Today I will compose a very simple entry where all I do is copy a couple of…
However, before I give the excerpts, I’ll get this out of the way:
Obligatory image
What I did here is take an ad from a magazine—just the first ad that appeared when I opened the pages at random—and I placed tracing paper over the top of the ad, and I copied some letters from the slogan and also some of the stuff they were trying to sell; but I didn’t finish the tracing because I got bored. Then I cut around my journeywork with shears, and photographed the paper against a plain cardboard background.
Dear diary,
In my last entry, you’ll recall that I plagiarized the 2019 SOTU speech. My source was the official text from the White House’s own website. Well anyone who bothered to compare my own version of the speech to the original would note that I left out at least one major part. That’s the part where the president says “America is not, and will never be, a socialist nation.” The reason I skipped over this hard truth is that my goal was to be absurd, NOT to brood. But since the point of this present entry is to brood, and only to brood—NOT to have fun—here below I will copy the neglected passage. My aim in doing so (besides brooding) is to document the general attitude of the political class in the Year of our Lord 2019. (And please note that the White House’s transcript includes the reactions of the audience; so the passage reads like a mini-drama.)
PRESIDENT: Here in the United States, we are alarmed by the new calls to adopt socialism in our country.
AUDIENCE: Booo —
PRESIDENT: America was founded on liberty and independence, and not government coercion, domination, and control. (Applause.) We are born free and we will stay free.
AUDIENCE: USA! USA! USA!
PRESIDENT: Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country. (Applause.)
AUDIENCE: USA! USA! USA!
In one of my recent entries, I noted how my mind has changed so I no longer care to defend the terms socialism and communism, etc. Seeing the above transcript only strengthens my resolve, because the words are being re-defined thru usage. Trump here simply equates “socialism” with “government coercion, domination, and control”. Who would ever believe in or want those things? I myself sure don’t; therefore, if socialism is to stand for “the opposite of liberty” and “the opposite of independence”, then I too am against socialism. I want everyone to be “born free” and to “stay free”. And socialism is apparently “anti-freedom”; so to heck with it.
OK. But when, to vast applause and chants of “USA!”, Trump says, “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country,” I think to myself: In order to RENEW a resolve, one must sometime in the past have originally MADE that resolve; thus I ask: When did “America” ever resolve to eschew socialism? Is there a genuine declaration that exists somewhere & which one might cite? Or could I just as easily shout from my tree stump at the park, when I sermonize to our local crows tomorrow afternoon, “Let us renew our resolve that America will never evict any bird from its nest!” (A blatant falsehood.)
But just a few days before Trump delivered the above address, an interview with the anthropologist David Graeber (whom I idolize after reading his book Debt: The First 5000 Years) was published as an audio file online, and his remarks appealed to me, as they usually do; so I thot it’d be OK if I copy out a portion of the talk (it has no accompanying transcript that I’m aware of), just to contrast with the above anti-socialist trumpetings.
The interviewer’s name is James Butler. He begins this part of the talk with a couple of his own observations.
JAMES BUTLER: In my bleak moments, especially when looking at American politics, I get the sense of these politicians as having a sort of sucking nihilist void; and especially in relation to climate chaos, as if they're saying: We're not going to be able to do anything about this impending disaster, so we might as well take as much as we can while there's still stuff to take—
DAVID GRAEBER: ...so that our bunkers will be nicer.
JB: [Laughing] —but... it does lead to the other question: ...If we have a sense that this general order of capitalism is crumbling—it's falling apart, its cracks are showing—what are the mechanisms thru which that order is still legitimated? And how does it function? Where are the foundations of its legitimacy?
DG: This is one of the things I've been fascinated with answering over the last ten years or so. And it's driven a lot of my research and writing. I like to think of myself as an exponent of the Karl Rove school of anti-capitalism, in the sense that Rove said "Don't go after your opponent's weaknesses; go after their strengths." ...I think that we need to proceed in a very similar way to capitalism, because everybody already knows that capitalism creates alienation, inequality, all that stuff — people were willing to put up with it anyway, for certain reasons. But the traditional reasons they're willing to put up with it have largely gone by the board. And there are three arguments that people would regularly make, over the course of the 2nd half of the 20th century, at least:
One was: Capitalism might create greater inequality, but a rising tide lifts all boats; and even the poorest, even working class people know that that their children will be doing better than they were. — Well obviously that's not true anymore. OK, so that's gone.
Number two was technology: capitalism is driving an incredible efflorescence of new sources of energy, new space technology, you know, we're all gonna be on Venus in a few generations and all these questions will be moot; and techno-wonders will make our lives so much better. — Well, nowadays, technological wonders seem to be limited to: Yet another iPhone. Ya know? That's really stopped. Nobody's even talking about “we're all gonna have androids that'll walk the dog and clean the kitchen...” So, military simulation and these information technologies are growing, but the kind that actually make your life way easier seem to have gone. And the really exciting, poetic technologies (as I call them)—you know: conquering other galaxies? Forget it. Now we can do really good movies about that kind of thing — way better than they did in the 50s — but we can't actually DO those things. In the 50s they thought we were actually gonna be DOING that stuff by now. Alright, so that's gone.
Then you have the 3rd one: stability. They said: “Well, you're gonna have a stronger and stronger middle class under capitalism, that's gonna mean political stability and an end to extremism.” — Well [laughs], no.
OK, so the three primary arguments for capitalism are gone. So, what do they have left? Well they have two things, as far as I can make out – or two classes of arguments. One of them is moral; and one of them is pragmatic.
