1. Philosophy is about generating new resources for being. This is what is meant by “philosophy is the generation of new concepts.” This is what is meant by “philosophy as an exercise in untimeliness.” Thus, philosophy is always – at some point – political.

2. Philosophy requires faith that doers can be thinkers as well. Otherwise, it has no point of application.

3. Philosophy that does not touch politics is either bad math or bad poetry.

4. Philosophy is not action.

5. When philosophy becomes action we call it revolution.

6. There are two kinds of philosophy. Political philosophy starts from the immediate conditions of oppression. Pure philosophy starts elsewhere.

7. The two kinds of philosophy are both philosophy.

8. The two kinds of philosophy might or might not meet in the middle. If they do not, it is not because either one is deficient to the other, but because the world is a complex and heterogeneous object in which different scales demand different methods of analysis.

9. The old philosophies of pure and timeless universal thought were necessary. Their deaths signal the first great maturation of conceptualization. The old philosophies were anti-philosophies. New philosophy must reject timelessness while avoiding indifference.

10. The current task is to exercise our freedom. Exercise requires the generation of new concepts, but also action. Exercise requires action, but action that rises above bare repetition. Either one in isolation is neurotic masturbation.

11. The current enemy is fear. A quantum leap in being, doing, and thinking is necessary for social existence to deepen.

12. The failure of current philosophy is due to two trends. One, the relentless application of moribund constructs in the anglo-American faction. Two, the failure of Continental philosophers to collectively bridge the gap between action and thought in their own lives. It is not enough to write; life must be lived as well.

13. The failure to live in the Continental tradition generates facetious speech susceptible to mockery. The failure to believe in the anglo-American tradition reinforces the fascism of inertia.

14. Scientists are doers whose deeds are useful. Artists are doers whose deeds are useless. Philosophers are neither.

15. Science and art progress by parallel tracks. It is in the nature of both to undergo paradigm shifts. Science is a practical community united by epistemological dogma. Art is an epistemological community united by practical dogma. Both praise and denigrate heretics before the orthodox. Both progress by killing their gods.

16. Philosophy advances in the worst cases by style. Stylized politics is fascism. Politicized style is consumerism. Style without politics is modern philosophy. Politics without style is the modern Left.

17. Politics is application.

18. The most developed ontologists are the mathematicians, but they remain dependent on counting. The first and last tasks of the philosophical ontologist are to give accounts of counting and to provide concepts for being beyond counting.

The challenge is to see the killings as reasonable and normal.

This injunction appears insensitive at best. That is because this article is not about people; it is about logics. It is my belief that if we are interested in people, we must first be interested in the systematic ways they come to understand the world and organize their lives. I term these systems ‘logics,’ and this article examines how logics are at work in our reaction to the UCSB killings.

Some may feel this is too much too soon, or insensitive to those who lost loved ones. To those who lost loved ones, I am truly sorry for your loss. Nothing can replace them, and I cannot imagine what it is like to be in that situation right now.

The vast majority of us will experience these events as media events. Not a firsthand experience of shock and terror, but instead a refracted experience of shock and terror and advertising. It is this experience that we will examine today.

Note 1. What is the mass media story doing?

We must at once be relentlessly concrete, almost to the level of stupidity. What is actually going on in the media story? There is a set of horrific events. They are reported on and appear senseless. The media story expands in an effort to reorient people so they can understand the situation (“we’ll keep you updated as the situation develops”).

This is the first level of what is going on. An exceptionally violent set of events challenges the stability of our everyday narratives. Our cognitive maps of the world suddenly seem incapable of telling us which way is up. In steps the media (in reality they stepped in beforehand – that’s how we were destabilized in the first place) to tell us our right from our left, so long as we keep watching, watching, watching…

Note 2. What is the media story made of?

What does the ‘story’ actually consist of? Concretely speaking it consists of three things. An idiosyncratic personal history of the killer. His associations with various groups (PUAhate, bodybuilding.com). And the fetish of his ‘digital trail’ (deleted forum posts! Youtube videos!).

These details serve to create a life-picture of the individual who pulled the trigger. This life-picture will bear the weight of being an explanatory vehicle for the actions. These acts of violence that are so hard to comprehend will be made digestible with a specific (and specifying) description of the killer. His motives, his psychology, his interiority. This is what will be produced as the reason why.

Foucault 101. The personnage (character) is invented in order to substantiate some locus for responsibility, an application point for discipline and punishment. Much like the construction of the author as the body responsible for heresy in the event of writings that contravened Church doctrine, the media personnage is also the juridical personnage. The party responsible, culpable, and subject to State violence in the name of justice.

Note 3. The visible and invisible stories

“Generating a secret medium and unique blindness. A seeing blindness” (Akira Lippit, “The Derrida that I Love”, 2005 Grey Room MIT).

“[What is invisible is] the singular body of the visible itself [not something missing, but what’s there], right on the visible—so that, by emanation, and as if it were secreting its own medium, the visible would produce blindness” (Derrida,  Memoirs of the Blind, quoted in Lippit, “The Derrida that I Love”).

There is a secret interplay here, between the visible and the invisible. Caution! It is easy to think the invisible as the opposite (negative) of the visible. Instead, we must think both of them as positive forms of the image. Then we can ask, what secret (secreted) medium is at work in our media story?

To get a handle on this, we can ask, what is the media spectator blind to, in the sense that it is “right on the visible?” What is the positive condition of her media field that structures and conditions its existence in the first place? And when we get there, what will we find?

The visible is easy, so let’s start there. We identified it Note 2. It is the idiosyncratic personal history of the killer, his associations with various groups, and the fetish of his digital trail. It is his life-picture, what produces him as a specific (specified) personnage.

