The Utopian

Animals

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 07:19:00 -0400

“I folded my problems into pretty paper animals to keep me company. I set them on the Formica dinette set. I jammed some into cracks so they’d stand up straight: organized warfare.”

A Short Story.

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I had twenty-three new problems that week. I knew because I’d stayed awake the night before recording them on strips of colored construction paper. Yellow, for the most serious problems; red for problems similar to my previous problems; orange for problems most likely to become yellow by the end of the week; and green, for problems which were clearly the result of my therapy.
    I folded my problems into pretty paper animals to keep me company. I set them on the Formica dinette set. I jammed some into cracks so they’d stand up straight: organized warfare. I imagined a young boy positioning his GI Joe’s, except that my soldiers were giraffes, toads, five monkeys, three elephants, and a duckbilled platypus that looked more like a sea lion.
    The monkeys were winning, I thought. I situated them in the rear and let the elephants storm the front lines. Platypus I placed in the very back beneath an upside down teacup. They’re coming for you, I told him. The enemy will kill your comrades before attacking you. This will take a while. I lifted the cup and slid a saucer beneath to cut off his oxygen, to weaken him before the onslaught. This is going to hurt, I said.
    I collected my problems that afternoon and carried them to therapy in a glass cookie jar that my ex-lover gave me.
    I’ve seen all kinds of therapists. Old men and young women, black grad students and a Hasidic Rabbi who I think practiced illegally, and yet only one remains vivid in my memory. She was everything you’d expect and need from a friend you pay for: kind, patient, attentive.
    My ex-lover? I don’t know why I told that lie. I bought the cookie jar at a thrift store in Greenpoint. I do that often—buy old things and tell people they mean a lot to me. Like the brooch I’m wearing, lovebirds kissing, their tiny white plumes stretch across my shoulder blade; I say, this was my great grandmother’s; it’s worth more than your life.
I paid four dollars for it on the Lower East Side twelve years ago. It has a fake patina that I scratch with my nail each year for effect.

    “Here they are.” I hold the jar close to Therapist’s face.
    “Tell me how you feel today, Claire?”
    She asked this each week and I always felt the same, but my answers were deliberate and rehearsed because I wanted her to sense she was helping me. Sometimes I told her I felt light and bouncy with a side of steaming guilt. I added the guilt so as to lend our sessions purpose. If I was too unencumbered, too breezy, I feared the entire relationship would backfire. She might hand me a gold trimmed piece of paper, my name in fancy script, congratulating me on graduating from my crisis.
    Though I knew people never graduated from therapy, I feared the day would come when she wouldn’t want to talk with me anymore, no matter how much I paid. So I told Therapist I was okay but not okay enough, like sex that’s interrupted. My life was like that. Except that it was nothing like that, because interrupted sex implies something that feels good until it ends, abruptly. I waited for the feel good to start. Waited for it impatiently, like one waits for an express train. The week before, I waited for it, the train that is, on my way to a session. The moment I realized the train was, in fact, coming, I had an urge to shove the woman next to me onto the tracks. I pictured her lying on her back, mouth gaped open, runs in her pantyhose, rats licking her teeth. I told Therapist about my urge and she said it was okay to think other people have it better than us. She said it’s very natural. She said we all do it.

    “Did you meet anyone interesting this week?” Therapist asked, reminding me of my assignment.
    I shook my head, not wanting to tell her about Ruthanne. Not wanting to admit that a woman like Ruthanne was out there in the world, in Manhattan, lurking around us. I wanted to talk about Therapist’s son. I wanted finally to admit that I knew all the details of his death, that I was ready, after the last six months, to take his place at her dinner table. I was ready to be the best daughter ever, if she’d have me.
    “If you aren’t willing to cooperate during these sessions I can’t help you.”
    Not willing to cooperate? Couldn’t she see I’d labored over the problems, that I’d developed them with intent and gusto? They were for her. I said, “I really love your necklace, where did you get it?”
    “You really must try to work out your fear of people.”
    She was right, and her big brown eyes, set close together, stared at me from above her nose. A nose that looked nothing like mine, but could, I thought, with the right makeup.
    Make-up is magic. Make-up can paint smiles from lips, blush on excitement, it can add levity to an otherwise heavy day. It can erase our secret selves and the lines we inherit and make us look like more interesting people.
    “I met a woman,” I told Therapist.
    “Good. And what was this woman like?”
    I reached into the jar and pulled out the orange elephant.
    “Why not the larger one? That red thing there.” Therapist pointed at the jar.
    “No, not that one, not now.” Then I had another urge. Not to hurt Therapist or anything. I never wanted to hurt her, but I did want to leave. I suspected she wasn’t going to like what she was about to hear and if she didn’t, she’d never tell me everything would be all right while massaging my hand. She’d never pay for a cab and sit in Washington Square with me, never admire my black umbrella when it rained, and I’d never admire the way she tapped the toes of her patent leather flats in puddles on the sidewalk. We’d never get there if I was this candid.

    Therapist leaned over, her shoulders hunched, elbows in her lap like she had to strain to hear me, like it was all up to me, like I had the power. That was, of course, ridiculous, because I didn’t have power. I’ve never had power. I’m not that girl. I hope you don’t think I’m that hungry girl who will take everything from you the first night. I take slowly. Little bits here and there. Usually while giving, so it doesn’t feel like any of the other person is being stripped away. People do that to one another; it’s survival. If we give and don’t take, then we end up alone, standing on a platform with someone waiting to push us onto the tracks.
    I unfold the paper elephant. “I don’t want this problem to interfere with our friendship.”
    “Would you like to read it to me?”
    “I probably should as it’s written microscopically.”
    Problem #14. On Monday I met a woman named Ruthanne, who claims she’s been sharing my brain. She said we’ve had the same brain for some time now. I wasn’t anticipating our meeting, so I didn’t know what to say.
    “What did you say to her?”
    “Complimented her hat.”
    “That’s very good. Go on.”
    “I complimented her hat and she informed me it was a family heirloom.”
    “And then?”
    “I told the woman I thought family heirlooms were good and she agreed, citing my mother’s ring as example.”
    “And?”
    “And I wasn’t wearing my mother’s ring.”

