Pro-porn activist site launched

And about time! For a while now I've maintained a Google alert for "Robert Jensen" + "readings" so I can take some sort of action to expose his hypocrisy next time he's in my neighborhood. As a kinky, sub-leaning male, I'm most affected by the fact that his discourse denies my existence. By insisting he knows what people can consent to, he silences and "invisibilizes" us kinksters as well as sex workers. Though he may not be as aggressive about it, unfortunately Noam Chomsky falls into this category too, given his response to learning about Hustler's content after giving them an interview. When I emailed him about this, he responded that in his view it was unquestionably degrading to women. Inasmuch as the images accompanying the interview had a spanking theme, which happens to be my biggest fetish, I take particular umbrage and doubtless will focus on that point when he comes around. I'll post announcements of such appearances here as I learn of them, as well as on kink-related lists I'm subscribed to.

Block party to raise green for Greens

This Saturday, from 8am to 8pm, a day of fun for all ages will be held at the Wharton community center and gym at 22nd Street and Cecil B. Moore Avenue, a facility maintained by Lewis Harris Jr. Proceeds will benefit the center, Harris' campaign for City Commissioner and Jacinth Brown Roberts' for City Councilmember at large, and the Green Party of Philadelphia. Harris and Roberts are GPOP nominees. I'll be running the voter registration table. Also upcoming: On Friday at 7:30, science fiction author and scholar Camille Bacon-Smith will be reading from her omnibus novel Daemon Eyes at Barnes & Noble, 1805 Walnut Street. This just in: REFUSING TO KILL IS NOT A CRIME STOP PERSECUTING CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS AND REFUSERS ACTION ALERT: Conscientious objector OSMAN MURAT ÜLKE in danger of re-imprisonment OSMAN MURAT ÜLKE, THE FIRST TURKISH CO TO BE IMPRISONED, IS AGAIN THREATENED WITH A 17-MONTHS SENTENCE ALTHOUGH THE MILITARY COURT DECISION WAS EIGHT YEARS AGO. ON 1 SEPTEMBER 1995 MR ÜLKE BURNED HIS MILITARY CALL-UP PAPERS, SAYING: "I AM NOT A SOLDIER AND I WILL NEVER BE . . . I WILL NEVER PERFORM MILITARY SERVICE." From October 1996-March 1999 he was repeatedly arrested, charged, convicted and jailed for refusing conscription. On 9 March 1999 Mr Ülke was released from military prison and ordered to present himself again to his military unit: instead, he went home and has since lived a semi-legal life, officially a deserter, but not arrested. On 24 January 2006 the European Court of Human Rights found that: " The clandestine life amounting almost to "civil death" which [he] had been compelled to adopt . . . constituted degrading treatment within the meaning of Article 3 [of the Human Rights Act]." On 13-14 February 2007 the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe "deplored that the Turkish authorities had as yet taken no individual measure to put an end to the violation found by the Court." On 6 June 2007 the Turkish authorities told the Council of Europe that a draft law to prevent repeated punishment of conscientious objectors was under way. YET ON 14 JUNE 2007 THE TURKISH MILITARY PROSECUTOR'S OFFICE ORDERED MR ÜLKE TO SERVE A 17-MONTHS SENTENCE. HE RISKS ARREST AND RE-IMPRISONMENT DESPITE THE JUDGEMENTS OF THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS, THE COMMITTEE OF MINISTERS, AND THE (SO FAR) EMPTY PROMISES OF THE TURKISH AUTHORITIES. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- WE DEMAND THAT THE TURKISH AUTHORITIES: *COMPLY WITH THE JUDGEMENT OF THE EUROPEAN COURT OF HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE CASE OF OSMAN MURAT ÜLKE *RECOGNISE THE RIGHT TO CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTION AND EXEMPT COs FROM MILITARY SERVICE *END NOW THE PERSECUTION AND "CIVIL DEATH" OF CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS *RELEASE IMPRISONED KURDISH CO HALIL SAVDA IMMEDIATELY. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- The 5 June 2007 INTERNATIONAL DAY OF ACTION (http://www.refusingtokill.net/5JuneFlyer.htm) - organized by the Conscientious Objection Platform (Turkey), Global Women's Strike, Greek Association of Conscientious Objectors, and Payday men's network - highlighted in particular the persecution of Osman Murat Ülke. We called especially on anti-war organizations to recognize the contribution of COs and other refusers to the anti-war movement and to organize actions to demand recognition of their right to refuse to kill, and thus to CO status and an end to their persecution. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- * SIGN THE PETITION-ON-LINE TO DEFEND OSMAN MURAT ÜLKE http://www.petitiononline.com/ossi/petition.html co-sponsored by: German Peace Society - United War Resisters www.deutsche-friedensgesellschaft.de/php/index.php?id=66 Global Women's Strike www.globalwomenstrike.net Greek Association of Conscientious Objectors www.antirrisies.gr Payday men's network www.refusingtokill.net War Resisters International www.wri-irg.org. * WRITE TO YOUR COUNTRY REPRESENTATIVE ON THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE The current Chair of the Committee of Ministers is Vuk Jeremic of Serbia msp@smip.sv.gov.yu. The UK representative is Secretary of State David Miliband MP (email milibandd@parliament.uk. The US observer at the Council is Ambassador Craig Roberts Stapleton (Fax 011 33 1 42 66 97 83). Please cc Payday, to forward to MEPs. ACTION ALERT ISSUED BY PAYDAY MEN'S NETWORK (UK and US) www.refusingtokill.net payday@paydaynet.org For information, call (US) 215-848-1120 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A bumper sticker made me laugh out loud today. White on red, it said, "APS: If this sticker is blue, you're driving too fast." (If you don't get it, you may be a mundane. Hint: APS stands for American Physical Society.) Recently I've noticed 7-11 is selling half-size hoagies as "little subbies." This tickles me no end. (Come to think, that can be taken more than one way ;-) )

