Author: john mcgowan

Occupy Anarchism

“A kind of anarchism of direct participation has become the reigning spirit of left-wing protest movements in America in the last half century. There is a lineage even longer. Decision-making by consensus is of Quaker inspiration, as if to say: Speak and listen, listen and speak, until the spirit of the whole emerges. In its recent incarnation, anarchism is not so much a theory of the absence of government but a mood and a theory and practice of self-organization, or direct democracy, as government. The idea is that you do not need institutions because the people, properly assembled, properly deliberating, even in one square block of lower Manhattan, can regulate themselves. Those with time and patience can frolic and practice direct democracy at the same time—at least until the first frost.” Todd Gitlin, Occupy Nation: The Roots, The Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street (NY: HarperCollins, 2012; pp. 80-81.)

“There was a graver problem with leaderlessness than the fact that it made it awkward for outsiders to know who to speak with. By rejecting leadership continuity, the movement remaining in motion, mobile, able in principle to adapt to new circumstances. But it also rejected the formalities, even the informalities, of accountability. When it made mistakes, it didn’t know what to do about them. It was prone, in difficult hours—and all movements, like organizations and marriages, have difficult hours—to thrash around” (Gitlin, 103-104).

[I]n keeping with the movement’s anarchist, antiauthoritarian thrust, there was a strong sentiment that, as naturalist Garbiel Willow told a New York Times reporter, ‘Demands are disempowering since they require someone else to respond.’ Demands conferred legitimacy on the authorities. Demandlessness, in other words, was the movement’s culture, its identity” (Gitlin, 110).

“The movement’s great majority rightly understood nonviolence not as negation, the absence of destruction, but as a creative endeavor, a repertory for invention, an opening, an identity. . . .Certainly, the tactics can grow stale with repetition, but committed and creative practitioners can renew it. The Occupy movement has been, so far, a seedbed of creativity. Its future rests in no small part on whether it can continue to learn from experience, deepen its tradition and funnel it into new soil” (Gitlin, 127-29).

“Communities governing themselves in assemblies. . . . The radicalism of the core movement helped explain what baffled so many observers—the absence of formal demands and programs. As a guiding principle, what the radicals wanted was direct democracy. It would have been absurd to demand that the authorities create direct democracy. The authorities have everything at stake in resisting such a demand. If you were going to have direct democracy, you had to launch it yourself, directly. You had to infuse the spirit of do-it-yourself with world-changing zeal, and vice versa. Political-economic decisions were too consequential to be made by anyone but all the persons concerned—the stakeholders, to use the current lingo. The radical core wanted a world run not by exclusive committees but by assemblies of the people” (Gitlin, 133, 138).

“The Occupy movement wanted to win reforms and to stay out of politics. At the same time.

Movements are social organisms, living phenomena that breathe in and adapt to their environments, not objects frozen into their categories while taxonomists poke and prod them. The come, go, mutate, expand, contract, rest, split, stagnate, ally, cast off outworn tissue, decay, regenerate, go round in circles, are always accused of being co-opted and selling out, and are often declared dead. If they are large, they contain multitudes, and contradict themselves. Outsider movements struggle to finesse these tensions, to square circles, striving to hold into their outsider status while also producing results” (Gitlin, 141).

So, if economic life is to be made substantially fairer and more decent, and plutocratic power is to be reversed, an enduring movement is essential. Such a movement may not be sufficient—it isn’t humanly possible to know that—but surely it is necessary. Occupy’s thrust is popular, which is essential, but popularity itself does not change the world.

What does? In the longer run, both institutional change and changes of heart and mind. The movement needs structures that flex and learn, train leaders, generate actions, recruit supporters. It needs to be a full-service movement—one that invites participation at many levels. For overmortgaged and underwater home-owners, it needs campaigns to corral the banks that have them in lock. For the civilly disobedient young, it needs appealing direct actions. . . . Whoever oyu are, it needs to prmotoe activities tailored to you.

In the medium run, say five years, networks of activists—the inner movement—need to devise an infrastructure that sustains them, recruits them, focuses their intellectual and strategic life, generates sustained pressure on power, keeps movement tensions manageable, and not least, make significant progress toward driving money out of the political system” (Gitlin, 165-66).

