Guess Who

"Only a handful of unreconstructed reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions. Only a fool would try to deprive working men and working women of the right to join the union of their choice."
...
"An industrial society dedicated to the largest possible measure of economic freedom must keep firm faith in collective bargaining. That process is the best method we have for changing and improving labor conditions and thus helping to raise the American standard of living.  

"Healthy collective bargaining requires responsible unions and responsible employers. Irresponsible bargainers cannot get results. Weak unions cannot be responsible. That alone is sufficient reason for having strong unions."

"Nothing like this had previously existed in the long annals of human slavery."

An illuminating passage from Orlando Patterson's Slavery and Social Death:

The U.S. South shared with other slaveholding societies the exploitation of slave women and the inclination of masters to manumit their concubines and children. The intense shame that the master class felt about this sexual relationship was absolutely unique to the South, however. The guilt, with its disastrous consequence for the freedmen, had three sources. First, there was the puritanical tradition, which condemned fornication with the threat of fire and brimstone. Second, there was a highly developed sense of racial purity frequently codified in laws against miscegenation. And third, there was a strong moral commitment to a patriarchal family life, in which the women of the master class were placed on a pedestal and became symbolic not only of all that was virtuous, but as W. J. Cash has argued, of "the very notion of the South itself." The cult of southern womanhood was of course directly derived from slavery and the sense of racial superiority. Any assault on the dignity and honor of the idolized woman was an assault on the entire system. 

But southern males were no less pleasure-loving than the men of any other slaveholding society. Their hedonism, however, conflicted with their religious values, making the southern master alive to a deep sense of sin and wickedness: "the Southerner's frolic humor, his continual violation of his strict precepts in action, might serve constantly to exacerbate the sense of sin in him, to keep his zest for absolution always at white heat, to make him humbly amenable to the public proposals of his preachers, acquiescent in their demands for the incessant extension of their rule." Equally, his hedonistic exploitation of the slave women was an assault on the integrity of the idolized women, all of whom were constantly reminding him of his wickedness when they were not displacing their bitterness in acts of cruelty toward comely female slaves. 

The result of all this was that the freed group, with its disproportionate number of mixed-blood members, was a living reproof, a caste of shame, confronting the white males with the fact that they repeatedly violated not only their puritanical precepts but the the honor of their women. It was not guilt about slavery that accounts for exceptional hostility toward freedmen, as Berlin and others claim, or any real fear of them as a political threat, but guilt about their own violation of their own social order. The "zest for absolution always at white heat" made it imperative that the freedmen be scourged from their midst—or, if not scourged, punished, victimized, and defiled like scapegoats. 

Nothing like this had previously existed in the long annals of human slavery.

Sandwich-man elected leader of Labour Party

Jeb! Bush! Tax! Cut! Defense – My Candidate for its Main Lie

Greg Mankiw hearts the tax cut proposal from Jeb! No surprise there. He also links to an incredible piece of dishonesty from the Usual Suspects:

For scoring purposes, however, to be conservative, we calculate that the tax and regulatory components of the Governor’s economic plan will strengthen GDP by a total of about 8 percent over a decade, with 5 percentage points coming from the tax reform plan and 3 percentage points from regulatory reforms. On an annual basis, that equates to approximately 0.5 percentage points of higher economic growth per year directly attributable to the tax policy changes outlined in the balance of the White Paper. And an additional 0.3 percentage points of annual growth arising from the regulatory reforms, which we understand the Governor will be outlining in detail in the period ahead.

I could get snarky and note that adding this alleged 0.8% to the current 2% is not nearly 4% so one has to wonder what fuzzy math the Team Republican candidates are using. Their supply side Laffers are warmed over from 35 years ago but I’ll let others have fun mocking this intellectual garbage. Permit me to focus on the bottom of page 3 where they noted that the Administration had high hopes for their fiscal stimulus in 2009. Here in my view was their greatest lie:

output has grown at about half of consensus’ projections from June 2009 until present. The weaker than expected economic performance should cause policymakers to revisit their economic programs and policies. They have not.

It is true that the recovery has been disappointing but the reason is clear – fiscal policy did change towards stupid fiscal austerity driven largely by Republicans. This statement alone should disqualify the Team Republican economists from the policy debate. But yea – I know. Republicans lying to us has been the norm for the last 35 years.

Labor Day: "Wealth is Disposable Time… and Nothing More"

"Is there not a state of society practicable, in which leisure shall be made the inheritance of every one of its members?" -- William Godwin

Published anonymously in 1821, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, deduced from principles of political economy, in a letter to Lord John Russell, was, according to Friedrich Engels, "saved from falling into oblivion," by Karl Marx. At the time of Engel's remark, however, Marx had scarcely mentioned the pamphlet in published writings other than a scant footnote in Volume I of Capital. Some rescue! Nevertheless, Engels acclaimed the pamphlet as "but the farthest outpost of an entire literature which in the twenties turned the Ricardian theory of value and surplus value against capitalist production in the interest of the proletariat."

