Really Awful "Rhetoric"

 "Rhetoric" in quotes because it may not be just that.  I have not been posting much, partly because had a wedding for daughter, Sasha, last weekend, but also because I am seriously demoralized by the current situation, and every time I think I have something intelligent to say about the economics of it, that seems to keep changing, although I shall soon.

Anyway, I have to get off my chest what I have heard from my wife, Marina, coming out of Russian language sources, not reported in English language media.  This is from an hour and a half presentation by a man named Padkin (don't know first name and googling does not bring him up, maybe spelling off) who apparently heads something in Moscow called the Foundation for Conceptual Technology, which also does not come up on a google.  Anyway, this guy was calling for the use of Russian tactical nuclear weapons against NATO members, more specifically against Ankara, Turkey where drones are being produced that the Ukrainians have been successfully using against the Russian military, and also against two air bases in Poland that have been used to ship arms to the Ukrainians.  About the only good thing that can be said about his broadcast is that he said warnings should be sent first so that civilians can be removed.

I do not know how this is gong to end, but that high level Russians are talking like this in public is very bad news.  I note that it was a Russian TV anchor back in 2014 who was the first person in a major nuclear power since 1962 to talk about using nuclear weapons openly and seriously after the essentially wimply economic sanctions were imposed after Russia annexed Crimea. That guy talked about how dare the US do such a thing when Russia could "incinerate New York City." 

Barkley Rosser

On that "deep feeling that something is wrong..."

Georg Simmel called it "a faint sense of tension and vague longing" connected with the modern preponderance of means over ends. What Simmel calls estrangement  

[We] feel as if the whole meaning of our existence were so remote that we are unable to locate it and are constantly in danger of moving away from rather than closer to it. Furthermore, it is as if the meaning of life clearly confronted us, as if we would be able to grasp it were it not for the fact that we lack some modest amount of courage, strength and inner security.

I would add that this perceived remoteness of spirituality and contemplation is compounded by ambivalence toward the material wonders that the preponderance of means delivers. Here I am -- blithely typing into my computer to instantly send my thoughts out to potentially who knows how many readers, yet: 

People's ecstasy concerning the triumphs of the telegraph and telephone often makes them overlook the fact that what really matters is the value of what one has to say, and that, compared with this, the speed or slowness of the means of communication is often a concern that could attain its present status only by usurpation.

This, at best, "faint sense of tension and vague longing," or, at worst, "deep feeling that something is wrong," is what underlies the otherwise inexplicable appeal of demagogues and scapegoating cults, which promise the "courage, strength and inner security" that people feel they lack. The magical thing about cults is that their failure to resolve the tension and longing merely heightens the loyalty of recruits. The more they fail, the stronger is their grip.

At the turn of the twentieth century, both Simmel and Thorstein Veblen were, I believe, seeking to address that "faint sense of tension and vague longing" -- the infamous fin de siècle spirit of "ennui, cynicism, pessimism, and 'a widespread belief that civilization leads to decadence'." (wikipedia) Both offered compelling analyses. It seems that Veblen's critique became the 'common sense' of American social criticism and as such was eventually assimilated into what I would characterize as a mainstream current of resigned radicalism -- the sense that things are not quite right but that there is no realistic chance of fundamental change.

Veblen's social criticism may be summed up as asserting that social progress is perpetually impeded by archaic -- 'obsolescent' -- habits of mind, such that we are always trying to address today's problems with yesterday's institutions. "...this process of selective adaptation can never catch up with the progressively changing situation in which the community finds itself at any given time":

Institutions must change with changing circumstances, since they are of the nature of an habitual method of responding to the stimuli which these changing circumstances afford. The development of these institutions is the development of society. The institutions are, in substance, prevalent habits of thought with respect to particular relations and particular functions of the individual and of the community; and the scheme of life, which is made up of the aggregate of institutions in force at a given time or at a given point in the development of any society, may, on the psychological side, be broadly characterized as a prevalent spiritual attitude or a prevalent theory of life. As regards its generic features, this spiritual attitude or theory of life is in the last analysis reducible to terms of a prevalent type of character.

The situation of today shapes the institutions of tomorrow through a selective, coercive process, by acting upon men’s habitual view of things, and so altering or fortifying a point of view or a mental attitude handed down from the past. The institutions — that is to say the habits of thought — under the guidance of which men live are in this way received from an earlier time; more or less remotely earlier, but in any event they have been elaborated in and received from the past. Institutions are products of the past process, are adapted to past circumstances, and are therefore never in full accord with the requirements of the present. In the nature of the case, this process of selective adaptation can never catch up with the progressively changing situation in which the community finds itself at any given time; for the environment, the situation, the exigencies of life which enforce the adaptation and exercise the selection, change from day to day; and each successive situation of the community in its turn tends to obsolescence as soon as it has been established [emphasis added]. When a step in the development has been taken, this step itself constitutes a change of situation which requires a new adaptation; it becomes the point of departure for a new step in the adjustment, and so on interminably.

It is to be noted then, although it may be a tedious truism, that the institutions of today — the present accepted scheme of life — do not entirely fit the situation of today. At the same time, men’s present habits of thought tend to persist indefinitely, except as circumstances enforce a change. These institutions which have thus been handed down, these habits of thought, points of view, mental attitudes and aptitudes, or what not, are therefore themselves a conservative factor. This is the factor of social inertia, psychological inertia, conservatism. Social structure changes, develops, adapts itself to an altered situation, only through a change in the habits of thought of the several classes of the community, or in the last analysis, through a change in the habits of thought of the individuals which make up the community. The evolution of society is substantially a process of mental adaptation on the part of individuals under the stress of circumstances which will no longer tolerate habits of thought formed under and conforming to a different set of circumstances in the past. For the immediate purpose it need not be a question of serious importance whether this adaptive process is a process of selection and survival of persistent ethnic types or a process of individual adaptation and an inheritance of acquired traits.