The invisible is the social logics responsible for producing the person who pulled the trigger. It is not the negative of the visible, but instead the specific conditions that allow for the existence of the visible in the first place. If you like, think of it as the cell culture that permitted the growth of the particular organism (specimen) the media is now busy dissecting.

Importantly, these social logics are themselves a type of invisible sustenance that structures and conditions the social field as a whole. Social logics are the systematic operators that construct our cognitive maps. They provide the grammars for our personal narratives: who we are, who others are, what our place in the world is, etc. By necessity, the map we use to navigate our world obscures its etiology. The subject is blind, and this blindness is what we call vision, understanding, orientation. It is a unique blindness, and it is the situation to which our mass media story attempts to return us.

Note 4. Blindness

The life-picture of the killer the media story produces is a distraction. It is the effect of a salvific operation, but what is being saved is not the spectator, but rather the social logics that structure the accepted universe in which the media (and by implication, the spectator) operates. These are none other than the dominant logics of our time and place (e.g. capital, patriarchy, race, pathologization of neurodiversity, etc.).

Some readers may object – “but the media is talking about his misogyny, his racism!” (But the importance sentence is not “he hates women.” It is, “our society is predicated on the control of women…”) Hold judgment for just a moment longer, and let us follow two lines of obfuscation produced by the dominant media story.

First we must consider the point of view of the narrative. It is relentlessly personal, about him. We should understand this positionally. Imagine, if you will, an array of sensors, probes and needles, hovering about the corpse of our killer, measuring, cutting, dissecting, pinning folds of skin back. This is what is happening. Interiority is being produced.

Interiority functions to localize the killings as an isolated point of aberration in an otherwise smoothly functioning social machine. It was this guy, this crazy guy, who went mental and started killing people. In this manner we are led to believe we are seeing a story about a deranged individual, consumed by hate. In reality, the story is about us, about our specific conditions for blindness (vision), and what moves must be made to hide from us the horror of our social logics: this news item is a feature, not a bug. This is what happens when the social machine operates as currently designed.

Second, in a perverse refraction, we will use his associations to paint a grade-school level social analysis of what could have made him so crazy. “Oh, it was his quest for an exaggerated masculinity. Oh, he was insane. Oh, he was a dork who didn’t fit in. Oh, he was depressed. Oh, he had no social skills with women.” [n1] For the mainstream media these apparently social factors serve to re-individualize the actions, to make them specific again.

This young man was bad with women. This young man was ill. This young man was incapable of fulfilling social interaction. There will be the idiots who applaud his actions, and those who rightly condemn them, and the ping pong punditry will dutifully parrot the so-called ‘debate,’ complete with superficial levels of nuance.

What is lost here is the need to insist on these actions as completely normal and reasonable. As inevitable outcomes of the social logics we use to construct our world. This is what is at stake in the critiques of capitalism, of patriarchy, of race, of all the dominant logics of our time. What is called for is not an empty promise to do better (be less sexist, be less racist, always an individual effort…), but the need to abandon reliance on ways of structuring our world that in turn create monsters. And what must be noted is that we are all those monsters. The monstrosity is what we call ‘society.’

Through these micro-stories blame will pass through a social logic and return to roost in the individual. It will be our center stage actor who was insufficient, obsessed, abnormal, different. As should be obvious, the presiding social logics are preserved at all costs. It was this man who was incapable of manhood, incapable of fitting in, of ‘passing’ for male. The focus is on the individual’s failure to fit, not on the social logic’s requirement to produce failures.

Thus the life-picture approach isolates the dominant social logics from critique in two ways. Structurally from the point of view, the events are localized to a specifically abnormal body – this crazy guy – in order to protect the social logics as a whole. Mechanically, the movement of emphasis, blame, and normality moves in a loop, from the individual –> social logic –> individual. This guy failed this social expectation and therefore took violent action.

Instead we should say, these social logics produce these internal frictions every day in a multitude of ways, which in some sad cases culminate in spectacularly obvious outbursts of violence. But the friction, the threat of failure, the promise of punishment if one does not comply, is there always. This is the condition of our existence. Life today is life under fear, and our failure to identify social logics as responsible is due in no small part to the fact that they lack a name and a face.

Note 5. Whiteface

It must be noted that the person who pulled the trigger is white. Thus, our quest to understand him will require relentless humanization. His life-story will be meticulously reconstructed (or, as all media events really are, constructed for the first time). We will likely hear from his family members, friends, see childhood photos, grapple with terms like ‘depression’ and ‘mental illness.’ We will be asked to identify.

Not so for people of color who pull triggers. For them, there are inferior social logics that already instruct us how to understand. Of course he killed all those people, we always knew blacks were dangerous. Of course he went on a shooting rampage, he was Chinese (no surprise given that the word ‘Chinese’ literally meant confused not too long ago in this country). Of course he killed those people, he was brown and Muslims hate us for our freedoms (note: not all brown people are Muslims, not all Muslims are brown). In the difference between our responses based on color we can unveil an ordering of social logics and the bodies they manage, a materially consequential hierarchy of discursively produced life.

Note 6. The digital fetish

We have now analyzed two of the three portions of the story: the killer’s idiosyncratic personal history, and his various associations. We now turn to the third, the “Internet footprint,” or “digital trail” fetish.

Reporters are falling over themselves to discover new forum posts, pick apart Youtube channel subscriptions, rehash social media, etc. In this flurry of activity a catalog must be produced, a handy guide for understanding what the various online communities the killer belonged to are about. A typology of sorts, even if only a lingering appositive after a title (“PUAhate, an anti-pickup artist forum…”).

With classification comes the possibility of specifying. With specification, the possibility of identifying. With identification, the possibility of predicting. With prediction, the possibility of preventing. Thought-crime is not the future, it is the present and this is its birth story.

