Sunday with Red Emma

It's been two months (minus one day) since we began The Notes Taken. The first post is dated September 16 (our 'about us' description), although the first content post is dated September 18. Two months in, and we have statistics: they are incomplete, because we've only have a sitemeter since late October, but they are revealing. Since October 25th, we've had 428 visits and 735 page views. In the last week of October, we had 98 visits/174 page views, while in the first two weeks of November, the numbers are 330/561, indicating a healthy growth in readership for the new site, courtesy of you. So, thank you.

For published posts, Devin has written a majority, at 42, Matt 7, Jason 3, Sean 1 and Josh 1. This post is the first signed by the 'Notes Taken Review.' We've been mulling it over, and we have decided to search for additional writers. Some of you, obviously, might want to contribute book reviews or brief review essays, and if you do, you can email (go to the Notes Taken Review profile and the link is there) us, and we will look it over and try and publish it if it accords with what we take our purpose to be.

Over the last week, we again had plenty to say: we discovered that Matt's been teaching the moral dilemmas of the Twilight series to his students (some people thought that Devin had posted it! Imagine!). There's some information up on the upcoming Sartre Society meeting in Memphis, filed under some shameless self-promotion. And I (meaning Devin; I can't keep writing in the third person at the moment) displayed some cynicism about the process of applying for tenure track positions, and then, more importantly, wrote a trio of blogs about politics and the economy: about the Federal Reserve as an ideological apparatus, the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the future of reform, and finally, about Tom Reifer's tribute to Giovanni Arrighi.

And then, as per tradition, if you only have time to read one post, read Joshua Kurdys's discussion about the status of women in philosophy. I've made the subject of the philosophical canon important to my Great Philosopher's course as a set up for reading The Second Sex. I've learned that if you make the status of women a critical issue in reading the canon, students are responsive (as much as they can be for a class of 130). They don't ignore questions like, what gender/sex is the Cartesian cogito? Who are the citizens in Plato or Rousseau's political philosophy? Could Hume doubt personal identity if he thought about bodies as gendered or sexual? We'll soon see how they take to Simone de Beauvoir...

When I taught this course in Toledo, my class loved Emma Goldman, despite the concerns of several 'philosophers' that Emma was not doing 'philosophy'. I didn't listen, and nor was I even the sole professor teaching Goldman's work (I ended up substitute lecturing that semester for a course in Women's Studies and one of my students was in both courses. Imagine her surprise when I walked into the other class!). I'm pretty sure we read "Anarchism: What it Really Stands for", "Traffic in Women" and "Marriage and Love" (for the rest of the book, see this page). Judge for yourself!

As for next week, since I will be out of town at the Sartre Conference, Sean Moreland is going to step in for the Sunday Review, wherein he will provide the best in links to material by or about David Foster Wallace.

Until then, a few odds and ends:

• Look into the most cited authors in 2007 (they are measured according to books cited, not articles), and see how many you are familiar with. Standing tall at the top, after all these years, is Michel Foucault.
• From the NYT Book Review, a review of Paul Auster's Invisible, and Nabokov's The Original of Laura.
  

Tom Reifer's Tribute to Giovanni Arrighi

After writing my previous post, I found Tom Reifer's tribute to Giovanni Arrighi, entitled "Capital's Cartographer," in The New Left Review, November-December 2009. Arrighi, an economist and sociologist, is one of the originators of world-systems analysis, and his book Adam Smith in Beijing (Verso, 2007) is one of the more original contributions to understanding the turbulence of our times. I read the book in June of this year (that month, Arrighi succumbed to cancer), and still, I've been trying to get my head around the ambitious scope of the book.

Arrighi, with his co-author Beverly Silver, over a decade ago, had foreseen that the expansion of global finance

of the last twenty years or so is neither a new stage of world capitalism nor the harbinger of a ‘coming hegemony of global markets’. Rather, it is the clearest sign that we are in the midst of a hegemonic crisis. As such, the expansion can be expected to be a temporary phenomenon that will end more or less catastrophically.