In his unpublished notebooks, Marx did declare the pamphlet an advance beyond Adam Smith and David Ricardo in its conscious and consistent distinction between the general form of surplus value or surplus labor and its particular manifestations in the forms of land rent, interest of money or profit of enterprise. Commenting on the pamphlet, Marx returned several times to what he referred to reverently as a fine statement: "a nation is really rich if no interest is paid for the use of capital, if the working day is only 6 hours rather than 12. WEALTH IS DISPOSABLE TIME, AND NOTHING MORE." Marx noted that Ricardo had also identified disposable time as the true wealth with the difference that, for Ricardo, it was disposable time for the capitalist that constituted such wealth. Ricardo's ideal would thus be to maximize surplus value as a proportion of total output.

Marx again cited the phrase in his Grundrisse, immediately following a characteristically explosive proposition:

Forces of production and social relations – two different sides of the development of the social individual – appear to capital as mere means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material condition to blow this foundation sky-high. 'Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours.'

Just how successful Marx was in saving the 1821 pamphlet from oblivion remains to be seen. Obviously, the pamphlet was spared from total oblivion or I wouldn't be writing about it. Aside from the few references by Marx and Engels, there have been scattered mentions of the pamphlet but no sustained analysis of it, which seems odd considering the importance that Engels – and Marx, in his manuscripts at least – assigned to it.

Perhaps one of the difficulties has been the anonymity of its authorship. That problem would appear to have been resolved by a disclosure in the biography of the 19th century editor and literary critic, Charles Wentworth Dilke. Dilke's grandson, the biography's author, reported having found an annotated copy of the pamphlet, acknowledging authorship, among his grandfather's papers. Subsequent authorities on Dilke and the literary journal he edited for several decades, The Athaeneum, appear satisfied with the plausibility of this attribution, given Dilke's writing style, his propensity for anonymous and pseudonymous publication, his political inclinations and his subsequent career. There doesn't appear to have been any concerted effort to either definitively establish or to refute Dilke's authorship. So Dilke qualifies as the leading and, so far, only candidate for authorship.

If Dilke was indeed the author, this presents two rather significant bits of context to the pamphlet. First, Dilke was an ardent disciple of William Godwin, who wrote, 'The genuine wealth of man is leisure…" The poet, John Keats, who was a close friend and next-door neighbor referred to Dilke, somewhat patronizingly, as a "Godwin perfectibility man". He was said to have retained that political inclination throughout his life. Second, in his career as editor of The Athaeneum, Dilke campaigned famously against journalistic "puffery" – the practice of publishers placing promotional material for their books in literary journals, for a fee, under the pretext that they were independent reviews. Both of these contextual items could be significant for an interpretation of The Source and Remedy precisely because the pamphlet lends itself arguably to a reading as a Godwinist tract (rather than a proto-Marxist one) but also to a reading as a polemic against yet another brand of puffery: political economy practiced by apologists for privilege and wealth. As for "turning the Ricardian theory of value against capitalist production," such an intention would hardly seem to fit an essay that on its closing page counted among the great advantages of the measures proposed therein that "their adoption would leave the country at liberty to pursue such a wise and politic system of financial legislation as would leave trade and commerce unrestricted."

The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties had something to say rather distinct from the message Marx took away from it. In his various notes on the pamphlet, Marx paid closest attention to the first six pages of the 40-page pamphlet and glossed over the rest. In his discussion of the pamphlet in Theories of Surplus Value, for example, the reader may wonder if Marx was actually still talking about the pamphlet after a few pages or had gone off on a tangent inspired by the pamphleteer having allegedly overlooked the impact of unemployment on wages. It has to be cautioned, though, that Marx's extended comments on the pamphlet appeared in manuscript notes that were published posthumously. They were not polished, fully thought-out positions intended for publication.

Although the first six pages are indeed interesting, in the context of the pamphlet as a whole their function is to set the stage for the crucial pair of questions that appear on page seven. That is, after deducing from principles of political economy that capital, left to its natural course, would soon do away with further accumulation, the author asks why that seemingly inevitable result has never happened and how it is that with all the presumably labor-saving wonders of modern industry, workers work longer hours and more laboriously than ever before.

Dilke's answer was that government and legislation act ceaselessly to destroy the produce of labor and interfere with the natural development of capital. They do this indirectly by, on the one hand, maintaining "unproductive classes" at a constant proportion to productive laborers and on the other by enabling the immense expansion of "fictitious capital," based ultimately on protectionism and government finance. Government does these things so that it may raise an enormous level of revenues that it couldn't through direct taxation of the laboring population, because "it would have been gross, open, shameless, and consequently impossible." Instead, it makes the holders of this fictitious capital accomplices in a stratagem to exact a much-enlarged revenue. As partner in crime, the capitalist lays claim to a generous portion of the booty. Not surprisingly, war is a "powerful co-operator" in this relentless process of destroying the produce of labor while expanding the (asymmetrical) claims of fictitious capital.