For Simmel, it is not the 'obsolescence' of these institutions and habits of minds that is at the root of the problem. Rather it is the sheer proliferation of "objective" facts that overwhelm the individual's capability of assimilating them: 

If one compares our culture with that of a hundred years ago, then one may surely say — subject to many individual exceptions — that the things that determine and surround our lives, such as tools, means of transport, the products of science, technology and art, are extremely refined. Yet individual culture, at least in the higher strata, has not progressed at all to the same extent; indeed, it has even frequently declined. … The fact that machinery has become so much more sophisticated than the worker is part of this same process. How many workers are there today, even within large-scale industry, who are able to understand the machine with which they work, that is the mental effort invested in it? ... In the purely intellectual sphere, even the best informed and most thoughtful persons work with a growing number of ideas, concepts and statements, the exact meaning and content of which they are not fully aware. The tremendous expansion of objective, available material of knowledge allows or even enforces the use of expressions that pass from hand to hand like sealed containers without the condensed content of thought actually enclosed within them being unfolded for the individual user. Just as our everyday life is surrounded more and more by objects of which we cannot conceive how much intellectual effort is expended in their production, so our mental and social communication is filled with symbolic terms, in which a comprehensive intellectuality is accumulated, but of which the individual mind need make only minimal use. … Every day and from all sides, the wealth of objective culture increases, but the individual mind can enrich the forms and contents of its own development only by distancing itself still further from that culture and developing its own at a much slower pace. 

How can we explain this phenomenon? If all the culture of things is, as we saw, nothing but a culture of people, so that we develop ourselves only by developing things, then what does that development, elaboration and intellectualization of objects mean, which seems to evolve out of these objects' own powers and norms without correspondingly developing the individual mind? This implies an accentuation of the enigmatic relationship which prevails between the social life and its products on the one hand and the fragmentary life-contents of individuals on the other. The labour of countless generations is embedded in language and custom, political constitutions and religious doctrines, literature and technology as objectified spirit from which everyone can take as much of it as they wish to or are able to, but no single individual is able to exhaust it all. Between the amount of this treasure and what is taken from it, there exists the most diverse and fortuitous relationships. The insignificance or irrationality of the individual's share leaves the substance and dignity of mankind's ownership unaffected, just as any physical entity is independent of its being individually perceived. Just as the content and significance of a book remains indifferent to a large or small, understanding or unresponsive, group of readers, so any cultural product confronts its cultural audience, ready to be absorbed by anyone but in fact taken up only sporadically. This concentrated mental labour of a cultural community is related to the degree to which it comes alive in individuals just as the abundance of possibilities is related to the limitations of reality. 

If only these two contemporaries could have been brought together in an exchange of views! I have long admired Veblen's thought and his influence on subsequent writers, including Kenneth Burke, Stephen Leacock, and Arthur Dahlberg. But re-evaluating it in the light of "planned obsolescence" and "progressive obsolescence" I can now see its potential for misappropriation. We "can never catch up with the progressively changing situation" — therefore we must race ever faster on the treadmill of technological progress! 

William Trufant Foster and Waddill Catchings wrote several underconsumptionist texts in the 1920s that Steven Kates has argued were a formative — but unacknowledged — influence on Keynes's General Theory. For our purposes, though, what is of interest is their comments on Veblen in two of their early books, Money (1924) and Profits (1925). In the former book, Foster and Catchings took issue with Veblen's objection to the "conspicuous waste" of non-productive consumers:

But, however objectionable it may be to have any members of society appropriate for their personal use far more than they contribute to society, we cannot for that reason hold them directly responsible" for fluctuations in the world's work. Their "joy-riding” cannot budge business as long as the amount they spend in consumption bears a constant relation to the other factors that determine the annual production-consumption equation.

In Profits, Foster and Catchings chided Veblen and others for hypocritically assuming that other people's consumption is waste but their own is sensible:

No one who cries out against wasteful and harmful products proposes to have his own freedom of choice restrained. He assumes that in an ideal economic order, where nobody wasted the labors of men in the pursuit of profit, he would still be able to buy about all that he now enjoys; for, naturally, his own expenditures seem to him sensible. He does not expect to give up his favorite cigar or cheese, or anything else except, perhaps, certain newspapers or vaudeville shows that are beginning to bore him. It is always some other man's way of spending money that he wishes to curtail for the common good. So when Thorstein Veblen lashes, with all the thongs of his far-flung vocabulary, the conspicuous waste of the leisure class, and when Hartley Withers condemns it for 'consuming things that it does not really want,' we should bear in mind, however tempted we may be to join in the flaying, that every consumer is the sole judge of what he really wants. 

There are only a couple of steps from every consumer being the sole judge of what he wants to the economic imperative of advertising and fashion compelling people to want things they otherwise don't want. The first step is from Foster and Catchings to Paul Mazur's American Prosperity: Its Causes and Consequences (1928). Catchings was a senior partner at Goldman Sachs; Mazur was a senior partner at Lehman Brothers. The two men "played equally important roles in directing investment bankers toward the consumer industry." ("Brokers and the New Corporate Industrial Order" -- William Leach). They worked together promoting mergers in the merchandise sector. Mazur didn't cite Foster and Catchings in his book and he didn't mention Veblen. 

Obsolescence, however, appears 43 times in Mazur's book. Veblen used the term in 1897 and used it pointedly in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). The term began to appear relatively frequently with reference to depreciation of capital goods around 1903-1904. Before then it usually referred to medical, biological, or linguistic matters. Obsolete was used by several economists, including Veblen, in the 1890s with reference to machinery. I could find no reference prior to the twentieth century of obsolescent or obsolete consumer goods.

Mazur's friend in the advertising industry, J. George Frederick, undoubtedly got his inspiration from Mazur's book for his article, "Is Progressive Obsolescence the Path Toward Increased Consumption." American Prosperity was published in January 1928. Frederick's article was published the following September. Frederick didn't mention Mazur. He did, however, take a dig at Foster and Catchings:

Messrs. Foster and Catchings have been talking and writing theoretically about this question for four or five years and getting much attention. They say "get more money into the consumer's hands with which to buy," which is most admirable doctrine, but their only concrete recipe for doing this little piece of bootstrap-lifting is for the Government to employ men on Federal building projects. I think that it is self-evident that this is a mere minor stop-gap.

Having now obtained Frederick's "Progressive Obsolescence" article, I'm confident he wrote the progressive obsolescence chapter of his wife's book and likely added the ironic praise of "Veblen's excellent phrase."

Herbert Marcuse's 1941 essay "Some social implications of Modern Technology" was published in the same issue of Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, as Theodor Adorno's "Veblen’s Attack on Culture: Remarks Occasioned by the Theory of the Leisure Class." Marcuse's references to Veblen there were mainly to the "Instinct of Workmanship" essay and to observations by Veblen about technology that were similar to Marx's views on the relationship between workers and machinery. Adorno was more perceptive in criticizing Veblen's one-sided debunking of culture as being "not completely out of harmony" with the "disarming" reception he received. Presumably, though, Veblen — and even Adorno — would have been horrified by facility with which Foster and Catchings repelled lashes from "the thongs of his far-flung vocabulary," Mazur perverted his "striking terminology," and the Fredericks mocked his "excellent phrase," conspicuous consumption.

