Peter Frase

"The Disposition Matrix" sounds like a dystopian science fiction novel. And indeed it is, but unfortunately it's being written by the American counter-terrorism bureaucracy, and rolled out as the blueprint for a future of state-sanctioned death squads.

The Washington Post [prints a riveting chapter](http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/plan-for-hunting-terrorists-signals-us-intends-to-keep-adding-names-to-kill-lists/2012/10/23/4789b2ae-18b3-11e2-a55c-39408fbe6a4b_story.html) of this story, a sequel to Obama's notorious "kill list". We discover the existence of a "next generation targeting list" (the aforementioned matrix), a spreadsheet of doom which will be used to keep track of all the undesirables now targeted for elimination by the CIA.

The story expertly combines bureaucratic tedium with horrific violence, and it is full of bizarre and terrifying lines. "The database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the 'disposition' of suspects beyond the reach of American drones." Drone assasination is now the *first* resort of the state.

***

"'We can’t possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us,' a senior administration official said. 'It’s a necessary part of what we do.'" Killing is ineffectual, which is why killing must remain our business forever. "Mitt Romney made it clear that he would continue the drone campaign. 'We can’t kill our way out of this,' he said, but added later that Obama was 'right to up the usage' of drone strikes and that he would do the same." We can't kill our way out of this, so we must keep killing. [You must go on. You can't go on. You'll go on](http://www.samuel-beckett.net/unnamable.html).

"'We had a disposition problem,' said a former U.S. counterterrorism official involved in developing the matrix." The problem was that there remained some people that the U.S. government was unable to kill.

Once, a man was captured off the coast of Yemen. "'Warsame was a classic case of "What are we going to do with him?" ' the former counterterrorism official said. In such cases, the matrix lays out plans." Perhaps we require ["camps . . . used for 'suspects' whose offenses could not be proved and who could not be sentenced by ordinary process of law."](http://www.peterfrase.com/2006/02/the-state-and-the-stateless/)

"The proposal, which would need White House approval, reflects the [CIA]'s transformation into a paramilitary force, and makes clear that it does not intend to dismantle its drone program and return to its pre-Sept. 11 focus on gathering intelligence." This will be very different from the [Tonton Macoutes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonton_Macoute). There will be no rustic straw hats and denim shirts this time.

"The matrix was developed by the NCTC, under former director Michael Leiter, to augment those organizations’ separate but overlapping kill lists, officials said." This is typical of the bloated, inefficient government bureaucracy. One day they'll think to outsource the machinery of death entirely.

"'The problem with the drone is it’s like your lawn mower,' said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and Obama counterterrorism adviser. 'You’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back.'" You kill them and kill them, but they just keep growing back. After a time, "Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it."

"The approach also applies to the development of criteria for 'signature strikes,' which allow the CIA and JSOC to hit targets based on patterns of activity . . . even when the identities of those who would be killed is unclear." Like Google's search algorithm, the characteristics that will make you deserving of government assasination are obscure.

"For an administration that is the first to embrace targeted killing on a wide scale, officials seem confident that they have devised an approach that is so bureaucratically, legally and morally sound that future administrations will follow suit." Barack Obama truly deserved his Nobel peace prize after all; he inaugurated the most moral campaign of wide scale killing in history.

"The number of targets on the lists isn’t fixed, officials said, but fluctuates based on adjustments to criteria. Officials defended the arrangement even while acknowledging an erosion in the caliber of operatives placed in the drones' cross hairs." Targeted killing used to be glamorous and sophisticated, but these days it's a bore. All the good targets are already dead.

"A senior aide to Panetta disputed this account, and said Panetta mentioned the shrinking target list during his trip to Islamabad but didn't raise the prospect that drone strikes would end. Two former U.S. officials said the White House told Panetta to avoid even hinting at commitments the United States was not prepared to keep." If we stop the killing, the terrorists will have won. If we say that we will stop the killing in the future, the terrorists will have won. If we hint that we might commit to stopping the killing in the future, the terrorists will have won.

***

It comes back, as it always does for me, to ["Four Futures"](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/). The fourth chapter of that essay is titled "Exterminism", and it suggests the following:

> Many of the rich . . . have resigned themselves to barricading themselves into their fortresses, to be protected by unmanned drones and private military contractors. Guard labor . . . reappears in an even more malevolent form, as a lucky few are employed as enforcers and protectors for the rich.

> But this too, is an unstable equilibrium, for the same basic reason that buying off the masses is. So long as the immiserated hordes exist, there is the danger that it may one day become impossible to hold them at bay. Once mass labor has been rendered superfluous, a final solution lurks: the genocidal war of the rich against the poor.

Until now, we have relied on the prison system to [warehouse the unemployed and unemployable](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/07/job-crisis-black-unemployment-rates), but there just seem to be more and more of them. How long until someone like Pete Peterson demands, in the name of fiscal responsibility, that we begin liquidating these stocks of unproductive bodies?

Fortunately, the disposition matrix has nothing to do with such fears. The targets of the lists are not surplus labor, after all, we are merely terrorists.

A month or two ago, Bhaskar Sunkara came to me with the idea that we could, on a short deadline, turn our long-running discussions about the future of progressive politics in the United States into a "[Piven-Cloward plan](http://www.thenation.com/article/weight-poor-strategy-end-poverty) for the 21st century" for the cover of *In These Times* magazine. This was, of course, an insane proposal, combining the intellectual hubris of a mid-20th century French philosopher and the slapdash work ethic of an undergraduate pulling an all nighter. But I've learned by now not to doubt Bhaskar's [crazy schemes](http://www.jacobinmag.com), so naturally I signed on.

You can read the resulting product [here](http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13998/the_welfare_state_of_america/#.UIVaggremjs.facebook), and Francis Fox Piven herself also weighs in with [an editorial](http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/14035/for_the_welfare_of_all) in the issue. I don't know whether we accomplished our grandiose aims, but I'm happy we at least made a case for something that's long been discussed on the left, and which doesn't get nearly enough attention: the need to shift responsibility for social policy from states and localities to the federal government.

In the essay, we make our case primarily on fiscal grounds, pointing out that the limited ability of sub-national governments to run deficits almost inevitably leads to a politics of austerity. But there's another aspect to this that we didn't really talk about, which is the regional structure of American politics. Reactionary approaches to the welfare state are particularly characteristic of the south, both its culture and its political economy. Federalizing social policy is therefore both an act of solidarity with the working class of that region, and a move toward completing the class project of the civil war.

As we note in the essay, Republicans---Romney and Ryan included---favor the inverse of our strategy, and advocate devolving social policy to the states. This has broadly negative consequences for the beneficiaries of such policies, but it has particularly bad implications for the residents of conservative states. Those states, as Jonathan Cohn explains [in *The New Republic*](http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/108185/blue-states-are-scandinavia-red-states-are-guatemala), are markedly stingier about social welfare spending. They also happen to be, by and large, the states with the most poor people. (This is, incidentally, what gives rise to "What's the Matter With Kansas"-style fallacies about poor people voting against their economic interests, due to the phenomenon of rich people living in poor states [being more strongly Republican](http://www.amazon.com/Red-State-Blue-Rich-Poor/dp/069113927X).)