"THERE IS A GOD!"

That's how a Bulgarian paper headlined the news that five of the country's nurses, along with one Palestinian doctor, had lost only eight years of their lives being imprisoned, tortured, and threatened with death in Libya for a crime they didn't commit. Way to go, all-powerful, all-loving Supreme Being! Yay, yay, Yahweh! 

Sheehan coming to Philly

On Tuesday the 24th Cindy Sheehan's Caravan for Humanity will be in town. From 1:30 to 3:30 they'll be rallying at the tombstone display by the Independence Visitors Center, on Market between 5th and 6th Streets. From 4 to 5:30 there'll be a Honk to Impeach rally on Broad Street between Arch and Vine. Participants are encouraged to wear orange to show solidarity.

Endorsers include afterdowningstreet.org, Brandywine Peace Community, the Bryn Mawr Peace Coalition, the International Action Center, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Main Line Citizens for Impeachment, Peace Action Pennsylvania, Grannies for Peace, the Philadelphia Regional Anti-War Network, South Jersey Progressive Democrats of America, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

A surprise breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence?

This was what I wondered when I saw the following sign: "STEAK DBL CHEDDAR BURGER WITH AI." But when I went inside, the Checkers personnel informed me that it was meant to read, "A1." Oh well.

A gold star goes to the Philadelphia Weekly for last week's "Cultural Report Card" column. They gave the Daily News a C- for "[p]reviewing the 'lucky' day of 07/07/07 in Friday cover story. Look for future cover stories on unicorns, hobgoblins, the new Scientology building on Chestnut Street, the Eagles winning the Super Bowl and of course Friday the 13th. ('Inside: Will Jason kill you today?')"

Introducing... the World's First Critical Thinking Tract!

At least, as far as I know it is.

Here's the draft:

How Can We Avoid Snares and Delusions?

Every day we face urgings to buy something or believe something. "Buy this and you will be sexy." "Believe this religion and you will find peace." "Support this candidate and he will make your life better." How can we know what to believe?

Many people choose to believe something because believing it makes them feel good. Doug Henning, the famous magician, wanted to believe that Transcendental Meditation could cure his cancer. So rather than get scientific medical treatment, which would almost certainly have let him live a long life since his disease was discovered at an early stage, he relied on TM to cure it. His belief made him feel better, but ultimately it killed him, because it wasn't true.

Sometimes a group of people adopts a belief because a leader with a very persuasive personality tells them something that makes them feel special. In the 1930s, the German people believed Adolf Hitler when he told them they were destined to rule the world if they followed him. Instead they got a wrecked economy, millions dead, and an occupied country. Their belief had made them feel special, but ultimately it ruined them because it wasn't true, either.

Often people believe something simply because it's traditional, and they've been taught that it's wrong to question it. The people of Easter Island thought that whatever problems they faced, they had to please their gods to get their assistance, by building huge stone figures of them. In the process they used up all the trees on the island, and subsequently starved to death. They had stuck to their belief because it was traditional and they thought it was wrong to question it, but it ended up killing them because it wasn't true either.

So we can see that believing something simply because it makes us feel good can be a terrible mistake. So can believing something because it makes us feel special. And so can believing something because it's a tradition that we've been taught not to question.

So, how can we tell what's true? Sometimes we can tell just by looking for ourselves. In the Middle Ages, people believed the Earth was flat, because that was (they thought) what people had always believed. But all they had to do was watch a ship disappear over the horizon, with the topsail disappearing last, to see that the world was curved. Most didn't do this simply because they weren't in the habit of looking for themselves. The Church told them the world was flat, and they weren't supposed to question the Church.

When we can't check something for ourselves, that doesn't mean we have to rely on one person's word for it. We can see whether other people are saying the same thing, or whether there are different opinions out there. Then we can ask ourselves, Why does that person say what she does? Has she had the chance to see something I haven't, or is she just saying it because it makes her feel good, or because it's her family's tradition, or because she can make money off of me by getting me to believe it?