The pragmatic agrument is obvious: “Capitalism's the only thing that works. You know, it's amazingly efficient; nothing else could possibly work.” — And one of the things I was trying to do, in my book Bullshit Jobs, is to point out how silly that is. I mean, look at this "rise of the robots" rhetoric: "Oh no, robots are going to come take our jobs; what are we going to do!" You know, I mean, "We're going to be faced with a world where there's very little need for work, plus vast wealth and abundance: Oh no! We can't handle THAT! That would involve redistributing things; and capitalism can't do that, right?" — Um, I thought we were supposed to be efficient. You know, that should be the easiest problem you could possibly have: Less demand for work, & more abundance. And we can't handle THAT? This must be one of the most inefficient economic systems ever.
So that's one issue: the efficiency; or, “there's nothing else that could possibly do even remotely as well.” There's a million ways that this argument is bizarre and sketchy. But go to the moral arguments, which I think actually are in some ways stronger:
Michael Hudson had a wonderful quote about debt: he said "Sometime in the 1950s & 60s, capitalists figured out that poor people actually feel morally obliged to pay their debts." — Because capitalists don't; they'll just screw you over the soonest moment they can — there's absolutely no feeling that they're hidebound to pay people just because they said they would. ...But poor people actually feel honor-bound to pay debts. So that's one thing: they really got people believing that if you fall into debt you're a deadbeat, you're a bad person, you're living beyond your means...
& allied to that is an ideology of WORK: people really believe that if you're not working harder than you'd wanna be working, at something that you don't enjoy much (preferably for someone you do not like), you're just a bad person: you don't deserve the love and support of your community, you know: you're a parasite. And people have really internalized this.
So I think those moral arguments, more than anything else, are what's holding the system together. And there's a whole series of misconceptions — you know, assumptions that people have, like: "Banks are lending somebody else's money." —No, they're not; they make up the money! ...or: "Governments need taxes as revenue to fund services." —No, that's not what taxes do; taxes are just a way of moving around money; and also they validate the money that the banks make up, because you can only use bank money to pay taxes.
There's a whole series of misconceptions like that, which people just automatically assume, and yet they have nothing to do with reality.
And it's really difficult for the politicians. Even left-wing politicians say: "Well, I have to operate within the terms that are given; it's up to you guys to change the way people think about this."JB: Yeah, I thought there was something really striking about a statement that I recently heard from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. For listeners who are unfamiliar with her: she's the new New York congresswoman—
DG: ...and superstar socialist.
JB: [Laughs.] Yeah! She has an amazingly strong social-media game, but she’s also willing to say things that I don't think have been said by someone in congress since—
DG: ...probably since the Populists.
JB: Yeah—
DG: ...the REAL Populists.
JB: Yeah, here was her line: “Every billionaire is a policy failure.”
DG: Hmm... that's not bad...!
JB: And I thought: Wow, in American public discourse, that's extremely rare. And what's striking about her is that she has this very clear and very strong moral argument about the failings of the system.
DG: And she was 20 years old when we did "Occupy Wall Street."
JB: O god! [Laughs.] That's depressing.
DG: No it's not! because 18 to 22 was the age of the people who were in Occupy, and this is what those people are doing today. I mean, whenever people say "Oh, the Occupy movement was such a failure," I always say "OK, well, the last time I checked a poll, the majority of Americans under 30 consider themselves anti-capitalist. When did THAT ever happen before? It certainly wasn't true in the 60s, or the 30s, or any of those other radical decades. Nobody's ever been able to pull that off." And those youth weren't getting this idea from the media. Nobody ever says anything good about socialism, or bad about capitalism, in the American media...
JB: But that moral claim reminded me of some historical work... you know, the stuff that E.P. Thompson chronicles — it's these strong, very ferocious moral condemnations of capitalism...
DG: Yes. James C. Scott is very good at that as well.
JB: Yeah! But it has been strikingly missing, I think, from left arguments around capitalism, for a long time—
DG: There has been, if anything, a hostility to moral arguments. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I've seen Marxists saying "Stop talking about greed – you're missing the point; it's not about the personal qualities of the capitalist: they're in a structural situation where they have to do that to compete." —But some of these guys aren't competing at all. You're in a different world now. It’s no longer 1845.
(I quoted more from David Graeber than I did from Donald Trump, because David Graeber is better than Donald Trump.)
P.S.
But now I think to myself: What about all those Trump supporters who live in your neighborhood, and who work at your music store, and who join your in-laws to drink the blood of Christ on Turkey Day? What about all those good people who live in the suburbs and who haven’t ever thot very seriously about what these political or economic systems mean? Don’t they get a say in matters? What about the friends and family members of all the billionaire capitalists and corrupt senators and judges?
I say: Let them run the country. I’m OK with that. The country will probably get good sooner or later, on its own. The U.S. is so healthy that you couldn’t ruin it even if you forced a bad system upon it.
But that’s why I wonder what all the red-scare hullabaloo was ever about. All the anti-communist stuff. And all the current anti-socialist stuff. For, if we’re such a strong nation that we could handle any system, however bad, and ultimately end up as excellent, because our rugged individuals build tight-knit families that cooperate to form the most distinguished communities—
Ah, but communist is defined as “One who must be killed.” So you can’t argue with that. And a socialist is “One who hates freedom.” So I am anti-everything, because of indisputable points.
P.P.S.
Yesterday I had to scrape the snow off my house’s roof, using a long silver pole with a shovel at its end, so as to avoid ice dams that can form when the… Well, anyway, ice dams cause your roof to leak; & believe me, you don’t want that: a leaky roof is an indoor rainstorm. It’s an affront to Mother Nature. But anyway, this task required me to stand in the deep snow and walk around the whole perimeter of my house; and I own no boots: I only have these cheap tennis shoes. So my feet got cold and wet. That’s why I say: Just keep the current economic system in place. I’m too worn out to argue about this right now.
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