This bifurcation of state-level social policy, which Cohn glosses as "Blue States are from Scandinavia, Red States are from Guatemala", also has a strongly regional pattern. Consider the following image, from the sidebar to Cohn's article:

The division between our local Scandinavias and Guatemalas tracks a very old north-south division in American politics, which is where the civil war comes in. Michael Lind recently [argued at Salon.com](http://www.salon.com/2012/10/10/slave_states_vs_free_states_2012/) that:

> The core of today’s Democratic Party consists of the states of New England and the Great Lakes/Mid-Atlantic region that were the heart of the Union effort during the Civil War. The core of today’s Republican Party consists of the states that seceded from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America.

Lind goes on to argue that:

> Notwithstanding slavery, segregation and today’s covert racism, the Southern system has always been based on economics, not race. Its rulers have always seen the comparative advantage of the South as arising from the South’s character as a low-wage, low-tax, low-regulation site in the U.S. and world economy. The Southern strategy of attracting foreign investment from New York, London and other centers of capital depends on having a local Southern workforce that is forced to work at low wages by the absence of bargaining power.

Centralizing welfare policy is therefore a way of avoiding a situation that pits the residents of the liberal states against an immiserated workforce in the south. This is an act of principled solidarity---a refusal to simply leave southern workers to deal with their conservative elites on their own---but also a pragmatic necessity. We may not yet be able to demand a global social democracy, but we can at least avoid an invidious race to the bottom with our fellow Americans.

Our essay concludes by envisioning the welfare state as a foundation for freedom:

> Freedom to give their children an education without rival. Freedom from poverty, hunger and homelessness. Freedom to grow into old age with pensions, Social Security, and affordable and accessible healthcare. Freedom to leave an exploitative work environment and find another job. Freedom to organize with fellow workers for redress.

The decommodification of labor that's entailed by egalitarian social policy is a partial emancipation from the [unfreedom of the workplace](http://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/01/let-it-bleed-libertarianism-and-the-workplace/). The stakes in this debate are therefore much higher than simply the existence of a "safety net" or a rudimentary social wage. It's about giving workers the confidence and the material security necessary to make bolder demands for social change.

You sometimes see Trotskyist sectarians [using the slogan](http://www.icl-fi.org/print/english/wv/980/civilwar.html) "Finish the Civil War! Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!" But before we get around to the revolution bit, just getting a robust national-level welfare state would in itself be a big step toward the completion of the emancipatory project.

In the debate between [Alex Gourevitch](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/10/two-hurricanes-2/) on one side, and [Chris Bertram](http://crookedtimber.org/2012/10/10/alex-gourevitch-on-environmentalism-some-pushback/) and *Jacobin* contributing editor [Max Ajl](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/10/climate-change-and-the-politics-of-responsibility/) on the other, I'd put myself more on Bertram and Ajl's side. Gourevitch's essay was a bit too long on caricatures of environmentalism, and too short on critiques of the particular way in which development operates in capitalism.

I do think, though, that Ajl's opening is a bit misleading as to the substance of his argument. He ridicules Gourevitch's call for "control and manipulation of nature" as "pure ideology", and insists that "ecological problems are not resolvable through endless technofixes". But the further control and manipulation of nature by means of technology is then precisely what he goes on to advocate. What separates the two positions is that while Gourevitch tends toward an uncritical conflation of "development" and "capitalist development", Ajl outlines an explicitly ecological (though not necessarily anti-capitalist) path of development, involving things like high-speed rail networks and alternative energy systems.

Ajl's other important point is to separate the defense of advanced technological society from the praise of large scale, centralized industrialization. As Bertram notes in his post, there is a sort of stagist theory of history implicit in Gourevitch's argument, in which poor countries must pass through the same kind of industrial development that characterized the imperial metropoles in the twentieth century. In fact, it is possible for poor regions to skip over some parts of the earlier history of industrialization entirely. Hence we see countries skipping the buildout of land line telephones in favor of cellular, and the same may happen with [distributed solar power generation](http://gigaom.com/cleantech/why-power-generation-will-mirror-cell-phones-in-developing-nations/).

Thus, while the specific criticisms Gourevitch makes (on Palestinian bicycle generators and the California energy crisis) are mostly on target, he is too quick to dismiss "federated, small-scale self-sufficient production communities" entirely. As Ajl notes, a red-green vision may reject retreating into some pre-industrial past, but it is also about something more than just generalizing current rich country ways of life to the whole world.

I'm jumping into all this because it connects to my [last post](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/10/the-3-d-printed-future-and-its-enemies/) on 3-D printers and related small-scale fabrication technologies.* One of the appealing things about these technologies is that, as Juliet Schor notes in [this post](http://www.julietschor.org/2010/08/new-work-centers-and-htsp/), they have the potential to make high-productivity but small scale production much more viable. This implies that an increasingly productive economy need not be identical with an increasingly centralized and hierarchical one. Which is not to say that big and complex infrastructural systems can be done away with entirely, only that they can be a less important part of our material culture. It may turn out that the industrial age was actually the apex of economic "bigness", and that the post-industrial future will be both more decentralized and richer, a manifestation of what Ursula Leguin [calls](http://www.sfsite.com/03a/ul123.htm) a "genuinely mature society" that employs advanced technology but has transcended the capitalist imperative to constantly grow and expand.

This would be very fortunate, and not only for reasons of ecological sustainability. Ashwin Parameswaran, in his many posts at [Macroeconomic Resilience](http://www.macroresilience.com/), has discussed the way in which contemporary capitalism is the endpoint of the high-modernist "control revolution". In [his view](http://www.macroresilience.com/2012/02/21/the-control-revolution-and-its-discontents-the-uncanny-valley/), post-Fordism is merely a completion of the Fordist project of "systematising each element of the industrial process", and "introducing order and legibility into a fundamentally opaque environment via a process that reduces human involvement and discretion by replacing intuitive judgments with rules and algorithms." The attempt to stabilize the incredibly complex systems of a modern macro-economy then leads, he says, to a situation in which the rules and feedback loops are so complex that they render "the system fundamentally illegible to the human operator". According to this analysis, our current version of "too big to fail" crony capitalism actually has much in common with the Soviet project, which ultimately failed "due to its too successful adherence and implementation of the high-modernist ideal."

In recent times, decentralization of the economy has been rhetorically associated with the libertarian right (even if, as Parameswaran argues, their project was actually a continuation of the control revolution). There is no reason, however, for the Left to respond by fetishizing bigness, which would be no better an answer than the the fetish for smallness that afflicts some of the environmentalists Gourevitch criticizes.