As part of taking the point-of-view of the social machine we see the person who pulled the trigger as a dangerous abnormality that must be stopped. No more 9/11′s. In the name of security unlimited police state powers will be demanded to manage bodies, organize data-stories, and dispense State-ordained violence as justice.

Note 7. This is outsourcing

The social logics that produce dangerousness in the first place export their dangerousness onto individual bodies, in the case of the attendant logic of mass surveillance, and inferior groups in the case of subordinate social logics that organize the lives of the colored, poor, feminine, etc. The social logics actually responsible for the production of danger are of course the dominant ones, capital, patriarchy, etc. Yet their production of intense internal friction in the bodies of persons who cannot find a way to fit in are then used as precisely the reason for their amplification, not their destruction. The cycle reinforces itself as mass surveillance expands. Watch all the bodies, lest one falls out of line.

And again, the structural equation must be considered. Always ask – keep who safe? From whom? In our world, where over 50% of targets of police violence require mental health care, where one in four prisoners worldwide is in an American prison (the highest incarceration rate globally), where more blacks are imprisoned now than ever were enslaved, we must keep this crucial fact in mind. The subject is blind. The supposedly neutral call for safety (enveloped in the crisp, accent-free cadence of the anchorperson, whose speech always seems to comment on speech but never explicitly speak…) is never neutral. Where the naïve political theorist and nighttime talk-show host both see a lowest common denominator, a common ground for politics, we see only the articulations of a specifically frightened, paranoid subject. The product of specific social logics’ cartography.

Note 8. Freedom

It must be noted that this time of highest unfreedom, when the individual is always sacrificed for the continuity of the dominant social logics, corresponds with what the unthinking historians label as the era of greatest freedom in human history: liberal democratic market capitalism. You are free to be whatever you want, so long as your choices generate profit (social profit too, e.g. social standing) within these limits.

The possibility for self-expression is transformed into the potential for risk. Individuals present themselves not as opportunities for creative invention, but as risk factors to be managed, assessed and controlled in the administration of increasingly concentrated life.

Or, they present themselves as profit potentials. The formula of Hollywood reigns supreme, with minor variations within its two poles standing in for human evolution. Familiar, but different. So you think you can dance? America’s got talent!

Anything else and the mechanism lays itself bare, betrays itself and follows through on its promise. In this light, even the aberration of this killer can only be seen as part and parcel of the normal, routine functioning of our social machine. The killing is not just a tragedy, but a tragedy with a use. A cautionary tale about what happens to those who do not adjust (you will commit acts of horror, and become horrific yourself), and a self-preserving warning for those who are adjusted to encourage (‘help’) others to do the same. All together now, fall in line.

[n1] The simplistic mainstream media analysis should not be confused with the significant work being done by feminist bloggers, who rightly point out that the ready pathologization of mental illness (for which there appears to be little evidence) offers a scapegoat for a media incapable of seriously discussing violence against women.

Julian Rodríguez-Drix presents our extended feature, “Frackonomics: Economic Strategy for Fractivists.” In this strategy-based piece, Julian provides an in-depth analysis of the oil and gas market in order to provide activists with a roadmap for economics-based strategies. In addition to clearly explaining the industry and its economic incentives, Julian’s work should prove useful for coalition-building between environmental and other activists, particularly students, land owners, and animal rights activists.

This issue marks a transition for Occupy America from a bi-monthly release schedule to a monthly release. It is our hope that this adjustment allows us to continue providing high-quality, in-depth coverage while reaching new writers.

As always, thank you for your time and I hope you enjoy.

Sincerely,

Bobo Bose-Kolanu

Lead image shows the Horai power station, Fukushima in 1975. Courtesy of National Land Image Information (Color Aerial Photographs), Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, Japan.

Emissions trading was elevated as the international policymaking community’s preferred mitigation solution by the passage of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, a multilateral agreement ratified by 156 sovereign states and infamously ignored by the United States, then the world’s largest emitter.^[2] Seeking to accommodate corporate firms’ capital accumulation strategies, emissions trading policies issue commoditized credits to pollute (one credit allowing one legal ton of CO₂ emissions) capped on a nation-by-nation basis toward the overall goal of reducing emissions through decentralized redistribution of credits among actors with different propensities to pollute. While proponents perceive the market as a neutral means for resolving the tension between climate change’s global reach and the divisive state of global politics, further investigation reveals this supposed neutrality to be a sham.

Dodging Historical Responsibility

As a complex phenomenon with an inexorable historical context, one might expect solutions to global warming to deal with history frankly. Cap-and-trade approaches, however, do exactly the opposite. The Kyoto Protocol’s allotment of credits on a historical basis is most gracious toward those countries with the most significant historical responsibility for emissions, the United States and the countries of the European Union, which in 2007 accounted for more than half of the world’s cumulative CO₂ emissions with less than a sixth of its population.^[3]The prevalent system of “grandfathering,” where countries allocate the largest portions of their credit quotas to their most polluting industries, similarly reinforces embedded inequality but on the scale of individual domestic economies.^[4] Nations and industries with the greatest historical responsibility for emissions are, with emissions credits, perversely given the most freedom to continue polluting.

An institutionalized moral hazard framework for allocating carbon credits cannot change long-standing behaviors responsible for creating the climate crisis in the first place.

The Market Cannot Fix The Planet

Despite the fact that the Kyoto Protocol’s recourse to the market evades historical justice, proponents of carbon trading schemes are slow to realize the deeper, structural problems with the cap-and-trade approach. From the perspective of the biosphere it is expansion of the traditional economy itself that is the problem. As John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark note, “in a properly functioning capitalist economy savings are redirected into investment or new capital formation designed to expand the scale of the entire economy… it is such expansion that is the chief enemy of the environment.”^[5]

In other words, as firms save money (for example, by switching to greener technology that lowers fixed costs like electricity bills), they redirect that money into expanding the scale of their operations in order to make even more profit. Environmentalist Wes Jackson sums the point up sharply: “When the Wal-Marts of the world say they’re going to put in different lightbulbs… what are they going to do with savings? They’re going to open up another box store somewhere. It’s just nuts.”^[6] An economy based on carbon-intensive, production-based growth cannot cleanly transition away from this reliance by replicating its profit-maximizing market-based approach in carbon trading. Instead of addressing the core of the problem cap-and-trade schemes expand it.