    Therapist took a lot of notes in her leather folio, on a pad of yellow paper. I imagined her drawing pictures of me, and beneath my name, Claire Wheeler, she’d write: Lonely, Delusional, Nice Brooch. I wondered if she even listened to me. I decided she was to the top with grief, so much so that grief leaked from her pores, from her nose; she sneezed it into hankies and left them in trash bins everywhere around the city. I imagined a body so overcome as hers would find it hard to pay close attention in situations like these. I continued talking as if she weren’t listening.
    “The woman insisted I wear the ring to show my family loyalty, which is when I politely excused myself, because mom is dead and how can one show loyalty to a family she doesn’t have.”
    “Do you want to talk about your mother today?”
    “No.”
    “Do you want to talk about the ring you have on, dear?”
    I liked when she called me dear. I wished she would say, my dear.
    The ring, gaudy, over-sized, with gold inlay had a single disc of stained glass. I think my mother bought it in Chinatown. Cheap as everything else I owned. My mother was a knockoff; I inherited her plainness and her flat chest. Only my hair is not as dull as I remember hers being. Before it fell out. Before she lay in a bed at St. Vincent’s, her baldness concealed with scarves from Canal Street, complaining they itched. Saying they were cheap.
    I slipped the ring from my finger into my handbag. I didn’t want any reminders that I used to be someone else’s daughter. I wanted Therapist to see me as virginal, unaffected, not ruined by one woman already. She needed to focus on how available I was.
    Therapist sat silent save the faint scratching of her doodles. She said silence is good and shouldn’t be feared. I wrung my hands in my lap until she finally spoke.
    “Clearly you’ve imagined this woman as means to finding a precious family heirloom.”
    I hadn’t, but I didn’t want to have a mother-daughter spat before she’d even agreed to the arrangement.
    “What else happened this week?”
    “Nothing.”
    “Something good must’ve happened?”
    I didn’t want to admit to finally visiting my mother’s grave. I imagined Therapist’s son lay beside my mother, even though my mother is buried in Jersey and wasn’t a Jew. I wondered if they were watching us, cheering us on, hoping we could love one another without scavenging.
    Therapist gave me her hopeful eyes, the eyes of a mother with a son at home playing video games, not of a mother with a son buried in Chatham Square.
    My mother never looked at me with hopeful eyes. For three months I left work at 2pm, caught the M7 to St. Vincent’s and sat with her, waiting for a nurse or a doctor to relieve us from one another. “I like your lipstick,” she’d say. “But your skirt is too high-waisted.” Or, “Let me see your shoes.” And then, “Jesus and Mary, they are so dowdy, so prehistoric.”
    I went to see my mother everyday until she died. We had nothing in common, but I knew that no one else would ever notice my shoes.

    Therapist always checked her watch in the first fifteen minutes of session. I hated when she did this but understood that she was a busy woman. I wished it were Sunday, a day when our time could be measured between meals and laughs instead of minutes in one hour. I should’ve asked her right then if she’d even wanted a daughter.
    “How about you read another issue, Claire.”
    I thought talking about Lenny would make her see I was desirable, at least to someone.
    Problem # 17 Lenny came over to my apartment. He said he was lonely, missed my mother and that seeing me makes him feel better. We talked for a stitch and then had sex on the kitchen floor. Afterwards I made him egg whites and corned beef hash while he read me the subway schedule in a British accent.

    “This is the fifth time you’ve let him have you like that on the floor and then fed him.”
    “Third time,” I said, quietly. “And I don’t always feed him.”
    “You must love him. Why would a woman lay on her back on cold linoleum for a man whom she does not love with all of her heart?”
    “Wood, I have wood floors.”
    Therapist looked down at her notebook.
    “He’ll make an honest woman out of me,” I said. “He’ll provide for me and buy me perfume on holidays.”
    “Are you sure?”
    I tried to remember Lenny buying mother something, anything, but couldn’t. They were together only two years. But I said, “Yes, most definitely.” I wanted to paint Lenny as a kind and giving man. “He would buy me cashmere if it were cashmere I wanted.”
    Therapist smiled and gave me a look that suggested I had fancy taste.
    “It’s just an example.” I stretched the polyester of my skirt to cover the sides of my chair, hoping that when not bunched the fabric resembled anything but polyester.
    “Well, okay then. Perhaps he’s not a bad guy. Does he want to be with you more than just occasionally?”
    “No, I don’t think so.”
    “Do you want it to be more than just occasionally?”
    “No, I don’t think so.”
    “What do you want?”
    I wanted her. I wanted her to invite me to sleep at her home, in a spare bedroom with a queen sized bed covered in peach sheets with white polka dots and a glorious duvet made of old lace sewn together like patches. I wanted that. In order to get that I thought she needed to see me as sought-after.
    “I want to be a daughter again,” I told her. “I want a second chance.”
    Therapist wrapped her fingers on the silver teardrop pendant hanging from the gold chain around her neck.
    I looked at my jar of problems, waiting for her to say something. Therapist probably thought that if she had a daughter, her daughter would never be so desperate.
    I blurted, “Lenny says that I don’t look like my mother, but we taste alike. I don’t like it when he talks like that. I tell him friends shouldn’t talk like that.”
    “But you aren’t friends, you’re lovers.”
    “Right,” I said. “That’s right, we’re lovers. That’s what I meant.”
    I felt like it was time. I felt like if I didn’t do it right then, my head would go spinning from my shoulders. “Did your son have a girlfriend?” Though I knew her son was seven and if he’d had a little friend, surely it wasn’t a girlfriend, I asked anyway.
    “Why do you want to talk about my son?”
    “He’s in heaven, right?” I wondered if Jews even went to heaven. They must; Jesus was a Jew. I needed to get out of that office.
    Therapist looked surprised that I knew about her son. He’d been dead nearly a decade. She must’ve felt like her patients gossiped about her behind her back, like we formed a club or knitting circle or patient’s guild. Like we took up collections around the Village and saved our pennies and nickels until we had enough money to sit on a stoop with coffee and chit-chat about Therapist.
    “Why do you want to talk about my son?”
    I grabbed the sea lion slash platypus and read fast, blending my words together like an excited toddler.
    Problem #3 I researched Therapist at New York Public Library. I read about how her son died. I have decided I want to be Therapist’s daughter. We both deserve second chances.