As for the natural claims of surplus value exacted by the capitalist, Dilke viewed them as causing the laborer "no real grievance to complain of," a position at least apparently at odds with Marx's views of exploitation and almost certainly incompatible with Engels' assertion that the pamphlet turned Ricardian theory "against capitalist production." Not only was Dilke not opposed to capitalist production, he described it as leading to a virtually Utopian condition of freedom if only it was left to unfold according to its nature. In his note, Marx objected that the pamphleteer had overlooked two things in coming to such a sanguine conclusion about the trajectory of capitalist accumulation. One was unemployment. Marx never got around to specifying the other.

Dilke's reasoning, although thought-provoking, is far from airtight. He confessed in his closing pages that his argument "is not so consecutive, that the proofs do not follow the principles laid down so immediately as I could have wished. The reasoning is too desultory, too loose in its texture." Whether such regrets were heartfelt or simply a stylistic gesture of modesty is hard to say. The subject matter itself is elusive and no treatment of it could be entirely exempt from error. Nevertheless, the case Dilke presented was an original and compelling one that has, as far as I know, been overlooked by Marx and his intellectual heirs.

The part of the argument that Marx appropriated to his own analysis – the author's consistent reference to surplus value as the general form underlying profit, rent and interest was ultimately incidental to Dilke's main points that nature places a limit on accumulation and that the surpassing of those natural limits occurs only as a result of government intervention, which, in effect mandates the excessive exploitation of labor.

There is a problem that arises from Marx appropriation of the (for Marx) correct premise of the pamphlet without first having systematically refuted the author's own deductions from it. What if Dilke's deductions were either equally or more plausible than Marx's? Rather than being a focal point of class struggle, might not surplus value then be "no real grievance to complain of?" Rather than underpinning a contradiction fated to blow the foundation of capital sky-high, might not the tension between "things superfluous" and disposable time have the potential to be adjusted like wing flaps to help bring Capitalism in for a soft landing?

By things superfluous, I refer, first, to the unholy trinity of fictitious capital, unproductive labor and inconvertible paper money and second, to their commodified expression as luxury goods. What I am suggesting is that for Dilke it seems that the primary contradictions of capitalism (to use Marx's expression) lay not so much between capital and labor as between real and fictitious capital, productive and unproductive labor, convertible and inconvertible money, necessities and luxury goods. This internalizing of the contradictions recalls Solzhenitsyn's observation in the Gulag Archipelago that, "the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts." Might we not ask if it's not only the line between good and evil that passes through every human heart but also the line between labor and capital, proletariat and bourgeoisie? From the standpoint of the arguments presented in The Source and Remedy, a proletarian revolution would be, in effect, superfluous. The possibility of revolution would arrive more or less at the moment when such a revolution would no longer be necessary.

A Hidden Reason Why The Fed May Raise Interest Rates

I am not going to get into any sort of argument over Phillips Curves or the sociology of the Fed or whatever. We know that many at the Fed have gone out on a limb wanting to raise rates to "return to normal," which has not been here since sometime in 2007 or at the latest 2008.  Yeah, getting to be a long time, a possible new normal. Understandable they would like to get out of the rut, but then we have China blowing up and all the markets going blooey.  I am not  remotely going to try to forecast what they will do in a couple of weeks, although I note that Janet Yellen did  not go to Jackson Hole, and I suspect she is not  sleeping as well as usually...

So, I think there is a deeper hidden issue here that some at the Fed are in fact aware of, although I do not think that it is a major factor in the immediate considerations.  It has to do  with the funding of the retirement of the baby boomers, many of whom are planning to cash in this or that accumulated asset account into an annuity.  How nice. The problem is that the sources of funding by the companies providing for them are heavily dependent on bonds.  Many of them have been holding long term bonds from way back, with the interest on those bonds far above what is out there right now for when they must eventually refinance. There has been little publicity about this and how without interest rates moving up noticeably sometime in the near future, these companies are going to come under serious pressure within the next few years as their longer term high yield bonds mature.  There are serious people aware of this, but, if in fact the Fed cannot get those interest rates back up somewhere near where they were some decades ago, the retired baby boomer rentiers-to-be may find themselves fulfilling Keynes's old wish that they be euthanized, or at least have to struggle to make up for a much lower income out of their long-accumulated savings than they thought they would get.