The hegemonic crisis in question is precisely that of the United States, and they warned that the US had unprecedented capacity to turn its power to "exploitative dominion." Iraq, maybe? Afghanistan? But, as Reifer notes,

In Adam Smith in Beijing, Arrighi returned to many of these issues in light of the re-emergence of a Chinese-centred East Asia and America’s reckless gamble to continue its hegemonic reign with the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Rather than heralding a new age of US hegemony, as its advocates hoped, Arrighi emphasized how the ambitions of the Project for the New American Century, whose members staffed key positions in the Bush White House, ironically increased the long-term likelihood that the 21st century will be the age of Asia.

That is as good of a summary of the book as I can think of, especially because it underlines that Arrighi sees hegemony as reinforced by military means, something that is often neglected or minimized by economists and sociologists (this, he argued, included Marx). I would recommend reading Reifer's tribute, if not Arrighi's work, to understand these developments. As Reifer states,

Adam Smith in Beijing, like its predecessors, is a difficult and ambitious book; not because it is poorly written—Giovanni’s prose was exemplary in its lucidity—but because of the density of its analysis and the scope of its ambitions.

Nevertheless, I don't think that should turn non-specialists away from the book. It is probably one of the more influential texts on how I think about global politics today (along with David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism), because economics is not separate from politics. We should reject the idea that economics is something self-contained that must be handled by experts, specifically because these experts work to reinforce their own power. Instead, do two things: in criticism, treat economics like anything else, that is, a system of social relationships; and in practice, not be afraid to call for heavy reform and regulation to make the system more stable and equitable.

However, while acknowledging that economics is not our expertise, we should still aim to inform ourselves and think critically about its relationship to global politics or world-systems. This is the importance of works by thinkers such as Giovanni Arrighi. The next step, that I have been thinking about off-and-on lately, is incorporating this kind of sociology/anthropology/economics approach into recent takes on hegemony (Laclau) and ideology (Zizek). My thesis is that the "Lacanian" turn, while it contributes to understanding how desire works in subjective identification, does not address the structural force played by violence and economics.

Sartre Society 2009 Meeting

The North American Sartre Society has put its conference program online (PDF). If you look, I am there, bright and early on Friday morning, giving a paper called "Reading Sartre against the New Atheists," which will have been the result of reading Being and Nothingness almost cover-to-cover over the last two months.

It looks like there are lots of interesting papers, and for plenary and keynote speakers, they've brought Robert Bernasconi, Thomas Flynn, Ronald Aronson, Annie Cohen-Solal and Robert JC Young.

Glass-Steagall and the Future of Reform

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the repeal of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which created a legal separation of commercial banks and investment banks. Today on Counterpunch you can find a succinct and well-written article by Robert Weissman, entitled "Maniacal Deregulation," on the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Far from being an arcane matter, Glass-Steagall was a central piece of legislation preventing commercial banks from participating in the kind of high-risk investment that is to blame for the current recession-depression.

Repeal of Glass-Steagall had many important direct effects but the most important was to change the culture of commercial banking to emulate Wall Street's high-risk speculative betting approach.

"Commercial banks are not supposed to be high-risk ventures; they are supposed to manage other people's money very conservatively," writes Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. "It is with this understanding that the government agrees to pick up the tab should they fail. Investment banks, on the other hand, have traditionally managed rich people's money -- people who can take bigger risks in order to get bigger returns. When repeal of Glass-Steagall brought investment and commercial banks together, the investment-bank culture came out on top. There was a demand for the kind of high returns that could be obtained only through high leverage and big risk-taking."

Weissman then sets out a set of demands for true reform, which means probably not the kind of reform that we will be told 'is necessary':

• Instead of creating a new regulatory body, banking reform should focus on industry structure, This included reinstating the legal barrier between commercial banks and investment banks, along with stricter regulation.
• Keep commercial banks, backed by the FDIC, from getting involved in speculation.
• Breaking up the giants of the financial industry because they wield too much political power.
• And finally, Weissman says it best: "we need broad reform in the area of money and politics. We need public financing of Congressional regulations, even stronger lobbyist reforms, and tight restrictions to close the revolving door through which individuals spin as they travel between positions in government and industry." This, I think is worth pointing out, probably has to be the basis of other reforms and not the other way around.
  

