Ayn Rand Will Enslave You! (2 Feb. 2013)

            Okay, "Ayn Rand Will Enslave You!" is a little over-stated, but I think I can pull off a snarky variation on a theme by F. A. Hayek and argue that fully-achieved, radical Libertarian capitalism would put us on a road that ironically returns to the essence of serfdom.

            Let me start with that "most of us."

            We humans have the bad habit of hearing stories or reading histories and identifying with the winners. (Americans nostalgic for the Confederacy are an exception: The rebel-traitors lost, pendejos! Get over it.).

            We humans have a bad habit of identifying with the winners and the privileged, and this is odd in Americans 'cause if our ancestors were doing all that well Over There, most of us wouldn't now be Over Here.

            I'm Over Here, in the US of A, in part because in 1903 my father's father fled Russia ahead of the Czar's police after him on a murder charge. He'd killed a Cossack; in the family version of the story — which we're sticking to — my grandfather killed the Cossack while the Cossack was raping his (my grandfather's) sister during a pogrom. Still, if my grandfather had murdered a Cossack in a fit of unfortunately premature revolutionary zeal, that would be all right with me.

            A lot of us are here in the USA because our ancestors mistimed their revolutionary zeal or lack of zeal or found themselves POWs at a time and place where POWs were sold to the local slave traders — or preferred not to starve to death in a potato famine or fled press gangs and conscription or a bad marriage and debt collectors; in short, for whatever reasons, they found it best to get the hell out.

            Granted, some were aristocrats who had to get the hell out: a few revolutions succeed, or nobly-bred conspirators took the wrong side in a coup that failed; but there never were that many aristocrats, not relatively speaking, not relative to the masses of peasants and lower.

            I had a friend who bragged that his family was on the losing side of wars and rebellions going back at least six generations; you probably lack bragging rights that impressive, but there's a really good chance your ancestors like mine were among that teeming "wretched refuse," the mongrels of the Earth.

            So none of this identifying with the aristocrats, already! It's not just un-American but unhistorical and disloyal. The odds are your people were peasants or lower on the food chain, and you'd damn well better be capable of thinking like a peasant or, in this case, a serf.

            So: What's the essence of being a serf?

            It's going to piss you serfs off that you're trapped in the precursor of a company town and have to get your grain ground at His Lordship's mill and get ripped off on assessments when His Lordship gets captured in battle and you have to help ransom his ass — or pay for his son's getting knighted or his daughter getting married. It will piss you off if His Lordship and Ladyship can't be hauled into court by a peasant like you when their thugs mug and rob you: "a jury of his peers" meant exactly that, his peers, not necessarily yours. And your heirs will be pissed off when the Lord gets the best of whatever you have to leave when you die.

            Sure, but the essence of your lowly estate is the demands on your time.

            That's the essence of serfdom and more so of slavery: the day-to-day, routine expropriation of time and labor.

            "But," you say, or should say, "but," you say, "freedom from oppression is exactly what capitalist Libertarianism is all about. Freedom from oppression by the State!"

            There wasn't much "State" back in the bad old days of feudalism, so let's all accept the idea that "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" primarily from the State but also from other possible oppressors and exploiters. And let's accept the idea that exploitation nowadays can get subtle. A "wage slave" isn't a slave and "working as a serf in a cube farm" isn't being a serf in Imperial Russia. But …

            But consider day-to-day life in a necessarily imaginary actually-existing capitalist Libertarian utopia: that's life as lived by you, a probable descendent of a slave, serf, peasant — or even an aristocrat not too good (or lucky) choosing sides in power struggles.

            So you're probably not an Ayn Randian general of industry leading the Makers of the world. You're probably a wage-earner pushing virtual buttons at home or in a cube farm and wondering if a capitalist Libertarian utopia offers a union you can join.

            What interests me more, though, is everyday life outside of work for a grunt like you or me in a rigorous market economy, life spent mainly as a consumer, and a consumer who is highly unlikely to have a staff.

            What's life like in a hyper-capitalist, high-tech world, where you're surrounded by choices in a grand array of overlapping free markets — mostly unregulated markets — caught up in the swirl of dynamic, rapid, capitalist change?

            With the money to hire a staff, life could be very good.

            Without a staff, though, I think you'd be trapped in a system that expropriates your time as much as — if far more gently than — in feudalism.

            Consider what happens when you have to negotiate and contract for health-care, paying for health-care, arranging public health services — good luck with that! — contracting for school, water, power, police and fire protection? And what happens when you have to negotiate those contracts more and more frequently as corporate persons fine-tune ways of maximizing profit by tweaking contracts as often as Travelocity changes rates for plane flights?

            There isn't much of a State in a capitalist Libertarian utopia, but what there is will spend most of its energy enforcing contracts. What happens when you really have to read all those agreements for Terms of Use?

            Choice is good. Change is often good. Choices forced upon you, however, continual and rapid change: those are not so good.

            If you have no choice but to spend large hunks of your time shopping around and operating as a "Midas-Plagued," product-consuming, free-market economic animal; if you have to negotiate your way through the day knowing that tomorrow you may have to renegotiate — what then?

            The bitter joke in recent, economically modernized and liberalized Eastern Europe has it that Karl "Marx was wrong about everything about Communism; unfortunately, he was right about capitalism." As Marx and Frederick Engels said about the slow-speed capitalism of their time: "Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air […]."