“Historically, coalitions of outer-movement and inner-movement groups have accomplished what individual groups could not” (Gitlin, 208).

I don’t want to belabor this material. Gitlin wrote his book in the spring of 2012, when Occupy was still alive—if on life support. I will let his comments speak for themselves, with only three observations of my own.

It is striking the extent to which Occupy captured the imagination of the left. Its fragility—and its inability to make a dent on the plutocracy it was trying to disrupt—were obvious from the start. Yet the left is so starved for any kind of “movement” that it took up Occupy as a savior. Gitlin bends over backwards to be sympathetic, even as he repeatedly points out all of Occupy’s flaws. His sympathy is to be applauded, not sneered at. But this ember cannot be stoked into a fire. There just wasn’t enough there—and never was.
The point about inner and outer movements is well taken. Some serious pressure from the left on the Democratic Party is sorely needed. So the dilemma remains: when should the radical left stand firm, when should it fall into line behind the Democrats. Disdain for electoral politics is suicidal, as the triumph of Trump shows. But being continually blackmailed by the threat of “their being worse” is a formula for snail’s pace progress.
So the only answer is to organize, to build larger and stronger coalitions. Anarchism is no help in that case. Assemblies are fleeting if they are not constituted as institutions. The people governing themselves in assemblies is a useless, even frivolous, goal. It doesn’t pass the sniff test. It’s a happening, not a politics—and is of a piece with the gestural politics that is so delicious to the avant-garde.

Lives Worth Living

The dilemma: if we adopt a universal, egalitarian, minimalist standard, then every life should be preserved. To say that “every life” refers to all living things on the planet, we are proposing the impossible, enunciating an “ought” that is completely disconnected from “can.” The only real choice is between “letting Nature take its course” or intervening to over-rule what Nature would produce if left alone. Such interventions cannot, however, cannot avoid killing some creatures (whether it is antibiotics killing bacteria or protecting sheep from wolves and thus condemning the wolves to starvation or condemning the creatures the wolves will devour when they can’t get at the sheep). Interventions, in other words, always make a value judgment that some lives are more worth preserving than some other lives. We can’t slip the noose of death, altogether. Death will come—to all creatures in the long run. We can either let it come as it may—or shunt it in one direction or another, buying time for some creatures even as we reconcile ourselves to, or even actively promote, the death of other creatures.

Humanism, at its most basic, presumably, is a prejudice in favor of human lives over the lives of non-human creatures. Such a definition of humanism would make it strictly homologous with racism and sexism—namely the valuing of one category (a particular species or race or sex) over another.

Robinson Jeffers writes “I’d rather kill a man than a hawk.” A radical attempt to slough off humanism. But not a way to avoid judgment or standards. There are, presumably, reasons for preferring the hawk’s life to the human’s. So—to reiterate—it comes to seem impossible to just say that my ethic is to respect all life, to work to preserve every life. Since life feeds on life, some must die in order that others may live.

But there is another problem, one in a rather different register. Let’s assume a full-bore humanism for the moment. So now it might seem the ethic would be revised to say: all human lives are to be preserved, accepting the consequence that all non-human lives are to be sacrificed to the needs of human life prior to any sacrifice of one human life to preserve another human life. This universalist egalitarianism is “liberal” in many ways, although liberals like Martha Nussbaum and Judith Butler are made queasy by the thought of animal sacrifice for human life. Still, both of them are adamant that all human lives should be equally valued—or, to phrase it differently, for Nussbaum all humans have an equal right to live, while for Butler all human lives should be equally grievable.

Certainly for Nussbaum (and I suspect for Butler, but won’t pursue here how she would make her case) this equal right of all humans to live is only a minimum, a floor—and, as such, does not represent her full ethical ambitions. It is not just a life humans are entitled to. Each human has an equal claim on the means, resources, and liberty required to “flourish.” Nussbaum offers a detailed list of 10 things—ranging from food, shelter, leisure, and education, to family, friends, and health—one needs in order to flourish. Nussbaum is not arguing that “bare life” (to use Agamben’s term for “zoe”; Agamben is working from similar texts from Aristotle as those that inspire Nussbaum) is not worth living. But she is arguing there are non-minimalist ways of living that are superior to bare life. For Agamben, “bios” in Aristotle’s texts names this life that is more than “bare life.” And one crucial question is what kind of society, what kind of polity, enables the achievement of bios, of flourishing.