The Personal is Still Political: The Status of Women in Philosophy

The autumn of 2009 has witnessed an interesting upsurge in questions of women’s place in the study of philosophy. The season began with several blog posts commenting on news reports about the absence of women studying philosophy. Subsequent posts and news stories began to question why so few women were studying philosophy, how this problem could be addressed and even whether the only problem was that the disparity appeared to be a problem rather than a natural tendency. One particularly contentious set of exchanges on the topic took place on Brian Leiter’s blog, Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog, and concerned the question of whether philosophy classes constituted a hostile environment for women. One of the original news stories on the topic explained the absence of women in the philosophy classroom by suggesting that “one reason may be that women are turned off by a culture of aggressive argument particular to philosophy, which grows increasingly more pronounced at the postgraduate level.” This suggestion, regardless of its merits as a description of what turns many people against philosophy and not only women, drew the ire of Brian Leiter’s corner of the blogosphere. After launching ad hominem [sic?] attacks on two prominent women philosophers who he regards as “hacks,” Leiter offers the enlightened suggestion that it is “demeaning to women” to say that the excessively aggressive argumentation that he prefers drives women out of the classroom and contributes to the absence of women in the profession generally. Never mind that this kind of dismissal, which Leiter employs quite regularly—as when a subsequent post jokes that Judith Butler writes her books using a random academic sentence generator—, may be precisely the kind of aggressiveness that women and others find intolerable about the study and profession of philosophy, the question deserves more than the dismissive or inevitably confounding treatment it receives from Leiter.

Without referencing that debate in her article for The Chronicle of Higher Education’s October 16^th “Diversity in Academe” issue, Regan Penaluna offers the hypothesis that misogyny in the philosophical canon may account for the absence of women in philosophy classes and their subsequent absence in the profession. Perhaps aware that her article would appear in a special “diversity” issue of the Chronicle or perhaps as an ironic underscoring of women’s exclusion from mainstream philosophy, Penaluna claims that since “the canon as it stands is almost entirely composed of men—including many who have little good to say about women” this situation “cannot but contribute to an unwelcoming environment.” (B27) Citing the fact that “other disciplines, such as history, English, and the sciences, also have male-dominated canons, but they attract comparatively more women than philosophy does,” Penaluna suggests that “for this reason, one might conclude that the cause of gender disparity in philosophy is not the canon” (B27) thereby suggesting that professors’ handling of misogynous material might have something to do with women’s attraction to the field. This would make the problem of philosophy less an academic problem concerning what to study and more a political problem about how to study it. In short, the disparity between women in philosophy and women in other fields with male-dominated canons might be a political problem rather than an epistemological one. Mercifully, Penaluna quickly provides the corrective to the unsettling question of whether philosophy professors’ handling of the subject might be partially to blame for the exclusion of women when she asserts that it “would be wrong” to exculpate the canon for the political actions of its interpreters.

Of course it is possible that both the canon and its handlers are to blame for creating an atmosphere of hostility toward women in the faculties and classrooms of philosophy departments. After all, it is not the philosophical canon alone that “demands that its students identify more closely with its canonical figures” (B28), it is rather philosophy faculty themselves that either do or do not “bring a critical approach to the interpretation of patriarchal texts, while also raising awareness of [. . .] works by women” (B27). Nevertheless, Penaluna explicitly rejects the idea that the political decisions of philosophy faculty to utilize a sexist canon without bringing a duly critical perspective to texts and thereby encourage their students to passively accept not only canonical figures but their misogynist attitudes are to blame before reiterating “that there are few women in philosophy because the canon is sexist and there is little being done about it.” (B28, emphasis added) Although that little conjunction, and, is unstressed in Penaluna’s article, I prefer to stress it because it highlights that the textual problem is actually a political problem about the relations that philosophers have not only with their material, but with one another as well. If philosophers are trained to emulate rather than critique their forbears, this is a failure of philosophical reflection to consider the political consequences of a certain kind of activity; it is not an effect that texts produce on their own. If it were not the activity of philosophers that made the difference then the “obvious” solution that “philosophers consider the misogynist passages of great philosophers in a critical manner” and “mainstream feminist philosophy” (B28) would have no chance of success before the occult power of the text.