Another way to avoid snares is to look for counterexamples to something we believe, or are being asked to believe. For instance, you may have been told there are more murders on nights with a full moon, and you may have heard stories to support this. But rather than assume this is true, we can ask ourselves: If a murder occurred on a night with a half moon or a new moon, would anyone have noticed? Or would they only remember the times murder was committed under a full moon, because that's what we always hear about? And then we can check for ourselves in the newspaper archives and discover that just as many murders occur under each phase of the moon!

So now we've seen how dangerous it can be to believe things for bad reasons, and we've seen some of the ways we can test the many claims we encounter in life, or may even find ourselves repeating to others without ever having checked them out for ourselves. Above all, the single best defense against these mental snares is to acknowledge that it's okay to not know. No one can know everything about this huge world of ours, and because there are so many bad -- yet tempting -- reasons to believe things, we often can't rely on what others seem to know either. And that's all right!

If you now see the importance of protecting yourself from snares and delusions, try making this pledge to yourself right now: "I understand that I can only see a little bit of my world, but what I can see for myself is what I can know most reliably. I will try never to believe something just because it makes me feel good or special, or because people tell me it's wrong not to believe it. I will try always to check what I believe or what others want me to believe for myself if I can, and if I can't, to see whether others believe differently and whether they have better reasons for believing what they do, than I have for believing what I do. I will never be afraid to admit that I don't have all the answers. And no matter how strongly I believe something, I will always be open to evidence that I'm wrong, and will search out such evidence as a way of resisting the temptation to only see things that confirm my beliefs. Finally, seeing the value of these critical thinking skills, I will encourage others to learn them too, will offer my assistance in practicing them, and will likewise ask for their assistance. In this way we can help protect each other from the temptations of mental snares and delusions."

Anticopyright -- Feel free to reproduce and distribute this tract, so long as this paragraph is included.

Hear Susan Abulhawa read from her first novel

My friend Susan Abulhawa, founder of the charity Playgrounds for Palestine, will be reading from her novel The Scar of David 7pm on Wednesday, 11 July, at the Langhorne Borders at 2343 E. Lincoln Highway. The latest Labor Notes has some excellent articles on the struggles of Iraqi workers to protect their national patrimony and overcome obstacles to organizing posed by both the US occupation and political Islam. They aren't available online, but you can order the July issue from the magazine's website or, better yet, subscribe. 

I've got a part!

(See 4 August entry for update.) As in, a part in the Cheezy Chunks Variety Hour, a recreation of a '50s TV variety show, which will be performed as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Shows will be 4-6 September, 8pm at the Rotunda. It's projected that I'll be playing a folksinger. Also last weekend, I saw some clever advertising on a coffee cup from a sex shop. One side read, "ROMANTIC SOFTWARE -- EROTIC HARDWARE," and the other side, "Body-Language.com: Building a Better Fucking America." I could see why my hosts had had to get it!

Help Juliet Anderson ("Aunt Peg")!

Recently Juliet Anderson, Golden Age porn star famous for her "Aunt Peg" character, had some medical difficulties and now needs some financial help. I'm publishing this appeal, copied from her fan discussion list, in hopes that those reading this will be moved to help out someone who made such important contributions to erotic film by pioneering the portrayal of a strong female character, as well as by discovering Nina Hartley. Here's her appeal:

On March 7th, I was driving in my car and needed to pee really badly, so I raced home. I bumped into another car, then slammed into a telephone pole, then smashed into a parked car which knocked over a scooter. Thankfully no one was hurt. But my car was totaled. (I had a '96 Honda Accord). I ran into my apartment to use the bathroom. The police came and thankfully didn't cite me for leaving the scene but were required to call an for an ambulance to transport me to the hospital.

At the hospital I checked out OK physically but got hysterical and and couldn't stop crying. So they called another ambulance to take me to their mental hospital in Vallejo where I stayed for a few days. I was sent home with a "mood stabilizer" medication.

A couple weeks later, I walked to the post office and someone stole my wallet right off my body, which sent me over the edge again. I cried all the way home and had a second breakdown. Another ambulance came and took me to a Fremont hospital where I stayed six days. Again they sent me home with medication.

After a few weeks, I stopped taking the medication, as I was feeling fine. I didn't understand how important it was to stay on it, so I had a third breakdown. A well meaning friend called another ambulance, and I returned to the hospital where I remained for 2 weeks.

In the hospital I rested, ate very well, walked around the grounds, swam, attended support groups and art classes. I learned coping skills and the importance of taking my meds everyday (Depakote). This is the first time I've ever been in the hospital for a mental breakdown and it will be the last.

But now I have the bills to pay. Fortunately, my medical plan (Kaiser) paid for my hospitalization. But not the ambulances or medication. And I'm out a month's income not being able to see clients. That totals to $5,000.

If I've ever had a positive effect on your life and you've enjoyed my skills and joy being Juliet "Aunt Peg" Anderson and can help me out in my time of need I'd greatly appreciate it. Even $5 would make a difference. Thanks.

Please send to:
Juliet Anderson
2124 Kittredge Street, #103
Berkeley, CA 94704

"Laura Nails Cheating Bush"

That's the headline I saw on a tabloid recently. Conjures up an interesting picture -- just too bad some people can think of gender-bending only as a punishment!