But I want to defer that political question for the moment and concentrate on the judgment, the standard, that justifies distinguishing bare life from flourishing. Because now we have a hierarchy within the set of all human lives. They are not all equal. Some are fuller, better, than others. One way of marking this difference would be to say that some lives are more satisfying than others. A life lived without the burden of chronic illness or fairly constant pain would be more enjoyable, easier to bear, even if not necessarily more fulfilling in other ways, than one lived in poor health. Another way of marking this difference would be to say that some lives are more meaningful than others. This second way seems to lead to issues (and ideas) of productivity. A meaningful life is given over to an activity that is deemed important (or significant)—and it has some success in achieving the important aims that it sets out to accomplish. We could say some lives are more admirable than others (in relation to the tasks that life is devoted to advancing and the success of those advancement efforts), just as (negatively) we can think of some lives as “wasted,” as having not made a very productive use of the time that person was allotted on earth.

The “liberal” solution to this dilemma, which introduces troubling (because unequal) distinctions among lives, is a) to try to distinguish between what is freely chosen by the individual and what is imposed from without, and b) to acknowledge a pluralism that realizes that “one man’s meat is another man’s poison.” The sum result of these two tenets is, basically, to say that material and other deprivations that limit the range of an individual’s life chances and choices are unacceptable—especially if others receive the material goods and social/educational/psychological opportunities denied to some. In practice, this usually comes to rest in the assertion that a strict equality of material goods and other kinds of opportunities is neither necessary nor achievable. But we can identify a “floor” of necessities (that is what Nussbaum 10 point list aims to do) that any “good” polity must provide if its citizens are all to enjoy a decent prospect of creating a flourishing life for themselves.

And the pluralism point says that—once that floor has been provided for all—the polity has no right to intervene in the choices people make about how to live their lives. Full bore tolerance is the only sensible approach to the variety of values that underlie people’s choices. Attempts to impose notions of meaning and importance can only lead to conflict. People are incredibly, perhaps congenitally, stubborn—which means that efforts to dictate how they should behave cause way more trouble than they are worth (because such efforts are rarely successful).

The Nussbaum position seems to me fairly unassailable. A good society should make available the means for flourishing. And her list of basic means is pretty convincing. A simple Kantian test works well here, in my opinion. Look at her list and consider which of its items I would willingly dispense with. Then consider on what grounds could I possibly deny to others any of those items. Why do I deserve something I would begrudge to others or, worse, claim that they did not deserve?

The most common candidate, of course, is work. I deserve something because I work for it. That slacker doesn’t deserve it. Don’t work, don’t eat. And that self-righteous distinction between effortful me and slacker him slides into the thrill of meting out punishment. If conservatives are obsessed with envy as the poison pill vice that afflicts all liberals, then leftists need to become equally obsessed with the sadistic desire to punish that is barely hidden within so much conservative moralism.

I want to finish up today’s thoughts by going in a different direction. What are we to do when the basic requirements for a flourishing life are not withheld by social and political arrangements, but by Nature itself? I speak out of personal experience here, but out of an experience more and more widely shared: witnessing old people outlive their lives, lingering on in debilitated physical and/or mental condition in ways that cruelly condemns them to live a life not worth living. Our humanist commitment to fighting against the death that Nature will eventually dole out, to delay as long we can, has the effect of sustaining a life that is worse than death. The values get completely inverted here. There are circumstances in which death is better than life. (Arendt made this point in her totalitarianism book in a most chilling way when she reminds us that certain kinds of torture can also make death preferable to continued life.)