    Therapist didn’t move at first, except to reach for her pendant. I watched her in silence. She pulled a cardigan from the back of her chair, buttoning the center two buttons, unbuttoning them, re-buttoning them. She adjusted the collar of her ochre blouse, and rubbed her hands in quick succession over her upper arms.
    “What does green mean?” Her voice hardened. “Why is that issue green?”
    “No reason.”
    “You’re lying.”
    Therapist stood. Her second story office with its massive windows made me feel as if we were in a tree house.
    “Not nice out there today,” I said. “Unusual for July, don’t you think?”
    “Why is it green, Claire?”
    “It’s about you.” Us.
    “Me?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Bringing my son into this is not going to help me help you.”
    I’d wanted to say, this is not about your son. This is about you and me. I knew then that talking about her loss had been the wrong way to approach it. I cursed the platypus and shred his little mass between my fingers.
    “This is inappropriate, this talking about my son.”
    I felt I had the right. I’d planned to talk about it for weeks. What did she mean I had no right?
    “We both deserve a second chance.” I said it, and then imagined Therapist helping me up from my chair, holding me close.
    “We’re not friends,” she said. “I can’t be your mother, either. Do you understand?”
    I did, but I didn’t want her to know she’d been so clear and persuasive, so I shook my head. This was not unfolding as I’d planned.
    “When did you develop these feelings?”
    I couldn’t answer that either. I didn’t know.
    “I’m sorry I didn’t see this coming for you.” She pressed a closed fist and then her forehead to the windowpane, “I’m struggling with my own loss.”
    “You didn’t know.”
    “Today’s session should be our last. Do you understand why?”
    I’d made her feel like a bad Therapist, as if this was her fault, and it wasn’t her fault. She was the only part of my life I hadn’t maimed.
    She returned to her chair, heavy. “Everyone deserves a second chance, Claire. I wish that for you.”

    Good feelings happen slowly for me. Unlike bad feelings, which seem to short circuit at the worst possible times, like when I’m standing on a train platform, or ordering a cheese croissant in Park Slope, surrounded by strollers and red-headed children. Gingers, my mother called them. If the good feelings start, I suppress them. I take baths to drown them, sink them, stick them to the soap scum and little hairs on the side of the tub after I shave. I suffocate them until they come back rounder and full of breath. Sometimes I pretend to put them in the toaster with an English muffin and walk away until the smoke detector goes off, until the burnt bread and good feelings can’t be separated from the black char.

    “Time’s up?” I asked.
    “It is.” She didn’t check her watch. “I’d be glad to refer you to another doctor.”

    What seems monumental often is not—like turning sixteen, or losing your virginity, like swimming naked in a lake beneath a sky ablaze in lightening, or being fired from your first job. While the small moments, the insignificant details in life, become the constant in which everything vacillates, trying to feel as equal, as important. And no matter how many pictures you take, how many albums you collect over the years, the big things never count. We laugh on our wedding day because suddenly it’s as if nothing has ever seemed so funny or absurd, and we cry on our birthdays because we think they are supposed to mean something more. When they don’t, we feel bad for ourselves.

    The following week I returned to my mother’s grave. I confessed everything. I said, “You left a terrible legacy. You left me like this. And I am here to tell you that I’ll never do what you’ve done.” I poured my pretty paper animals in a potted plant beside her marker. I dumped them on her, left them to decay with her. I went to Therapist’s clinic light and bouncy, but Therapist wouldn’t see me. Her receptionist at the clinic gave me an envelope. “Your reference.”
     A small package accompanied the letter—the size of one of those cards you stick in flowers you send people who aren’t important enough for more than a few words—a bit of tissue paper wrapped around a silver tear drop pendant on a gold chain. I recognized it immediately. The note said: To second chances.

    I’ve never told anyone about the necklace or about Therapist. I’ve worn it and seen other shrinks. I’ve confessed many problems including my husband’s infidelity, my daughter’s autism, my own inadequacies at parenting. I’ve admitted that sometimes when I’m making love to my husband I picture the woman who bags my groceries at Pathmark. I admit to hiding food beneath my bed to eat late at night; sometimes after I prepare dinner, the idea of eating with my family makes me ill. My husband chews with his mouth open and our kids do the same. I want a breast enhancement; I talk about that. I steal money my husband gives to the kids; I steal fifty dollars a week from our grocery allowance. I feed the kids generic cereal, and tell my husband it’s organic. Some lies can’t be helped.
    This morning, I was at the drycleaner picking up my husband’s shirts. A garish woman in line talked on her cell phone. Her daughter had been shoved from a platform on some stop off the L train. She was beside herself in a way that made me uncomfortable, but also in a way that made me question her decision to stay in line. Certainly her daughter wasn’t dead. She poured on the tears for her audience, and eventually the conversation led to a discussion of who was best fit to retrieve her daughter from the hospital and drive her home. When her conversation was over, I tapped her shoulder.
    “Is your daughter seeing anyone?” I asked.
    “Oh, yes. Yes, she is seeing a man from upstate.”
    “No, a therapist. Is she seeing a therapist?”
    “Well,” the woman hesitated, “I don’t know. Why do you ask?”
    “No reason.” I gripped my necklace.
    I didn’t have the right to tell the woman that her daughter probably wasn’t pushed from the platform. I didn’t have the right to tell her that most of us are ready to jump. That that’s what we want to do when no one is looking.