Simmel's analysis didn't lend itself so readily to snappy sloganeering and perhaps that spared it from assimilation and vulgarization. I recently read a 54-page essay  that mostly focuses on a 24-page section of Simmel's The Philosophy of Money. My advice would be to read the section on culture in Simmel's chapter on the "Style of Life" twice -- or maybe three times. This is not meant as a slight on the 54-page essay. Simmel's writing is so rich and deep that one can read it over and over profitably. 

Simmel didn't offer a solution to the problems of modernity that he describes. To be fair, Veblen didn't offer a solution either, at least not in The Theory of the Leisure Class (later on he hallucinated about 'the engineers' as agents of social change). Simmel's refusal of a solution was consistent with his critique of the preponderance of means over ends. Solutions to problems, after all, are means, not ends. The end is not resignation but wisdom.

Marx's "most realistic... most amazing insight!"

In his farewell lecture at Brandeis University, "Obsolescence of Socialism," Herbert Marcuse quoted a passage from the Grundrisse and claimed that in Capital, Marx had "repressed this vision, which now appears as his most realistic, his most amazing insight!"

As large-scale industry advances, the creation of real wealth depends increasingly less on the labor time and the quantity of labor expended in the productive process than on the power of the instruments set in motion during the labor time. These instruments, and their growing effectiveness are in no proportion to the actual labor time which the production requires; their effectiveness rather depends on the attained level of science and technical progress. Human labor then is no longer enclosed in the process of production — man rather relates himself to the process of production merely as supervisor and regulator. He stands outside this process instead of being its principal agent. In this transformation, the basis of production and wealth is no longer the actual (physical) labor performed by man himself, nor his labor time, but his own creative power, that is, his knowledge and mastery of nature through his social existence in one word, the development of the social (all-round) individual. The theft of another man's labor time, on which the social wealth still rests today, then becomes a miserable basis compared with the new basis which large-scale industry itself has created. As soon as human labor, in its physical form, has ceased to be the great source of wealth, labor time will cease, and must of necessity cease, to be the measure of wealth, and exchange value must of necessity cease to be the measure of use value. The surplus labor of the mass of the population has then ceased to be the condition for the development of social wealth, and the leisure of the few has ceased to be the condition for the development of the intellectual faculties of man. The (capitalist) mode of production, which rests on exchange value, thus collapses... 

Marcuse's quotation corresponds to the passage beginning on page 704 of the Penguin edition and continuing though most of page 705, with some elisions. "Man becomes free from the necessities of spending himself in material production," Marcuse exclaimed following the quotation, "Free to control, even to 'play' with it according to his own human faculties. Not a word about class struggle! Not a word about impoverishment!"

Not a word about class struggle or impoverishment in the passage quoted by Marcuse because those questions were dealt with elsewhere in the manuscript. "It is already contained in the concept of the free labourer," Marx wrote on page 604, "that he is a pauper: virtual pauper." And, Marx continued:

According to his economic conditions he is merely a living labour capacity, hence equipped with the necessaries of life. Necessity on all sides, without the objectivities necessary to realize himself as labour capacity. If the capitalist has no use for his surplus labour, then the worker may not perform his necessary labour; not produce his necessaries. Then he cannot obtain them through exchange; rather, if he does obtain them, it is only because alms are thrown to him from revenue. He can live as a worker only in so far as he exchanges his labour capacity for that part of capital which forms the labour fund. This exchange is tied to conditions which are accidental for him, and indifferent to his organic presence. He is thus a virtual pauper. Since it is further the condition of production based on capital that he produces ever more surplus labour, it follows that ever more necessary labour is set free. Thus the chances of his pauperism increase. To the development of surplus labour corresponds that of the surplus population. In different modes of social production there are different laws of the increase of population and of overpopulation ; the latter identical with pauperism. These different laws can simply be reduced to the different modes of relating to the conditions of production, or, in respect to the living individual, the conditions of his reproduction as a member of society, since he labours and appropriates only in society. The dissolution of these relations in regard to the single individual, or to part of the population, places them outside the reproductive conditions of this specific basis, and hence posits them as overpopulation, and not only lacking in means but incapable of appropriating the necessaries through labour, hence as paupers. Only in the mode of production based on capital does pauperism appear as the result of labour itself, of the development of the productive force of labour.

 "Not a [single] word about class struggle! Not a [single] word about impoverishment!" No, not one word -- three hundred and twenty words about class and pauperization with another six pages on the same topics to follow. 

The passage Marcuse quoted is from a part of the Grundrisse that has come to be known as the "fragment on machines." It is my argument that the so-called fragment is intimately related to two other fragments that occur earlier in the edited manuscript as it has been published. The connections between the three fragments are both lexical and logical, and the analysis in the first two informs the interpretation of terminology used in the third. Marcuse was right that the passage he quoted contained a "most amazing insight." It just wasn't the one he thought it was.

Misunderstanding of Climate Change and Why it Matters: The Energy Price Spike

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered a spike in oil and gas prices worldwide.  A natural response is for countries with untapped reserves to expand production as quickly as possible, but doesn’t this contradict the pledges they have also made to combat climate change?  This issue is covered at some length in a New York Times article today, and the entire discussion—the arguments used by government officials and energy experts and the assumptions of the journalists who quote them—is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how atmospheric carbon causes global warming.

The claims and counterclaims in the article are about whether short term increases in carbon emissions will make it easier or hard to reach a net zero target decades into the future.  That would be the right question to ask if there is an on-off climate switch based on what happens in 2050 or some other year, but there isn’t.

The severity of climate impacts will be determined by the accumulation of carbon dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) in the atmosphere; in economic terms, it’s a stock, not a flow, externality.  The true test of our response to the climate crisis is whether we can keep this accumulation within a reasonable limit.  That’s the physics and chemistry of the greenhouse effect, not a political opinion.  If we emit more this year, no matter what the reason (like Ukraine), the budget constraint requires us to emit that much less in future years.  Given that stringent policies are not in place anywhere on planet Earth, and it is unclear whether there is political capacity to bring them about, there is no question at all about the effect of increased fossil fuel production, this year or any other, on climate outcomes.

It’s amazing how removed current political and media chatter is from the basics of climate science.

The Iran Nuclear Deal And The Ukraine Invasion

 At New Year's I disagreed with forecasts made by David Ignatius that Putin would fully invade Ukraine and that the JCPOA nuclear deal with Iran would be revived. I have been proven wrong on the first matter already. As of a week or more ago it looked like I would be about the second as well as reports had a revived deal nearly made, which I would like to see.