I understand all the complexities of euthanasia and also understand all the legal safeguards put in place even in jurisdictions that allow assisted suicide. I don’t want to get into how to create a good euthanasia program here. What I want to assert—and I think this should be fairly uncontroversial although many would disagree—is that some lives are not worth living. We can—and should—be pluralistic here as well. A life that would be intolerable to me still might be well worth living for another. And maybe there are some people wo are—and can be—absolutists on this score. For them, any life, no matter how dire its circumstances and its debilities—is better than death. But it is certainly the case that there are also many people who find death preferable to certain lives.

This all makes me unhappy. I would like to take life as an absolute standard. But I am compelled by this logic to accept a) that we do judge among lives, finding some more satisfactory or significant than others (even if we want to protect against the polity devaluing some lives below a minimalist floor because other lives are worthier), and b) that in certain circumstances death is better than life.

In short, we can’t just leave it at “bare life” as a good all should have protected and preserved. Bare life is too bare—and in some cases so extremely bare that death is preferable.

The Only Wealth Is Life

In Unto This Last, John Ruskin declares that the “only wealth is life.’ There is something deeply attractive to me in this absolute declaration. Here my spade turns. Whatever does not avail to life, Ruskin adds, we should designate “illth, for we ought to have a corresponding term” to wealth, one that designates those things that impede or even actively destroy life. (pp. 209, 211 in Penguin edition.)

To take “life” as one’s standard of value means that, at a minimum, that which provides for the material goods required for subsistence is good. For starters, it would seem we need to supplement that standard with the proviso that all are equally entitled to “life”—from which it follows that all should have the means to sustain life. When it comes to mere existence (what the new discourse is calling “bare life,” having resurrected the term zoe out of Aristotle’s work), no life is more valuable than another. Life is a non-discriminating term. “I know when one is dead and when one lives,” says Lear (V, iii, 264), and that basic difference is all that counts. We should value, Ruskin is saying, everything (whether it be food, or a way of arranging human and social affairs) that contributes to sustaining life and delaying death.

What appalls Ruskin—and me—is that, despite the lip service we pay to life as, if not the highest, at least a recognizable, good, we hardly act that way. “We usually speak as if death pursued us, and we fled from him; but that is so in only rare instances. Ordinarily he masks himself—makes himself beautiful—all-glorious; not like the King’s daughter, all glorious within, but outwardly: his clothing of wrought gold. We pursue him frantically all our days, he flying or hidden from us” (190). Our actions belie our devotion to life since so much of what we do is death-dealing, either for ourselves or for others. Isn’t it enough that nature brings pestilence, famine, and death? Do human actions have to add to those burdens?

Yet even Ruskin—as determined a seeker of firm, absolute values as any writer I know—cannot maintain “life” as an unqualified standard. He, too, like almost all writers on the subject is moved to consider what makes a life worth living (to borrow William James’s phrase). It seems impossible to view all lives as equal or equivalent. We are pushed to judge among lives, to compare them, to see some as more valuable than others. For Ruskin, this evaluation takes the form of assessing various modes of living in the world as contributing to the promotion of life. “Five great intellectual professions, relating to the daily necessities of life, have hitherto existed,” he tells us:

The Soldier’s profession is to defend it.

The Pastor’s to teach it.

The Physician’s to keep it in health.

The Lawyer’s to enforce justice in it.

The Merchant’s to provide for it. (177).

And the value of these lives, when we come to judge them, is not only determined by how well different individuals performed the professional task they assumed, but (crucially) rests on the willingness of those individuals to die instead of failing to perform that task.

“[T] duty of all these men is, on due occasion, to die for it [i.e. life].

“on due occasion,’ namely—

The Soldier, rather than leave his post in battle.

The Physician, rather than leave his post in plague.

The Paston, rather than teach Falsehood.

The Lawyer, rather than countenance Injustice.

The Merchant—what is his “due occasion” of death?

It is the main question for the merchant, as for all of us. For, truly, the man who does not know when to die, does not know how to live (177).

What happened to the supreme value of life? It has evaporated in front of us—or, at the very least, some individual lives must willing accept death “on due occasion” in order to promote the general life (of the species?, of a more circumscribed community?). A life not devoted to the furthering of life is a life not worth living. Integrity to that purpose, faithfulness to duty, could require death. And if one does not acknowledge the claim death has upon him in such instances, one “does not know how to live.”