Jaime Karnes, editor-at-large for fiction at The Utopian, is a 2013 Pushcart Prize nominee. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Millay and VCCA, and is currently at work on her first novel.

47 Days

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 06:53:00 -0400

By Paul Lisicky.

“How often were two men in sync when they weren’t worn out or hyped up on drugs? Maybe their good luck had something to do with the fact that the two were wounded.”

A Short Story.

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Jake wanted the cop again. If he couldn’t have him, then Jake wanted the guy he was before he was the cop. He wanted the guy who touched his brows and grabbed his shoulders, as the two lay facing each other, eyes too close to stay open. Jake didn’t want to take a break, and the guy didn’t want to take a break. They were in some club, with dark halls and little rooms. How often were two men in sync when they weren’t worn out or hyped up on drugs? Maybe their good luck had something to do with the fact that the two were wounded. At least Jake knew himself to be wounded, so much so that he could only think of himself from some distance. He needed the protective mechanism. How would poor Jake make out it out of the muck after he’d lost his father, his lover, his dog, and his best friend within the span of six months?

Jake stood at the great window of his apartment twenty-one stories above the city. The headlights crept down the expressway in the distance. The power plant wafted clouds from its stacks, and to the left, almost outside of the frame, the refinery flared orange. Jake missed birds, animals, and trees up here, but he wasn’t ready for the earth just yet. Would the cop ever call? In his mind the cop would always be standing before Jake, showing him the bullet wound in the pale skin beneath the hard ridge of the hipbone. It was almost as if the cop were inviting him to put a finger inside it, as he told Jake about the 47 days he’d spent in the coma, the lost weight, the sepsis, the learning to walk again. His need to smoke within minutes of coming to, and waiting for the nurse to leave, then wheeling down the hall, down the elevator, down the hill out back, tubes and contraptions and all, until he took out the cigarette, hands shaking as he struck the match against the cover. He didn’t know then that he didn’t have the strength to wheel back up the hill. He didn’t know then that he’d weep, begging a teenage girl to push him to the back door, and fast. He was still thinking of how the beautiful smoke lit up his head, swirled in his veins like liquid, like a drug, only silver.

Jake listened to this story and more until he forgot himself in the sound of another human voice. For some minutes it didn’t matter that the cop only talked about himself and didn’t comment when Jake had something to share. It didn’t matter—so much—that the cop admitted to throwing his ex through the plate glass window of the bar, thus making sure he’d be banned from the premises for life. And it mattered much less than usual that he referred to one guy as an Asian, or another guy as a Mexican, and yet another as colored. (Colored?) Jake forgot himself in the sound of another human voice. There was the pull of gravity, the pull to the earth, to another human body with scars, track marks, and muscles so dense and tailored that Jake was in awe of them.

They were such old souls.

And yet they weren’t. Jake stood at the window. For a minute the city felt incredibly wild, so wild that he wouldn’t have minded being thrown through the glass, falling from that height, all 21 flights to Pine Street down below. He ran that image again in his head, and he caught himself loving that image a little too much. He stepped back from the window, but not before drawing the blind. Maybe the cop was in some building across the way, watching him reaching up for the cord. He sat down in the chair. He put his arms around his shoulders and held himself down. He held himself there, as only he could.

Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy, Famous Builder, The Burning House, and two forthcoming books: Unbuilt Projects (Four Way, 2012) and The Narrow Door (Graywolf, 2014).

The Liberal Case for Intellectual Property

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 12:37:00 -0400

By Yascha Mounk.

“Let us drop the deluded pretense that the defense of intellectual property is inherently conservative, or even reactionary.”

Why our society would be less egalitarian and artistic without intellectual property rights.

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Given how technical a topic intellectual property is, most debates about it are strikingly emotional and partisan. Opponents of intellectual property cast movie studios, record labels, and even book publishers as robber barons who want to squeeze every last cent out of consumers whose only crime it is that they love art. Defenders of draconian punishments for online piracy, meanwhile, tend to cast themselves as civilization’s last line of defense – once the pirates take away our intellectual property, they seem to say, our women and children will be next.

The hysterical terms of the debate are hardly conducive to drawing the fine distinctions the field of intellectual property calls for. Even a recent exchange between Matt Yglesias and Caleb Crain on Slate, which rightly got a lot of attention for its relative subtlety (and considerable entertainment value), suffers from a few fundamental misconceptions. Their main points of disagreement revolve around two questions that appear crucial if we want to formulate reasonable laws on intellectual property: Is online piracy theft? And to what extent is online piracy a threat to important social and cultural goods, like the ability of artists to produce movies, films and books? Unfortunately, they both are confused about the first question and both miss (though, in Crain’s case, only narrowly) the most important considerations concerning the second question. Let me try to do better.

Is online piracy theft? Yglesias and Crain both try to settle the question by analogy to other forms of theft. For Yglesias, online piracy isn’t theft. His reason is simple: if you steal my slice of pizza, I no longer have a slice of pizza to eat; if you illegally download a copy of a book I’ve written, my publisher retains the original copy of the electronic file. Crain is more ambiguous on this point. On the one hand, invoking Immanuel Kant, he echoes the point that nothing is really being stolen because no material possession is being taken away from a holder of intellectual property. On the other hand, Crain worries that what is being stolen is the potential income that artists might derive from the sale of their property to persons who, instead, acquire illegal copies for free.