* *As an aside, I should clarify that some of what I discussed in that post was speculative, and not meant to describe the current state of these technologies. In particular, I'm well aware that it's not possible to manufacture anthrax (or, to be scientifically precise, the Bacillus anthracis bacterium) in one's home. But there's no reason to believe such things won't eventually be possible.*

Lately, it seems like everyone is [talking about 3-D printers](http://www.wired.com/design/2012/09/how-makerbots-replicator2-will-launch-era-of-desktop-manufacturing/all/). Until recently, these devices have been seen either as novelties or as expensive pieces of equipment suited only for industrial use. Now, however, they are quickly becoming affordable to individuals, and capable of producing a wider range of practical items. Just as the computer became a vector for pervasive file-sharing as soon as cheap PCs and internet connections were widespread, we may soon find ourselves living in a world where cheap 3-D printers allow the dissemination of designs for physical objects through the Internet.

The line between science fiction and reality is moving rapidly. Scroll through [these links](http://boingboing.net/tag/3d-printing) at BoingBoing and you'll see 3-D printers churning out everything from guitars to dolls to keys to a prosthetic beak for a bald eagle.

Ensconced in the home, the 3-D printer is a [step toward](http://store.makerbot.com/replicator-404.html) the [replicator](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicator_(Star_Trek)): a machine that can instantly produce any object with no input of human labor. Technologies like this are central to the vision of a post-scarcity society that I outlined in ["Four Futures"](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/). It's a future that could be glorious or terrible, depending on the outcome of the coming political struggles over the adoption of these new technologies. As the title of a [report](http://www.publicknowledge.org/it-will-be-awesome-if-they-dont-screw-it-up) from Public Knowledge puts it, "It will be awesome if they don't screw it up."

Battles over 3-D printing will be fought on two fronts, and two mechanisms of power are likely to be mobilized by the rentier elites who are threatened by these technologies: intellectual property law and the war on terror.

***

I wrote earlier this year (at [Jacobin](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/01/the-google-vanguard/), the [New Inquiry](http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/phantom-tollbooths/), and [Al Jazeera](http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/03/20123121415465844.html)), about the fight over laws like the Stop Online Piracy Act, which would have given the state broad and ambiguous powers to monitor and persecute alleged copyright infringers. The intellectual property lobby is currently in retreat on this front, but the general problem of intellectual property stifling progress has not abated. Aaron Swartz, who was the victim of one of the [more ludicrous](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/07/artificial-scarcity-watch-jstor-edition/) recent piracy busts, is still facing [multiple felony counts](http://crookedtimber.org/2012/09/19/new-charges-against-aaron-swartz/). Apple and Google, meanwhile, now spend [more money on patent purchases and lawsuits](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/patent-wars-among-tech-giants-can-stifle-competition.html) than they do on research and development. And the next front in the war over IP is likely to [center on 3-D printing](http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/26/the-next-battle-for-internet-freedom-could-be-over-3d-printing/).

Like the computer, the 3-D printer is a tool that can rapidly dis-intermediate a production process. Computers allowed people to turn a downloaded digital file into music or movies playing in their home, without the intermediary steps of manufacturing CDs or DVDs and distributing them to record stores. Likewise, a 3-D printer could allow you to turn a digital blueprint (such as a CAD file) into an object, without the intermediate step of manufacturing the object in a factory and shipping it to a store or warehouse. While 3-D printers aren't going to suddenly make all of large-scale industrial capitalism obsolete, they will surely have some very disruptive effects.

The people who were affected by the previous stage of the file-sharing explosion were cultural producers (like musicians) who create new works, and the middlemen (like record companies) who made money selling physical copies of those works. These two groups have interests that are aligned at first, but are ultimately quite different. Creators find their traditional sources of income undermined, and thus face the choice of allying with the middlemen to shore up the existing regime, or else attempting to forge alternative ways of paying the people who create culture and information. But while the creators remain necessary, a lot of the middlemen are being made functionally obsolete. Their only hope is to maintain artificial monopolies through the draconian enforcement of intellectual property, and to win public support by presenting themselves as the defenders of deserving artists and creators.

This same dynamic will arise with 3D printing. Now, however, it is industrial designers who will be cast into the role of the artists and writers, while certain industrial manufacturers will be threatened with death by dis-intermediation. Designers will still be needed to create the patterns that are then fed into 3D printers, while the factories will be superfluous. Imagine a world in which you could download the blueprints for an iPhone 5, and print one out at home. Suddenly, Foxconn and the Apple Store are out of the picture---the only indispensable part of the Apple infrastructure is industrial designers like [Jonny Ive](http://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/online/jonathan-ive-on-apple/jonathan-ives-biography), who are responsible for the putting together the sleek and attractive design of the device. The Public Knowledge report cited above predicts that "as 3D printing makes it possible to recreate physical objects, manufacturers and designers of such objects will increasingly demand 'copyright' protection for their functional objects."

In the last issue of *Jacobin*, Colin McSwiggen [admonished designers](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/designing-culture/) to pay attention to the fact that they "make alienated labor possible". The idea of "design" as separate from production is tied to the rise of large scale capitalist manufacturing, when skilled craftspeople were replaced with factory workers repetitively churning out copies from an original pattern. But the order McSwiggen critiques is one which will be undermined by the dissemination of micro-fabrication technology.

3-D printing isn't going to restore the old craft order, in which design and production are united in a single individual or workshop. What it will do instead is make some designers more like musicians, struggling to figure out how to react to consumers who are trading, remixing, and printing their creations all over the place. At the same time, it will blur the line between creation, production, and consumption, as amateurs delve into creating and repurposing design. Like musicians, professional designers will have to decide whether to [scold their customers](http://www.spinner.com/2012/06/19/cracker-david-lowery-npr-illegal-downloading/) and join industrial interests in fighting for strong copyright protections on designs, or whether to look for [new ways of getting paid](http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/the-artistic-freedom-voucher-internet-age-alternative-to-copyrights/) and new ways of connecting with their fans.

***

The dark side of being able to print any physical object is that other people can print any physical object. It's all well and good when people are just making clothes or auto parts, but recently there have been stories about more unsettling possibilities, like 3-D printed guns. The first of these was ultimately [over-hyped](http://www.zdnet.com/no-you-cant-download-a-gun-from-the-internet-7000002108/), but did show that the day was at least approaching when home-printed firearms would be a reality. Then, there came a story about a 3-D printer company [revoking its lease and demanding its device back](http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/10/3d-gun-blocked/) after it got wind of a collective that intended to make and test a 3-D printed weapon.

This story is significant because it indicates a line of attack that will be used to restrict access to 3-D printing technologies in general. I have no particular love for the gun-enthusiast crowd. Those leftists who think access to guns is somehow useful to revolutionaries are living in the past and underestimate the physical power of the modern state, and having your own gun is more likely to lead to you getting shot with it than anything else. But guns, and other dangerous objects, will surely be used as the pretext for a much wider crackdown on the free circulation of designs and 3-D printing technology.

When the copyright cartels were still only trying to control the circulation of immaterial goods like music and software, they faced the problem that it was hard to convince people that file sharing was really hurting anyone. Notwithstanding a few lame attempts to [link piracy to terrorism](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080328/122324685.shtml), the best they could do was point to the potential loss of income for some artists, and the possibility that there would be less creative work at some point in the future. These same arguments will no doubt be rolled out again, but they will be much more powerful when linked to fearmongering about DIY-printed machine guns and anthrax.