H. L. Mencken on metaphysics (by way of the May PhACT newsletter):

It is never possible for a metaphysician to state his ideas in plain English. Those ideas, with few exceptions, are inherently nonsensical, and he is forced to formulate them in a vague and unintelligible jargon. Of late some of the stars of the faculty have taken to putting them into mathematical formulae. They thus become completely incomprehensible to the layman, and gain the additional merit of being incomprehensible also to most other metaphysicians

(This might be made more current by substituting "critical theory" for "metaphysics.")

I've arranged for Kali Morgan, proprietrix of Passional Boutique, to interview independent mayoral candidate Larry West for her magazine.

Saturday morning I'll be at Renewal Presbyterian Church, 48th & Spruce Sts., to have my cheek swabbed to see whether I'm a bone marrow match for a baby with a rare disease. I passed that church every day when I was growing up in Cedar Park and attending Lea elementary and junior high school, but have never been inside it.

Later that day, I'll be attending a kinky private party.

Sunday I'll audition to sing in the Cheezy Chunks Variety Hour.

Other upcoming events:

Saturday, 30 June: Musicians rally in Rittenhouse Square Park from 1 to 3pm for the right to perform there without a permit. Tuesday, 3 July: At dusk, The Horror of Party Beach will be screened at Liberty Lands Park, 3d and Wildey Sts.

Wednesday, 4 July: There will be a rally to free Mumia Abu-Jamal outside the Independence Visitors Center at 11am. From 1 to 9pm at the same location, there will be a "Philadelphia Emergency Anti-War Convention," called initially by Cindy Sheehan in response to the Democrats' failure to cut off funds for the war in Iraq. Monday, 9 July: The Philly Brights Munch. I'm suggesting we use this meeting to discuss how we might devise a pro-critical-thinking tract. No reason we should leave the field of popular propaganda to the believers. Through Sunday, 9 September: The Please Touch Museum has an exhibit on "Dragons and Fairies: Exploring Viet Nam through Folktales." The Public Record seems to think this exhibit is only for "young children." Mundanes .

I'm with the Banned

Today I took part in a rally in Rittenhouse Square Park to restore the right to make music there without a permit. This right was being exercised frequently until a recent incident in which one singer, Anthony Riley, was told to stop and was arrested when he refused to, spending eighteen hours in jail. A group called the Philadelphia Artists' Rights Coalition has been formed to reestablish the principle that you don't need a permit to sing in public. Thinking Straight About Consent I've just sent the following letter to the Philadelphia City Paper, in response to this guest commentary: Amy Jersild's commentary is riddled with illogic. For her own ideological convenience, she tries to squeeze the public discourse over the recent serial rape trial into a dichotomy of "bad" vs. "good" men/women. But it really shows that considerably more complex issues were considered by the jury as well as observers of the trial. For instance, she claims that "media attention surrounding [the] case ... perpetuates the myth that accused rapists are usually monsters" because the defendant's attorney called him "a playboy, not a rapist." This is nonsense. Does Jersild doubt that a woman accused of embezzlement might be described by her advocate as "a loving mother, not a criminal"? Would anyone think this implies that one can't be both? Of course not. That the jury didn't believe in such a dichotomy is demonstrated by the very question Jersild laments: whether one who is legally intoxicated can consent to sex. Obviously, if the defendant's character were all that mattered to them, they wouldn't have bothered to ask this. But Jersild is too busy twisting definitions to notice. She claims the state's rape law answers the question, when its actual language is "engag[ing] in sexual intercourse with a complainant ... who is unconscious or where the person knows the complainant is unaware that the sexual intercourse is occurring." This is plainly a stronger criterion than mere intoxication, which is defined by a blood alcohol level. Everyone knows one can be "drunk" without being unconscious or unaware. She similarly twists the issues when claiming the verdict implies that "if one consents to drinking, one consents to sexual intercourse." More nonsense. What it implies is that if one consents to ingesting alcohol or another mind-altering substance, as opposed to being given it covertly, then whatever one subsequently chooses to do is also consensual. This is only logical since, after all, that might be why one chose to ingest it in the first place. Jersild may consider this a questionable choice -- one she wouldn't make herself -- but who is she to deny it to others? And that's effectively what one does if one makes others, simply for cooperating with such choices, subject to felony prosecution. But there's an even more blatant inconsistency here: Jersild repeatedly poses acquaintance rape as a matter of "poor judgment made poorer by substance use." Whoa! Wasn't she just suggesting that any woman who's intoxicated is incapable of consenting to sex? Then how could a man who's likewise intoxicated be responsible for subjecting her to it? Can we say "double standard"? A female friend of long standing has described to me how, on two separate occasions, she witnessed "enthusiastically consensual" sex in a party or group dating situation, only to have the women involved complain to her the next day of how they'd been "raped." Ideologues may prefer not to know about it, but cognitive dissonance can be a powerful motive for false accusations in this area (and even more so for informal claims, which might account for the disparity between survey data and actual prosecutions). While Jersild urges women not "to abdicate responsibility for their own safety," she might also urge them to take responsibility for their own sexuality, and accept that it may sometimes take them places they hadn't expected to go.