But both Yglesias and Crain – and, along with them, virtually every writer who’s tackled this point in the public sphere so far – put the cart before the horse here. They think that we need to start by thinking about whether the making of unauthorized copies of art is theft; once we’ve settled that question, we can decide whether or not online piracy violates the rights of holders of property rights. Thus, using ever more extravagant metaphors, they endlessly agonize about the supposedly complex concept of theft. “Is an illegal download more like stealing a Mercedes or more like Jesus multiplying fish?”, they ask.

But this is confused. The concept of theft is much simpler than they realize: it is the act of infringing on another’s property rights. We therefore need to start with an entirely different question, to wit, “what property rights do we have reason to grant producers of artworks in our society?” Once we have settled that prior question, the supposed mystery about theft and intellectual property implodes: (immoral) theft of intellectual property is any infringement on another’s (just) property rights.

This brings us to our second question. In our legal tradition, we don’t think of property rights as rigidly encompassing the exact same rights and duties in every circumstance. Rather, the famous metaphor used in first-year law classes is of property rights as a bundle of sticks: a property holder does not hold all sticks in all circumstances. It is up to the legislator, taking account of considerations including economic efficiency and the public’s interest, to decide what kinds of sticks holders of a particular kind of property should be assigned in particular circumstances. So if we want to decide whether holders of intellectual property should be assigned the right to stop others from making electronic copies of their work, we first need to determine what would happen if we didn’t assign them this particular stick.

Here Yglesias’ point about pizza becomes relevant after all. To steal somebody’s pizza has a very straightforward moral and economic cost that online piracy does not have: the owner of the slice of pizza now no longer has a slice of pizza. Since online piracy does not impose the same costs on the holders of intellectual property, the particular set of reasons that justifies us in assigning to the owners of slices of pizza the right to exclude others from their meal does not justify us in assigning to holders of intellectual property the right to stop others from making copies of their work. But might there not be other reasons why it is in the interests of artists, and indeed of society as a whole, to ban the uncontrolled reproduction of movies, music and books?

Crain rightly argues that there is. His worry is straightforward: the producers of valuable artistic work will no longer be able to do what they are doing if intellectual property, the economic foundation for their (already mostly meager) salaries, is taken away. Yglesias, however, does not buy Crain’s argument because he thinks that some people would continue to write books or sing songs no matter how low the salary they received. No doubt. But it doesn’t seem to occur to him that it might matter, both for the quality of the eventual result and for meritocratic reasons, who gets to do this. Sure, somebody in our society is always going to have the leisure to spend years of their lives focusing only on writing an intricate novel – there already are plenty of untalented trust fund kids doing that now. But it might turn out that these novelists of Yglesias’ future are primarily the likes of Georgina Bloomberg, rather than the likes of David Foster Wallace or Jonathan Franzen. The notion that Franzen or Wallace should – or would – simply have fired off their masterpieces around the edges of a 9-6 workday is naïve.

The same is true for political commentary – but here the inegalitarian effects of watering down intellectual property would be even starker. Sure, blogs would not disappear just because, copying of their work being so rampant, even the most famous bloggers could no longer live off their writing. Perhaps Yglesias is even so devoted to writing political commentary that, foregoing a social life and kids (too time consuming), he would spend a majority of the time his day job leaves him blogging. Even so, he would be at an inherent disadvantage to people who could spend their whole day on blogging: after all, they could respond to major stories more quickly, do more intricate research, and spend more time on honing their attacks. And who would these people be? People who can either live off their riches, or are paid handsomely by billionaires to defend the points of view they find congenial. In short, the brave new world Yglesias is advocating is a world in which only men of means can devote their lives to art, and politics becomes even more dominated by the rich.

So here’s the liberal argument for intellectual property. For both political and artistic reasons, it is important for the most talented individuals to be able to devote their life to art (or, yes, blogging). People of average means will only have a fighting chance to make a livelihood from their talents if they can stop others from gaining access to their work for free (or from placing copies of articles on their own websites.) This is a good reason for us to assign producers of intellectual property the right to decide how their work is to be distributed. Anybody who violates the terms they set infringes on their property rights and is therefore to be considered a thief. As a result, we are justified in employing both tort and criminal law to keep instances of intellectual property theft to a minimum.

Just as with all other uses of state coercion, there is of course one condition: the punishments inflicted on perpetrators of online piracy must remain proportionate both to the degree of their guilt and to the social harm they cause. The most sanguine proposals of defenders of intellectual property overstep this mark – just as many criminal laws against thieves of trivial material goods like slices of pizza are overly punitive. So, by all means, let’s have a careful debate about how to enforce a socially useful law without inflicting draconian punishments on people for what is, after all, a relatively minor offense. But let’s also drop the deluded pretense that the defense of intellectual property is inherently conservative, or even reactionary.

Yascha Mounk is the Founding Editor of The Utopian.

Bárbula Copies, A Funeral Home

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 08:31:00 -0400

By Slavko Zupcic.

(Translated by Jeremy Osner.)

“We ran to him. We had a fucking corpse! Finally, we had a corpse.”

A Short Story.

________________________________________________________________________

      — Death takes us all. — That was all we would say when customers asked us how we had made the decision to go into the funeral home business here next to the medical school, when they asked us how we could have chosen such a name for our business as Bárbula Copies.
      The customers (to be precise, not customers of the funeral home, but of the service we ran on one side of the shop writing letters of condolence) usually didn’t probe any further. Blushing as if the color was from some old slap, they would nod with a conspiratorial air and give us the information we needed to write their letters.

      One thing for sure, it was death that had brought us there: me and José Carlos, Zapata and Moratinos as well. The four of us were students, we were in our fifth semester at the medical school. After classes we used to walk along the Avenida Bárbula, maybe stop at the dive bar across the street, maybe we needed to make some copies at the shop that used to be in this storefront, maybe buy a lottery ticket next door.