So, it seems, life is not such a simple matter. One has to learn how to live. Or maybe it is better to say that one has to self-consciously, reflexively, assess one’s life in light of the standard to promote life—and then judge if one’s life meets the standard. A certain reading of Nietzsche would see him as precisely scorning this sort of evaluation. Living creatures should pursue life—its continuation and the pleasures it might afford along with the sufferings that it entails—period. No second thoughts, no regrets, no judgments of good and evil. Any evaluation beyond seeing something as “good” because it avails life or “bad” because it impedes it only hinders life’s full expression. To affirm life unreservedly is to damn the consequences in ways that Ruskin cannot bring himself to do.

The sticking point is, as Esposito (in Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy) makes clear in his chapter on Nietzsche, is that Nietzsche denies that it is either possible or desirable to “preserve life through the abolition of conflict” (85). Life is only abundant, only fully realized, in conflict. Thus, life cannot be sequestered from death; life is, to a large extent, the infliction of death. In the most basic terms, this boils down to the fact that life feeds on other lives. Everything that eats must kill some other living creature for its food. If every creature (as the conatus doctrine in Spinoza asserts) aims to persist in its own mode of being, the life is sustained only through the destruction of some conative beings by other conative beings. There are no willing sacrificial victims to life’s persistent hunger. In order to sustain life, we must kill.

It is this logic that I am trying to puzzle out. Lots of different ways to go from here. One is the Girard route, toward the idea that the sacrifice is inevitable, and thus the issue is whether the sacrifice will be imposed on another creature or assumed by one’s self. Freely chosen self-sacrifice (the model is Jesus Christ) is the only path to peace.

A different track leads to my opening concern. If Nietzsche states some fundamental law of life, then how come Foucault, Arendt, Taylor etc. seem to think that a special attention to life is a “modern” development—and that this “special attention” leads to death-dealing polities/societies. Why is the attempt to preserve life, an attempt to fend off the Nietzschean fatalism about the inevitability of conflict, a formula for increasing the violence some humans direct toward others. And, finally, I also want to consider how “bare life” is not enough, so that (on the one hand) we have the appeal of the Aristotelean notion of “flourishing” (a la Martha Nussbaum) and (on the other hand) we can think of lives not worth living (leading to issues of assisted suicide as well as unassisted suicide).

I’ll see how far I get in subsequent posts.

Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century

I am about 2/3rds of the way through The Long Twentieth Century, which has been a slog, but also worth the effort. I will get back to the “life” stuff in subsequent posts, but want to pick up on three points from Arrighi today.

One: Arrighi is a fairly orthodox Marxist in that he firmly believes that economics drives history and, in particular, offers the explanatory causes for all armed conflicts. Even more fundamentally, he believes that the exigencies of profit are the main drivers of all economic activity. There is a logic to how and where profit can be made, as well as cycles that move capital from seeking profit through trade to seeking it through financial transactions. Individual actors in capitalism have few, if any, options. They must do what profit demands in any particular situation. The iron laws of capitalism rule.

Interestingly, however, Arrighi recognizes that no profit could even be made if all actors only pursued profit. Thus, he must posit that some people are otherwise motivated. If everyone were motivated by profit, trade would come to a standstill because no one would make trades unless able to make a profit—and profit, finally, is a zero-sum game. It is zero-sum because, unlike the fantasized barter exchange that is equally advantageous because I need eggs and your need clothes, the introduction of money translates all exchanges into the same currency. I only make a profit if the eggs I exchange for clothes are worth less in monetary terms than the sum you give me, part of which I expend on clothes, the rest of which I pocket as profit. (Kiernan had a friend once who refused to sell any properties in Monopoly because his older sister had so consistently taken advantage of him in the past. The result was an endless game, because no one could ever go bankrupt if not monopolies ever got formed. That might prove a functioning economy, but it certainly isn’t a capitalist one.)

