertations in cultural studies. But when historians reflect on our time, the parallel will be hard to miss: at the same time that Americans were becoming increasingly disgusted with the incompetence and mendacity of their political leaders, they lashed out at the deceptions of a baseball player whose personality, in his arrogance, egotism, and sense of entitlement, is evocative in many ways of George W. Bush.

For many who placed their faith in Bush after 9/11, it is difficult to contemplate the possibility that he is both a liar and an idiot. And even for those who have always been confirmed Bush-haters, it sometimes seems hopeless to expect political improvement. With our tepid two party duopoly, gerrymandered congressional districts, and hack media, it may seem as though no outrage by the Bush administration will be sufficient to provoke an anti-Republican backlash. Destroying Barry Bonds, on the other hand, is both psychologically easy and politically feasible.

Of course, Barry Bonds is also black, and we shouldn't discount the alchemy of moral outrage and submerged racism in the way baseball fans respond to him. Race, too, explains why Bonds makes a better target than Bush: he shares all of the President's shortcomings, but he lacks the markers of racial privilege that shield Bush from the recriminations of his white base. Reading the coverage of young white men taunting Bonds wherever he goes, one wonders how many of them are disaffected Republican voters.

I will admit that I am that rarest of things in baseball--I am, in some twisted way, a Barry Bonds fan. I love him as a theatrical character, a villain so perfect that he seems to have walked out of a professional wrestling script. But I also sympathize with this most unsympathetic man, who has become the object of a nation's displaced rage--a rage that would be so much more fruitfully employed elsewhere.

Let me step back, for a moment, from the abstract contemplation of concrete phenomena in the world, to consider how it is that we think abstractly at all. I've been fascinated, for a few years now, by the possibility of historicizing epistemology by connecting abstract thinking with processes of abstraction that operate in everyday life in capitalism; the path-breaking work here is that of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and his theory of the "real abstraction".

I was provoked to return to this line of thought by a news story about a remarkable medical case, a woman with perfect memory:

James McGaugh is one of the world's leading experts on how the human memory system works. But these days, he admits he's stumped.

McGaugh's journey through an intellectual purgatory began six years ago when a woman now known only as AJ wrote him a letter detailing her astonishing ability to remember with remarkable clarity even trivial events that happened decades ago.

Give her any date, she said, and she could recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred on that date.

. . .

McGaugh has spent decades studying how such things as stress hormones and emotions affect memory, and at first he thought AJ's memories were of such emotional power that she couldn't forget them.

But that hypothesis fell short of the mark when it became obvious that "the woman who can't forget" remembers trivial details as clearly as major events. Asked what happened on Aug 16, 1977, she knew that Elvis Presley had died, but she also knew that a California tax initiative passed on June 6 of the following year, and a plane crashed in Chicago on May 25 of the next year, and so forth. Some may have had a personal meaning for her, but some did not.

This remarkable case, if it is indeed as described, is a real life version of Ireneo Funes, the protagonist of the Jorge Luis Borges story "Funes the Memorious" (or, in the 1998 Hurley translation, "Funes, His Memory"). Here is Borges' narrator describing Funes:

With one quick look, you and I perceive three wineglasses on a table; Funes perceived every grape that had been pressed into the wine and all the stalks and tendrils of its vineyard. He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compare them in his memory with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once, or with the feathers of spray lifted by an oar on the Rio Negro on the eve of the Battle of Quebracho. Nor were those memories simple--every visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, and so on. He was able to reconstruct every dream, every daydream he had ever had. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day; he had never once erred or faltered, but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day. "I, myself, alone, have more memories than all mankind since the world began," he said to me. And also: "My dreams are like other people's waking hours." And again, toward dawn: "My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap." A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a rhombus--all these are forms we can fully intuit; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a young colt, a small herd of cattle on a mountainside, a flickering fire and its uncountable ashes, and the many faces of a dead man at a wake. I had no idea how many stars he saw in the sky.

But for Funes, perfect memory is not an asset--it is a curse:

I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very good at thinking. To think is to ignore (or forget) differences, to generalize, to abstract. In the teeming world of Ireneo Funes there was nothing but particulars--and they were virtually immediate particulars.

One wonders, then, what sort of thinker is AJ, our real life Funes? In the story, Funes is physically crippled; Borges implies that he is also intellectually crippled by his "gift". AJ is not, as one might expect, incapacitated by her prodigious memory--she has lived a fairly normal, functional life. Yet it does seem that she is subject to some of the same limitations as Funes, according to the original press release about her:

There are limits to AJ’s memory. While she has nearly perfect recall of what she was doing on any given date and instantly can identify the date and day of the week when an important historical event in her lifetime occurred, she has difficulty with rote memorization and did not always do well in school. She scored perfectly on a formal neuropsychological test to measure her autobiographical memory, but during the testing had difficulty organizing and categorizing information. She refers to her ongoing remembering of her life’s experiences as “a movie in her mind that never stops”.