But now it looks like it may fall victim to the Ukraine invasion. In particular Russia is now demanding that any deal not involve any enforcement of any economic sanctions on Russia. Apparently Iranian leaders are unhappy about this extraneous demand, and the deal may not happen.  However, apparently it may not be necessary for Russia to sign for it to legally go into force.  The main complication would be that Russia is where excess enriched uranium from Iran is supposed to go, so Russia could scuttle implementation, even if the deal is legally reinvigorated.

One reason Putin may wish to do this involves oil prices.  Getting the deal back in place would relax sanctions on Iran and allow it to export more oil. This would ease the world price of oil. As of now, Putin would prefer to have that price as high as possible both to damage his enemies economically as well as to get as much income as he can from the oil he is able to export, given that Russia's oil is now banned from certain markets.

Barkley Rosser

Selling Mrs. Conspicuous Consumption

In Selling Mrs. Consumer, Christine Frederick shilled for progressive obsolescence, which had been advocated the previous year in an article by her husband, J. George Frederick. Or at least that is the way it seemed to her biographer, Janice Rutherford, who wrote, "she now took up and elaborated upon his theme, even using the same words..." 

Even using the same words?! It is possible that Mrs. Frederick copied passages from her husband's article. It is also possible that her husband, editor, and publisher, Mr. Frederick, wrote the chapter on progressive obsolescence for Mrs. Frederick's book. It's possible he wrote other chapters and made strategic additions here and there throughout the book. I mean, seriously?

There is another odd moment in Selling Mrs. Consumer that could possibly be from the pen of J. George Frederick. In chapter 13, the author makes the odd observation that "[c]ooking in general is thus no longer a means of "conspicuous consumption," to use Veblen's excellent phrase [emphasis added]." Rutherford described the peculiar comment as "misunderstanding his [Veblen's] indictment of the middle class's emulation of the wealthy." The book went on, however, to explain:

Emulation is a natural and a persisting human quality in all of us. The display of expensive goods or unusual possessions testifies to the economic distinction and pride of the owner or person making the display. Thus, the old time housewife making a display of her cooking skill, her elaborate menu, her rich dishes, did so as a means of expressing the "conspicuous consumption" of her particular family and herself as contrasted with the persons or family or woman to whom she was making the display. We have "conspicuous consumption" today, but its objects have changed, thus we have or make displays in the kind and elaborateness of the clothes we wear, in the furniture or jewels or furs we possess, and above all, in the car we drive and the home we occupy, or our way of life and living.

There is no "misunderstanding" here. Frederick -- whether Mr. or Mrs. -- simply omitted the implicit stigma of Veblen's "indictment." It's natural and persistent, so why should it be treated like a crime? Given Veblen's deadpan, matter-of-fact delivery, who is to say that his description was unequivocally an "indictment"? 

Why do I suspect George may have contributed the remarks on conspicuous consumption? In 1933, Frederick edited the volume, For and Against Technocracy: A Symposium. The Technocracy movement of the 1930s was steeped in the influence of Veblen. Frederick also edited volumes on The New Deal and on planning. He was reported interested in Joseph Schumpeter's idea of creative destruction, which he likened to his own views on progressive obsolescence. 

An apologetic interpretation of The Theory of the Leisure Class is conceivable, albeit eccentric. While pondering this matter, it came to my attention that Veblen used the word "obsolescence" nine times in The Theory of The Leisure Class. He used the word "obsolete" eight times, and "obsolescent" 16 times. 

Prior to 1900, most journal articles that use all three of those terms are either dealing with animal species or with features of language. Even the term "obsolescence," by itself, mostly refers to biological or medical phenomena. Of 95 instances of "obsolescence" prior to 1905 in JSTOR, 3 or 4 of them referred to other than biological, medical, or lexical matters. 

Veblen's contemporaries and influences -- Herbert Spencer, Henry George, William Graham Sumner, John Bates Clark, for example -- did not use the term. Veblen used "obsolescence" in The Theory of the Leisure Class, The Engineers and the Price System, The Theory of Business Enterprise, The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts, and An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace. It would be fair to conclude that Veblen popularized obsolescence as a sociological or economic concept.

In fact, Veblen theory of institutional evolution is grounded in the inherent obsolescence of contemporary social institutions:

Institutions are products of the past process, are adapted to past circumstances, and are therefore never in full accord with the requirements of the present. In the nature of the case, this process of selective adaptation can never catch up with the progressively changing situation in which the community finds itself at any given time; for the environment, the situation, the exigencies of life which enforce the adaptation and exercise the selection, change from day to day; and each successive situation of the community in its turn tends to obsolescence as soon as it has been established [emphasis added]. When a step in the development has been taken, this step itself constitutes a change of situation which requires a new adaptation; it becomes the point of departure for a new step in the adjustment, and so on interminably. 

Incidentally, Theodor Adorno cited the above passage in his 1941 essay, "Veblen's Attack on Culture." It would be fascinating to assess Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man from the perspective of Adorno's critique of Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class (Adorno's essay is anthologized in Prisms). Presumably, Adorno was unaware of the Fredericks's cynical appropriation of progressive obsolescence and conspicuous consumption but he did acknowledge the assimilation of Veblen's theories, including the adoption by journalists of his "striking terminology":

One sees here the objective tendency to disarm a tiresome opponent by giving him a warm reception. Veblen's thought. however, is not completely out of harmony with such a reception: he is less an outsider than he seems at first sight.

What Adorno criticized as Veblen's one-sided (might one say "one-dimensional"?) debunking of culture thus lent itself to precisely the sort of cynical appropriation it received. One might say the same for Marcuse's "repressive tolerance" and today's hyped-up cult of the victims of cancel culture. I will address the latter issue in a future post, expanding on the arguments I presented three years ago in "Unreading Marcuse's Repressive Tolerance" and a few other related posts from that time.

A Footnote to IT WAS BEDLAM!

Lewis Corey was a pseudonym for Louis Fraina, one of the founders of the U.S. Communist Party. In a letter to Marcuse dated August 16, 1960, Raya Dunayevskaya replied at length to his request for references to the American literature dealing with the issues of "the transformation of the laboring class under the impact of rationalization, automation and particularly, the higher standard of living." This was in connection with his research for One-Dimensional Man.