So what motivates people besides profit? Arrighi answer (which, unfortunately, he doesn’t develop at all) is “power and prestige.” War provides a consistent boon for those seeking profit—and most wars, he seems to think, are actually motivated by the need to protect or to expand sources of profit. But he does seem to admit that aggrandizement, the quest for power and status apart from profit, can also motivate conflict, competition, and war. And the profit seekers are more than glad to, in Country Joe’s words, “supply the army with the tools of the trade.” War is not only a great consumer of merchandise (manufactured goods) but also a major source of debt (i.e. of profits for financial capital). The potlatch that is war serves profit precisely because it does not seek profit itself, representing a different desire instead, one that cold-eyed profit seekers can exploit.

There are, of course, other ways to seek status besides war—and that leads us to topic number two.

Two: We are familiar with “crises of overproduction,” the paradoxical creation of poverty during economic downturns where the problem is not a scarcity of goods, but a surfeit of them. Less often noted is the problem of a surfeit of capital, a crisis of “over-accumulation.” Arrighi is particularly good on this species of crisis, one that seems particularly acute in our day and age. For starters, the two types of crises can be (although they need not be) related. When markets are saturated, when there is not sufficient demand to meet supply and hence production is slowed because there is too much stuff around and no place to sell it, then capital might also begin to accumulate for lack of any place to invest it. You can’t put the capital to work because there is no need for increased production.

In this situation, capital will move from production to financial markets. Arrighi, in fact, believes that this movement from relying on commodities for profits to relying on selling money to make profits is the grand cycle of capitalism, with the movement to finance capital in the world’s dominant economy—first the Italian city-states, then the Dutch, then the British, then the US—marking the moment of transition from one site of dominance to the next. The newcomer begins by taking over production from its predecessor until it, too, exhausts the profit capacities of production and moves into finance. In this vision, the US, having moved from production to finance somewhere in the 1970s is in decline, with Asia bidding to become the next hegemonic capitalist site.

One possibility, then, is for capital to move from the former hegemonic site of production (the US) to the new one (China). But, for fairly obvious reasons, capital is not entirely mobile. For one thing, nationalist sentiments weigh against allowing the importation of too much “foreign capital.” There are also risk factors: the worry that foreign lands might not be stable. And there are transaction costs of moving into a different legal/banking regime and working in a different currency.

For various reasons, then, some (at least) excess capital will desire to stay home. And that leads to bubbles and to creative “financial instruments” and to Ponzi schemes and other forms of fraud. The bubbles, I would argue, are always often tied to status. The inflated value of the “bubbled thing” (if I can invent a term) relies not simply on its supposed ability to be cashed in for a certain sum, but also for the prestige of owning such an expensive, highly valued commodity. Currently, real estate and art works clearly play this role. They are great places to park excess money, because they can be rationalized as investments, not just frivolous spending. But owning a New York apartment or a painting by Monet is also conspicuous consumption. More bang for the buck: prestige plus a profit to be made.

Another factor drives bubbles, I think. The search for safety. That seems paradoxical since bubbles contain enormous risks—if we believe that value must, in the final instance, be tied back to something “real.” A very different dynamic is at work, I think. The world is a dangerous, unstable place—and seems more dangerous every day. (That fear of its dangerousness is, most likely, pretty constant across time. There are always ample reasons for fear.) The money being parked in New York and London and Vancouver real estate and in paintings by the masters is money being siphoned out of risky environments and salted away in places perceived as safe. The American who buys a high-end New York apartment can’t find a better place to invest his excess capital. The Chinese citizen who does the same is squirreling away his excess capital in a safe place. Both acquire the prestige of having a place in New York.

The quest for status does lend itself to expenditures that are pretty much complete financial losses: high-end clothes and accessories, fancy vacations. There is money to be made in the luxury trades and never more so than in times of slack production and excess capital. Education is a funny hybrid in such times. It is clearly a prestige item—the fancy prep schools, the elite colleges—but can also be rationalized as an investment. It is hard to know if the return on investment (given the differential in initial outlay) for going to Harvard exceeds that of going to Grand Rapid State—mostly because the place from which the respective students start is so vastly different that the assessment of eventual outcomes (in terms of income or of other measures of economic well-being) cannot isolate the specific contribution of the degree. But people love to spend money on things they think can also be justified as “investments.” One need only look at the immense sums American parents are spending on sports training/competition for their children, justified as possibly leading to that child getting a scholarship to college.

