The Left Blogosphere
A great and necessary post from Erik Loomis at Alterdestiny that I think is relevant to the way we pursue queer and trans politics:
A truly left blogosphere does not exist. If the left side of the neoliberal consensus is as far left as respectable policy makers and writers are going to get in this nation, I have no chance of ever making a difference through my own writings. Because the things that I call for–the return of manufacturing jobs to the United States through a combination of penalizing companies for moving factories outside the country and working with other nations to make hard decisions about which industries and products to protect and which to trade freely on the international market, forcing companies to pay high wages and follow U.S.-style environmental legislation if they move their factories abroad, deconnecting housing prices from measurements of economic growth, full employment as a human right, etc., have no chance of ever being taken seriously, even by people who I should ostensibly be allied with.
It is my strongly held belief that the current neoliberal economic system is both a short and long-term failure. It is environmentally unsustainable. We are flat running out of rare earths that are desperately needed for modern technology. Climate change is already causing problems in some localities and nations. The nation’s commitment to letting corporations rule the country has only increased since 2007, despite the fact that their actions are what drove us into financial collapse. It’s almost impossible to put people back to work in the face of a long-term economic depression (not necessarily this one) because we have destroyed our industrial infrastructure and allowed capital to become fully mobile. I could go on.
But even if progressives agree with all of this, they still like the idea that they can go buy a Kindle.
Loomis is quite right to point out that the enchantments of capitalist consumerism (contra Max Weber in some sense) is an obstacle, that even on the putative Left there is the acceptance of inequity that comes with the production of interesting commodities. Consumerism amuses us for good reason, but it’s not enough because it’s made from human misery via sweatshops and other forms of exploitation (as we all know on some level but repress most of the time).
This makes some very good points, but for instance the sweatshop issue escapes me as somebody who never has enough money, and I want some clothes/thing/computer bits, how do I get them WITHOUT resorting to sweatshops, this is the conundrum we generally face and it’s rubbish.
I agree that these things are terrible, but just how do we go about changing that, radical culture jamming seems dead in the water and how else do we solve it.
The first step would probably be something like encouraging industry in western countries NOT to relocate as Erik said, the trick of course if for incentives to be worthwhile, because as long as we are stuck working within a capitalist system Corps will continue to exploit the sweatshop system as long as the profits from it are greater than the profits to be gained from incentives.
I have nothing to say on Max Weber, I do have ‘Letters From Max Weber’ but have barely touched it, so I’ll avoid commenting to much aside from saying that I did enjoy the name drop…..
Samantha
21 Jan 11 at 2:44 pm
I think it’s inevitable that no matter what strategies we take (locavorism, sustainability, fair trade, barter) it’s basically impossible to not be complicit with inequitable labour practices at some point. I don’t say that so that you give up, because a failed effort is still productive.
Rather than give corporations more incentives to not relocate, I like US Senator Sherrod Brown’s solution – an international minimum wage. That’d be a *huge* political ask to achieve, but it seems just to me, and would prevent exploitation at home and overseas alike.
The point of my brief Weber name drop was to reference his “disenchantment” thesis, where he argued that as a result of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, modern science and the rise of modernity, the West has largely banished supernaturalism (eg we tend not to give diseases supernatural causes, where in the Middle Ages it may have been considered a result of a sin or a demon, or to consider natural disasters to have divine origins etc etc). My argument would be that enchantment in modernity went from that kind of supernaturalism into commodity fetishism itself, into the way that capitalism imbues mere objects like a $100 bill (itself just a mere piece of paper) with a sense of something “more,” something fascinating and alluring. That is where we find the magical today, in the enchantment of objects.
This can pretty much apply to any product we want at all, but the process is basically the same – we attribute this “something more” to the object rather than our way of looking, to our capitalist fetishism and the influence of advertising.
Weber’s well worth a read though, I recommend his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism…
Queen Emily
21 Jan 11 at 3:14 pm
I have briefly touched on The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism although only in class with my lecturer.
The enchantment of objects comes heavily from the way they are marketed, and the ideas/feelings/culture/ around said objects seems to be achieved through branding which leads to said objects being integrated into culture.
The example of the $100 bill is interesting because the bill itself is designed to instil a a sense of value in an otherwise worthless object.
Which brings me to the point that in our economic system the fact that physical money valueless for anything other than money seems to be the whole purpose.
If it had value physical money would cease to be useful in an economic system because there is the possibility it would be worth more than the currency itself.
The trick of money is to stop the public from realising this and make the idea of currency more important than the idea of physical goods….
Samantha
21 Jan 11 at 3:50 pm