Barkley Rosser

PS  Added 9/6:  Obviously this is a longer term issue and is highly unlikely to be playing much role in what is coming up at this next FOMC meeting. There are obviously reasons why they may put off the rate increase, with the rising value of the dollar against nearly all  other currencies perhaps being the issue that really puts it off.  Stock market volatility is one thing, but the forex rate of the dollar is much more serious.

The Moral Center of Capitalism and the Cornerstone of the Confederacy

"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!" -- Harry Jaffa

Robert Reich asks, "What happened to the moral center of capitalism?":

An economy depends fundamentally on public morality; some shared standards about what sorts of activities are impermissible because they so fundamentally violate trust that they threaten to undermine the social fabric.

A few days ago Sandwichman posted a long selection from John Elliot Cairnes's The Slave Power (1862) in which Cairnes expressed similar sentiments

But it seems impossible that a whole people should live permanently in contemplation of a system which does violence to its moral instincts. One of two results will happen. Either its moral instincts will lead it to reform the institution which offends them, or those instincts will be perverted, and become authorities for what in their unsophisticated condition they condemned.

The resolution of this conflict, according to Cairnes,  "depends whether the Power which derives its strength from slavery shall be set up with enlarged resources and increased prestige, or be now once for all effectually broken."

The slave power was not broken once and for all but was reincarnated in the neo-Confederate ideology that underpinned segregation and the enduring white supremacy of the American political discourse. In documenting that the reason for the Civil War was the defence of slavery, Cairnes quoted a passage from Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens's "cornerstone" speech. Harry Jaffa, the conservative historian who wrote Barry Goldwater's 1964 acceptance speech, characterized Stephens's cornerstone speech in the following terms:

This remarkable address conveys, more than any other contemporary document, not only the soul of the Confederacy but also of that Jim Crow South that arose from the ashes of the Confederacy. From the end of Reconstruction until after World War Il, the idea of racial inequality gripped the territory of the former Confederacy—and not only of the former Confederacy—more profoundly than it had done under slavery. Nor is its influence by any means at an end. Stephens’s prophecy of the Confederacy’s future resembles nothing so much as Hitler’s prophecies of the Thousand-Year Reich. Nor are their theories very different. Stephens, unlike Hitler, spoke only of one particular race as inferior. But the principle ot racial domination, once established, can easily be extended to fit the convenience of the self-anointed master race or class, whoever it may be.

The "measuring rod" of historical "correctness" for school textbooks in the Southern States instructed school boards and libraries to "Reject a book that says the South fought to hold her slaves." These criteria, enforced by state textbook selection committees in the South, became the de facto national norm for the U.S. due to commercial expediency.

So, Reich's question, "what happened to the moral center of capitalism?" can only be answered with a question: "what moral center?"

Microaggressions and Measuring Rods

I don't care who writes a nation's laws — or crafts its advanced treatises — if I can write its economics textbooks. -- Paul Samuelson

In a comment on a recent post about the factitious "political correctness" controversy, Barkley brought to the Sandwichman's attention a recent uproar about "an absurd restriction on speech" issued by U.C. Berkeley President Janet Napolitano, in which "Examples of forbidden speech include 'America is a melting pot.'"

Barkley was correct that there was an enormous kerfuffle about the outrageous infringement on freedom of speech. But what this totalitarian muzzling of free thought by the Insane Speech Police amounted to was an innocuous -- if rather over-earnestly patronizing -- handout "Tool" titled "Recognizing Microaggressions and the Messages They Send." Yes, one of the example statements was indeed "America is a melting pot."

Here is the [yawn] tyrannical wording of the free speech banishing edict:

Microaggressions are the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership. The first step in addressing microaggressions is to recognize when a microaggression has occurred and what message it may be sending. The context of the relationship and situation is critical. Below are common themes to which microaggressions attach. [emphasis in original]

For those of you who are slow on the uptake, "recognize" is the secret Insane Speech Police code word for "Verboten!" Also, note the ominous reference to a "first step" -- leaving the horrific second and third steps to the imagination. Concentration camp, anyone? Summary execution?

"America is a melting pot" was presented as one of five examples of "Color Blindness: Statements that indicate that a White person does not want to or need to acknowledge race."

Does this kind of bureaucratic manners micromanagement serve any useful purpose? No, it's busybody administrative bullshit. Ever worked in an office? But is it the Left-Wing Gestapo bursting down the hallowed doors of academic freedom? Oh, please.

Frankly, I find the hysterical* -- and orchestrated -- distortions of this tripe by the self-appointed Guardians of Liberty far more intimidating to speech than the anodyne tripe itself. If you're a leftie or a Democrat, don't you ever dare to say anything half-baked that the Mighty Wurlitzer Propaganda Mill assholes Guardians of Liberty can quote out of context and blow-up out of proportion.