My New Career Begins

Today I busked for the first time. I suppose I'd been doing it a bit less than an hour before my voice started to tire, and shortly after I got my first tip. Interestingly, this was while I performed my version of "Morning, Noon and Nighttime," my favorite song, which I'd put off for a while. Perhaps the feeling came through and reached someone, so to speak. Upcoming -- Tuesday, 19 June: 7pm, Free Library of Philadelphia central branch -- Helen Oyeyemi reads from The Opposite House, a fantasy novel. Wednesday, 20 June: 6pm, Robin's Book Store -- Audacia Ray, editor-in-chief of $pread magazine, reads from her new book, Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing In on Internet Sexploration. Thursday, 21 June: 7:30pm, Borders, 1 South Broad Street -- Paul Offit reads from Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases. Friday, 22 June: 6pm, Passional Boutique, 5th and Bainbridge Sts. -- Audacia Ray (see 20 June). Tuesday, 26 June: Dusk, Liberty Lands Park, 3rd and Wildey Sts. -- Screening of The Mummy (1932).

Sixty Demand Justice for Transwoman

That was my estimate of the attendance at a rally Thursday to demand an investigation into the death of Erika Keels. According to organizers, witnesses saw an intentional and malicious homicide, but police have described it as an accident. I could only attend for a few minutes since I was on the job, but it was clearly well-organized.

I had an experience last weekend that epitomized the "True Believer" mentality. Before the paranormal research meetup that I've been attending recently, someone made a remark impugning psychotropic drugs in a broad-brush manner. I told him I didn't think the evidence supported such a sweeping position, and he responded that it did because his mother had died after taking one. I answered this non sequitur by saying he was free to draw his conclusion on such an unscientific basis if he wanted to, to which he reacted with outrage, "You have no right [!] to call it unscientific!" I was about to respond by saying yes I did, and reminding him of something called the First Amendment, but he continued with some remark about "heartless science" and then lectured me that "science without human values is worthless." So I had to try and explain to him that science can't serve human values unless it uses rigorous standards of evidence, and elaborated by suggesting placebo-controlled, double-blind trials as such a standard. He claimed he'd seen "too many examples" of studies by drug companies' being biased, and I pointed out that many studies are carried out by universities too, such as the one in which I started getting paroxetine, and that I'd gotten considerable benefits from it. He said that could be the placebo effect, but I reminded him that experiments control for this effect. So he retrenched by saying we shouldn't be "playing Russian roulette like that." When I answered, "That's why they do experiments first," he answered that he doesn't condone such experiments. "Fine, you don't have to condone them. They are voluntary," I said, to which he answered that people just do them for the money. So I pointed out that many, like myself, aren't paid to be subjects but do it in hope of getting help. So he tried to convince me that paroxetine is dangerous, saying a woman he knew who'd done a lot of paid subject-ing knew another one who'd committed suicide after going off it. I said this sounded as if not the drug, but going off the drug had killed her. He parried that this was true of heroin too, and I had to point out the distinction that people aren't addicted to heroin before they start taking it, whereas they do have serious mental problems before going on an SSRI. Although my interlocutor claimed repeatedly to have seen "lots" of research to support his position, he never described any -- just anecdotes. And notice his philosophical inconsistency here: he rushed to blame a drug for the woman's death instead of the depression for which it had been initially prescribed, yet invoked the placebo effect rather than acknowledge it might have benefited me. Note also that, when faced with the unanswerable fact that independent research supported the drug's benefits, he changed the subject by condemning the research on moral grounds. (Or perhaps one should say moralistic, since he would deny individual choice in the matter.) Such "skepticism of convenience" is not real skepticism at all.

I was alarmed

to see the following headline this morning: "Putin attacks West ahead of G8 summit." Fortunately I soon realized it must have been only a conventional attack -- otherwise I'd've been incinerated by then. (And probably so would you, depending on where you're reading this from.)

Epistemology quote of the week: Why doesn't anybody ask researchers who choose sex work as their primary subject if they were sexually abused as children? And if they knew they were going to be asked that, would they be more reluctant to study the subject? -- Jo Weldon, in $pread Vol. 3 Issue 1, p. 38.

Now You Can Read the Whole Essay

My essay on "Making the Right to a Job More Than a Slogan" is now published. You can read it in the entry dated 21 May.

ON MEMORIAL DAY, LET'S REMEMBER THE MILITARY AND CIVILIAN WAR DEAD OF ALL COUNTRIES.