In sum, profit depends on their being other powerful motives that overrule profit for some people. As Marx put it on the more basic level of the material needs for subsistence, capitalism is in the business of turning your needs into weaknesses that it can exploit. The whole thing doesn’t work if there aren’t some people who do not pursue profit relentlessly and to the exclusion of all else.

Three: Arrighi argues that a major innovation of the American century, the time of its economic hegemony which encompasses the “long twentieth century” of his title, is the modern corporation. In particular, the modern corporation—think Ford, Exxon, Kodak, Ma Bell—combined mass production with mass marketing. These companies used the fact of being first in producing some product to gain massive market share by aggressively organizing its distribution and advertising operations. Newcomers (i.e. potential competitors), Arrighi argues, did not face overwhelming technical obstacles to produce products with the same efficiency as the first-comers. What the newcomers lacked was a way to crack into the market in sufficient volume to underwrite the capital costs of mass production. Organizing the market in ways that orient it toward one’s firm is equally as necessary as establishing an efficient mode of production. Where the two do not co-exist, the firm will not thrive.

On the one hand, this assertion still seems true. Apple and Google and Amazon are prime examples. They were, in some ways, technical innovators, although there were certainly personal computer makers in the 1980s who were Apple’s equals, and Amazon never did anything all that innovative technically. In Arrighi’s words, “the transnational corporations that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries . . . were strictly business organizations [i.e. were not state/business hybrids like the East India Company and South Africa Company of the British hegemonic period] specialized functionally in a particular line of business across multiple territories and jurisdictions” (250-51). They integrated “the process of mass production with those of mass distribution within a single organization” (248).

It occurs to me that a similar “crowding out” operates in politics. The difficulties of forming a “third part” or a new lobbying firm or a new social movement are enhanced by the presence of highly organized players already on the field. Thus, for example, there is no strong anti-NRA group. MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) might be a counter-example—and provide a model for those in favor of gun control to follow. Of course, there was hardly a strong lobby for drunk driving, the way that the NRA is a strong lobby against gun control. In any case, the advantages of being there first are only secured by also being organized. An organized player in the field only attracts more resources by virtue of their power and visibility. And, for that reason, I think (as has been a theme of so many of my musings) that the anarchist love of leaderless, horizontal, non-organized action so prevalent in many radical circles today is a losing strategy. Organization (money, boots on the ground, a well-articulated set of objectives, and a coherent strategy for advancing toward those objectives, a strategy followed consistently by the organization’s members) will defeat an amorphous protest group every time.

And yet, on the other hand, the whole point of Boltanksi and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism is that the monster corporations of the middle twentieth century are dinosaurs, too cumbersome to respond quickly and adroitly to rapidly changing conditions on the ground. IBM is just one poster child (GM and GE are others) for the supposed liabilities of the big firm. Paired down, focused firms like Toyota, Southwest Airlines, and Dell computers can take on the big boys—and win—because they can keep costs down and quality high. It is hardly that these successful new firms are unorganized. But the organization is highly decentralized; responsibility for different aspects of the operation are widely dispersed—including, in many cases, to other firms who, by way of contract, provide key support services or even key component parts. Such “outsourcing,” whether overseas or domestic, drives down costs, even as it increases accountability.

In politics, then, aspirant newcomers might want to consider how to play the disadvantages of size against the established players, the existing parties. I must admit I am not sure how that would work. For all the supposed “down-sizing” of the big dinosaurs in order to become leaner (and definitely meaner), it is not as if market share has changed all that drastically. Coke and Pepsi still dominate the soft drink business; the big breweries buy up craft breweries almost as quickly as Apple and Google buy out any possible competitors. I guess I would say that today’s firms are less uptight than the GM of 1950 about the need to do everything in-house, the need to be the employer of record of everyone whose work was needed to make the company function. But today’s firms are even more obsessed with controlling the market. Hence the endless customer satisfaction research.

Enough for now. The big question still looms—as it always does for me. What causes (there were obviously several) explain the “return of ruthless capitalism.” Why were labor costs and profit levels that were deemed satisfactory in 1960 were no longer acceptable to capitalists in 1980?