Do you want to see actual censorship and infringement of academic freedom in action? I would suggest, then, having a good long look at the career of Mildred Lewis Rutherford and the successful campaign to rewrite the history of the Civil War, as taught in the South. "Reject a book that says the South fought to hold her slaves."

Miss Mildred L. Rutherford

At their 1919 reunion the United Confederate Veterans "resolved to inaugurate a movement to disseminate the truths of Confederate history." To carry out this aim, they comissioned Miss Rutherford, Historian for the United Daughters of the Confederacy to prepare "A Measuring Rod to Test Text Books and Reference Books in Schools, Colleges and Libraries" to be used by textbook committees of boards of education, private schools and libraries to ensure "absolute fairness" "truth in history" and "full justice to the South."

These crackers were not just whistling Dixie. If you know anything about the textbook industry, whatever Texas wants, y'all get. "The Lost Cause triumphed in the curriculum," quipped historian James McPherson, "if not on the battlefield." Here are some excerpts from the pamphlet's front matter:

A MEASURING ROD FOR TEXT-BOOKS 

" 'A Measuring Rod For Text-Books,' prepared by Miss Mildred L. Rutherford, by which every text-book on history and literature in Southern schools should be tested by those desiring the truth, was submitted to the Committee. This outline was read and carefully considered. 

"The Committee charged, as it is, with the dissemination of the truths of Confederate history, earnestly and fully and officially, approve all that is herein so truthfully written as to that eventful period. 

"The Committee respectfully urges all authorities charged with the selection of text-books for colleges, schools and all scholastic institutions to measure all books offered for adoption by this "Measuring Rod" and adopt none which do not accord full justice to the South. And all library authorities in the Southern States are requested to mark all books in their collections which do not come up to the same measure, on the title page thereof, "Unjust to the South." 

"This Committee further asks all scholastic and library authorities, in all parts of the country, in justice and fairness to their fellow citizens of the South, to yield to the above request. 

"C. IRVINE WALKER, Chairman."

INDEX (see also "TRUTHS OF HISTORY") 

I. The Constitution of the United States, 1787, Was a Compact between Sovereign States and Was not Perpetual nor National 6 

II. Secession Was not Rebellion 7 

III. The North Was Responsible for the War between the States 8 

IV. The War between the States Was not Fought to Hold the Slaves 9 

V. The Slaves Were Not Ill-Treated in the South and the North Was largely Responsible for their Presence in the South 10 

VI. Coercion Was not Constitutional 11 

VII. The Federal Government Was Responsible for the Andersonville Horrors 12 

VIII. The Republican Party that Elected Abraham Lincoln Was not Friendly to the South 13 

IX. The South Desired Peace and Made every Effort to Obtain it 14, 15, 16 

X. The Policy of the Northern Army Was to Destroy Property—the Southern Army to Protect it 18-21 

XI. The South Has never Had its Rightful Place in Literature 22-23

WARNING!  

Do not reject a text-book because it does not contain all that the South claims—a text-book cannot be a complete encyclopedia. 

Do not reject a text book because it omits to mention your father, your grandfather, your personal friend, socially or politically— it would take volumes to contain all of the South 's great men and their deeds. 

Do not reject a text-book because it may disagree with your estimate of the South 's great men, and the leaders of the South 's Army and Navy—the world can never agree with any one person's estimate in all things. 

But—reject a book that speaks of the Constitution other than a Compact between Sovereign States. 

Reject a text-book that does not give the principles for which the South fought in 1861, and does not clearly outline the interferences with the rights guaranteed to the South by the Constitution, and which caused secession. 

Reject a book that calls the Confederate soldier a traitor or rebel, and the war a rebellion. 

Reject a book that says the South fought to hold her slaves. 

Reject a book that speaks of the slaveholder of the South as cruel and unjust to his slaves. 

Reject a text-book that glorifies Abraham Lincoln and villifies Jefferson Davis, unless a truthful cause can be found for such glorification and villification before 1865. 

Reject a text-book that omits to tell of the South 's heroes and their deeds when the North's heroes and their deeds are made prominent. 

Refuse to adopt any text-book, or endorse any set of books, upon the promise of changes being made to omit the objectionable features. 

A list of books, condemned or commended by the Veterans, Sons of Veterans, and U. D. C, is being prepared by Miss Rutherford as a guide for Text-Book Committees and Librarians. This list of course contains only the names of those books which have been submitted for examination. Others will be added and published monthly in "The Confederate Veteran" Nashville, Tennessee. 

_______________________

* Trigger Warning: Yes, I know the etymology of the word "hysterical."

Thank You, Maryland, Iran Nuclear Deal Will Pass

I had previously focused on the important roles of Senator Ben Cardin and Representative Steny Hoyer, both of Maryland, in reaching the necessary numbers in the US Senate and House to sustain a veto by President Obama of th expected passage of a bill that would not allow the US to support the nuclear deal negotiated with Iran and the other members of the UN Security Council plus Germany, which is already internationally legal thanks to having been passed unanimously by the UNSC.