Cap-And-Trade Is The New Bubble Economy

Industrial capitalism is not the only capitalism at play in cap-and-trade. In today’s heavily finance-based market systems, risky trading schemes analogous to those responsible for the global recession and subprime mortgage crisis are beginning to appear in carbon trading markets as well.^[7] Understanding how carbon credits are calculated is necessary to understanding how these markets evolved.

In theory cap-and-trade enables markets to efficiently allocate plots of land to their most economically productive uses, while building in the risk associated with greenhouse gas pollution. For example, a polluting firm might purchase a carbon credit to offset its emissions, and the credit may represent a tract of land in the Amazon to be kept clear of development in order to act as a carbon sink.

In order for these calculations to take place cap-and-trade first requires establishing baselines. The baseline process is essentially arbitrary. Setting a baseline requires measuring the projected change in emissions a climate-friendly project might accrue against the amount of emissions happening would the project not be implemented. While at first glance this process seems logical, the blind spots are significant. Since greenhouse gasses are a function of human activity, the baseline requires deciding on quantity and quality of human activity over time. Furthermore, since accurate measurements of carbon sequestration — a natural process for trees, akin to breathing — are difficult to produce, it is easy to be seduced by the market incentive to overvalue the amount of sequestration taking place. Since valuation schemes are not rigorously regulated, traders are free to manipulate conditions as they see fit, allowing polluters to continue emitting greenhouse gasses while doing little to abate global warming overall.^[8]

The picture gets more complicated with the introduction of the negative futures contract, where sellers of credits promise not to emit. In exchange for no effective change in behavior, a firm is able to offset its carbon emission on paper while not performing or causing any real offsets ecologically.

Like the relationship between collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and home mortgages, emissions credit prices are not aligned with any real underlying asset such as the health of the environment. Instead their prices are determined by market demand. Since the debt obligations are bundled in tranches to offset risk and regulatory oversight is absent, no real assets guarantee the debt. As both a trade in debt and a negative futures contract, the buyer-seller relationship of emissions trading is cemented by the seller’s appearance of not having emitted a set amount of carbon, which is then borrowed by the buyer to emit the same amount. In a vein similar to the collateralized debt obligation market preceding the 2008 financial crisis, this sweet but unsustainable arrangement foreshadows a massive risk of default, namely that the parameter of the emissions trading game, the health of the atmosphere, is not improving but instead deteriorating at a rapid pace. Emissions credits, while meant to insure buyers against overall rises in emissions, thus aggravate the destruction of the environment.

The cap-and-trade market is not a solution to the greenhouse gas problem. In fact, it is a Trojan horse, a magnification of the problem masquerading as a solution. Not only does it ignore the historical responsibility of the United States and Europe in creating the climate scenario we are now embroiled in, it also actively rewards and incentivizes increased pollution with risky trading structures that proved their volatility in the subprime mortgage crisis. Effective environmental solutions will need to look elsewhere.

Few of us stop to ask if this assumption is warranted. When facts arise that threaten this worldview we acknowledge them and move on. Democracy is imperfect, but it’s the best solution we’ve got. Errors happen, but reform can fix them.

Anything else, we say, is idealistic. Those who question the integrity of our systems as a whole are generally seen as outsiders or fringe elements, unable to appreciate the hard-nosed pragmatism that comes with an adult understanding of reality.

Is this really the case? In this issue we invite readers to ask what we have termed “the threshold question.” There are many different ways of stating it, but they all get at the same thing. “How big does a contradiction have to get before it stops being the exception and becomes the rule?” Or put another way, “How bad is bad enough?”

Some will undoubtedly cling to what they see as the pragmatic response, shunning the threshold question as too idealistic to be useful. To those of you considering such a response, I have a simple question. If your ideals aren’t worth fighting for, why bother believing in them?

In this issue we invite you to consider seriously whether the current state of affairs reflects your core values. And if it does not, we ask that you consider whether internal reforms will be sufficient to address your concerns or if more radical action is required.

My own article criticizes the profit-first construction of our economy and the complete capture of our government by financial elites. With a detailed analysis of how capitalism creates unemployment, I call for new coalitions between the far left and far right to reorient our society towards democratic justice.

Ralph Paone’s piece interrogates how the conditions of so-called “knowledge work” constrain our ability and desire to organize for social change. He calls for inventive experimentation in blockades, strategic mapping, and the redeployment of knowledge-based skills to reactivate the knowledge-classes in social struggle.

Prashanth Kamalakanthan’s extended feature offers a detailed analysis of the largely hidden American war machine and the extraordinary power to assassinate-at-will that President Obama has grabbed. With a private military and the power to kill without public oversight, it’s unclear what power this system leaves for the people.

We hope you find this issue engaging, and thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Bobo Bose-Kolanu

(Lead image courtesy of Tom Page)

What Jobs Used To Be

In the post-World War II era American jobs were golden, comparatively speaking. Unions’ demands for higher wages and increased benefits were so successful that a single bread-winner (often a male) could support an entire family.^[1] Working conditions improved with overtime provisions and workplace safety regulations passing as a result of labor organizing^[2]. Overall a job was a ticket to steady income, promotion with time, and the means to support a family.