Making the Right to a Job More Than a Slogan

Keywords: job rights, jobs for all, employment rights, full employment, libertarian socialism, libertarian communism

Making the Right to a Job More Than a Slogan

  http://stripey7.blogspot.com/2007/05/making-right-to-job-more-than-slogan.html

A longstanding and widely held assumption has been that socialism and libertarianism are antagonistic. I intend to challenge this. Now, there are some people who say they're for libertarian socialism. What they mean, in the best of cases, seems to be that socialist democracy should be largely decentralized to workplace collectives, with larger-scale planning only specifying overall input/output directives to the collectives; or, in some cases, that collectives should compete in a marketplace and be completely self-governing. There are various weaknesses to these proposals. In the case of decentralized planning, there's the problem that it hasn't yet been shown to be workable anywhere; people are reluctant to work for a system that may not itself work. In the case of market socialism, the objection is raised that market mechanisms will cause capital to re-concentrate in whichever collectives have a technological advantage, and class differences will re-emerge in the form of "bourgeoisified" and "proletarianized" collectives. In answer, market socialists sometimes say that state regulation and taxes can be used to prevent imbalances. I don't find this satisfactory, for two reasons. First, state regulation has a poor record when it comes to controlling market forces; state bureaucrats are too few to monitor a whole economy, and can often be bought off by whoever already controls the most wealth. One can hope that supervision by the community at large will do the job, but again no examples can be offered where this has worked in the long run. It may not be realistic to expect that most people, most of the time, are going to be that vigilant. Secondly, the state-regulation approach permanently writes off the idea of having the state wither away, a utopian aspect that is one of the most appealing features of the communist vision for me, and probably for many others. At the same time, the historical record suggests that a pure-planning approach carries considerable statist dangers. The record of Stalinism is often cited as proof that this is inherent in socialism. While orthodox Trotskyism makes a reasonable argument for alternative causes of Stalinism, it cannot prove these empirically. Again, this record makes people reluctant to support revolutionary socialism, especially in countries with a long tradition of civil liberties. So, does this mean that libertarian socialism is an unrealistic project? I don't think so. Instead, I think the problem is that none of its advocates, to the best of my knowledge, has taken it to its logical conclusion. That conclusion is that, to be truly libertarian, socialism's fundamental agent of production can't be the work collective; it has to be the individual worker. Hold on a minute, you're thinking -- how can it be socialism if the individual is the fundamental agent? To answer this question, let's step back a moment and examine closely what really defines private property. 

What makes private property private? Today, it's common to view private property and state property as the two branches of a dichotomy. But for most of history, private owners and state owners have been largely one and the same: god-kings, feudal lords, etc. The counterposing of the two categories as essential opposites really only arises with the appearance of capitalism as a social system; embarrassingly for conventional (procapitalist) libertarian theorists, it's the appearance of public (initially royal) property whose essential function is to facilitate transit and commerce, rather than to monopolize productive wealth, that makes the capitalist system possible. (Its novel status is subsequently consolidated through constitutional/republican revolutions.) So, what does the creation of this public property mean? It means that everyone has an equal right of way on it -- making possible the free movement of goods, key to the superior productivity of capitalism over preceding systems. By contrast, private property is property that a private owner can monopolize and control access to, be he a personal sovereign like precapitalist rulers, or a modern capitalist. In fact one of the classical political economists, David Ricardo, argued to make capitalism even more efficient by nationalizing land, so that wealth wouldn't be siphoned off by "idle" landlords from the "working classes," which from his standpoint included both capitalists and waged workers. Instead, land would be re-leased periodically to whoever could pay the highest rent, which would presumably be whoever could put it to the most productive and therefore profitable use. (An echo of this idea is heard today in the "Single Tax" of the Georgists.) Note that, importantly, Ricardo's idea was not to statize land in order to implement central governmental control of its use, but rather to free the individual capitalist to invest wherever he could do the most good. But this overlooked the fact that capital is also created from natural resources, and so its private ownership is ultimately just another form of monopoly over a part of nature, allowing some to profit from the application of (other people's) labor to it -- which Ricardo himself first recognized to be the sole source of new value. The nub of the issue is that property is private insofar as someone -- anyone -- can deny access to it. (Note that the word is related to deprive, privation, and privilege.) Whether the entity doing the denying is an individual, a corporation, a state, or a collective, the ability arbitrarily to deny access gives it power over the individual seeking employment. She consequently may have to subordinate herself to that entity's terms, regardless of whether they are legitimately entailed by the requirements of production, in exchange for the opportunity to work. This is what gives her the status of wage-slave, no matter who is setting those terms. So the key to real freedom, from a materialist standpoint, is unqualified access to economic wealth: the right to participate in social production. So, then, how does one finally give agency exclusively to those who actually create new wealth? The answer should now be apparent: nationalize capital to give the individual worker freedom to invest her labor wherever she feels she can use it best. So where the political republic created by bourgeois revolutions gives people unilateral freedom of movement to exercise their civic rights in the state, county, ward, and division of their choosing, the economic republic created by a proletarian revolution would give them unilateral choice of the enterprise in which to exercise their economic rights. In the same way that, today, no one can arbitrarily prevent me from voting where I want, provided I'm willing to live in and give some of my money (taxes) to that political unit, so, in an economic commonwealth, I couldn't be arbitrarily excluded from exercising my franchise in and sharing in the profits of any company I wished, in proportion to the number of hours I was willing to give to it. This solves at one stroke the principal objection to market socialism -- that market laws would cause class differences to reappear under a new guise -- not by the dubious, inefficient method of state regulation, but by creating a new individual right, one that would provide an automatic corrective to any tendency for wealth to re-concentrate. Much as, under capitalism, the rate of profit "seeks its own level" via capital's flow toward the arenas of greatest return, so in this system hourly wages would equilibrate via labor's flow toward wherever it enjoyed the best rewards (qualitative as well as quantitative). Now, instead of the burden of proof's resting on the state to show that a collective had broken a regulation or evaded taxes, it would be on the collective to explain why it hadn't let someone clock in. An objection may be raised at this point that, with a job guaranteed, people wouldn't feel the need to actually work.But with wages directly linked to a company's profits, rather than a fixed hourly rate, everyone would have a clear incentive to be productive. True enough, if a company became outstandingly profitable, more people would join to share in this, bringing compensation per member down again. But insofar as the high profits had been based on working harder or smarter, not just longer, this would leave the original members with more leisure time than they'd started with, so they'd still be ahead. The role of social incentives might be even more important. Most people will not be very comfortable slacking off, if they have to spend a full workday around those whose labor they're living off of.