The proposal to mainstream feminist philosophy, however, will only have marginal success at bringing more women into the classroom and the profession without a corresponding change of attitude toward the philosophical canon. One of the prevailing themes in feminist philosophy involves critiquing the canon’s exclusion of women through their inclusion as an object of study. That is, in the Aristotelian conception of woman as receptacle, for example, part of the problem is the presumption that woman are known and not misrepresented by that description. Consequently, the traditional role of women in philosophy has been a form of passive inclusion as an object of knowledge whose ability to speak has been far more rigorously proscribed because of that inclusion than because of women’s exclusion. To be sure, Brian Leiter includes women like Judith Butler in his philosophical universe, but he does so by suggesting that she works unthinkingly, mechanically, instinctively and therefore “incompetently” in the medium of thought that is philosophy’s proper sphere. It is therefore unsurprising that feminist philosophers have raised significant questions about the phallogocentrism of the Western philosophical tradition and thus found themselves at odds with the preferred narrative of inclusive progress that philosophy spins about itself. At the same time, it is unsurprising that those feminists who questioned the political effects of philosophy’s preoccupation with the cerebral at the expense of the bodily became the objects of scorn for the philosophical mainstream committed to toeing the same line that resulted in women’s exclusion in the first place. The problem with the token inclusion of women philosophers who do not challenge the philosophical mainstream is that the presence of a Martha Nussbaum or Maudmarie Clark, valid in its own regard, is purchased at the expense of disparaging those who challenge the profession, like Butler or Rand, as either hacks, or “sophomoric,” as Leiter characterized Penaluna’s mention of Nietzsche’s possible misogyny.

In denying the political responsibility of philosophers, I wonder if Penaluna offers a critical narrative that is in fact very comfortable to academic philosophers because it does not significantly disrupt their standard practices within the profession. These practices may start with reading the same books ad nauseum, but they further involve utilizing the same conceptual techniques no matter what their limitations and no matter what the consequences of those limitations. For example, in attacking the canon, one is conspicuously silent on the complicity of academics, who may have hesitations about the possibly misogynous bits in Nietzsche or the pro-slavery aspects of Aristotle, but skip over that material rather than assessing it openly. This preserves the respected tradition of decorum in which philosophers decline criticism until they can be sure about the grounds for criticism at the expense of those for whom such views are not only intolerable, but detrimental. It is emblematic of this attitude that Peter Carruthers suggests that the proportion of women in philosophy needs further study by experimental philosophers. By skipping over misogyny in philosophy through delay or oversight or simply substituting it with material that makes the same substantive point without including the offensive details, academics convey a powerful message about the place of women in the discipline: misogyny and those it hurts are not part of philosophy proper, a field that knows no gender, class or cultural identity. Rather these are simply errors to be at least ignored, or at best replaced with a more inclusive figure that preserves the timeless truths of the masters. As Penaluna notes, such an attitude is neither philosophically, nor socially responsible. Misogynous aspects of the canon should impugn the philosophical integrity of those associated with them because they display a stark lack of attention when “philosophers who devote[] their lives to investigating human experience” can ignore a significant portion of humanity by remaining “simply unconcerned with the condition of women.” (B29) Moreover, it begs the question of the social function of philosophers if they believe that the experience of women or the difficulty in responding to misogyny belong to subjects outside the purview of philosophical reflection.

Because I am not sure that Penaluna isn’t simply a more subtle and nuanced writer than I am, I will refrain from claiming that she misleads readers by downplaying the political implications of choices that philosophers make about their subject-matter. This may be wise if for no other reason than that she cites the numerous political decisions philosophers make to promote the continued relevance misogynist ideology. Nevertheless it seems relevant to emphasize that these claims are not simply hypothetical postulates, but reflect the actual conditions of women studying and making their way into the profession of philosophy. The absence of women from philosophy classrooms and the professoriate is already a political issue that many current members of the profession have ignored, promoted, misrepresented or resisted. Philosophical reflection should play a role in deciding which of these options we would like to continue, but that will not come about unless one is clear that reflection takes place within the medium of political relationships rather than being outside of them.

Nobody Could Have Predicted...

Today I've read over a few articles talking about how economists got the economy wrong. Each, in some way, try to cast light on the obscurantist claim that nobody could have predicted the downturn by showing how a particular set of circumstances brought about the intellectual blinders worn by contemporary economists. Together, they make an interesting read First, Paul Krugman explains how the economics profession gradually shifted from Keynsian theory to neo-liberalism. Keynes can be simplified to two points: 1) that markets require regulations (especially finance), and 2) "he called for active government intervention — printing more money and, if necessary, spending heavily on public works — to fight unemployment during slumps."

