Peter Frase

The new issue of Jacobin will be out next week, just after Christmas, and it’s full of great stuff. You should subscribe if you haven’t already, or give someone else a gift subscription if you have. (You can place an order with the right shipping address, send an email to subscriptions@jacobinmag.com with your gift announcement, and we’ll handle the rest.)

This issue’s cover is inspired by my lead editorial, which is both an appreciation and a critique of the Baffler, the small magazine that strongly influenced me and others associated with Jacobin back in its 1990′s heyday, and which was recently relaunched under new leadership. I’m sure people will enjoy the salacious catfight element of sniping at another publication, but I hope they also respond to my larger purpose, which is to explain why the Baffler was so important and appropriate to the time of its initial run, and why I think Jacobin is reacting to a qualitatively different historical moment.

While you’re waiting for the issue to appear, here are two things you should do. The first is to help defend University of Rhode Island professor and Lawyers, Guns, & Money blogger Erik Loomis. As explained in this statement at Crooked Timber, Loomis is the victim of an absurd rightist smear campaign, all because he used Twitter to metaphorically demand NRA head Wayne LaPierre’s “head on a stick” in the aftermath of the Newtown school shooting. I’ve had my strong disagreements with Loomis, but this is a moment to pull together in solidarity. As an untenured professor, Loomis’s job and career are at risk, and what’s happening to him is a risk that all of us run when we air radical ideas in public. Read the statement for more, or just go right ahead and contact the following administrators at URI:

• Dean Winnie Brownell: winnie@mail.uri.edu
• Provost Donald DeHays: ddehayes@uri.edu
• President David Dooley: davedooley@mail.uri.edu

The second thing I would recommend for U.S. readers is to have a look at this page, which catalogs the positions of Senate Democrats on President Obama’s plan to cut Social Security through a change in the way benefits are adjusted for inflation. Some have already come out against it, but many more haven’t made their position clear, and a few are in favor. If your Senators are in the undecided or pro-cuts group, you can use the site to contact them and either express your disagreement, or try to pin them down on their position. Figuring out where all these politicians stand will be important in trying to beat back these cuts, just as it was in the fight over Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security.

With that out of the way, here are some other things I’ve published elsewhere lately that may be of interest.

I have an essay in a rather unusual venue for me: the “Garage Sale Standard”, a broadsheet that was commissioned to accompany a recent staging of artist Martha Rosler’s “Meta-Monumental Garage Sale” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. My essay, “The Garage Sale and Other Utopias”, can be found in PDF form here. I attempt to place the garage sale in the context of capitalism’s fetish of the commodity, and individual attempts to escape from it:

To alter the conditions that produce things like the Foxconn scandal would require a radical, worldwide transformation of the kind of society and economy we live in. Lacking the ability to bring about such a change, consumers disturbed by what is revealed when objects are defetishized understandably look for ways to avoid implication in processes of production that they find ugly and exploitative. Two of the most popular strategies are ethical consumption and buying secondhand. But while each of these points in certain hopeful and utopian directions, each also demonstrates the limits of seeking individual solutions to a collective dilemma.

I also have an essay in the most recent issue of the New Inquiry, “Sowing Scarcity”. It’s a discussion of agriculture, in which I attempt to combine my longstanding preoccupation with intellectual property laws with a richer appreciation of ecological issues:

This is late capitalism’s inverted world, where business and government treat nature as infinite but strictly ration culture. Thus does capitalism, billed in every economics textbook as the supreme mechanism for allocating scarce resources, degenerate into a machine that introduces scarcity where it need not exist and blithely squanders the things that are in short supply.

Finally, I had a blast appearing on Portland’s KBOO radio to discuss the Basic Income and anti-work leftism with Joe Clement and Kathryn Sackinger and take questions from callers over the course of an hour. You can find the audio file at the link, along with some supplementary reading. If you want to hear an explanation and defense of Universal Basic Income as a Gorzian “non-reformist reform” in audio format, I think this is a pretty comprehensive one.

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 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, so naturally I signed on.

You can read the resulting product here, and Francis Fox Piven herself also weighs in with an editorial 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, 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.)

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 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. 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 “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.

[A note for whoever still comes around these parts: I now have my own personal blog on the Jacobin site, 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, laziness, out-of-control intellectual property laws, and just giving people money, 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 (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:

The just-released new issue of Jacobin has several articles that speak to these themes, including James Livingston’s celebration of “postbourgeois” consumer culture 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, Mike Beggs on David Graeber, Seth Ackerman and James Oakes on the Civil War, Eli Friedman on China and plenty more besides.