How do we get there? Now that we've sketched the outlines of an economic commonwealth, we have to think about how we can bring it about. With Marx, I think that socialism can arise only from workers' self-activity and self-organization, both political and economic; the question then is how this vision of socialism would inform workers' self-activity. For the labor movement, it could have considerable implications. If the fight against unemployment -- the main factor holding wages down -- is not focused entirely on asking the government to create jobs, but largely on opening existing work to the unemployed, this suggests that unions should try to wrest control over hiring from employers, and use this to spread the work around. The ultimate objective would be for the workers to control the company totally, self-managing it through their union. In most cases this couldn't be accomplished in one leap, inasmuch as political power was still held by the capitalists. It might involve a strategic "detour" wherein a union would not demand an increased wage package, but ask instead for it to be converted to a collective profit share for it to divide among its members. (To work to their benefit, such a contract must include a guarantee of access to the company's -- real -- books.) The sweetener for the capitalist in such an arrangement would be the union's direct investment in the company's profitability. The strategic gain for the union would be a reduction in the area unemployment level, an increase in community goodwill and identification with the union, and a consequent reduction in the likelihood of scabbing in the event of a strike. Doubtless some capitalists wouldn't agree initially to any loss of control over hiring; unions could still pursue this strategy in other ways. They could raise members' dues sufficiently to provide everyone in the area pay equivalent to their net wages; or they could create free community services such as a kitchen, health clinic, etc. It might be held implausible to expect members to sacrifice some of their immediate interests for the sake of their unemployed neighbors; but consider that this is just what many union workers have done over the years in the name of keeping their employers in business -- a gamble that often didn't pay off. This approach differs in that it proposes to invest in solidarity not with the capitalist but with fellow workers, who are far less likely to renege if only because they often have nowhere else to go. It may go over especially easily with community-based labor organizations like Black Workers for Justice, since they already have a perspective that transcends the purely trade-union. Some may object to this approach because it would subject unions to the "logic of profit." But such an objection reflects a confusion between two different meanings of profit. One sense is the capitalist's profit: the net income he has after covering all costs. Insofar as he's done no socially useful work himself, this is value created entirely by the workers' labor, but not kept by them -- what Marx termed surplus-value. Profit in this sense has an inverse relation with wages. But the other sense of profit is revenue after non-human elements of production are covered -- the net increase of wealth to be divided between workers and capitalists. This is simply a measure of the social utility of the enterprise, and not of exploitation. It's profit in this sense that I'm proposing to divide up among the workers -- and for unions to demand a percentage of within the context of the present system. If the argument is made that it's inherently less "pro-social" to operate on the principle of profit rather than planning, I would answer that there's simply no evidence that this is true in practice. There appears instead to be abundant evidence that markets are very efficient aggregators of information, and that if they don't meet human needs optimally at present, this is due to the skewed distribution of income, which would be precluded by my proposal. None of this should be construed as suggesting that areas already widely recognized as "externalities" to the market should be subjected to it. Things that even developed capitalist countries generally treat as public goods -- such as the environment, infrastructure, and health care (with the notable exception of the U.S.) -- could continue to be.