      The bar was the same one that’s there now; its name used to be El Caney. A left-handed guy would wait on us — the corner table was where the fat lady sat who ran the numbers game, waiting for customers. If she saw somebody going into her shop, she’d put down her Coke and cross the street that separated her from her tickets.
      Sometimes a professor would come along with us. Moratinos was the one who’d find out if he was going to buy us a drink.
      — Don’t worry about it, it’s my treat. But take off your white coats, they could get stained. Or what’s worse, someone could tell the dean…

      The guy who ran the copy shop, we didn’t ever see him in El Caney. Just the same, he ended up going bust. No idea why — it seems like a copy shop right next door to the medical school should keep the money coming in.
      His bankruptcy came at the same time as that of one of my father’s clients, who when his bill came due, saw fit to pay my father with a boat, a motorcycle, a painting by Telmo Romero, and five coffins.

      I was sitting in El Caney, relating that list to Zapata and Moratinos. José Carlos was still at his Pharmacology class.
      — So what’s your father going to do with all that? — asked Zapata, fourth beer in his hand.
      — Nothing… He sold the cycle and the boat. My mother’s keeping the Romero painting.
      — And the coffins? — Moratinos was signaling to the waiter for another round as he asked me.
      — No idea. Why; do you guys want to set up a funeral home? — I joked. (I swear to God, I was just joking.) — It would be the first funeral home ever, run by medical students.

      When José Carlos heard about the coffins and the idea of starting a funeral home, he called us together for an urgent meeting.
      — I’m dead serious. I think we could really do this.
      — But how?
      — Where are we going to do it?
      — And with what?
      …Probably we should have asked, “Why?” Perhaps José Carlos wouldn’t have had such a quick answer to that.
      — With the coffins from Benavides’ dad. In the copy shop. We don’t even need to buy a new sign, it’ll still be called Bárbula Copies. We’ll just paint “Funeral Home” on the side.
      — And what will we do there?
      — Well, nothing. What we do here. Chat, drink beer, hang out.
      — We can have our girlfriends over.
      — We’ll save money on motels and bars.
      — Yeah, like that.

      So we painted the sign. We blacked out the front window and we put the coffins where the big Xerox machines had been. We bought a black necktie and swore we would wear it whenever a customer came. We posted hours; between ourselves, we worked out a schedule that would let us cover them.
      Zapata made the most of his time in the shop studying and, as there was still a Xerox machine left over from the old business, making copies of Harrison, which he had checked out from the library and was selling to our classmates, chapter by chapter. Moratinos, in his turn, converted the back room into a painting studio and eventually into an apartment for himself. José Carlos, who had always spoken of his uncle who ran a funeral home in Caracas, was the most responsible in carrying out his duties: he would come in early and raise the gate, and would sit there behind the desk wearing the black tie all the time he was in the shop. As for me, I must confess I spent my time reading; I read and read and I dreamt that one day soon, Susana M would come by Bárbula Copies and I would get my chance to make love with her inside the biggest of the coffins: a beige Queen of Heaven. I made sure to dust it off every day.

      Besides us and a few girlfriends, the only person who saw the inside of the funeral home in its first month was the fat lady who ran the numbers game. It was ten in the morning. I thought our first customer had come, I was hunting around for the tie; I was all nerves as I went out to wait on her.
      — Can we help you with anything? — I asked in the deep voice of my Psychiatry professor.
      She opened the blue folder she was holding in her immense hands — it looked like a little candy wrapper. She spoke deliberately, with all the serenity in the world:
      — Juan, the guy who ran the copy shop, he had a regular number. Do you want to hold onto it?

      In the following months, not much changed. We didn’t see a single customer. José Carlos thought (and this was directed mostly at Zapata and Moratinos) it was because we were not serious enough. Moratinos thought it was the opposite thing: — Workers at funeral homes are townspeople — he said. — Not college students.
      I found I did not agree here. It seemed to me like being medical students could be turned to our advantage, that we ought to advertise it somehow.
      — Are you nuts? That’s the last thing somebody’s going to want to think about when their mother has just died, they don’t want to think about doctors and drugs, much less about medical students. Leave things as they are, let’s see what comes.

      And Moratinos had a point. It didn’t really matter that we didn’t have customers. The rent on the shop was quite low — we were just about able to pay it out of the money we weren’t spending at El Caney — and we had for our exclusive use a multi-purpose space: a library, a bar, a motel, a studio, an apartment — and one that was great for making an impression on punk chicks and goths.
      The only problem was the numbers game. If we were going to pay the fat lady every day, we had to have some business. We called a meeting to decide what to do.

      José Carlos thought we should end our agreement with the fat lady, and that we should work in shifts watching the emergency rooms like vultures. Zapata, who was stuck on the Harrison and the Xerox machine, was trying to convince us that our future lay in selling copies of the text. I was going to say something, say anything, maybe that we just needed to wait, the time was not yet ripe; but Moratinos wanted his chance to speak first:
      — None of this. If we want to make money we have to do something new, something that will bring people in.
      — But how? — José Carlos interrupted him. — People have been dying forever, there’s not much you can do to innovate in that regard.
      It looked like that would be the end of the discussion. We felt like giving up — we would lose our regular lottery number; we would go on being the screw-up medical students who had rented the copy shop and put coffins in place of the Xerox machines; but then Moratinos (for the first time ever) showed us a practical application of his idea.
      — I wasn’t talking about innovation, I meant we should offer something different. Of course we can’t offer bigger coffins; but maybe something else. What about a service for writing condolence letters — bright, sympathetic, sincere letters for people who don’t want to overwhelm their friends.
      — We could include medical details about the ailments, it’ll be like writing stories — added Zapata (or it may have been José Carlos or me who said that.) Suddenly the four of us knew where we were going to get the money for the numbers game.