This is where the [intensification of the surveillance state](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1680390), throughout the Bush and Obama administrations and under the rubric of the "war on terror", becomes important. The post-9/11 security state has gradually rendered itself permanent and disconnected itself from its original justification. We will be told that our purchases and downloads must all be monitored in order to prevent evildoers from printing arsenals in their living rooms, and it will just so happen that this same authoritarian apparatus will be used to enforce copyright claims as well. Meanwhile, the military will of course proceed to use the new technologies to [facilitate their pointless wars](http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/10/printers/). Readers who are interested in a preview of this dystopia of outlaw fabricators trying to outrun the police are referred to Charles Stross's novel, [*Rule 34*](http://www.amazon.com/Rule-34-Charles-Stross/dp/B004Y3I6XW/charlieswebsi-20).

There really *are* dangers in the strange new world of 3-D printing. I'm as uneasy as anyone would be about unbalanced loners printing anthrax in their bedrooms. But we have seen all too well that the repressive state apparatus that promises to keep us safe from terror mostly manages to [roll up a bunch of inept patsies](http://www.propublica.org/article/fact-check-how-the-nypd-overstated-its-counterterrorism-record) while remaining unable or unwilling to stop a [deranged massacre](http://www.salon.com/2012/10/01/aurora_survivor_stars_in_gun_control_ad/) from going down now and then.

Terrorism, like drugs before it, is only a pretext for ratcheting up a repressive apparatus that will be used for other purposes. Today, we are familiar with the statistics [showing that](http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/10/02/what_id_like_to_ask_obama_and_romney) terrorism has killed 32 Americans per year since 9/11, while gun violence has killed 30,000. Soon enough we will be able to add 3-D printers to the list of phantom menaces that are trotted out to justify wiretaps, raids, and indefinite detentions.

***

William Gibson famously said that the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. In the future, expect the copyright cartels and the national security state to team up to bring you a new announcement: the future is here, but you're not allowed to have it.

*Update, 2 October 2012: Corrected a mistake in the data on the charitable contributions tax deduction. An earlier version referred to the wrong table from the Tax Policy Center.*

The American plutocracy's habit of portraying itself as an oppressed minority has become a source of ongoing amusement, and Chrystia Freeland has the latest chapter of this comedy [in the *New Yorker*](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/08/121008fa_fact_freeland?currentPage=all). She presents a series of quotations and anecdotes that will be barf-inducing to anyone who hasn't had their head pickled in Ayn Rand aphorisms. I particularly enjoyed the guy who compared Barack Obama's treatment of the rich to the oppression of black Americans, and the guy who compared Wall Street supporters of the President to battered wives.

But the most illuminating and distinctive part of the essay is the way it highlights this curious argument about the "self-taxation" of the rich:

> __Many billionaires have come to view charity as privatized taxation, paid at a level they determine, and to organizations they choose. "All things being equal, you’d rather have control of the money than the government," Cooperman said.__ “Even if you’re giving it away, you’d rather give it away the way you want to give it away rather than the way the government gives it away." Cooperman and his wife focus their giving on Jewish issues, education, and their local community in New Jersey, and he is also setting up a foundation that will allow his children and grandchildren to support their own chosen causes after he dies.

> Foster Friess, a retired mutual-fund investor from Wyoming who was the backer of the main Super pac supporting the Republican primary candidate Rick Santorum, expounded on this view in a video interview in February. __"People don’t realize how wealthy people self-tax," he said. "If you have a certain cause, an art museum or a symphony, and you want to support it, it would be nice if you had the choice."__

It would, indeed, be nice if you had the choice. Obviously charitable donation is only equivalent to tax-funded government spending if you are indifferent to democratic accountability. So it's not surprising to hear this kind of rhetoric out of the ultra-rich, who tend to be committed to an [ideology of meritocracy](http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=613) that is fundamentally hostile to democracy. The less cautious apologists, like [Bryan Caplan](http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/11/06/bryan-caplan/the-myth-of-the-rational-voter/), will straightforwardly propose "relying less on democracy and more on private choice and free markets." Left unsaid is that "choice" in the private market consists mostly of the [choices of the people with the most money](http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/04/hoisted-from-the-archives-a-non-socratic-dialogue-on-social-welfare-functions.html).

This is why a class compromise over the welfare state is so elusive. It doesn't matter whether the rich agree that they benefited from their society in the "you didn't build that" sense, nor does it matter whether higher taxes on the rich and more spending on social programs and jobs will ultimately promote more economic growth. This is about *power*. Even those who piously declare their desire to "give back" to society insist on doing so only on their own terms.

Traditionally, the socialist movement has emphasized the need to subject the investment decisions of capitalists to democratic accountability, but it's just as important to talk about democratic control over social welfare spending. The choice we face is not really whether there will be a social safety net, the struggle is over whether we will have a democratic welfare state or a kind of private welfare state run according to the whims of rich philanthropists. The latter, even in the improbable event that it could replace public spending in terms of overall dollars, would be both undesirable as a matter of democratic principle, and a lot less likely to consist of the kind of universal, unconditional income support that is most [consistent with individual freedom](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/03/against-means-testing/).

A more specific policy point about this issue of "self-taxing" is that it highlights what an obscenity the tax deduction for charitable donations is. The Joint Committee On Taxation [reports](https://www.jct.gov/publications.html?func=startdown&id=4386) that this deduction (including both individual and corporate donations) cost the federal government $41.3 billion in 2012, and the cost is projected to rise to $54.7 billion by 2015. Data from the Tax Policy Center [shows](http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?DocID=3135&topic2ID=60&topic3ID=95&DocTypeID=2) that over 95 percent of this benefit goes to the to 40 percent of the income distribution, and over a third of it goes to the top 1 percent. This data also shows that repealing the deduction would be equivalent to a 0.5 percent tax rate increase on the top 20 percent, and a 1 percent rate hike on the ultra-rich top 0.1 percent.

It's bad enough that this deduction encourages the transfer of social welfare functions from the state to the unaccountable non-profit sector. But a lot of "charitable" spending is of questionable social value anyway. Leon Cooperman, described in Friedland's article as the "pope" of the whiny billionaire movement, recently gave $25 million to the Columbia Business School, which means that the government is subsidizing his efforts to help the reproduction of the capitalist managerial class. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, one of the largest charitable foundations in the country, is a [major promoter](http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/investigations/corporateaccountability/1580/selling_schools_out/) of the neoliberal "education reform" movement that played a major role in the battle between Rahm Emanuel and the Chicago Teachers Union. And large chunks of charitable donations (including Mitt Romney's) go to churches, which are more important as conservative ideological and political actors than they
are as sources of aid.

Leon Cooperman is both a signatory to the Warren Buffett/Bill Gates "Giving Pledge", which commits him to giving the majority of his assets to philanthropic causes, and a passionate supporter of Mitt Romney. There is no contradiction there. Cooperman and Romney are both committed to the same principle: there's nothing wrong with helping the needy, as long as only rich people have the right to decide when, whether, and how it gets done.