            The turbo-charged capitalism of our time has placed even more strain on people. A capitalist-Libertarian "utopia" of rampant markets would be worse. The markets might be free, but those systemically coerced into using them are far less free. The working conditions will be a whole lot better, but like our "huddled masses"/"wretched refuse" ancestors, much our time and labor will have been appropriated: appropriated by the aristocrats of the new world, with money to hire us peasants as staff to do the grunt work of consumption.

Memorial Day, 2013: Reconciling with Johnny Reb —or Not (27 May 2013)

            In a useful web page in four languages, the US Memorial Day Organization tells us that it is likely Memorial day "had many separate beginnings" where Americans after the Civil War gathered, by plan or spontaneously, "to honor the […] dead" in what remains to our day the worst war in America's history: worst in terms of the death and sufferings of Americans, the destruction of American cities, towns, and treasure, and worst in terms of long-lasting scars.

            In what seems to be uncontroversial history, the Memorial Day Organization tells us that Memorial Day — called "Decoration Day" at the time and long after — "was officially proclaimed on 5 May 1868 by [Union] General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic […] and was first observed on 30 May 1868, when flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery." Decoration Day became an official holiday in New York State in 1873, and by 1890, Decoration Day "was recognized by all of the northern states"; Americans of the old Confederacy, however, "refused to acknowledge the day, honoring their dead on separate days until after World War I (when the holiday changed from honoring just those who died fighting in the Civil War to honoring Americans who died fighting in any war). It is now celebrated in almost every State on the last Monday in May […], though several southern states have an additional separate day for honoring the Confederate war dead: January 19 in Texas, April 26 in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi; May 10 in South Carolina; and June 3 (Jefferson Davis' birthday) in Louisiana and Tennessee."

            "Memorial Day," the Memorial Day Organization hopefully says, "is not about division. It is about reconciliation […]."

            Looking at American politics and society in 2013, however, it's clear that that reconciliation had problems to start with and remains troubled.

            If I were a Black American, descended of Africans kidnapped and then enslaved in the Americas, I might feel strongly that the North/South reconciliation after the Civil War was bought at the expense of my grandparents and great-grandparents and my ancestors generally. Post-Civil War "Radical Reconstruction" of the Confederacy was nowhere near radical enough and ended far too soon; "reconciliation" was purchased for White folks by allowing a Jim Crow regime and the triumph of the theory that States' Rights included the "right" to continue to oppress, rip off, and occasionally lynch and otherwise terrorize Black people long after the Civil War and the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments to the US Constitution.

         From my off-White point of view, the passion is less, but the historical conclusion is still there.

            In his Second Inaugural Address, nearing a Union victory, Abraham Lincoln moved toward reconciliation and talked about harboring "malice toward none" and called upon his fellow citizens "to bind up the nation's wounds." Fine, but in 2013 let us recall the full context of those appeals for charity even for those guilty of "Treason against the United States […] in levying war against them." 

         Lincoln points out the simple fact that in 1861 an eighth of the US population was enslaved and the peculiar fact that most Americans, North and South "read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other." He then goes on to speak differently from the definitely nonAbolitionist Lincoln of the First Inaugural, rather snarkily noting that "It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces" — though he adds the Christian-like qualification, "but let us judge not, that we be not judged. " Lincoln continues:

  The prayers of both [Union and Confederate] could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the  providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

         Then, and only then — after talking about Justice, and adding a reminder about the differences between right and wrong and the necessity to continue in the right — then we get the concluding lines: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

           We're approaching the 150^th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, a major "sesquicentennial," and I for one am willing to forgive and forget, get undivided and reconciled. That is difficult, however, when there are still a fair number of Americans in the Old Confederacy and some Reb-symp areas who talk of "The War of Northern Aggression" when most of us in the Old North are polite enough to decline to talk of the War of the Rebellion or "the War of Confederate Treason." It's difficult to think of final reconciliation when we still hear talk by supposedly serious politicians about what amounts to nullification, and interposition, and petitions circulate calling for secession. It's difficult when people who should know better think any rebellion basically a good thing and display Confederate flags, or remain silent when others do so.

            The war is over; the Union won, and more important the Union deserved to win. "The Lost Cause" lost and deserved to lose, and it's not just dumb-ass romanticism to hold onto The Lost Cause of the Confederacy but unpatriotic and wicked.

            And from there let us think our way through to contemporary issues and the dangers of Nixonian-style continuations of "The Southern Strategy" to get non-rich Whites to vote against their own interests and hysteria over "takings" and disarming the (White, Christian, "patriot") population. Yeah, we took away your slaves and U.S. Grant tried — with unfortunately little success — to use the power of the Federal government to disarm the Ku Klux Klan; get over it! Freeing slaves and, temporarily, disarming enemy combatants was the right thing to do, and threats from the US Federal government nowadays are different — and relatively minor.

            So, Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy, I would like to reconcile. But, frankly, if you guys really don't want to forgive and mostly forget; if you still want to celebrate martyrs to the Grand Old Cause of slavery and (later) segregation; and then, if, say, Texas wants to secede from the Union — I'm willing to discuss terms.

            The folks at the US Memorial Day Organization seem to be nice people and will us well in wanting reconciliation — but Memorial Day 2013 saw America still seriously divided.