While this picture sounds good it is important to note that racial and gender discrimination were much higher, with women usually economically dependent on men due to wage discrimination and black Americans facing second-class citizenship with few protected civil rights, widespread segregation, and lynchings.^[3]

Along with high wages and benefits, corporate taxation was the highest in American history. As a result the rich/poor gap was at an all-time low, with economic growth being shared more evenly among the classes.^[4] These corporate taxes helped pay for a variety of social assistance programs including welfare, Medicare, and Social Security. By redistributing income the government provided a safety-net for the unemployed, the sick, and the elderly. Critically this safety net also helped the economy. Those who might otherwise not be economically productive could still contribute to the economic cycle by generating demand through consumption.

What Jobs Are Now

Things today are much worse for the American worker. Unemployment is at 8%, the highest since the Great Depression, with a record number of job-seekers remaining unemployed after 6 months.^[5] The rich/poor gap in America has returned to Great Depression levels, with the top 1% of Americans receiving over 20% of pre-tax income nationally, ranking America 93^rd in the world for income inequality behind the likes of China and Iran.^[6] Predictably social mobility (the likelihood of becoming richer than your parents) is at a historic low with the top 1% of Americans controlling 42% of the nation’s wealth, and the top 5% controlling nearly 70%.^[7]

The jobs that are created are overwhelmingly part-time and low-wage, with one-fourth of working Americans making less than two-thirds of the median national hourly wage.^[8] Between 1981 and 2008 the richest 10% took home on average 96% of income gains only to capture 100% of income gains between 1997-2008 with the wages of the bottom 90% declining.^[9]

The poignant story of Tyree Johnson draws these statistics into sharp focus. Johnson receives $8.25/hour, while the CEO of his employer McDonalds took home $8.75 million this year. Specific strategies are in place to ensure Johnson remains poor. He is transferred between locations, his wage-scale is restarted upon change of ownership to avoid promotion and raises, and he is unable to get a full 40 hours of work each week and thus does not qualify for full-time benefits.^[10] After working at McDonalds for 20 years Johnson still makes minimum wage.^[11]

At an all time high are third quarter corporate profits this year, reaching a record high of 11.1% of the U.S. economy.^[12] Since 1978 CEO pay has increased 27 times faster than worker pay, with outsourcing and the decline of organized labor paving the way for fatter executive bonuses.^[13]

Advanced tax dodging schemes continue to allow corporations to get away without paying their fair share, or in some cases paying any taxes at all. Google’s Chairman Eric Schmidt openly defended the practice, saying “It’s called capitalism. We are proudly capitalistic. I’m not confused about this.”^[14] According to Citizens for Tax Justice’s “Corporate Taxpayers & Corporate Tax Dodgers 2008-2010″ report, Boeing, DuPont, Capital One, and General Electric all paid a negative effective tax rate in 2010.^[15]

How Did We Get Here?

The specific historical reasons are complex and varied, but two large trends stand out. Both are consequences of the same structural flaw of our economy. The flaw has to do with how capitalism creates profit.

Used here, profit refers to “economic profit,” or the return on investment made by investing capital in a specific venture as opposed to any other venture.^[16] In other words, calculating economic profit helps someone decide where to invest their capital.

Profit happens when workers continue to work beyond the cost of their wages. For example, if a factory worker earns the cost of his wages in there hours, but works eight, five of those hours are “surplus value,” or profit for the factory owner. Viewed this way, surplus value is a tax the worker pays the capitalist for the right to have a job. The capitalist collects this tax simply by happening to own the means of production, like the machinery required for a factory to operate. Because the laborer cannot afford to start his own factory, he must pay the capitalist in the form of free work in order to have a job.

For a capitalist seeking to increase profits only two options are available: make workers work longer, or increase the productivity of labor. Union-based labor struggles established maximum working days with overtime laws and worker safety provisions in the United States. This led to the small rich/poor gap of the post-WWII era but also encouraged capitalists to find new ways to extract profit.

Automation provided a means for capitalists to increase worker productivity, thereby extracting the same amount of labor while employing fewer workers and keeping a larger share of production in the form of profit.

The agriculture industry provides a case-in-point example. Agriculture employed roughly 70% of American labor in 1840, 10% in 1950, and employs only 2% today.^[17] The manufacturing and service industries will soon follow suit as technological advancements in automation render much of labor irrelevant to the production process. Structurally capitalism attempts to eliminate the worker in order to maximize profits.

Labor, It’s What’s For Dinner

As it eliminates labor from production, capitalism then proceeds to extract profit directly from the fate of the unemployed:

1. High unemployment keeps wages low, since others can take the place of workers who would organize for higher demands. (Despite this key obstacle Black Friday strikes hit WalMart stores in 100 cities throughout 46 states this year.^[18])

2. Borders keep labor chained to its country of origin but allow goods to move freely to find the highest price. Companies exploit differences in purchasing power to buy labor cheap and sell their goods high. Borders create a literal stock market out of human bodies for corporate exploitation.

3. The booming prison and mass surveillance industries are worth approximately $8 billion yearly, with secondary industries like domestic arms sales, security systems, and media and advertising likely pushing the total much higher.^[19] Each of these industries depends on peddling a discourse of dangerousness that sensationalizes problems and rejects informed discussion about holistic solutions in favor of fear-based purchases and policy. America is roughly 5% of the global population, but one in four prisoners worldwide are American.^[20]

Of course one may object that without laborers drawing adequate wages demand cannot sustain the economy. This is why we saw a shift from redistributed income providing demand in the 1950′s-70′s to a debt-based financing model from the 1980′s onwards. This debt model imploded with the subprime mortgage crisis as home values plummeted and credit dried up, triggering a global recession through which we are still suffering today.^[21]

And of course, don’t forget the bailout. Crucially it is not the American worker who received substantial economic aid from her taxes, but instead the banks and hedge funds whose predatory lending practices and irresponsible loan repackaging precipitated the crisis in the first place.^[22]

Most Americans are aware of the $700 billion Troubled-Assets Relief Program (TARP) the Treasury Department dispensed to banks following the downturn. TARP already represented a kind of socialism in reverse, where profits remained private and losses were borne by the public. Without asking Congress and without telling the public, the Federal Reserve gave an additional $7.7 trillion to the banks.^[23]

That number is over half the yearly total economic output of the United States.