You can look at people like Gates and Cooperman as the alternative to the decaying, narrowly rapacious capitalist class I described in [this post](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/08/the-decay-of-the-capitalist-class/). They aren't altruists or class traitors, they're just demonstrating their enlightened self interest as a ruling class, and a recognition that they need to dedicate some resources to collective projects that help perpetuate the society they dominate. But they're still the class enemy, and they'll remind you of that as soon as their power is seriously threatened.

[A note for whoever still comes around these parts: I now have my own personal [blog on the *Jacobin* site](http://jacobinmag.com/category/st-monday/), where I posted the introduction below. For the time being, I intend to keep cross-posting everything here, and I may also use this space for writings that get censored by our power-mad publisherdon't quite fit the parameters of the *Jacobin* blog.]

As you can see, things have been prettied up quite a bit around here, as Remeike Forbes and Daniel Patterson have stepped up their game once again with a great site redesign.

As part of that revamping, I now have my very own blog, which I guess means I actually have to start blogging again. I'll be back soon enough with my usual ramblings about work, [robots](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/business/new-wave-of-adept-robots-is-changing-global-industry.html), laziness, [out-of-control intellectual property laws](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/08/28/apple_v_samsung_the_two_models_of_innovation_that_explain_the_case.html), and [just giving people money](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/08/08/obama-doesnt-want-to-just-write-welfare-recipients-checks-but-what-if-we-did/), but in the meantime I thought I'd introduce the blog's title.

"Saint Monday" is, naturally, a reference to my ongoing preoccupation with transcending the empty fetish of the work ethic and opening up time for freedom, life and leisure. It refers to a joke from the early days of capitalism, which is recounted by Witold Rybczynski in [this essay](http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/91aug/rybczynski-p1.htm) (and also in his wonderful book of the same name):

> Eighteenth-century workers had, as Hugh Cunningham puts it in *Leisure in the Industrial Revolution*, "a high preference for leisure, and for long periods of it." This preference was hardly something new. What was new was the ability, in prosperous Georgian England, of so many people to indulge it. For the first time in centuries many workers earned more than survival wages. Now they had choices: they could buy goods or leisure. They could work more and earn more, or they could forgo the extra wages and enjoy more free time instead. Most chose the latter course. This was especially true for the highly paid skilled workers, who had the greatest degree of economic freedom, but even general laborers, who were employed at day rates, had a choice in the matter. Many of these worked intensively, sometimes for much more than the customary ten hours a day, and then quit to enjoy themselves until their money ran out.

> It was not unusual for sporting events, fairs, and other celebrations to last several days. Since Sunday was always an official holiday, usually the days following were added on. This produced a regular custom of staying away from work on Monday, frequently doing so also on Tuesday, and then working long hours at the end of the week to catch up. Among some trades the Monday holiday achieved what amounted to an official status. Weavers and miners, for example, regularly took a holiday on the Monday after payday—which occurred weekly, on Friday or Saturday. This practice became so common that it was called "keeping Saint Monday."

> Saint Monday may have started as an individual preference for staying away from work—whether to relax, to recover from drunkenness, or both—but its popularity during the 1850s and 1860s was ensured by the enterprise of the leisure industry. During that period sporting events, such as horse races and cricket matches, often took place on Mondays, since their organizers knew that many working-class customers would be prepared to take the day off. And since many public events were prohibited on the Sabbath, Monday became the chief occasion for secular recreations. Attendance at botanical gardens and museums soared on Monday, which was also the day that ordinary people went to the theater and the dance hall, and the day that workingmen's social clubs held their weekly meetings.

Or, for a more contemporary take on the issue, there's [this](http://xkcd.com/1073/):

The just-released [new issue](http://jacobinmag.com/issue/emancipation/) of *Jacobin* has several articles that speak to these themes, including James Livingston's [celebration of "postbourgeois" consumer culture](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/how-the-left-has-won/) and---for subscribers only!---Chris Maisano's insistence on full employment as the key to liberation from labor and Audrea Lim's reflections on the importance of ecstatic spectacle.

There's plenty of other great stuff in the issue as well, of course. Check out [Melissa Gira Grant on sex work](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/happy-hookers/), [Mike Beggs on David Graeber](), [Seth Ackerman](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/american-jacobins/) and [James Oakes](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/the-war-of-northern-aggression/) on the Civil War, [Eli Friedman on China](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/china-in-revolt/) and plenty more besides.

I've argued on various occasions that in the quest for full employment, we ought to be [less obsessed with maximizing job creation](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/against-jobs-for-full-employment/) and more concerned with [making it easier and better to not be employed](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/08/on-the-productivity-of-unemployment/).

The most persuasive argument against this view is that unemployment is really bad for people, and they don't like it, and therefore it's very important to minimize its incidence. [This analysis](http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/7943) at VoxEU by three European economists initially seems like it's going to validate that perspective. They write that while "people adapt surprisingly well to changes in their lives", the unhappiness produced by unemployment is an exception: "the life satisfaction of the unemployed does not restore itself even after having been unemployed for a long time."

However, the authors go on to ask *why* the unemployed are so persistently unhappy, and in doing so they clarify an ambiguity that always arises when the effects of unemployment are discussed. Is unemployment bad for people because the experience of working is good for them, or because unemployment carries a powerful social stigma? (Leaving aside, of course, the most obvious reason for the unpleasantness of being jobless---being broke.)

The answer to this question has important political implications. If work is inherently life-improving, then job-creation schemes---even of the useless [hole-digging](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/stop-digging-the-case-against-jobs/) variety---are more desirable than simply handing money to the unemployed, which would risk leaving people isolated, dissolute, and cut off from meaningful activity. If, however, the negative impacts of unemployment are primarily due to social stigma, then it would be more helpful to combat the ideology that equates working for wages with contributing to society.

The VoxEU column attempts to pry apart these two views about work using survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. The clever approach is to look at the change in self-reported life satisfaction among people who move from being unemployed to being retired. The authors observe that "[e]ntering retirement brings about a change in the social category, but does not change anything else in the lives of the long-term unemployed." Yet they find that the shift from being unemployed to being retired brings about immediate and dramatic increases in happiness, even when controlling for other factors:

> The average life satisfaction of a long-term unemployed male living in a partnership and with average personal characteristics (e.g. state of health and income) rises by approximately 0.3 points on a life satisfaction scale from 0 to 10. If he was actively looking for a job before retiring, his average life satisfaction even rises by nearly 0.7 points, and even more so if he experienced several unemployment spells in the past. Women who became unemployed for the first time shortly before retiring hardly benefit at all from retiring. However, if they had been unemployed several times during their life, their life satisfaction also rises considerably when they retire, by as far as 0.9 points if they were actively looking for work prior to retiring.

> A comparison may help appreciate this observed rise in life satisfaction. The experience of a marriage causes a mere 0.2 point increase in average life satisfaction (see Lucas et al 2003). This comparison shows __how strongly long-term unemployed people benefit from the change of their social category while retiring and the associated relief from not having to meet the social norm of being employed anymore.__ This underlines the importance of identity for individual wellbeing.