      We posted flyers by the classifieds desks of both of Valencia’s newspapers. We posted flyers at the morgue, in the three hospitals, on electric poles on the streets. They were hand-written and photocopied, with a fringe of slips at the bottom with our phone number and address, for people to tear off.
      It was a simple message — “Letters of condolence, obituaries” — and it was mixed in on the bulletin boards among girls who wanted to baby-sit, or clean, or care for the elderly.
      Since our goal was just to pay for lottery tickets, there’s no question about it: we were a success. Once or twice a week a customer would come in; we would have fun composing his note inviting friends and family to a cook-out by the cemetery after the funeral, to drink a beer in the Memorial Gardens, or as if he were placing a classified ad with us, offering for sale the kitchen appliances of Octavio Godoy, who had died with his wife while crossing the highway up by Campo de Carabobo.
      We weren’t getting rich, it wouldn’t even afford a living for one of us, but we were able to pay the fat lady for her lottery tickets.

      This could have gone on forever I guess; but after a few years the four of us were getting close to finishing our seventh semester. We would have to choose a hospital and begin practicing.
      Juan Carlos was the one who said it: — If we’re doing our residencies, it’s going to be impossible to keep the funeral parlor open.
      — We’ll have to close it down. It seems like a real shame — was Zapata’s reaction.
      — Here’s what we could do, wait a month. If we have a customer, a real customer, a burial and everything, if we can get rid of one of these coffins, we’ll make the sacrifice and stay in business. If not, see you later, alligator.

      Of the five coffins we had started out with we still had two. I had finally gotten my chance to ball with Susana M in the Queen of Heaven; she had liked it so much she made me bring the coffin to her house for us to use regularly. Two had been used for José Carlos’ mother and for Zapata’s brother; but even though these two had died and their funerals had been performed by Bárbula Copies, their families could not be considered customers as they had not paid anything.
      The four of us wished with all our hearts that one of the remaining two coffins should be occupied by a body — a dead body, a stranger’s body. We wanted a corpse, we wanted to perform a burial; we truly did not want to close the funeral parlor.

      Of the month that we had said we would wait, 28 days had gone by. We were sure, all four of us, that we would be closing the funeral parlor.
      Moratinos even said that, as far as he was concerned, it was over already. — 28 days is a lunar month. The month is over even if we’re not in February yet — he said as we were leaving the medical school. We were coming from a Pathophysiology class: Ovulation Disorders.

      José Carlos was tending shop that day; we decided to go over there. On our way we ran into Zapata.
      — At least let’s spend these last few days together — was what I said.
      As we approached the shop, we could see José Carlos standing there: he was wearing the tie, his hands in the air, a beer in each hand. He looked ecstatic, and we knew there could be only one explanation. We finally had a corpse.
      We ran to him. We had a fucking corpse! Finally, we had a corpse. We were happy.

Slavko Zupcic, a psychiatrist and occupational physician, was born in Valencia, Venezuela. “Bárbula Copies, A Funeral Home” is part of an unpublished story collection, Médicos taxistas.

Jeremy Osner is a translator specializing in Latin American literature.

A Rights-Based Utopia?

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:43:00 -0500

By Adam Etinson.

“Rather than worry about how we might preserve the utopian status of human rights into the future, we ought to worry about how to rescue utopia from the clutches of human rights. “

A plea for substantive utopias.

_______________________________________________________________________________

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.

— Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

When we stop to think about what an ideal world would look like, it is striking to notice how quickly human rights enter the picture. So many of the staples of any plausible utopia are projects that have now been taken up in the name of human rights: the relief of global suffering; the protection of human dignity; the provision of equal economic and social opportunities to all; the purging of corruption and dishonesty from politics; the achievement of world peace; freedom from crime, fear, alienation, and torture; harmony with the planet, its ecosystems, and species; loving relationships, success, spiritual fulfillment, and even affordable (and unrestricted) internet access for all. All of these admirable goals have somehow become bound up with the idea of human rights as we commonly understand it today.

What is the significance of this imaginative entanglement between human rights on the one hand, and utopia, on the other? Well, for one, it means that many of our traditional utopian aspirations (e.g., peace, harmony, prosperity, and social advancement) have found expression in the modern idea of human rights. This has had the effect of exerting an outward pressure on such rights to incorporate more and more of what we deem good. For instance, Article 22 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights affirms a human right to “national and international peace and security.” That there is a legally posited human right to world peace is good evidence that such rights have become placeholders for almost any worthy cause whatsoever.

On the other hand, the inverse is also true. The Enlightenment idea of human rights — and, with it, the far older notion of a right — has found a secure home in our modern utopian imagination. The effect that this has had on our utopian ideals is not entirely clear. However, since it is doubtful that human rights bring with them some new concern that was hitherto neglected by our conceptions of utopia, it seems unlikely that our vision of utopia is in a parallel way pressured to expand as a result of its incorporation of human rights. Rather, it seems far more likely that our utopian imagination is in fact restricted by its preoccupation with rights. What I want to do in what follows is to try to clarify the nature of this restriction, and to highlight some of its dangers.

This essay is in part a response. Towards the end of his fascinating new book on the history of human rights, The Last Utopia, Samuel Moyn, a historian at Columbia University, asks whether human rights will be able to continue carrying the burden of their utopian status through the coming centuries or even decades.[1] Moyn is worried about the fate of human rights as a utopian ideal. But he never stops to consider the fate of utopia as a rights-based ideal. Nor does he consider how our utopian imagination, too, suffers burdens as a result of its connection with human rights. It is this blind spot in Moyn’s analysis that I want to fill in.