In her reply, Dunayevskaya briefly mentioned -- and dismissed -- Fraida/Corey's The Decline of American Capitalism as "so-called Marxist" and "underconsumptionist":

If you take the economists, you also have a choice of the flip side so that Louis M. Hacker now touts The Triumph of Capitalism and while everyone is ashamed of such past as The Decline of American Capitalism which, like all so-called Marxist books from Corey to that Stalinist apologist who passes for the Marxist authority (even Joseph Schumpeter's monumental but quite lopsided or, as we say more appropriate in Jewish tsidreit [confused, distorted], work, History of Economic Analysis refers to him as such) Paul Sweezy are one and all underconsumptionist so that, whether you take the period of the 1930s when "all" were Marxists to one degree or another and some serious works were done, or you take now when nearly the only works against capitalism are issued by the Stalinists, there really is no genuine Marxist analysis of the American economy either historically, sociologically or as economic works.

I suspect Marcuse accepted Dunayevskaya's evaluation and didn't bother with The Decline of American Capitalism, which is unfortunate because Corey's "so-called Marxist" critique of 'progressive obsolescence' may have led him away from Veblen-by-proxy moralism of the Vance Packard account of planned obsolescence and his own presentation of the evils of planned obsolescence as self-evident.

 

IT WAS BEDLAM!

 From The Decline of American Capitalism by Lewis Corey (1934):

Capitalist production saves on labor and multiplies the productive forces. But two contradictions arise which constantly torment capitalist enterprise. Saving on labor decreases relative wages and limits the conditions of consumption. This sets in motion the forces of excess capacity, sharpened competition, and mounting distribution costs. These costs absorb much, if not most, of the saving on labor, and eventually strengthen the downward pressure on the rate of profit. The efforts of capitalist enterprise to escape these manifold contradictions created bedlam.

...

Bedlam reached its climax in the theory of “progressive obsolescence,” seriously considered by the tormented magnates of industry, finance, and advertising:

“If we are to have increasingly large-scale production there must likewise be increasingly large-scale consumption ... To get more money into the consumers hands with which to buy ... is a mere minor stopgap. There is, however, a far greater and more powerful lever available. I refer to a principle which, for want of a simpler term, I name progressive obsolescence. This means simply the more intensive spreading – among those people who now have buying surplus – of the belief in and practice of buying more goods on the basis of obsolescence in efficiency, economy, style or taste. We must induce people who can afford it to buy a greater variety of goods on the same principle that they now buy automobiles, radios and clothes, namely, buying goods not to wear out, but to trade in or discard after a short time when new or more attractive goods or models come out. The one salvation of American industry, which has a capacity for producing 80% or 100% more goods than are now consumed, is to foster the progressive obsolescence principle, which means buying for up-to-dateness, efficiency and style, buying for change, whim, fancy ... We must either use the fruits of our marvelous factories in this highly efficient ‘power’ age, or slow them down or shut them down.” -  J. George Frederick, "Is Progressive Obsolescence the Path Toward Increased Consumption," Advertising and Selling, September 5, 1928, pp.19-20.

This is economic and cultural lunacy, but a lunacy wholly in accord with the social relations of capitalist production. Capitalism must produce and sell goods, but from the standpoint of profit it makes no difference what goods or who buys them.

The lunacy of “progressive obsolescence” was matched by the desperation of proposals to restrict production (now one of the aims of state capitalism). Said the president of the Durham Duplex Razor Company:

“Manufacturing merchandise faster than it can be sold is one of the principal causes of the increase in competition ... We are turning out more merchandise than can be sold profitably ... Business health can only be preserved by maintaining an equilibrium between production and consumer sales.” [12]

Thus was rejected the “principle” that production and prosperity depend upon mass consumption:

• “Limit production,” with 2,500,000 workers already unemployed!
• “Maintain an equilibrium between production and consumer sales,” “induce those people who now have buying surplus ... to buy a greater variety of goods ... not to wear out, but for style, change, whim, fancy,” while 85,000,000 workers and farmers were living on or below subsistence levels!

The Blindfolded Scaffolding Begins to Unfold

We sense too little for the process of containment to unfold. Yet phenomenologists focus on early representations from the scaffolding for subsequent events in front of the now not-blindfolded infants. Infants looked at longer aspects of the psychoanalytic scaffolding: how reverie can be and is being a weird kind of blindfold. 

Since our dynamical, reciprocal exchanges unfold and lead to changes -- gaze-following behavior of another blindfolded person in which students were blindfolded and presented with a series of interstitial spaces that unfold between them. It follows that any better instructional scaffolding to students by tapping behavioral dynamics that unfold in the variations of student problem solving by being blindfolded to problem difficulty. As a member of the urban landscape and theatre, scaffolding seem temporarily to lead a group, or to lead a blindfolded person and the empowerment that brings there, in that underground space, the blindfolded audience a separate, private show begins to unfold.

While mothers showing adaptive scaffolding accounting for infants' feedback to the learner in the form of scaffolding and/or guidance from a coach or mentor, strengthening the scaffolding upon which we experience our lives to the target length, which is transferred to the blindfolded student (right) by repeated trials. Pat was thrown across those who watch all of the pieces unfold in time and space, and Robertson instructed her by asking how the story might unfold in today's world, and how it might examine events as they unfold (in particular, the scaffolding of using narrators was no longer of the children being blindfolded, experiencing the trauma again, or seeing it unfold before their eyes). Furthermore, we should unfold the time t and allow the As we can see from the above discussion, scaffolding not only, regular training, and blindfolded testing sessions whereas, the kind of concrete and scaffolding and crowds and cars, lorries,,, 

The inputs to here, one will also find most of the scaffolding with which Marx blindfolded but didn't know in which direction it was tracing how capitalist contradictions unfold is also the way that actual experiment participants are blindfolded, and the crucial role of mutual responsiveness in the scaffolding of our day-to-day life unfold: the existence and ubiquity of such qualities of experience that unfold during such go-along encounters that interact, one way or another, with the unfolding activity of our neural and bodily apparatus are apt (at best) for mere support and scaffolding by their best tools and technologies.

Ha ha. I could do this bit blindfolded.

In the concepts of scaffolding and the extended mind as long as the interaction process continues to unfold in this. Participants are located in separate rooms, blindfolded, given the novel’s postmodernist scaffolding as prime means. The story would unfold during the fragile interstices of a tense. I was still clinging to the scaffolding pole as he slaughtered. Then the blindfolded participants are left to sway in place. When they took off the blindfolds, men somehow had to hang on. Why transport a blindfolded victim on a bicycle? One of the fishermen volunteered to be blindfolded and toss their faces wrapped in cloth. That leaves them featureless, they seek beyond that wall of quattrocento blue a beauty that is a fiction of themselves -- and do not find it, blindfolded by love. 