I’ll blame my recent silence on the fact that I was moving again—as of Tuesday, I’m back in the Grand Duchy. 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.

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, which is full of great stuff as usual. It also includes my essay 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” and Tim Barker reviewing James Livington’s Against Thrift, 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 on intellectual property, which covers familiar blog themes but hopefully in some new ways. And a radio interview with Doug Henwood, 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 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. 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. 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”, the slavery of the machine” on which “the future of the world depends”, and capitalism between consenting adults. Somewhere in the intermingling of those three, you’ve pretty much got my utopia.

As someone who compulsively woke up early to watch Al Jazeera English cover the Egyptian revolution last year, I’m surprised and pleased to now find myself with an op-ed running on the AJE website. Blog readers still get my ideas fresh and hot out of the kitchen, though—the column expands on something I wrote back in January about SOPA, intellectual property, and related issues.

Meanwhile, it looks like that Bloggingheads appearance is getting around. Thanks to Glenn Greenwald for highlighting our discussion of Obama’s awful civil liberties record, in his post on the administration’s shameful role in the imprisonment of a Yemeni journalist. Although I do have to object to being called a “liberal”.

If you enjoy the writing of me or Mike “Rortybomb” Konczal, you’re sure to love staring at our big bald white heads as we jabber about politics. Behold, my first appearance on bloggingheads.tv, as Mike’s guest on the new Roosevelt Institute series “Fireside Chats”:

We get into the state of the left, capitalism’s inherent tendency to crisis, the basic income, labor and automation, and of course, Star Trek. I’m not too experienced in doing stuff in this format, but I think it turned out OK. Thanks to Mike for inviting me on—there aren’t a lot of liberal think tank folks who would think to have a kook like me on as their first guest.

In other news of radical socialist media domination, my comrades at the Democratic Socialists of America had a brief moment of fame on the Daily Show:

I think DSA national director Maria Svart acquitted herself well, especially in contrast to “Trotskyist From Central Casting” and libertarian nutball Wayne Allyn Root.

With all the writing I do about our encroaching dystopia of artificial scarcity and rentier elites, it’s always slightly embarrassing when my writing is trapped behind a paywall. Fortunately, both of my contributions to the new Jacobin have entered the digital commons, now that my editorial on working time and feminism has been posted online. This web version preserves the print and PDF formatting, so it also shows off the work of our fantastic new designer, Remeike Forbes.

My editorial isn’t particularly radical, especially in contrast to the speculative reveries of my main essay in the issue. But I felt like it was worth taking the time to say that if we’re to talk about reducing working time—something that’s a central political concern of mine—we have to be clear that paid work isn’t the only kind, and that reducing time in waged work can sometimes be in tension with equalizing the gender division of labor.

I do wish, though, that I’d said a little more about the institution of the nuclear family, which functions as a kind of unstated premise of my whole editorial. Just after I wrote it, I read this essay by Jenny Turner on recent feminism, which draws out a great point from Toni Morrison by way of Nina Power:

‘Sometimes the things that look the hardest have the simplest answers,’ Nina Power writes towards the end of her chapbook, One Dimensional Woman. She then hands over to Toni Morrison speaking to Time magazine in 1989. On single-parent households: ‘Two parents can’t raise a child any more than one. You need a whole community … The little nuclear family is a paradigm that just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for white people or for black people. Why we are hanging onto it I don’t know.’ On ‘unwed teenage pregnancies’: ‘Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can … The question is not morality, the question is money. That’s what we’re upset about.’ On how to break the ‘cycle of poverty’, given that ‘you can’t just hand out money’: ‘Why not? Everybody [else] gets everything handed to them … I mean what people take for granted among the middle and upper classes, which is nepotism, the old-boy network. That’s the shared bounty of class.’

What about education? If all these girls spend their teenage years having babies, they won’t be able to become teachers and brain surgeons, not to mention missing out on cheap beer, storecards, halls of residence. To which Morrison, with splendour, rejoins: ‘They can be teachers. They can be brain surgeons. We have to help them become brain surgeons. That’s my job. I want to take them in my arms and say: “Your baby is beautiful and so are you and, honey, you can do it. And when you want to be a brain surgeon, call me – I will take care of your baby.” That’s the attitude you have to have about human life.’