How To Move Forward

In the face of such overwhelming capture by financial elites it is difficult to continue calling the United States a democracy. Change through the existing two-party system is politically unimaginable as Democrats, traditionally viewed as the pro-union party, prepare to join Republicans in slashing Social Security.^[24]

Even if one of the parties were willing to do an about-face on 30 years of political history and defend effective corporate taxation to support the American Dream, it is unclear that such an economy would present a long-term solution to the structural bias capitalism displays for unemployment. While mixed economies can dampen some of capitalism’s excesses domestically, those problems almost always shift abroad as capital moves to seek the highest return on investment, in turn deflating the domestic economy it leaves.^[25]

Instead, those on the far left and far right must join together and build a new coalition that places people above profits. Communists, socialists, anarchists, queer/race/gender activists, libertarians, and those Christians who actually support ministering unto the poor all agree on the core value of self-determination, though they have differing ideas about what this freedom looks like and how to achieve it. Perhaps even more importantly, all these groups demand a basic value (liberty, the common good, or love) takes precedence above profit extraction, and this requires resistance against capitalism. Together this coalition could present a strong force for positive change in our nation.

While plotting a program for cooperation in advance remains unlikely, one thing is clear. Sustained dialogue across ideological enclaves will be necessary to invent a new language that abandons hardened dogmas in favor of practical steps to reorient our society and our economy towards justice.

The title of this article is a play on the uber-successful Clinton election catchphrase “It’s the economy, stupid!” Under President Clinton effective corporate taxation fell precipitously.

Lead image courtesy of Steven Damron.

Bobo is a writer, artist, and aspiring business owner. He currently researches human-machine interaction at Duke University.

The diagram is deceptively simple. First fear erupts from a threat to the current social order. It then justifies emergency action to expunge this threat. Privacy or other rights are given up for a supposed neutralization of the threat. Pacified, we believe ourselves safe and adjust to a new, less free society. Then the cycle repeats to generate more profits for the industries that “keep us safe.”

But there are two specific wrinkles to this general outline. First, the status of ideas and the recent attacks on the university. Second, the normalization of crisis to create a society always “up in the air.”

Attack the Students

Students have historically been at the forefront of social movements: the 1968 general strike in France, anti-Vietnam protests in America, and most recently the Quebec anti-austerity protests this year. In each of these examples criticized governments passed legislation granting extraordinary powers allowing police to suppress the free speech of students. And each time, the students’ free speech spread throughout society, galvanizing popular attacks on social injustice.

Seen in this light, the police attacks on student protesters at UC Davis and UC Berkeley during Occupy should come as no surprise. This infamous photo shows Lt. John Pike, a Davis police officer, pepper spraying seated students. At UC Berkeley the university police beat and dragged protesters by their hair, including a professor of English. UC police Captain Margo Bennett claimed, “The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence… linking arms in a human chain when ordered to step aside is not a nonviolent protest.”

While Bennett’s claim is factually and historically wrong, what is more troubling is the worldview it reveals. To dissent is already to be violent. Crucially, this framework also enables a particular kind of economy based on fear.

They Actually Named It “Create and Capture”

In the last year there have been a rash of news reports about the FBI creating terror plots in order to “solve” them, circularly justifying their counter-terrorism budgets. The reports document how FBI informants, usually criminals working in exchange for a reduced sentence or money (as much as $100,000 an assignment according to RT), target individuals based on their First Amendment protected political speech. If the informant thinks the individual can be flipped to consider an act of terrorism, he pursues the target. The individuals in question are generally so confused and disorganized (and sometimes even mentally disabled) that such scenarios would be laughable were it not for the consequences. In one case, it took 11 months of persuading and a $250,000 offer to create a “terrorist” who, it must be noted, refused to kill women and children. The individual in question still did not agree until he lost his job and decided the money was worth it.

While killing for money is clearly indefensible, the opportunity to make that decision would not have been possible without the FBI fronting the money, the guns, the plans, and the resources. Comparing these supposed terrorists’ crimes to our government’s extra-judicial drone strikes is revealing. We routinely target weddings and funerals in Pakistan, killing women and children as well as adult men. We also practice a technique (first invented by Hamas) called “double-tapping,” in which we fire a second attack at first-aid responders attempting to give medical assistance.

The fear economy is not restricted to the FBI. The NYPD and CIA jointly spied on American Muslim student groups and houses of prayer “over a more than six-year period” and “failed to yield a single terrorism investigation or even a single lead.” Perhaps responding to the failure of their “special Demographics Unit” in exposing any terror plots, the NYPD and CIA proceeded to jointly coordinate a program called “Create and Capture.” Counterpunch explains a standard M.O.:

Shamiur Rahman (age 19) had been arrested a few times for drug possession. To erase this record, the NYPD told him to spy on students at John Jay College and at area mosques. He was told to “bait” Muslims into saying incriminating things.

When the supposed bogeyman does not appear, the authorities produce him for us. They keep us safe from horrors of their own creation, and in the process demand we give up our Constitutional rights – and then thank them for the privilege of doing so.

Historical Echoes: But They’re Just Muslims Communists

Fear-based politics is not new. In 1964 a young Catholic student named Mario Savio had recently arrived on UC Berkeley’s campus. Before attending Berkeley he faced down the Ku Klux Klan to help blacks register to vote in the South. Upon attending Berkeley and finding free speech under assault, he joined the non-violent Free Speech Movement to challenge a campus-wide prohibition on political speech.