Vietnam Stress is like running blindfolded with weights on. These of coping and transformation that began to unfold. Often the faulty scaffolding builds new scaffolding on which to develop not just these experiences in more depth, when it collapsed.

Fascist Traditionalism And Putin's Invasion Of Ukraine

 About a half century ago I urged by my oldest friend to read a book by Fritjof Schuon (1907-1998) written in 1953, The Transcendental Unity of Religions. The book's title basically tells its message: that while each religion has its own exoteric forms that differ from those of each other, there is a core to all of them that is the same, a transcendental unity of cosmic truth and fundamental reality. Schuon had links with the Shadhili Sufi order, the Sufis being the branch of Islam open to relations with other relations from a transcendental mystical perspective, somewhat echoing ideas present in the 19th century US transcendentalist movement that was also associated with progressive political ideas. 

I found this book most interesting, although I was not moved to get involved with the Sufi group that my friend and a couple of others were drawn to. My old friend and his wife really got into that group for several years, becoming quite conservative on social issues as well as some others. This led to a period of time when we did not have any dealings with each other. Eventually they became disillusioned with this group and moved on, eventually becoming Romanian Orthodox despite neither having any Romanian ancestry. They remain quite conservative in their views, although fortunately have not been fans of Donald Trump at all. We did renew our friendship and remain in communication. Schuon, originally from Switerland, eventually moved to the US, dying in Bloomington, IN, not too far from where my friends now live outside Indianapolis.

Schuon was strongly influenced by Frenchman Rene Guenon (1886-1961), who also would join the Shadhili Sufi sect and would move in 1930 to live in Egypt. He is viewed as the founder of a movement known as Traditionalism, also as the Perennial Philosophy. Raised as a Roman Catholic, Guenon initially was interested in Hinduism as well as Taoism before joining the Sufi sect. But like Schuon he argued that all religions share a common unifying of transcending beliefs.  Guenon argued that these ideas and beliefs dated from the pre-modern world and thus are Traditional. He favored ancient and medieval forms of art over those arising in the Renaissance and since. The Enlightenment and science and reason were seen as distracting from and degrading this primordial vision of transcendental unity.  Guenon's ideas were most influentially laid out in several books he wrote in the late 1920s such as The World in Crisis (1927) and Spritual Authority and Temporal Power (1929).  Guenon's work would become highly influential on much of modern academic religious studies.

While Guenon's work implicitly posed a highly conservative view of the world with its denigration of science and modernity, he avoided specific political movements, as did his follower, Schuon, and some others.  But one such follower did not engage in such avoidance, Giulio (Julius) Evola (1898-1974) of Italy. He would shift the religious focus to occultism and adopted an overtly anti-Semitic stance. His most famous books were Revolt Against the Modern World (1934) and Men in the Ruins (1953). Living in Italy under Mussolini he was initially too extreme even for the Fascists, but in the late 1930s after spending time in Germany with Himmler he would help move Mussolini to fully racist position more in line with that of Nazi Germany. He disapproved of the "populism" of both the Fascists and Nazis, arguing for the revival of an ancient caste system. He continued to formulate his philosophy of "radical traditionalism" and "magical idealism" after the war, adding a patriarchal element to his anti-democratic position.  He would be arrested in 1951 for active involvement in attempting to revive fascism. He advocated a trans-national "European Imperium." One of his current followers is sometime Trump adviser, Steve Bannon.

But for our purposes his most important follower and advocate of this Traditionalism is the Russian Aleksandr Dugin (b. 1962), who would lead the sociology department at Moscow State University for several years prior to 2014, when he was fired.  Dugin accepted the authoritarian and anti-Semitic elements of Traditionalism while shifting the religious focus to the Russian Orthodox Church. especially its Old Believer branch. He has developed his own version of the European Imperium as Eurasianism, which sees an even broader entity that rules all of Eurasia that is ruled by Russia. Dugin has laid this out in various works posing his own version of history that glorifies the history of the Kyivan Rus, especially in his most influential book, The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia (1997). This book, now widely read by members of the Russian general staff, has become a major influence on none other than Vladimir V. Putin, with Dugin a major adviser of his. Reportedly it was Dugin who convinced Putin to take over and annex Crimea in 2014, and has long advocated Russia conquering Ukraine as part of a broader campaign to establish his Eurasiatic entity.

We thus have a great irony. On the one hand V.V. Putin has declared that a major motive for his invasion of Ukraine is that he is supposedly going to "de-Nazify" the nation. But his underlying philosophy reflects a profoundly fascist vision of the world.

Barkley Rosser

The cleric Th. Chalmers, in the otherwise in many respects ridiculous and repulsive work... has correctly struck upon this point,

‘Profit,’ says the same Chalmers, ‘has the effect of attaching the services of the disposable population to other masters, besides the mere landed proprietors, . . . while their expenditure reaches higher than the necessaries of life.’

The above quote is not the point Marx considered correct in Chalmers's "otherwise... ridiculous and repulsive" book. It does, however, indicate Marx's knowledge of Chalmers's concept of disposable population. The remark occurs in the Grundrisse only seven pages before Marx's intense discussion of the necessity -- as a condition for the realization of capital -- of a surplus population, in which he alludes again to Chalmers and to the "idle surplus population" treated as necessary by the "population fanatics." 

I previously discussed Chalmers's disposable population and its possible connection to Dilke's disposable time and to Marx's discussion of surplus population in Disposable People and Necessary labour. Surplus labour. Surplus population. Surplus capital. (The Return of "Disposable People"), respectively. In Disposable forces, disposable class, I mentioned the likelihood that Chalmer's concept of disposable population was an adaptation and modification of Turgot's disposable class. 

Where Turgot's disposable class had to do with proprietors who possessed disposable revenues, Chalmers's disposable population referred to workers who were available to perform work beyond providing sustenance and comforts. The disposable population would thus be employed by the disposable class to do jobs that were neither 'productive' nor 'stipendiary' in Turgot's terms or, for Chalmers, the population in excess of the agricultural population and a 'secondary population' who produce "whatever enters, after food, into the general standard of enjoyment among the peasantry." Chalmers's first two populations are thus indistinguishable from Turgot's first two classes.

In my latest post examining Herbert Marcuse's use of planned obsolescence, I discussed how Thorstein Veblen's analysis of concepts of conspicuous consumption, conspicuous waste, and invidious comparison relied on the "Four Stages Theory" that David Graeber and David Wengrow criticize in The Dawn of Everything. In his 1766 essay, Réflexions sur la formation et la distribution des richesses, Turgot refers to the theory of stages in paragraphs 52, 53, and 54, where, as he explained in paragraph 51: 

We here again are obliged to go back to a retrospect of many things which have been as yet only hinted at, after we have spoken of the division of different professions, and of the different methods by which the proprietors of capitals may render them of value; because, otherwise, we should not be able to explain them properly, without interrupting the connection of our ideas.