The story of neo-liberalism is the story of the struggle against Keynes. Neo-liberalism reduces regulation to monetary policy. As Krugman writes:

Monetarists asserted, however, that a very limited, circumscribed form of government intervention — namely, instructing central banks to keep the nation’s money supply, the sum of cash in circulation and bank deposits, growing on a steady path — is all that’s required to prevent depressions.

This view is often associated with Alan Greenspan, but the policy was first introduced by Paul Volker during Jimmy Carter's presidency. Couple this with a blind faith in markets and an attack on regulations, and we're pretty close to neoliberal policy. If there is a general difference between the two approaches, it is that neoliberalism advocates Federal Reserve policy while Keynsians advocate government spending during market downturns (and note that neoliberal hegemony only occurred in the USA with heavy Keynsian-style military spending in the background).

And then, ideologically, neo-liberalism has one more particular quirk: any time that its policies fail, it is always, according to its partisans, because deregulation didn't go far enough. There is always some other government function that is interfering with the free market.

Krugman doesn't explain how neo-liberalism became hegemonic beyond the university and regulatory system. On its forced introduction across the globe, see Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine. In the USA, the neoliberals have been running the show for the last three decades, and while Alan Greenspan has 'admitted' to some mistakes, their ideology is still dominant. How were economists "seduced by the vision of a perfect, frictionless market system," as Krugman puts it?

Ryan Grim, at the Huffington Post, says we should follow the money. While through the mid-1970s the academics of economics were largely divorced from the Federal Reserve, today the Fed largely reinforces its own ideology through academic publications and funding:

The Federal Reserve's Board of Governors employs 220 PhD economists and a host of researchers and support staff, according to a Fed spokeswoman. The 12 regional banks employ scores more. (HuffPost placed calls to them but was unable to get exact numbers.) The Fed also doles out millions of dollars in contracts to economists for consulting assignments, papers, presentations, workshops, and that plum gig known as a "visiting scholarship." A Fed spokeswoman says that exact figures for the number of economists contracted with weren't available. But, she says, the Federal Reserve spent $389.2 million in 2008 on "monetary and economic policy," money spent on analysis, research, data gathering, and studies on market structure; $433 million is budgeted for 2009.

So while much of neoliberal ideology is discredited, it still has a strong academic industry behind it. Which is why, when the current administration turns to the question of new regulations for the financial sector, there will be strong resistance both ideologically (from PhDs whose careers are at stake) and financially (there is lots of money at stake in Wall Street, as we know). The difficult task is to legislate significant reform before Congress can be bought off, and before the President takes in too much bad advice from his economic advisers, who largely were responsible for getting us into this mess. And then, as Thomas Frank points out, we might not even get out of the clear with new regulation:

What if some future administration were to install as the chairman of the Federal Reserve—or as chief of whatever agency is made into the One Big Regulator—a man who really doesn't believe in the regulatory mission? What if control of the systemic regulator is handed over to a person who considers 19th-century economic arrangements to be a sort of aspirational ideal? A man who turns out to be a dedicated fan of Ayn Rand, that Nietzsche of the boardroom? A man who blows off warning signs because, in his perfect theoretical universe of rational markets, the only really systemic problem is government itself?

This is no hypothetical problem, because Frank is referring to Alan Greenspan, who presided over the Fed from 1987 to 2006, and was, for all the wrong reasons, ascribed to have deity-like powers.

Given these problems, it's difficult not to be skeptical and cynical about reform.

Words of the Wise

Like a few of my friends at the moment, I am currently working on job applications for tenure track positions in philosophy. There are a lot of things I could say about this process, but let's just say that I've heard, more times than I can count, that "soon there will be lots of jobs because a lot of professors are due to retire." That rumor has been going around, I've also heard, since the mid-1980s. Which is why I found this piece of advice, sent to me from a friend who has been through this routine before, to be apt.

You're probably at least hip-deep in advice on this thing people call the job market. I have my own, which is to keep in mind that anyone who advises you on the way to be successful in the job market should immediately be suspected of naivete at best, gross bad faith in most instances, and for the rest, total hypocrisy. I wish you the absolute best (pardon the pun).