Prior to the movement the FBI had already begun intensive surveillance operations on students and professors. Two initiatives stand out. Under the Responsibilities Program the FBI funneled scant (and oftentimes knowingly false) allegations against “liberal” or “radical” professors to state governors. The governors enlisted university officials to investigate and terminate these professors’ contracts under the cover of thwarting communism. Almost one thousand professors lost their jobs in the 1950s as a result of allegations they were never aware of and unable to defend themselves against.

The FBI also expanded its operations against students, creating the “Security Index,” a list of Americans to be detained indefinitely in the event of a national emergency. The FBI targeted individuals on the basis of dissenting political speech, and with the Free Speech Movement picking up steam, they soon began listing its members as well.

Economic Echoes, Too

The fear machine has a real, economic basis behind it as well. Then-UC President Clark Kerr had lifted a ban on communist and socialist speakers. Author Seth Rosenfeld, whose book Subversives forms the foundation of this historical analysis, paraphrases Kerr’s explanation: “the university is not engaged in making ideas safe for students, it’s engaged in making students safe for ideas. He believed that if students were well educated, they could hear ideas from any point of view and then make the right decisions.”

The FBI detested this approach for its fear-based reasons. Ronald Reagan, then running against incumbent Pat Brown for California’s governorship, had a long history of informing for the FBI against supposedly dangerous Hollywood actors and actresses. Upon winning the race Reagan secured Kerr’s dismissal, acting on false allegations compiled in similar fashion to the Responsibilities Program. Notably, “a lot of people also forget that Reagan was the first person to institute tuition at the University of California, which, before him, had been free to all people who were able to get into the California university system.”

We see similar economic incentives for fear at work today. Alameda County, which supported Reagan’s demonization of the free speech protestors as “filthy,” recently approved a $32 million contract for Corizon Health Inc., a prison services provider, based solely on a two-page letter from Alameda County Sheriff’s Office. The county now faces a civil grand jury recommendation to develop actual oversight policies on spending and awarding private contracts.

Interestingly, the Alameda County Sheriffs are the only police force to have brought explosive tear gas canisters to last year’s October Occupy Oakland protests, where they lacerated the spleen of Iraq war veteran Kayvan Sabeghi. As of October this year, the Alameda Sheriff’s office is calling for drone-based permanent surveillance of the skies over Alameda, doubtless with a fat contract awaiting some lucky private contractor.

The fear economy is larger than one or two governmental decisions in California. In America today one in five jobs is guard labor,  where an American is paid to monitor someone else, usually another American. The global surveillance industry is valued at approximately $5 billion annually, with much of its growth coming in the last decade. Oftentimes, as was the case when Nokia-Siemens’ technology helped Iran repress the 2009-2010 protests against rigged elections, the technology repressive regimes use to identify and execute protestors comes from technology companies based in the U.S., U.K., and the West more generally.

Permanent Crisis

We can now see the logic of the fear economy come full circle. A dangerous “outsider” (frequently created by those our taxes pay to keep us safe) presents a challenge to our safety. The authorities assure us they will remove the threat, but only if we give up essential rights. Rights taken, the government and private corporations deploy extraordinary powers and reap deep financial gains. The industry expands, and draws repressive regimes together with so-called democracies as it opens up new markets abroad with surveillance techniques perfected at home.

Two moments from this original diagram have collapsed. First, we no longer give up our rights. They are taken from us in advance. Second, we no longer adjust to a less free society. The next round of fear begins before the current one ends.

With technological innovation and trade both increasing in speed, the distance between these moments shrinks until they become indistinguishable. The rights we think we enjoy do not exist as we like to imagine them:

“Why are you guys so anti-dictators? Imagine if America was a dictatorship. You could let 1% of the people have all the nation’s wealth. You could help your rich friends get richer by cutting their taxes. And bailing them out when they gamble and lose. You could ignore the needs of the poor for health care and education. Your media would appear free, but would secretly be controlled by one person and his family. You could wiretap phones. You could torture foreign prisoners. You could have rigged elections. You could lie about why you go to war. You could fill your prisons with one particular racial group, and no one would complain. You could use the media to scare the people into supporting policies that are against their interests.”

Today it is hard to find an example of politics that is not crisis politics. Even funding our own government’s operation is a crisis issue: “the fiscal cliff.” This constant crisis has at least two important consequences. First, we are unable to distinguish true crises from manufactured ones. Despite continued rebuttal of every talking point climate deniers can find, the House recently appointed Lamar Smith, a climate science denier as well as the primary sponsor of the Internet censoring bill SOPA, to lead the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

Second, we are unable to rationally discuss ideas. All politics takes the form of the fear machine: a dangerous outside threatens a vulnerable inside, and any person—even an Iraq war veteran—can flip from one location to the other at a moment’s notice. Speaking produces suspicion, and free speech and reasonable debate are entirely evacuated. How can one learn in this climate?

At this point in time there are significant questions we should be asking. How stable is a system that exists only as a continual string of emergencies? Who profits from suppressing our ability to discuss ideas freely? And perhaps most importantly, do we want to live in a society whose authorities primarily see the free assembly of its citizens as dangerous, violent, and unclean?

In the coming struggles students may play a pivotal role in jamming the cogs of the fear economy. Already existing in common by virtue of the dormitory lifestyle, their traditional emphasis on learning and open inquiry provide a crucial battleground from which we may begin to unwork the fear that closes around our voices, threatening to strangle us just as we begin to speak.

MLK photo used with permission from Tina Dupuy

Bobo is a writer, artist, and aspiring business owner. He currently researches human-machine interaction at Duke University.