Which is to say that Turgot's discussion of the division of labour in a commercial society presumed the theory of historical stages of savagery, pastoral life, cultivation, and commerce but proceeded from a logical analysis of commerce, rather than a chronological account. Thus, Turgot's disposable class is the foundation of the final stage.

In Theories of Surplus Value, volume one, Marx credited Turgot with a "deeper analysis of capital relations" among the Physiocrats. Marx identifies an analysis of "the essence of surplus-value" in Turgot's Réflexions:

Turgot at first presents this unbought element as a pure gift of nature. We shall see, however, that in his writings this pure gift of nature becomes imperceptibly transformed into the surplus-labour of the labourer which the landowner has not bought, but which he sells in the products of agriculture.

Marx did not mention Turgot's classe disponible. In the Grundrisse, and in volume three of Theories of Surplus Value, Marx devoted a great deal of attention to the concept of disposable time from Charles Wentworth Dilke's 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties. In fact, Marx adopts Dilke's expression that wealth is disposable time and makes it the foundation of his theory of surplus value: "The whole development of wealth rests on the creation of disposable time." Capital converts disposable time into superfluous labour time, the basis of surplus value.

My speculation, based on the relative rarity of the expression 'disposable time' before Dilke's usage, is that Dilke intended it as a rebuttal to Chalmers's disposable population, which Dilke characterized as 'unproductive labour.' Central to Dilke's analysis was the claim that the expansion of unproductive labour -- the 19th century version of 'bullshit jobs' -- was one of the main obstacles to the enjoyment of leisure time by the labouring classes.

Monetary Sovereignty, Sanctions and Russian Economic Policy

The central role of economic sanctions in the US/EU strategy against Russia has returned international political economy to center stage, if it had ever left it.  Here are some thoughts occasioned by Adam Tooze’s interesting analysis of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as perceived by the Russian economic policy apparatus, connected to the role of monetary reform in the anti-colonial struggle of the 1930s as documented by Eric Helleiner in Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods.

Let’s start with MMT.  This is usually presented as a set of claims and recommendations that follow from acknowledging the implications of monetary sovereignty: countries whose central banks issue internationally accepted (hard) currencies and can therefore borrow without foreign exchange constraints can treat debt like money, running fiscal deficits as needed to sustain full employment indefinitely.  Rather than being raised to “pay for” spending, tax revenues should be adjusted so that debt is as stimulative as it needs to be, short of provoking inflation.  This is, for the most part, a resurrection of first-generation (1930s) Keynesian thinking, as codified, for example, in Abba Lerner’s Functional Finance.

In the usual presentation in a US or other wealthy country context, MMT takes monetary sovereignty as paradigmatic: it is assumed to exist as the starting point for the rest of the analysis.  Moreover, such sovereignty is implicitly treated as binary; it exists or it doesn’t.  Thus there are two types of states, those to which MMT applies and all the rest.

But there’s a different way to look at the question.  Sovereignty or its lack, rather than being a parameter, can be thought of as an object of policy, something to be achieved.  And rather than being all or nothing, sovereignty can be a matter of degree, a policy space that can expand or shrink depending on the circumstances countries face and the measures they take to respond to them.  Finally, sovereignty in economic matters is a crucial component of sovereignty overall.

This is clearly how things look from a Russian government perspective.  Emerging from the Yeltsin period in the 1990s, Russia was a largely extractive state that created fortunes for those able to seize former state assets, especially in natural resources, but little was done to institutionalize an economy capable of growth, development or effective policy guidance.  The country lived, as it still largely does, on revenues from energy and other resource exports, and modest growth occurred as the result of reinvestment by entities acquiring those export revenues.  The disaster of 1998, when Russia experienced a sudden stop in capital inflows, led to a regime of budget surpluses—i.e. fiscal austerity.

But Russia hoarded its current account surpluses, building up a war chest of hard currency assets in its central bank and using capital controls to restrict the ability of private actors to spirit capital abroad.  What some Russian analysts came to realize was that this conferred a substantial degree of monetary sovereignty on the country, making it eligible for the growth-friendly recommendations of MMT, or Keynesian fiscal policy in general.  This is documented by Tooze.  What he doesn’t say, but what lies at the heart of the story, is Russia’s ability to continue to earn reserve currencies, euros directly and dollars indirectly, by its energy exports; this defines a space in which the ruble can indeed be sovereign, since it is exchangeable for these other currencies up to the limit of those revenues.  That’s not full sovereignty in the “pure” MMT sense, but it’s enough to justify an expansive countercyclical fiscal policy.  It also bolsters Russia’s overall sovereignty, including its ability to execute the war against Ukraine.

Sovereignty is not always a good thing.

All of this brought to mind the fascinating narrative that takes up most of Helleiner’s superb book on international monetary policy pre- and post-WWII.  I understand that Helleiner had to structure his book around a central thread, and he chose to have it argue against the claim that “development” was a neocolonial concept foisted on the global South in the context of the cold war between the US and the USSR.  On the contrary, he shows that development was the goal of Latin American governments democratizing in response to the Great Depression, along with the Indian independence advocates seeking economic as well as political sovereignty vis-a-vis England.

The largest part of his book, however, is taken up with an account of monetary reform in Latin America during the 1930s, which was both an economic and a political movement.  Prior to the depression, these countries had either adhered to the gold standard or were making do as debtors powerless in the face of the global power exercised by Wall Street, the City of London, and the political-military apparatus that enforced their dictates.  They had no meaningful sovereignty in economic affairs, and public projects to promote development were largely ruled out by monetary constraints.

Then the New Deal swept into power in the US, and in large parts of the governing apparatus there was open hostility to Wall Street.  In particular, a team in the Treasury Department, headed by Harry Dexter White, took as its mission monetary reform throughout the Americas that would increase sovereign policy space, especially for expansionary fiscal policy.  They helped countries develop the tools to conduct independent monetary policy, creating central banks with foreign exchange reserves and as much flexibility in money creation as circumstances would permit.  While Helleiner foregrounded the widespread desire for development and the centrality of the South’s demand for it in the Bretton Woods process during the subsequent decade—a decision I understand—it now seems to me that there is another thread of equal importance: the role of what we now call Keynesian macropolicy and institutional capacity in decentering the global power of finance.  That is, Keynesianism in the achievement and exercise of monetary sovereignty works against the subaltern status of non-dominant countries.