The "Twilight" saga and moral education

Several factors contributed to my recently getting into the dreaded "Twilight" saga, something I'm pretty sure I swore a blood oath I would never do. It was Halloween recently; my friend dared me to; with the recent passing of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, I've been thinking more about structural analysis of myth; finally, I've had a bad cold and have had plenty of time on my hands while recuperating. So I'm well into the second book of Stephenie Meyer's series, and I have to report that despite the fact that I am not a teenage girl, it's been worth it.

Why the hell, you might ask? Has McLennan dulled his hard, unforgiving critical-Marxist edge? Is he punishing himself in some way? is Stephenie Meyer paying him? None of it. I've discovered in Twilight not only an entertaining mythology, but a great entering wedge into moral education. Every twist and turn of the story involves some kind of horrible dilemma or moral quandary, and leaving aside how the characters actually deal with these, it's gratifying to see a popular series that might actually get kids thinking in moral terms.

I've tested this against my intro Moral Reasoning students. Many of them read Twilight books on break in class, so when I gave a pop quiz joining elements of the series to John Stuart Mill's harm principle and the critique of Mill by James Q. Wilson, many of them snapped to attention and went to work like mad. Sometimes you have to play to the crowd. But beyond that very interesting experiment, I continue to find grist for the mill.

This post is of course somewhat redundant, as I see that Blackwell has put out a "Twilight and Philosophy" collection as part of their "Philosophy and Pop Culture" series. But I never take those books very seriously without thinking through the links between philosophy and pop culture artifacts myself.

Sunday From Lévi-Strauss to Makavejev

Another busy week at The Notes Taken, so you might of missed any of the following: we republished an interview with Todd May on Jacques Rancière and anarchism, Matt McLennan reviewed Alberto Gualandi's Lyotard, and Jason Smith reviewed Civilising Subjects by Catharine Hall. I weighed in on Bittergate and the politics of resentment, and also on Question 1 in Maine, which prevents marriage in that state. In an update to that post, I added that the fight over Referendum 71 (which was about equality, but without calling it marriage) in Washington seemed likely to meet a better fate. So it's worth another update to let you know that Referendum 71 has passed with 52% of the vote (a yes vote= toward equality). For something a little less political, I also remarked on a recent study about the differences between lefties and righties (and one of the few times that this distinction doesn't refer directly to politics!).

However, if you only have time to read one post, I would like to direct you to Matt McLennan's tribute to Claude Lévi-Strauss, who died last week. I have to admit that I have read very little of Lévi-Strauss' work, and when I started getting more interested in it, I was thick in the dissertation work. So a quick trip to my bookshelf reveals that I had purchased Tristes Tropiques on May 26, 2009, but I still have yet to read it. Nevertheless, I found that Matt's tribute moved me, and in my mind provides all the right reasons for one to want to read the late anthropologist's work.

As you wake up this morning, however, there are lots of other news items afloat in the oceanic internet. First up, health care:

• Start getting to know the lone Republican in the House who voted for the health care bill. He represents a heavily Democratic district, and was elected in part because his opponent, William Jefferson, was caught with $90,000 in bribe money in his refrigerator.
• No health care debate is complete without some conservative disrespect toward women.

And in book reviews:

First, a review at Red Pepper, of Liz Fekete's A Suitable Enemy: Racism, Migration and Islamophobia in Europe:

Fekete’s central argument is that the colour-coded anti-immigrant racism of the 1960s and 1970s has been superseded by a new continental ‘xeno-racism’, which has shifted its hostility to Europe’s migrant populations towards the terrain of culture or religion rather than race.

Second, The Nation has a review of Lorriane Mortimer's book on Dusan Makavejev, who is the director of WR: The Mysteries of the Organism (1971). WR is a difficult movie to summarize, but it's a collage of Stalinist hagiographies, a documentary on Wilhelm Reich, street theatre in New York and a fictional romance featuring a kind of 'philosophy in the bedroom' in which an ice skater from the Soviet Union and a woman named Milena from Yugoslavia discourse on sex and ideology. This should be enough to convince you to read the review and watch the movie. But if that isn't enough, as Richard Byrne aptly summarizes,

Makavejev approaches Reich's theories--and in particular, Reich's notion that humanity is corroded physically and enslaved politically and morally by its frustrated sexual urges--as an avenue to investigate how power works to keep humanity in chains.