The unemployed become happier, it turns out, as soon as they stop thinking of themselves as workers. This result suggests that the harm caused by unemployment has a lot to do with the way we, as a society, regard the unemployed. We treat paying work as a sure mark of a person's worth, even though this conviction has [no coherent rationale](http://jacobinmag.com/winter-2011/hipsters-food-stamps-and-the-politics-of-resentment/).

An immediate political application of this finding is as a rebuke to those who like to call for raising the retirement age for Social Security in the United States. With unemployment still high, and older workers in particular [struggling to find jobs](http://www.epi.org/blog/pew-long-term-unemployed/), the easiest way to immediately raise the well-being of Americans would be to *lower* the retirement age.

For those of us who write about politics and the economy, there is a bigger lesson. Liberals and even leftists constantly repeat the mantra that unemployment is bad for people, and therefore job creation is an urgent necessity. I've done it myself at times. But in glibly repeating this formula, we unwittingly help to reinforce the stigma of unemployment. My anti-work themed writings, like my recent *Jacobin* essay on [the politics of getting a life](http://jacobinmag.com/spring-2012/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/), are my tiny attempt to contest this picture of the world.

I got a touching email from a reader the other day, thanking me for that essay, and for reinforcing his conviction that the rejection of work is more than just childish or lazy. But, he said, his one attempt to share the article with a normally open minded friend resulted in scorn and dismissal, leaving him "afraid to broach the subject with anyone else".

The stigmatization of the unemployed feeds that fear, and the fear reinforces the stigma. In the short term, job creation may be a necessary response to our immediate crisis. But the longer term project is to disconnect waged work from its associations with material well-being *and* with social prestige. With respect to the material side, I'll just keep quoting André Gorz: "the distribution of means of payment must correspond to the volume of wealth socially produced and not to the volume of work performed." But studying the unhappiness of the unemployed demonstrates that it's not only the means of payment that need to be redistributed, but the sources of social esteem as well. This is why post-work politics is simultaneously a demand for policies like the [Basic Income](http://www.usbig.net/index.php) and an ideological campaign against the hegemony of the work ethic.

It's far to soon to say what the elections in France and Greece mean for the future of austerity in Europe. François Hollande may turn out to be a meek Sarkozy-lite---or he may be pushed in that direction by the German government, the bond markets, and the European Central Bank. Greece, meanwhile, is still in a state of flux, although the rise of the radical-left Syriza is [encouraging](http://www.leninology.com/2012/05/syriza.html) (even as the sectarianism of the Greek Communist Party is dispiriting.) Greece may be looking at another round of elections, and the rise in support for the fascist Golden Dawn party suggests that things could get dangerous if the left isn't able to come together in coalition. In any case, I'm certainly not the one to make expert pronouncements on all this, and I'd direct you instead to my *Jacobin* comrade [Seth Ackerman](http://inthesetimes.com/uprising/entry/13165/europe_in_revolt_an_interview_with_seth_ackerman/).

I hope Hollande is right, and "austerity can no longer be the only option". Whatever else it ultimately achieves, the resurgence of the European electoral Left has provoked a defensive response from the propagandists of the austerity faction, who have raced to denounce the foolish notion that our problems can be solved in any way other than by sadistically punishing ordinary people while further enriching the financial elite. The dumbed-down mass market version of this comes, naturally, from [David Brooks](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/08/opinion/brooks-the-structural-revolution.html):

> The recession grew out of and exposed long-term flaws in the economy. Fixing these structural problems should be the order of the day, not papering over them with more debt.

> There are several overlapping structural problems. First, there are those surrounding globalization and technological change. Hyperefficient globalized companies need fewer workers. As a result, unemployment rises, superstar salaries surge while lower-skilled wages stagnate, the middle gets hollowed out and inequality grows.

> Then there are the structural issues surrounding the decline in human capital. The United States, once the world's educational leader, is falling back in the pack. Unemployment is high, but companies still have trouble finding skilled workers.

Singing from the same hymnal, but for the [highbrow crowd](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/05/raghu-rajan-polarizes-with-his-essay.html), we have [Raghuram Rajan](http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/raghuram.rajan/research/papers/FA%20May%202012.pdf):

> With the aid of technology and capital, one skilled worker can displace many unskilled workers. . . .

> Not all low-skilled jobs have disappeared. Nonroutine, low-paying service jobs that are hard to automate or outsource, such as taxi driving, hairdressing, or gardening, remain plentiful. So the U.S. work force has bifurcated into low-paying professions that require few skills and high-paying ones that call for creativity and credentials. Comfortable, routine jobs that require moderate skills and offer good benefits have disappeared, and the laid-off workers have had to either upgrade their skills or take lower-paying service jobs.

> Unfortunately, for various reasons---inadequate early schooling, dysfunctional families and communities, the high cost of university education---far too many Americans have not gotten the education or skills they need. Others have spent too much time in shrinking industries, such as auto manufacturing, instead of acquiring skills in growing sectors, such as medical technology.

There is an odd dissonance in these accounts, however, one that's more obvious in Rajan's version than in Brooks'. First, we are told that the stagnation of wages and the disappearance of jobs is an unchangeable structural fact: globalization and technology dictate that the demand for labor will be split between a handful of high-skill, "superstar" jobs and a mass of menial, poverty-wage service work. Yet we are also told that we face a deficit of "human capital", implying that adequate education is all that anyone needs to escape the trap of unemployment or low wages.

There is an odd sort of [Lake Wobegonism](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon) in this prescription, in which everyone gets to be above average in the labor market. This is, perhaps, a style of argument well-suited to appeal to Americans, who [believe they can all become millionaires](http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2011/09/19/what-are-your-chances-of-becoming-a-millionaire/) and [never get sick](http://andrewgelman.com/2012/04/clueless-americans-think-theyll-never-get-sick/). But we are given no reason to suppose that an investment in education will change the sort of labor demanded by capitalist enterprises. Just because everyone is qualified for high-skill "superstar" positions doesn't mean that we can all inhabit those positions; someone still has to fill all those "low-paying service jobs that are hard to automate or outsource". *Ceteris paribus*, more education is just a recipe for more [PhDs on food stamps](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/07/food-stamps-phd-recipients-2007-2010_n_1495353.html). It's also the setup for another round of zero-sum, beggar-thy-neighbor neoliberalism, in which countries, localities and social groups fight to take the good jobs for themselves while foisting the bad jobs off on somebody else.

A simple solution to this problem, of course, would be to compensate those forced into the bad jobs by transferring lots of money from the "superstars" to the low-waged. But I suspect that suggestion would provoke Brooks or Rajan to go all [Edward Conard](http://prospect.org/article/endless-arrogance-wall-street) on us.

Philosophically, the Brooks and Rajan essays are interesting for the way they awkwardly combine an old-fashioned style of conservatism (the poor will always be with us, accept your lot) with a more modern form of inclusive neoliberalism (accept deregulation, and you too can be rich!) By itself, the first style of argument is simply intolerable to modern sensibilities, but the crisis has rendered the second increasingly implausible. Together, however, the two arguments add up to nonsense.