To take one example from the present, the case for sanctions against Russia we initially heard was that, while they might not be so effective in the short run, they would be devastating over time as restrictions on international investment take hold.  But this assumes that Russia would be unable to make those investments on its own.  This is false to the extent that Russia has the means and will to run deficits to finance them.  (I am abstracting from the parallel issue of technology transfer and integration.)  Until recently the will was missing, since, as Tooze documents, the Russian state ran surpluses to prevent any recurrence of 1998.  What the MMT debate inside the country signifies is that at least some Russian policy experts understand that a current account surplus does indeed confer the ability to self-finance growth.

The freezing of central bank assets is significant, but only in relation to Russia’s demand for foreign exchange.  As long as it has enough oil and gas revenue to not only finance sufficient consumer imports but also sustain the sovereignty that fiscal deficits requre, it can continue on its present path.  In the end there is no substitute for radically shrinking those revenues.

War, Waste, and the Myth of Progress

In the introduction to One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse listed four authors -- Vance Packard, C. Wright Mills, William H. White, and Fred J. Cooks -- whose works were of "vital importance" to his analysis. In the text, he mentioned "the affluent society" several times, which, of course, was the title of a famous book by John Kenneth Galbraith. 

Galbraith, Mills, and White all cited Thorstein Veblen in their books. Packard cited the influence of Stuart Chase's The Tragedy of Waste on his thinking. Chase's book cited Veblen no fewer than 20 times. It is not an overstatement to say that the specter of Thorstein Veblen haunts One-Dimensional Man. 

I will leave debates about the compatibility or incompatibility of Marx and Veblen to the literature in the archives. What I am interested in here is the adequacy of Veblen's critique of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste to Marcuse's critique of late capitalist social identity. 

As I mentioned earlier, Marcuse never specifically analyzed planned obsolescence. He simply included it in lists of symptoms of the one-dimensional society. Throughout nearly a dozen publications, Marcuse typically listed planned obsolescence along with advertising (18 times), waste (10-13 times),  militarism (9 times), and a dozen or so miscellaneous items, several of which could be interpreted as examples of either waste or advertising.

War, waste, and advertising are central themes in The Tragedy of Waste but Chase's use of World War I as a benchmark of rational planning is odd, to say the least:

War control lifted the economic system of the country, stupefied by decades of profit seeking, and hammered it and pounded it into an intelligent mechanism for delivering goods and services according to the needs of the army and of the working population.

It would be more accurate to say that the wholesale waste of war and war production made the retail waste of peacetime profit-seeking superfluous. As Stephen Leacock had stipulated four years earlier, "The economics of war, therefore, has thrown its lurid light upon the economics of peace." It did so by amplifying the waste, not by eliminating it:

War is destruction—the annihilation of human life, the destruction of things made with generations of labor, the misdirection of productive power from making what is useful to making what is useless. In the great war just over, some seven million lives were sacrificed; eight million tons of shipping were sunk beneath the sea; some fifty million adult males were drawn from productive labor to the lines of battle; behind them uncounted millions labored day and night at making the weapons of destruction.

Leacock was another of Veblen's followers, as was Kenneth Burke, who in 1929 wrote the prescient essay, "Waste -- the future of prosperity." Arthur Dahlberg was a follower of Leacock as Vance Packard was a follower of Stuart Chase. All roads lead to Veblen.

Here's the catch: Veblen's evolutionary explanation is based on myth. This is not to say his social criticism is invalid. The problem is that the social criticism is  wrapped in a myth of progress that neutralizes its effectiveness, at the same time, however, of possibly affording the criticism a wider audience than it would have received in the raw. Here is how Veblen articulated the myth:

The early differentiation out of which the distinction between a leisure and a working class arises is a division maintained between men's and women's work in the lower stages of barbarism. Likewise the earliest form of ownership is an ownership of the women by the able-bodied men of the community. The facts may be expressed in more general terms. and truer to the import of the barbarian theory of life, by saying that it is an ownership of the woman by the man.

The "lower stages of barbarism" is evidently something that modern society has evolved out of -- but not completely. Actually, though, it is a tale told by Anne Robert Jacques Turgot to justify social inequality and modified by Jean-Jacques Rousseau to explain why "man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains." In The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow present the back story on this pervasive myth of progress.

Starting at around minute 44:00 to around 54:30 of the above video Graeber  discusses the contributions of Kandiaronk, Madame de Graffigny, Turgot, and finally Rousseau to the modern evolutionary myth of progress. As Graeber and Wengrow put it in their book, Turgot invented his myth of social evolution to refute a compelling indigenous criticism of European society. Rousseau synthesized the indigenous critique and the mythical evolutionary refutation. Graeber jokes toward the end of the segment, that Rousseau invented what would become both the standard conservative and leftist political myths.

The consequences of this framing are too immense to go into here but one of the things that it does is domesticate any criticism of "the way things are." Instead of "the best of all possible worlds" or even "there is no alternative," the myth of progress admits that there are problems but implies that they can only be addressed by a gradual and virtually unintended process of evolution.

Never Mind Schrödinger's Cat, Here's David Bohm's Dream

I’ve had dreams of all sorts from time to time, but I don’t remember them too well. There was one dream that had a sort of philosophical content.

I dreamt I was in a place that had a cat. I came into the room where this cat was talking to another cat, making a date to meet at a certain time. I said, “There’s something wrong here. What could it be? I know what it is: Cats can’t tell time!”

I went up to this cat and said, “What do you mean by making this date? You know you can’t tell time. ”

The cat said, “Of course we cats can tell time.”

I said, “I don’t believe it. There’s a clock on the wall. Tell me the time.” The clock showed a quarter after eight.

But the cat hemmed and hawed and said, “Five after four... ten after three...”

So I said, “That proves that cats can’t tell time!”

Then I woke up laughing because the point was that in the dream, I was concerned with some trivial difficulty when a much more fundamental issue was askew. The trivial difficulty was that cats can’t tell time. The fundamental absurdity was the cat talking!

Original Sin And Planes In The Air

 The original sin of the current catastrophe in Ukraine was the failure of the US and UK to defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine when Putin's Russia seized control of Crimea as they promised to do in the Budapest Accord of 1994 when Ukraine gave up the third largest stock of nuclear weapons in the world.  They are also now in violation of that Accord now by their weak effort to save Ukraine. They can and should enforce a no fly zone over Ukraine, which I believe they can enforce.  This is not about NATO; it is about right and wrong.  This is not boots on the ground; it is planes in the air.

Barkley Rosser