As it is, today Maryland's other senator, Barbara Mikulski, who is retiring, has become the 34th senator to annouce support of the deal, more precisely to vote to sustain the veto, thus guaranteeing that the US will be a part of this deal after all.  Thank you Senator Mikulski, and the State of Maryland (or is it a Commonwealth?).

Now the only question is whether or not 7 more Senate Dems can be persuaded to join her, thereby being able to block the bill entirely through a sustained filibuster.  That would even be better. But the main deed is done.  The Iran nuclear deal will be in place.

Barkley Rosser

The Confederate Ideology: "At this cost the system is maintained."

Cornell students leaving Willard Straight Hall

"We presume that the citizens of Virginia are much like the 'rest of mankind,' and under ordinary circumstances have as much nerve as falls to the lot of common humanity. But they have long lived under the shadow of a great terror. Each slaveholder keeps a grim skeleton in his social closet, which may start into life at any moment. The 'demon of hate' which his life of wrong and outrage has invoked, haunts him night and day. He listens for the roar of the slumbering fires of the volcano upon whose sides he sleeps, and every sound that hurtles through the air, every footfall behind him, makes him fancy that the avenger is on his truck." -- Frederick Douglass, "The Reign of Terror in the South"

The sub-sub-title to John Ellis Cairnes's eloquent The Slave Power described the 1862 book as "an attempt to explain the real issues involved in the American contest." This blog post is an attempt to explain the real issues involved in the (too) long-enduring contest over "political correctness." It comes to the conclusion that it is pretty much the same real issue as Cairnes identified. The spectre of political correctness emanates from the "grim skeleton in [America's... capitalism's] social closet, which may start into life at any moment."

Undoubtedly, the "political-correctness police" exact a tremendous toll on the psyches of White Americans and have been doing so for several decades. To put all that torment in perspective, one is advised to read Alexander Cockburn from 1992, "Bush & P.C. -- A conspiracy so immense..." Lewis Lapham from 2004, "Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda Mill, a brief history," and Martin Jay from 2010, "Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as scapegoat of the lunatic fringe." 

A Republican Propaganda Mill

Cockburn's article gives a good idea of the breadth and intensity of the moral panic when it surfaced under the P.C. rubric in the early 1990s. Lapham's provides a peek into the inner workings of the well-oiled and highly-connected "propaganda mill" that perpetually incites the panic. Jay's dissects the even seamier underbelly of the already seamy enterprise.

"In spite of elaborate attempts at mystification..."

Politics of Pastiche: "voters... need someone to fire all the political-correct police"

"...voters crave the anti-status-quo politician. They want results. They need a fighter. They need someone to fire all the political-correct police." -- Sarah Palin, interview with Donald Trump

Anders Breivik

In the introduction to his "compendium" manifesto, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, mass-murderer Anders Breivik asked, "What is Political Correctness?" and "How did it all begin?" His answer dwelt on the Frankfurt School, and singled out Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization as especially important.  Breivik's text was copied and pasted almost verbatim from a screed called "Political Correctness: a Short History of an Ideology?" by William S. Lind, "Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation."

In turn, the "cultural Marxism" thesis of Lind's "history" can be traced to a 1992 article, "New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and Political Correctness,"  published in a Lyndon Larouche cult magazine, Fidelio The article's author, Michael J. Minnicino, subsequently disowned his work as "hopelessly deformed by self-censorship and the desire to in some way support Mr. LaRouche's crack-brained world-view."

Along the way, "conservative" Republican stalwarts Ralph de Toledano and Patrick J. Buchanan have recycled those crack-brained conspiracy theories, documented by abundant footnotes that typically lead either to a source who didn't say what they were credited with saying, to some other hack propaganda recycler or to an "authoritative" emigre like Victor Zitta or Lazlo Pasztor relying extensively on official histories published by the Axis-allied Horthy regime. Martin Jay traced the strange trajectory of this propaganda meme in "Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe."

Roger Kimball

This month saw the publication by Roger Kimball's Encounter Books (an "activity" of the Bradley Foundation) of yet another rehash of the discredited crap, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West, by Michael Walsh. A credulous review of that book in the Washington Free Beacon presents the book's argument, apparently oblivious to its dubious lineage:

In The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West, Walsh argues that the current obsession with politically correct speech began with a group of Marxist academics at the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University in Frankfurt, who would come to be known as the Frankfurt School. The scholars, Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, among others, developed a wide-ranging, if often contradictory, critique of the principal tenets of "bourgeois" Western culture—from the centrality of reason and individuality to Christian sexual mores.

As Barkley and I have discussed, the term "politically correct" probably was popularized in the late 1960s and early 1970s by left-wing student activists wary of the self-righteous dogmatism displayed by self-styled Marxist-Leninist political grouplets. But that's not the way the conventional mythology goes.