Political approaches I've discussed things labor organizations can do to start constructing the new order within the cocoon of capitalism. But what about political action? As a historical materialist, I doubt that any anticapitalist movement can get very far without the support of organized labor. Nonetheless, even groups that as yet lack much of a labor base, such as the Greens, can propose something like this as an alternative vision for society. It's even more natural for the Labor Party, which counts some major unions among its members and affiliates. A suitably radical approach would be to advocate a Constitutional amendment to change property relations in fell swoop. As I noted in an earlier entry, Congress is presently derelict in its duty to call a Constitutional Convention, having been petitioned by forty-nine states when, according to Article V of the U.S. Constitution, only two-thirds (34) of them must do so to mandate such a call. A convention would be the most appropriate forum for introducing such a revolutionary amendment. As the opportunity arises, a more gradual path could also be tried, such as offering tax incentives to capitalists who agree to donate their companies to the public for conversion to "open enterprises," or however one might choose to designate them. (I'm suggesting this term to indicate that they'd be open for anyone to join at will.) The possibility that many capitalists may do this voluntarily should not be underestimated, especially as a generation of them grows up in a world where such arrangements have become increasingly common and possibly "hip." In this connection, it's worth recalling that, as Frank Sulloway has demonstrated, support for many radical social movements, such as the French Revolution, has been predicted more by individuals' birth order than by their class origins [1]. Some may condemn such an approach as antirevolutionary. It's undeniable that, at the time he wrote the Communist Manifesto, Marx believed only "forcible" revolution could overthrow capitalism. This is understandable given that democracy was nowhere to be found in Europe then. Another factor shaping his early thinking was that it appeared inevitable that workers' wages sank to the minimum necessary for survival, or below. He later saw the need to revise this view in light of advances by the labor movement, and conceived a distinction between "natural" and "social" components of the value of labor-power, with the latter being determined by trade-union and other struggles. Even with this correction, however, he may have continued to underestimate the degree to which workers could improve their position under capitalism. If Marx erred on this point, it's because he thought he was analyzing capitalism in its last throes when it was really still in its infancy. I would suggest that the proletarian revolution may turn out to be much more like the bourgeois revolutions than Marx thought possible, in the sense that it will have been preceded by a considerable period of gradual accumulation of strength by the revolutionary class, perhaps in part through the sort of labor movement strategy that I described previously. This is not to deny that, at some point, there may be violent resistance by a hard-line element of the old ruling class to finally rewriting the fundamental rules to clear away the remaining "bourgeois rubbish" in the legal system, to paraphrase Marx. But the more workers have done to build up a broad-based and deeply rooted social/political/economic power base before this point is reached, the less of a problem this will be. To summarize, I propose to redefine socialism in terms of the individual right to employment, rather than by a general preference for planning over markets or "human needs before profits." This conceptualization would have the advantages of not arousing fears of totalitarianism associated with planning, and of being based on a mechanism (the market) that is known from experience to work well for those with an adequate income, which this system could guarantee everyone. Last but not least, it will appeal viscerally to anyone who has ever hated having to work for a boss.

27 May 2007

[1] Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives, by Frank J. Sulloway. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. Anticopyright -- Permission is hereby granted to reproduce this essay, provided it is reproduced in its entirety, including the author's name, blog title and URL, and this paragraph.

Seen on a T-shirt the other day: "I'm not an asshole -- JUST AN AMERICAN." Perfect for traveling abroad!

"Veto No, Peace Yes"?

Some people at the impeachment rally the other day were holding signs saying, "Veto No, Peace Yes." So I approached one and said this made no sense to me. Surely it's good that Bush is vetoing a war spending bill, whatever his motives may be. She agreed, but added that she feared the Democrats would eventually "cave" and vote a bill without any deadlines. This may indeed be, but it misses the point. The point is that it utterly confuses the issue to protest, in the name of peace, the veto of a war spending bill just because it was passed by an opposition party that claims to be for peace yet votes for more war with only a few dubious strings attached. It lets the Democrats off the hook for being prowar while letting them, rather than the objective requirements of peace, set the agenda. What would have been an appropriate slogan, you ask? How about "Veto All War Funding"? It's just as concise as the other slogan, with the bonus of actually making sense!

Bush, Cheney Still Not Impeached

But perhaps a hundred people did rally for it today in LOVE Park. In the course of conversation with one of them, I decided it would be a good idea to copy the first couple paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence and post it around Center City. 

Upcoming events: Sunday, 29 April: 1-4pm, starting at City Hall - a rally for Darfur. This is problematic for me. People want to show that they're concerned, but UN interventions have often been counterproductive, and are sometimes just imperialism under a humanitarian/legalistic guise. If I were to go to such an event, it would be to point this out to other participants. But, as it happens, my book group is meeting at the same time. 7pm, second floor, Fergie's Pub, 1214 Sansom Street - Green Quizzo Tournament. $15 per attendee/participant, $100 per team. Monday, 30 April: 1pm, Austrian Auditorium, Clinical Research Building, Penn Medical School - Talk by Priscilla Smith, J.D., on "Defending Abortion Rights at the Supreme Court." Free. Thursday, 3 May: 6-8pm, Buchanan & Ingersoll - "How Long Will You Live?" Talk by Dean Foster of the Wharton Statistics Department. Follow the link at right to the Philadelphia Future Salon for directions and to RSVP. Free, reservation required. Sunday, 6 May: 1:30pm - The University Museum screens The Mummy as part of its "Hollywood on the Nile" film series. Monday, 7 May: 7pm, Free Library of Philadelphia Central Branch, 1901 Vine Street - "One Nation Under God: Does Religion Unite or Divide Us?" A symposium with Margaret Downey of the Freethought Society of Greater Philadelphia, plus one cleric each from the Jewish, Catholic Christian, Muslim, and Protestant Christian traditions. Free.