From commentary by Em over at Dangerous Minds: What the protestors in Tahriri Square as well as the public Union workers in Winsconsin have in common is the rejection of a commonly repeated narrative about how wealth is created. In this commonly repeated narrative, it is necessary to concentrate capital in the hands of a few, who will then use that capital to create businesses and generate wealth, which will trickle down to the many. In order to get this alleged wealth-pump moving, impediments to wealth concentration such as labor movements must be removed, and indeed (according to the common false narrative), the history of wealth generation in developed countries such as the USA is precisely the history of overcoming these pesky impediments. What the protestors in both Wisconsin as well as the Arab world have done is reject that narrative as well as the bogus and half-baked economic theory that is often sold as part of it. A corrollary to this theory of wealth generation is that civil liberties such as free speech are a luxury, and should be suspended for the sake of the greater good, until wealth starts to flow and incomes rise significantly. This is a particularly pernicious part of the package, because no doubt countless men and women workers have resigned themselves to a life of incredible toil in order to (they believe) move their society forward. Inequities, injustices as well as the suspension of civil liberties were tolerated because they appeared necessary to move their country ahead into greater levels of wealth for everyone. What the third world protestors in Tahriri Square and elsewhere in the Arab world have done, along with their compatriots in the Wisconsin State Capital, is reject this set of lies and the false either/or choice it presents of civil liberty versus economic progress. Though they may not be able to articulate it, the protestors have finally looked upon the general character of those that hold the levers of power and chose to regard the false choice they have proferred as a lie, which it is. The first part of this larger-scale lie is that Labor has played no significant role in the generation of wealth in the developed world. In fact, empowering workers has been equated with command-driven soviet and communist models, which were arguably equitable by making everyone equally poor. In this narrative, the US has generated its unprecedented wealth precisely by defeating the evil specter of organized labor. Wealth, it is told, has been created by allowing capital to be concentrated into the hands of the wealthy, who best know how to wield it, thereby creating jobs and new wealth. What is not stated in this view is that the wealthy classes are regarded as almost a divine class, having been born (and not made) and appointed by God. ~ more... ~
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
The Relationship Between The Labor Movement And Wealth Creation In America
[R]evolution 2012 - Revolution Evolution 2012
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Marshall McLuhan: Notes on Burroughs (1964)
From Reality Studio: 1. Today men’s nerves surround us; they have gone outside as electrical environment. The human nervous system itself can be reprogrammed biologically as readily as any radio network can alter its fare. Burroughs has dedicated Naked Lunch to the first proposition, and Nova Express (both Grove Press) to the second. Naked Lunch records private strategies of culture in the electric age. Nova Express indicates some of the “corporate” responses and adventures of the Subliminal Kid who is living in a universe which seems to be someone else’s insides. Both books are a kind of engineer’s report of the terrain hazards and mandatory processes, which exist in the new electric environment. 2. Burroughs uses what he calls “Brion Gysin’s cut-up method which I call the fold-in method.” To read the daily newspaper in its entirety is to encounter the method in all its purity. Similarly, an evening watching television programs is an experience in a corporate form — an endless succession of impressions and snatches of narrative. Burroughs is unique only in that he is attempting to reproduce in prose what we accommodate every day as a commonplace aspect of life in the electric age. If the corporate life is to be rendered on paper, the method of discontinuous nonstory must be employed. 3. That man provides the sexual organs of the technological world seems obvious enough to Burroughs, and such is the stage (or “biological theatre” as he calls it in Nova Express) for the series of social orgasms brought about by the evolutionary mutations of man and society. The logic, physical and emotional, of a world in which we have made our environment out of our own nervous systems, Burroughs follows everywhere to the peripheral orgasm of the cosmos. 4. Each technological extension involves an act of collective cannibalism. The previous environment with all its private and social values, is swallowed by the new environment and reprocessed for whatever values are digestible. Thus, Nature was succeeded by the mechanical environment and became what we call the “content” of the new industrial environment. That is, Nature became a vessel of aesthetic and spiritual values. Again and again the old environment is upgraded into an art form while the new conditions are regarded as corrupt and degrading. Artists, being experts in sensory awareness, tend to concentrate on the environmental as the challenging and dangerous situation. That is why they may seem to be “ahead of their time.” Actually, they alone have the resources and temerity to live in immediate contact with the environment of their age. More timid people prefer to accept the content, the previous environment’s values, as the continuing reality of their time. Our natural bias is to accept the new gimmick (automaton, say) as a thing that can be accommodated in the old ethical order. ~ more... ~
That Mitchell and Webb Look: Homeopathic A&E
The Story of Citizens United v. FEC (2011)
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