At the end of December 1982, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed, "The Shattered Humanities" by William Bennett, who at the time was chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Bennett's complaint was that "matters of enduring importance" -- "the true," "the good" and "the noble" -- had been abandoned because "we have yielded to the bullying of those fascinated with the merely contemporary." By the early 1990s, Bennett's lament about the decline of traditional values in the humanities had swelled into a moral panic about the alleged tyranny of political correctness on campus, fueled by best-selling books such as Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals: How Politics has Corrupted Our Higher Education and Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education: The politics of race and sex on campus. 

Even President Bush I had to get into the act with a commencement address at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in which he railed against "political extremists [who] roam the land, abusing the privilege of free speech, setting citizens against one another on the basis of their class or race."

Ironically, on the 200th anniversary of our Bill of Rights, we find free speech under assault throughout the United States, including on some college campuses. The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land. And although the movement arises from the laudable desire to sweep away the debris of racism and sexism and hatred, it replaces old prejudice with new ones. It declares certain topics off-limits, certain expression off-limits, even certain gestures off-limits. 

Isolated anecdotes and broad generalizations can only get you so far. The elusive scourge of political correctness needed to be explained by theory of its origins. Thus the Minnicino/Larouche conspiracy theory, taken up by Lind, Buchanan, de Toledano, Breivik and now Walsh.

In spite of being called out more than two decades ago by a President of the United States, those political extremists liberals on the left have allegedly persevered in their "unrelenting demands... for increasingly preposterous levels of political correctness over the past decade." This, according to S. E. Cupp explains Donald Trumps popularity: "Trump survives -- nay, thrives! -- because he is seen as the antidote, bravely and unimpeachably standing athwart political correctness."

Meanwhile, "A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 71% of American Adults think political correctness is a problem in America today, while only 18% disagree. Ten percent (10%) are undecided."

National Survey of 1,000 American Adults
Conducted August 25-26, 2015
By Rasmussen Reports 

1* Do Americans have true freedom of speech today, or do they have to be careful not to say something politically incorrect to avoid getting in trouble?

2* Is political correctness a problem in America today?

Hey, if they keep repeating it, it must be true, right?

Three Stooges: Lyndon Larouche, Roger Kimball, Anders Breivik

Forget Shorter Showers

Another opinion...

Is There a Lump in Your Trump?

"Whether it's China or Japan or Mexico, they are all taking our jobs." -- Donald Trump

Whatever one may think of Donald Trump, one thing he is not is naïve. So does it make sense when someone like Adam Davidson (or Jonathan Portes) claims that worry about immigrants or foreign countries (or robots or non-retiring seniors) "taking our jobs" are based on the "something called the Lump of Labor Fallacy: the erroneous notion that there is only so much work to be done and that no one can get a job without taking one from someone else"? 

Of course not. These folks are just mouthing platitudes they've heard without a thought to where the platitudes came from, whether they make sense or whether they are persuasive. (See also Sandwichman's Lump-of-Labor Odyssey)

PROPOSED RESOLUTION ON THE COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY NATURE OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Proposed resolution [parody] submitted by the Louis Lingg Memorial Chapter, Students for a Democratic Society, June 1969. (printer's bug "IWW Printing Co-op Chicago, Ill. - I.U. 450):

It is clear that our movement has come a long way in the last two years. Beginning from a preoccupation with essentially liberal issues like student power and peace, we have arrived at a perspective through which we have aligned ourselves with the revolutionary working class against American capitalist imperialism. 

The achievement of a correct position does not, however, mean that our intellectual struggle is over. We must explore the implications of working class politics for every area of our activity, in order to reinforce those politics and free them from contamination by bourgeois individualist thought. This proposal is a modest contribution to this effort. 

Concern with correct thinking and proper expression of that thought is a hallmark of the true revolutionary. Our vehicle for thought and communication is language; to be concrete, it is the English language. Now it has never occurred to us that this language is by its very nature counterrevolutionary and that truly correct revolutionary thought in English is therefore impossible. Yet we intend, through careful analysis, to establish that the English language is little more than a tool of imperialism designed to stifle genuinely radical ideas among the English-speaking masses. 

We can talk about language from the standpoints of meaning and structure. Although bourgeois linguists introduce complex terminology into their discussions of meaning, chiefly in order to prevent us from understanding what they mean, we shall consider it only in terms of words. Now English has a great many words, and this in itself is suspect: what it suggests is that no matter how hard the worker tries to educate himself, the bosses and their lackey politicians can always produce new words from their lexical grabbag to confuse him. Even in our own movement this elitist duplicity manifests itself in the use of esoteric words like "chauvinism," "reification," "dialectical materialism." and so on. It is almost axiomatic that the revolutionary status of a language is inversely proportional to the weight of its dictionary. 