In Foucault's terms, it is one of the greatest films that presupposes the repressive hypothesis. I had a chance to watch WR in Chicago on the big screen, but this required walking through a downpour in which an umbrella was basically useless. Still worth it. It's too bad that they don't have it at the University of Ottawa.

Finally, the New York Times shows how not to review a book by Barbara Ehrenreich, by emptying the book of its political message, so that Ehrenreich just sounds like a crank who is irritated by all that talk of positive thinking.

The Lessons of Bittergate

I'm no fan of the -gate suffix being attached to political snafus, but now that the "2008 Campaign in retrospect" books are coming out, it's difficult to avoid using it. Bittergate, if you recall, was the shorthand name for the 'controversy' around Obama's comments in April 2008, at a fundraiser in San Francisco, stating that when blue-collar voters "get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations

"

Mayhill Fowler has recently published an excerpt from her forthcoming book about this so-called controversy on the Huffington Post. Her central claim is that

Obama's remark was and still is one of the biggest stories of that historic Presidential run. It is also still one of the least understood. Though I was the first to report on his comments in my Levittown post, here on HuffPost as a citizen journalist following the candidates and covering the campaign trail, it was not until later that I fully understood the driving forces behind that statement. I don't think it was really an accident at all, but rather, that in his quick rise to power, Barack Obama did not have the chance to get to know his fellow Americans -- at least not the ones in Levittown, Pennsylvania.

To conclude that Obama did not have a chance to get to know his fellow Americans means that Fowler doesn't really see the significance of the remark either. I think the largest problem with his remark is not that it's condescending (Clinton's take) or that of a "liberal elitist" (McCain), but that it states the most obvious open secret in American politics: that Republicans (and some Democrats) run on a politics of resentment. It's okay, if you an political commentator to talk about this (think of Thomas Frank here), but it's off limits for a politician to mention, even though every politician has to already know this. Which means that Obama knew his fellow Americans pretty well.

The politics of resentment is one of the driving forces of the teabagger phenomenon (remember when that term just referred to kink?), that is running the GOP train off the rails. The people involved probably really believe that their freedom is being taken away, and ally with the Republicans, not realizing that it is the Republican brand of neo-liberalism perpetuates the economic and social insecurity of the lower and middle class whites who cling to guns, religion and xenophobia. Ironically, something like health care is in their economic interest.

Not to mention that these demonstrations occur aided by a number of government services at their disposal. Over the summer, I recall conservatives at one or other tea party even complaining about the Metro that they nonetheless used for transportation. Or that these same people depend on police and fire departments, and even medical help. At the recent "Superbowl of Freedom" (note that conservatives don't get the irony of hyperbole), described by Dana Milbank (I know, not the best opinionator), on the steps of the Capitol, with people waving signs comparing government health care to Nazi death camps,

a man standing just beyond the TV cameras apparently suffered a heart attack 20 minutes after event began. Medical personnel from the Capitol physician's office -- an entity that could, quite accurately, be labeled government-run health care -- rushed over, attaching electrodes to his chest and giving him oxygen and an IV drip [...] By the time it was over, medics had administered government-run health care to at least five people in the crowd who were stricken as they denounced government-run health care.

Stories like this are supposed to demonstrate the absurdity of these kind of positions, but it is also important to understand the logic behind them. These conservatives might not even believe that government services are bad in and of themselves, but that their tax dollars might be redistributed to others in need of services who the lower class conservatives also view as getting some form of privilege. What they resent is that their relative status has declined while it seems others are unfairly getting ahead. The missing part of the story, however, is that the political party that they have aligned with is largely responsible for perpetuating their economic decline.

The thing is, these people aren't all lost to persuasion. They don't all parade around with idiotic signs. Some are disaffected and don't see how these changes could benefit them. They can be reasoned with, and it is one of the tasks of activists on the left to show how their plight is part of a larger social struggle for economic justice. I don't mean convincing them to vote Democratic. I mean using argumentation to help them see the larger connections between Wall Street, both parties, and globalization so that they can make more informed decisions about how to participate in politics. Maybe that means voting, but it can also mean unions, social movements, etc. The most important part is reintroducing a sense of social solidarity so often lacking in political discourse.