Our extended feature is Leo Zimmerman’s article, which unearths contradictions at the heart of Occupy Baltimore and examines them in light of the Occupations in general. Leo lived in Occupy Baltimore from its founding to its dissolution. From his unique perspective he suggests difficulties Occupy faced as well as new ways of coming together.

Prashanth Kamalakanthan examines how Occupy is regrouping. Turning from the tactic of occupying public space, Prashanth argues the 99% can find a common tie in debt resistance, which exposes the inequality at the heart of our current system.

Nate Gorelick turns to Canada to find a recent example of a massively successful Occupy style protest against tuition hikes. The protest ballooned into a people’s referendum on austerity measures and saw solidarity triumph over the 1%, as government officials resigned in disgrace.

My own article examines participatory budgeting, a horizontally democratic method for allocating government funds that is beginning to catch on in the United States. I argue that participatory budgeting offers a unique way for activists to engage the state productively while retaining a critical distance, offering the possibility for more systemic changes in the future.

We hope you find this issue engaging, and thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

Bobo Bose-Kolanu

This somewhat romantic picture of Absolute Good and Absolute Evil underlies many assumptions we have about social justice struggles. Often discussions about social change become impossible. One is either “with us, or against us.” American or terrorist. Revolutionary or pig.

In addition to the obvious communication challenges such a rubric presents, there are consequences for what we understand as effective activism. Some imagine that social change must come from a mythical outside to be truly transformative. Others immediately discount ideas that seem external, either with an appeal to pragmatism or an outright fear of the outside as dangerous.

This choice between being a militant and being a citizen is a false one. Participatory budgeting offers a different model for social justice claims to be addressed. In a participatory budgeting model, citizens direct how a portion of a city budget is to be spent. The Participatory Budgeting Project notes that while “each experience is different, most follow a similar basic process: residents brainstorm spending ideas, volunteer budget delegates develop proposals based on these ideas, residents vote on proposals, and the government implements the top projects.”

Originating in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 1989, participatory budgeting was introduced at a time when one third of the city’s residents lived in slums, without access to basic needs like “clean water, sanitation, medical facilities, and schools.” In three years, public housing increased from 1,700 residents to 27,000 more. After nine years, sewer and water services reached 98% of residents, as opposed to a previous 75%, and the number of schools quadrupled.

Significantly, participants are almost overwhelmingly from the poorest and most marginalized sectors of society. According to Giapaolo Baiocchi, “participants at all levels are poorer, less educated, and more likely to be black than the city averages.” In addition, each year “a substantial proportion of participants are first-timers, without any prior participation in civil society.” Instead of a regime of professional politicians deciding how to spend money, participatory budgeting offers a means for society’s most marginalized to operate power themselves. As a result their living conditions improve, and social inequality decreases.

In stark contrast, the current American model favors the election of representatives to spend our tax dollars for us. The poorest and most marginalized are completely ignored, with neither Presidential candidate directly addressing the working classes in any of the debates this election. As Jonathan Neale notes,

“There are 206 million adult American citizens who can vote. Of them, 62 million voted for Obama, 60 million voted for Romney. But 84 million eligible voters did not vote…

The non voters are a majority of people under 50. They are a majority of  people who have not graduated from college. They are a majority of  people in households making less than $50,000 (£32,000) a year. They are a majority of Hispanics. They are a majority of the working class…

The reason they don’t vote is not that they are stupid or apathetic. It is that they are not allowed to, or that they think none of the politicians will help them.”

The group of non-voters dwarfs the group of Americans who do vote, exceeding the totals for Romney and Obama by over 20 million.

Neale identifies this massive civic disengagement as a result of protracted voter suppression campaigns as well as disenchantment with the American political apparatus. Disenchantment should come as no surprise, as foreclosures sweep the nation and the U.S. census finds that 48% of Americans are poor or low-income, with the majority of low-income families spending over one-third of their income on housing, and an additional fifth on daycare when the mother works. Homelessness in turn reveals an awful contradiction at the center of our current iteration of the American dream. There are approximately 5 to 25 times as many empty homes as there are homeless Americans, depending on which figures are used.

While participatory budgeting will not solve all our problems, it offers a way for excluded citizens to realize their demands for social justice. Indeed, Chicago’s 49^thward and New York City already have participatory budgeting structures in place, and Vallejo, California has become the first city in America to adopt citywide participatory budgeting. Worldwide, over 1,500 cities employ participatory budgeting, allocating as much as 20% of their municipal budgets.

Crucially, participatory budget structures alone are insufficient to guarantee a just society. Some socially controversial spending, like sexual and reproductive rights related expenditures, may not be sufficiently protected. It is also unclear how participatory budgeting could restrain American militarism abroad or address structural unemployment. Major economies like the military and prison-industrial complexes, as well as global trade imbalances, seem at first glance to escape the democratic oversight provided by participatory budgeting structures.

On the other hand, participatory budgeting may provide a crucial training ground for communities to self-organize and build civic power.  As a democratic model based on participation from the bottom up, it neither pushes activists outside the system nor fully captures them within it. As Baiocchi notes, social movements “can force the state into democratic innovations that in some cases shape the polity itself, in ways that blur distinctions between movement and state.”

Perhaps a widespread deployment of participatory budgeting in America could provide a fertile training ground for even larger, more systemic attacks on social injustice. Citizens could learn to deliberate and reach agreement across differences, and also build political investments in their communities. This solidarity, which as we saw in Brazil is particularly attractive for the poor and the workers, could be the basis of a powerful series of reforms to restructure our society for the better.

The Participatory Budgeting Project has information and opportunities to bring participatory budgeting to your community on their website. Many cities already have citizens organizing for participatory budgeting.

Bobo is a writer, artist, and aspiring business owner. He currently researches human-machine interaction at Duke University.