Lest this sound farfetched, we may cite the pioneer linguist Otto Jesperson in The Growth and Structure of the English Language. He notes that the Norman invasion and subsequent domination of England for centuries by descendants of the French-speaking conquerors produced a class division of the English vocabulary, with the French imports reserved chiefly for the upper classes. The other great influx of foreign words came during the Renaissance when scholars, not content with the language of the people, imported quantities of Latin and Greek, thus widening the semantic gulf between the educated elite and the masses. 

Significant though consideration of meaning be, it is in the area of language structure that our analysis is most fruitful. Structure or syntax is the sum of all those rules which govern the ways the words in any language can be put together to make sense. We use the rules of syntax more of less unconsciously because they are inculcated in early childhood along with religion, patriotism, etc. It is the unconscious nature of syntax which makes its influence so insidious. 

The foundation of structure is the categories, which are theoretical divisions of human experience imposed on all languages. In English the main categories are tense and number; centuries ago we had gender as other European languages still do. There are many other categories: some languages divide all matter by shape, so that one cannot speak of an object without adding some word ending to indicate whether it is round, square and so on, while others classify things by their tangibility or lack thereof. The categories are classifications of thought; in English we cannot, for instance, speak of anything without indicating number (singular or plural) and time (past, present, future). 

Bourgeois scholars pretend to make a great mystery of the categories, in order to conceal the perfectly plain facts. Edward Sapir, for example, baldly states in Language that the origin of linguistic categories is altogether unknown. It is crystal clear to the proletarian analyst, however, that the nature of the categories arises directly from the nature of the ownership of the means of production: how else explain the preoccupation of English syntax with time and number? It is the capitalist factory system which necessitates an emphasis on time, and it is the capitalist money economy which causes the obsession with "how much, how many" that pervades our society. 

Sapir completely gives himself away when, in an unguarded moment, he lets us know that Chinese grammar expresses neither number nor tense. Can it be only coincidence that the Chinese, with their progressive syntax, have created the greatest socialist revolution of history, while no English-speaking people has achieved a successful proletarian revolution? Can it be possible that the incisive brilliance of Mao Tse-tung's thought owes nothing to the inherently revolutionary nature of the Chinese language? 

There is one other point about English syntax which needs to be clarified. As the proletarian linguists S. and K. Freedman point out in their monumental work And the Word Was Marx, the English sentence is a beautiful example in miniature of the relationships which prevail in capitalist society. The indispensable components of the sentence are the subject and verb: the subject is the capitalist, who runs the whole operation, and the verb is the worker, who carries out the capitalist's orders but can do nothing on his own. We may ask, how could a sentence be otherwise? this question only proves that the nature of English is so oppressive that it prevents us even from considering alternatives. 

Linguistic structural analysis provides us with a key to much that has previously been confusing in the history of the radical movement. For example, according to the revolutionary Polish investigator B Marszalek, the total ideological sell-out and intellectual bankruptcy of the British Labor Party and its American counterpart, the Socialist Party, are directly attributable to the onerous influence of English grammar. 

Having posed the problem, albeit briefly, we are now faced with the difficulty of providing a solution. In a nutshell, our alternatives, linguistically speaking, are between reformism and revolution. The bourgeois sentimentalists will speak touchingly of our "mother tongue" and plead in a thousand devious ways for superficial changes which would only rationalize the fundamentally imperialist character of the English language. Our only real choice is the total overthrow of the decadent tongue and its supplantation by a new speech fit to express our revolutionary ideology. 

After long consideration, we propose the adoption of an altogether new language. This language must be totally unrelated to English and to the tongues of other imperialist oppressors, as well as to those of revisionist regimes. It should be the language of a non-white people, to express our solidarity with the Third World. Having search [sic] extensively, we have found a suitable language. It is a little-known Amerindian tongue called Durruti, of small vocabulary, and has the virtue of having never been written down, thus making it possible for us to develop a simple spelling system, unlike that of English. (It is well known that the irrational complexities of English spelling are a tool of the power structure to keep working class children in their place.) 

We recognize that Durruti cannot be put into instant use. We offer, however, the following specific proposals: 

1. The major effort of the movement during the following year should be committed to the setting up of centers in factories and working-class neighborhoods to teach Durruti to workers and their families, along with education in Durruti within the movement; 

2. Funds should be allocated for the translation and publication of proletarian literature in Durruti; 

3. All resolutions of the 1969 Conventions of the Students for a Democratic Society are to be published in Durruti. It is our conviction that these resolutions will be at least, if not more, meaningful to the workers in Durruti as in English.

The Fundamentals are Sound

Meanwhile, down under: Tony Abbott, "and here in Australia, our fundamentals are strong."

Good thing about those fundamentals, wot?