The simplest response is that self-styled critics of "structural" economic problems are not [being structural *enough*](http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-parallel-universe). The existence of a hyper-polarized wage structure is not a fact of nature but is itself a structural problem, and one that has been facilitated by specific policy choices. What we need is not "human capital" but a shift away from [protecting rentiers](http://jacobinmag.com/winter-2012/four-futures/) and toward [strengthening the bargaining position of labor](http://www.peterfrase.com/2012/02/the-dialectic-of-technology/).

I'll blame my recent silence on the fact that I was moving again---as of Tuesday, I'm back in the [Grand Duchy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxembourg). Clearly either the spirits of the Haymarket martyrs or the exploited employees of British Airways were punishing me for traveling on Mayday, because I ended up spending the better part of 24 hours waiting in lines, being redirected to unexpected cities, and having my luggage lost. Consider that lesson learned.

I've once again managed to return to Europe just as things are getting interesting in the U.S., with Occupy-aligned activists pulling off some impressive Mayday actions. But you can get plenty of reporting and analysis on that from *Jacobin* honcho Bhaskar Sunkara, from his new perch at the *In These Times* "Uprising" [blog](http://inthesetimes.com/uprising).

Meanwhile, I've had a few new things appear recently that I haven't mentioned here. I neglected to plug the [latest issue of *Jacobin*](http://jacobinmag.com/), which is full of great stuff as usual. It also includes my [essay](http://jacobinmag.com/spring-2012/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/) on post-work politics, centered around Kathi Weeks' book *The Problem With Work*, which I've mentioned here before. See also Mike Beggs on ["Keynes' Jetpack"](http://jacobinmag.com/spring-2012/keynes-jetpack/) and Tim Barker [reviewing James Livington's *Against Thrift*](http://jacobinmag.com/spring-2012/yes-logo/), which cover closely related themes.

In addition, I've had a couple of other things appear. There's an [essay for the most recent *New Inquiry*](http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/phantom-tollbooths/) on intellectual property, which covers familiar blog themes but hopefully in some new ways. And a [radio interview with Doug Henwood](http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#S120331), where we discussed sex, work, and related topics. What these all have in common is that someone edited them, so they're bound to surpass my usual output in clarity and precision.

Something relevant to the anti-work themes of the *Jacobin* and Henwood links is [this recent post](http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/03/housework-in-utopia/) from John Quiggin about "housework in utopia". He makes the point that if some kinds of drudgery can't be automated out of existence, we can still promote "social norms that frown on unnecessary crap-work." This gets to one of the core points of Weeks' book, and of my review: when it comes to perpetuating the work-based society, the ideological power of the work ethic is at least as important as the technical possibilities of production.

I was happy to see Quiggin point out that "Social standards inherited from the days of cheap servant labour dictate much more cleanliness than is required for hygiene, and practices like ironing for which there is no need at all." I look forward to the day when "a freshly ironed shirt would attract the same kind of response that is now elicited by a fur coat or an ivory brooch". Of course, there's a danger in taking the stereotypically male position of being cavalier about contemporary standards of neatness, since it leaves one open to the critique Belle Waring mounts [here](http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2006/02/ok_a_whiffle_ba.html). Maybe I'm just reproducing a patriarchal fantasy in which somebody else does the dishes.

But I'll take the risk---defending the right to be a slob is just another aspect of defending the [right to be lazy](http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/1883/lazy/). As I note in the *Jacobin* essay, the argument Lafargue makes in the linked essay is that the glorification of unnecessary work has often been an ideology produced and perpetuated by elements of the working class itself. He was talking specifically about wage work, but the same point applies to unwaged work. As Weeks points out in her book, the modern work ethic combines an injunction to compulsory wage labor with a "family ethic" of compulsory household labor.

Historically, it has been men who have done most of the wage labor (though this is less and less the case), and women most of the household labor (depressingly, still mostly the case). So it isn't surprising that we see more defenses of the inherent worth and dignity of wage work from men, and more defenses of the necessity of unwaged work from women. We shouldn't take either case at face value. Both waged and unwaged work contain much that is truly necessary for the reproduction of society and the maintenance of a decent standard of living. But they are also forms that sustain huge amounts of senseless or destructive labor, which exists only to reproduce capitalism, patriarchy, and the work ethic itself.

Quiggin makes a general point that I think bears on all discussions of the social and economic meaning of work:

> For any of the tasks we think of as housework, there are four possibilities I can think of,

> (1) we can do it ourselves, as a crappy chore

> (2) we can do it ourselves, as an enjoyable and fulfilling avocation

> (3) we can do it using a technological solution that involves little or no labour

> (4) we can contract it out to a specialist worker, who may in turn either (a) enjoy the work or (b) find it just as crappy as we do

This applies not only to "housework" but to all work, waged and unwaged. Quiggin contends that the only objectionable possibilities are (1) and (4b), and I tend to agree. Those two bad options basically correspond to two inseparable aspects of degrading and alienated labor in capitalism: unpaid household labor and involuntary wage labor. Options (2), (3), and (4a) correspond roughly to the communism in which ["labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want"](http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm), the [slavery of the machine" on which "the future of the world depends"](http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/index.htm), and [capitalism between consenting adults](http://jacobinmag.com/blog/2012/03/the-problem-with-sex-work/). Somewhere in the intermingling of those three, you've pretty much got my utopia.

I don't usually write about education. I don't have any special expertise or knowledge about it, and anyway, fellow *Jacobin* writers [Andrew Hartman](http://jacobinmag.com/winter-2012/teach-for-america/) and [Megan Erickson](http://jacobinmag.com/uncategorized/a-nation-of-little-lebowski-urban-achievers/) are on the case. But [this story](http://thehappyscientist.com/blog/problems-floridas-science-fcat-test) (via [Slashdot](http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/04/16/2119219/florida-thinks-their-students-are-too-stupid-to-know-the-right-answers?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29)) touches on some of my more typical themes.

The linked post is written by Rob Krampf, a science educator in Florida who found some serious problems when he was trying to develop practice materials for fifth grade students preparing for the state's mandatory science test, the FCAT. This is one of those so-called "high stakes tests" which are the idol of the education reform movement and the bane of left-wing education critics, because they are used to dole out financial incentives or penalties to schools. But the trouble with these tests goes beyond the standard criticism of testing-focused education. In the test questions Krampf received from the state, many of the "wrong" answers turned out to be just as correct as the supposedly "right" ones. This led to an exchange with state authorities that should be read in its entirety, for the dark comedy if nothing else. Here, however, is a representative sample from the FCAT:

> This sample question offers the following observations, and asks which is scientifically testable.

> 1. The petals of red roses are softer than the petals of yellow roses.
> 2. The song of a mockingbird is prettier than the song of a cardinal.
> 3. Orange blossoms give off a sweeter smell than gardenia flowers.
> 4. Sunflowers with larger petals attract more bees than sunflowers with smaller petals.