So it is true, as Borges supposed, that perfect memory is at odds with the actual process of thinking. This has implications for social theory, for it demonstrates the complex relationship between empirical sense-data and conceptual abstraction--and it supports the type of dialectical thought recommended by Marxists like Bertell Ollman:

Dialectics restructures our thinking about reality by replacing the common sense notion of "thing" (as something that has a history and has external connections with other things) with notions of "process" (which contains its history and possible futures) and "relation" (which contains as part of what it is its ties with other relations). Nothing that didn't already exist has been added here. Rather, it is a matter of where and how one draws boundaries and establishes units (the dialectical term is "abstracts") in which to think about the world. The assumption is that while the qualities we perceive with our five senses actually exist as parts of nature, the conceptual distinctions that tell us where one thing ends and the next one begins both in space and across time are social and mental constructs. However great the influence of what the world is on how we draw these boundaries, it is ultimately we who draw the boundaries, and people coming from different cultures and from different philosophical traditions can and do draw them differently.

Ollman's methodology, Borges's narrative, and AJ's example all militate against the misconception that we can arrive at truth through a mere accumulation of information; to Ollman's principle of drawing boundaries between sensory qualities, we can add the importance of excluding some sense-data while retaining others. These examples are therefore a defense of the usefulness of social theory, both for understanding the world and for changing it. But I think the discussion of memory and abstraction also has something to say about a little discussion I had with Geoff recently, about the new types of subjectivity that are encouraged by the Internet. In a way, the Internet is a cyborg appendage which gives us all Funesian memory: a machine which preserves every random bit of information, and every comment on that information, eternally. The argument I have sketched so far suggests that this is as likely to imped
e our ability to think, as it is to facilitate it.

So perhaps the question facing us is: in an environment where every memory is preserved, how do we devise new principles for forgetting?

The sign at left was posted at Camp Nama, an Iraqi military installation which was commandeered by U.S. special forces. There they turned one interrogation room into a ghoulish torture chamber called the Black Room:

"In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball. Their intention was to extract information to help hunt down Iraq's most-wanted terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, according to Defense Department personnel who served with the unit or were briefed on its operations."

What is most disturbing about this episode of detainee abuse is, as with Abu Ghraib, its seeming pointlessness, relative to extracting any actual information, and its ostentatious sadism. Torture for any reason is horrifying; but torture for its own sake is the most chilling because it calls to mind the worst of the historical atrocities perpetrated by humans on their fellow humans.

But at least the "Black Room" of Camp Nama has been brought to light by the diligent work of the New York Times, and at least we still live in a society which retains enough humaneness and dignity to execrate such acts when they occur. Yet there are other "black rooms", whose existence cannot be revealed because they are not hidden--they are the "dark places" hidden in plain sight, from which we avert our eyes out of habit or despair.

In Florida, a young man was sent to boot camp for stealing his grandmother's car, then beaten to death for talking back to his jailers. The ensuing scandal has given everyone from Jeb Bush to the county medical examiner a stage on which to do their utmost to come across as depraved, racist monsters. Bush spoke against closing the boot camps since they have "yielded a good result". And Bay county medical examiner Charles Siebert, who initially found that the young man had died, not from being beaten and suffocated, but from sickle cell anemia, said he was "appalled". Not appalled, mind you, at the senseless death of a 14-year-old boy, but at the "baseless and mean-spirited accusations from special interest groups" who impugned and embarassed him by questioning his nonsensical medical verdict.

Young Martin Lee Anderson was evidently not the first person to be beaten at one of these boot camps. It was only his accidental death which forced the "black room" of the boot camps into the light; had he merely been maimed as intended, the routine physical brutalization of young black men by the state of Florida might have continued unchecked, indefinitely.

Meanwhile, something completely different, only not: the Indonesian army moved to quell riots by taking control of a provincial capital in Papua. The "riots" are in fact protests, directed against an American mining company, Freeport McMoran. In so many ways it is a typical story, of corrupt governments in the global South acting as enforcers for American capital. The sort of open class violence that is tolerated in the periphery would be outlandish and unacceptable in the core--except, as we saw in the previous case, when the violence is directed at the most oppressed "internal colonies" within the homeland.

Among the more despicable specifics of the situation in Indonesia is the following:

The senior Papuan at Freeport, Thom Beanal, who is a leader of one of Papua's biggest tribal groups, the Amungme, and a director of the Indonesian unit of Freeport, said the company was concerned about maintaining its daily operations in the current atmosphere.

Mr. Beanal said in a telephone interview from his home in Timika, near the mine, that he advised Freeport this week that to reduce hostilities, the company needed to deal more effectively with the more than 700,000 tons of mine waste that is generated every day.

Much of it hurtles directly down the Aghawagon River, and protests began last month when villagers were told by the security forces that they could no longer pan in the waste for scraps of gold. "I suggested they put the waste in a pipe and put it far away," Mr. Beanal said.

Environmentalists and some mining engineers have made similar suggestions, but the company has rejected them, saying they would be too expensive to carry out.

It is hard to know what is more appalling in these four paragraphs. Is it the abject figure of Mr. Beanal, attempting an impossible reconciliation between loyalty to his people, and loyalty to his company? Is it the casual reference to the company's profligate desecration of the local environment? Or is it that, after insisting that it has no choice but to deluge the local residents with toxic waste, Freeport McMoran now reproaches them for having the temerity to steal scraps of gold from the company's proprietary sludge?

Faced with such scenarios, those of political good will often throw our hands up in despair, helpless in the face of what seem to be horrors without end. And this is not only a reflex of rationalization and denial; our powerless to restrain our government or "our" capitalists is in many ways real. But I fear that those generations which follow us, if any, will not judge us kindly for our "black rooms".