Leaving aside the point about “just handing out money“, which I obviously love, this point about the nuclear family struck me just recently, because I was writing an entry for an academic encyclopedia on the topic of the “24/7 economy”—that is, the fact that 40 percent of employees in the United States don’t work Monday to Friday 9 to 5 jobs, but instead work evenings, nights, weekends, or rotating shifts. Scholars of these “non-standard” work schedules often point out that they tend to make child care logistically difficult, but usually this is posed as a contrast with the “normal” situation of a couple working standard hours. Workers with non-standard hours are much more likely to rely on their relatives for child care, for example; but rather than viewing this the way Morrison does, as an opening onto a more humane and realistic way of organizing care work, it is instead portrayed as a problem and a burden, something which threatens to strain relations between family members.

As long as single and dual parent nuclear families are the norm, it makes sense for the Left to demand policies that at least ease the burden of unpaid work on women, which is what my essay was about. But I’d very much like to reclaim the old socialist-feminist idea that, as Turner puts it, “any politics worth having has to start with the nuclear family: its impossibility, its wastefulness, its historical contingency.” I wouldn’t ultimately be satisfied with reforming the current relations of re-production any more than I just want to humanize the relations of production—the point is to overturn them.

The folks over at 3 Quarks Daily are awarding their third annual prize for “the best blog writing in politics & social science”, and someone was nice enough to nominate my musings on Anti-Star Trek. A first round of voting is underway here, which will narrow the selections down to twenty semi-finalists; the winners will then be picked by celebrity guest judge Stephen Walt.

If you’d prefer not to inflate my ego any further, two other especially deserving choices were written by friends of this blog: Corey Robin on conservative radicalism and Aaron Bady on power and Occupy Cal. Just whatever you do, please don’t vote for that Ezra Klein post.

I’ve been preoccupied with moving out of the apartment I’ve lived in for 6 years and now I’m in the process of moving to Europe for three months, so today’s post is a clip show; regular programming will resume next week. My last post was somewhat controversial, and elicited responses from both Marcy Wheeler and DJW at Lawyers, Guns, and Money. Those deserve serious responses, but that will have to wait until I have some more time.

Meanwhile, we’re in reruns. Most of this blog’s readers have discovered it in the past few months, due to the much-appreciated publicity of folks like Matt Yglesias, Mike Konczal, and Henry Farrell (and with a special hat tip to John Boy for being the O.G. of promoting my writing when I couldn’t be bothered to do it myself). But I’ve actually been blogging on and off for years; until recently, I wrote mostly for myself and a few friends, indifferent to the possibility of finding a broader audience. But as long as you’re all here, I figured I’d point out a few of my favorite posts from this site’s pre-history, which I think at least sort of hold up. There are some elements of style and content that I wouldn’t repeat now, but I still hold to the core ideas.

• On the Mode of Production. This one is quite old, but it’s still the best attempt I’ve come up with at expressing something I think about Marxism, and about theories of history in general, that I think is both unusual and important. The short version is that I think Marxism is a theory of capitalism, not a theory of history, and I’m skeptical that a fully trans-historical account of human societies is even possible. (Although David Graeber’s new book on debt makes a good run at one; more on that later.)

• The Game Beyond the Game. My case for a radical rather than liberal interpretation of The Wire.

• Idiocracy‘s Theory of the Future. This is actually high up on the list of my most-viewed posts of all time, but all of that traffic seems to be from search engines. It’s my reckoning with a movie that’s both under-appreciated and deeply fucked up, a post that belongs in the same lineage of arguments that produced my break-out hit single “Anti-Star Trek”.

• Marx’s Theory of Alien Nation. How capitalism is like an alien invasion.

• Art as Art, Anti-Art, Post-Art. My one and only attempt at art criticism, which is probably going to seem foolish or old hat to people who actually know about this stuff. But for what it’s worth, I once put this argument to Ad Reinhardt’s grandson (who’s a theater director), and he found it at least plausible.

It’s pretty cool to discover that someone likes your writing enough to translate it for free. So I’m happy to report that my most popular post of all time is now available in German at systempunkte.org, which was described to me as “a blog platform with a broadly left-libertarian and anarchist focus.”

Thanks to Chris from systempunkte for doing the translation. If any of my readers happen to be Deutsch-speaking, let me know what you think of it.