> The document indicates that 4 is the correct answer, but answers 1 and 3 are also scientifically testable.

> For answer 1, the Sunshine State Standards list texture as a scientifically testable property in the third grade (SC.3.P.8.3), fourth grade (SC.4.P.8.1), and fifth grade (SC.5.P.8.1), so even the State Standards say it is a scientifically correct answer.

> For answer 3, smell is a matter of chemistry. Give a decent chemist the chemical makeup of the scent of two different flowers, and she will be able to tell you which smells sweeter without ever smelling them.

> While this question has three correct answers, any student that answered 1 or 3 would be graded as getting the question wrong. Why use scientifically correct "wrong" answers instead of using responses that were actually incorrect? Surely someone on the Content Advisory Committee knew enough science to spot this problem.

I'd just add that you could probably find scientists who'd call 2 a right answer as well (survey a random sample of listeners about the prettiness of birdsongs, and voila...) This would be embarrassing enough if it were merely a sloppy oversight. But when he asked for an explanation of this bad question, Krampf received the following justification:

> Christopher Harvey, the Mathematics and Science Coordinator at the Test Development Center told me:

> "we need to keep in mind what level of understanding 5th graders are expected to know according to the benchmarks. We cannot assume they would receive instruction beyond what the benchmark states. Regarding #1 - While I don't disagree with your science, the benchmarks do not address the hardness or softness of rose petals. We cannot assume that a student who receives instruction on hardness of minerals would make the connection to other materials. The Content Advisory committee felt that students would know what flowers were and would view this statement as subjective. Similarly with option 3, students are not going to know what a gas chromatograph is or how it works. How a gas chromatograph works is far beyond a 5th grade understanding and is not covered by the benchmarks. As you stated most Science Supervisors felt that student would not know this property was scientifically testable. The Content Advisory Committee also felt that 5th graders would view this statement as subjective. We cannot assume that student saw a TV show or read an article."

Here we have the ideology of testing reduced to its fatuous essence. The ritual memorization and regurgitation of a decreed list of "facts" is the paramount value, superseding all other goals of education. We simply "cannot assume" that a student might "receive instruction beyond what the benchmark states", that they could "make the connection to other materials", or that they "saw a TV show or read an article." Not only does the FCAT not assume these things, it actively penalizes them. The test is not merely indifferent but actually hostile to any understanding or learning that happens outside the parameters of the testing regime.

Krampf's commenters continue to pile on; a reading teacher reports tests full of "bad grammar, incorrect spellings, and questions that simply made no sense". You might ask what sort of system could produce the kind of pathological rationalization for these errors that I quoted above. Another commenter refers to "a culture of bureaucratic ass-coverage", which lends credence to David Graeber's claim, [which I discussed the other day](http://www.peterfrase.com/2012/04/capitalism-against-capitalists/), that much of the apparatus of late capitalism has degenerated into a sclerotic order dominated by "political, administrative, and marketing imperatives".

A slightly different question, though, is *what sort of society can tolerate this kind of dysfunctional education system?* I'm not a rigorous [structural functionalist](http://uregina.ca/~gingrich/n2f99.htm)---that is, I don't think every social phenomenon can be explained in terms of the role it plays in optimally reproducing the social order. But I'm enough of one to think that as a rule, the behaviors that are encouraged by a society are those that are useful to it, or at least not actively hostile to it. Capitalism is unusually hospitable to [sociopathy](http://thenewinquiry.com/features/why-we-love-sociopaths/), for example, because the sociopath approaches the ideal-typical personification of capital itself. Conversely, capitalism is an unfriendly place for those of us who tend to prefer [time over money](http://www.peterfrase.com/2012/03/the-scourge-of-overemployment/), because this is in tension with capital's need for ceaseless expansion.

One might think that capitalism requires workers who know how to do and make things, and that therefore our elites would not complacently accept the emergence of Florida's regime of enforced stupidity through testing. There is a narrative of cultural decline to this effect, still available in both liberal and conservative packaging. According to this lament, America neglects the proper education of its populace at its peril, as we allow ourselves to be eclipsed and out-competed by better-educated, more ambitious hordes from abroad. This is a reassuring argument, in a way, because it presumes broad agreement about the purpose of education: to produce a society full of practically skilled workers, capable of at least enough critical thought to do their jobs.

Critique from the left tends to spend its time condemning models of education that are narrowly focused on the instrumental task of creating a new generation of obedient and productive workers. Megan Erickson's [essay](http://jacobinmag.com/winter-2012/a-nation-of-little-lebowski-urban-achievers/), for instance, worries that under the influence of self-styled reformers, "social studies and music classes are commonly replaced by . . . glorified vocational training". But a farce like the Florida science exams fails even at this narrow task. A population raised to take the FCAT will be ill-prepared to be either engaged citizens *or* productive workers. Can the ruling class really be so inept, so incapable of producing the proletariat it requires?

An alternative explanation is the one I've explored in my writings on the disappearance of human labor from production---most notably, in ["Four Futures"](http://jacobinmag.com/winter-2012/four-futures/). My analysis of the political economy (recently summarized and seconded by [Matt Yglesias](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/04/05/slouching_toward_utopia.html)) is that we are experiencing a slow transition from a capitalist order in which accumulation is based on the exploitation of labor, into a ["rentist" order based on rents](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/slouching-towards-rentier-capitalism/) accruing to land or intellectual property. Such a society is not, in my view, functionally compatible with the ideals of broadly-distributed critical thinking or practical work skills.

In a rentist order, an increasing percentage of the population becomes superfluous *as labor*---but they are still necessary as consumers. For reasons of ideological legitimacy and political control, the fiction that everyone must "work" is maintained, but work itself must increasingly be pointless make-work. What kind of populace is suited to this habit of passive consumption and workday drudgery? One that accepts nonsensical and arbitrary rules---whether they are the rules of endless work or endless consumption. Students who learn to answer the questions the testing bureaucracy wants answered, irrespective of their relationship to scientific knowledge or logic, will be well trained to live in this world.

Krampf's description of the Florida science testing dystopia is a grim vindication of something I wrote in [an old post](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/01/idiocracys-theory-of-the-future/) about the Mike Judge movie *Idiocracy*. I think of that post as kind of a lost chapter in my "rentism" series---I wrote it just after ["Anti-Star Trek"](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/anti-star-trek-a-theory-of-posterity/) and intended it as a follow-up, but it's been read by orders of magnitude fewer people. I hope you'll go read that post, but my general critique was that Judge portrayed stupidity as being inherent and genetic, even though the logic of his own movie suggested that stupidity is socially produced.

And mindless, bureaucratized testing is exactly the sort of system fit to produce the citizens of our future idiocracy. The mentality required to correctly answer the questions on the FCAT is a mentality suited to a world of pervasive marketing and advertising, in which reality is reduced to a postmodern nominalism of disconnected slogans. The students who unthinkingly repeat the assertion that smell and texture are not scientifically testable will grow up to confidently inform you that they water their crops with Brawndo---it's got electrolytes, after all, they're [what plants crave!](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1fKzw05Q5A&noredirect=1)