One interesting thing to note about the hold that human rights have on our contemporary social and political imagination is how recent a phenomenon this is. The more or less standard story we’re told about human rights is that (after a lengthy post-Enlightenment slumber) these rights recaptured the global imagination in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and, in particular, the Holocaust. Most importantly, it was widespread and acute postwar revulsion to Nazi brutality that culminated in the international signing of the influential 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Since then, so the story goes, what we’ve witnessed is the gradual dissemination of the moral wisdom embodied in that document, in the form of a growing affirmation of the moral importance of human rights across the globe, and in the form of the progressive introduction of human rights into domestic and international law.[2]

This familiar narrative has been fiercely challenged by Moyn in his recent book. According to Moyn, the linearity of the history of human rights has been grossly overestimated. If we are prepared to resist the temptations of hindsight, he argues, at least two discontinuities in that history become apparent. First, the twentieth-century internationalist idea of human rights bears little resemblance to its Enlightenment or pre-Modern counterpart: while the former pretends to limit national sovereignty by making all governments answerable to certain universal standards of conduct, the latter had no such pretension. Second, Moyn goes to great lengths to show that even the twentieth-century history of human rights is far from linear. Contrary to popular belief, the immediate global reverberations created by the Universal Declaration itself were modest, and the full moral impact of the Holocaust only set in later on. In fact, it was not until the mid-to-late 1970s, Moyn argues, that an arbitrary confluence of factors created an environment in which human rights finally emerged as a genuinely viable social cause.

Before the 1970s, human rights were off the ideological and moral map, so to speak. Eclipsed by what were — until then — far more dominant social movements, human rights only emerged as a plausible ideological alternative after disenchantment with revolutionary communism and nationalistic anti-colonialism finally began to set in during the years of the Vietnam War. In fact, Moyn argues, it was precisely because human rights came off as ideologically and politically neutral — accommodating both communism and capitalism on the one hand, and nationalism and individualism on the other — that human rights then emerged as a safe bet for the ideologically disenchanted. Most importantly, human rights were innocent of the aggressive utopianism that brought their alternatives to ruin. They did not require a commitment to manifestly violent processes of political and social upheaval in the way that communism and anti-colonialism did. Nor were they incompatible with communism in a way that would demand foreign interventions like the Vietnamese and Korean Wars. Human rights found success in representing a feasible, sober-minded, anti-political, anti-revolutionary, anti-utopian utopia, at the right historical moment. In this sense, human rights came to represent a kind of last utopia, hence the provocative title of Moyn’s book.

In his epilogue, Moyn expresses concern that, having come to play the role of a substitute for now-defunct utopian projects, human rights may implode under the enormous ideological pressure heaped upon them. One of those pressures is what Moyn calls the “burden of politics.” Standing in as a substitute for earlier grand political visions, there is pressure on human rights to not only offer “a set of minimal constraints on responsible politics,” but to present a bona fide political programme of their own. However, because the original utopian appeal of human rights consisted precisely in their modest, ideologically neutral, and real-world character, there is a serious question as to whether that appeal can survive the process of politicization. Moyn’s implicit suggestion is that, in order to preserve their status as the last utopia, human rights must reticently call our attention to “a few core values that demand protection,” thereby making room for “new and other political visions that have yet to be fully outlined.”

I agree with Moyn that human rights should be seen as offering something less than a complete political program. It is precisely when we try to give them real institutional substance — say, by affirming a human right to representative democracy — that human rights begin to lose their aura of universality and descend into partisanship. This is perhaps the main reason why both the Universal Declaration and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1976) fall short of declaring a human right to “democracy” as such. The avoidance of political partisanship, however, need not be seen as a sign of moral infirmity or political compromise, let alone as an attempt to preserve the utopian status of human rights. Very often, it is better understood as motivated by the recognition that there is more than one way to satisfy human rights at an institutional level. Democracy has gained significant momentum over the course of the last century, and the more widespread democratic governance becomes, the less partisan the idea of a human right to democracy will be. Nevertheless, it will always be true that there are and have been other social forms, other non-democratic ways of organizing human society, under which people have been able to live perfectly decent and dignified lives. It wouldn’t make a great deal of sense, for instance, to ascribe a human right to democracy to the members of isolated tribes in the Amazonian rainforest. Given their unique isolation, history, and socio-political traditions, it seems more apt to say that the members of such tribes have an abstract right to political participation in their communities, rather than a specific right to democratic rule.

Another reason to resist the temptation to fully politicize human rights is that, after all, they are only rights. Rights are commonly understood to correlate with duties — duties assigned either to individuals or institutions, or both. The relevant duty might be to provide an individual with some good or service, or to refrain from mistreating them in certain ways. In either case, what is at issue in any claim of right are certain obligations that one agent owes to another, obligations strong enough to qualify as a matter of “right.” So, for example, when one is confident that strong corollary obligations exist, one might claim that “affordable access to higher education is not just a good thing, it is our right,” or that “ample paid paternity leave is his right,” or that “freedom from torture is a human right.” As such, rights are an extremely important part of our moral and political vocabulary; they structure our efforts to make others answerable to crucial interests, concerns, and vulnerabilities that we have as citizens and as human beings.

Yet, so much of what is important in politics escapes the purview of rights. Societies typically coalesce around a way of life that is oriented by certain basic values. These values — like the values of fairness and equality — can affect our thinking about the set of rights that we all possess, but such values can also affect our judgment about non-rights-related questions. For instance, a society will tend to endorse certain standards of good conduct towards strangers that have nothing to do with rights, as well as standards of loyalty and caring towards friends and family that are similarly non-rights-related. Those standards and values can have a momentous impact on what political life — essentially, our life as lived together — is like. They affect, for instance, what it’s like to travel on trains, to walk on the street, to buy groceries, or to do almost anything. Moreover, a society’s basic values address a host of questions that are simultaneously personal and political: questions about virtue (e.g., “what sort of person should I become?”), about personal fulfillment (e.g., “what will make me happy?”), and about daily life (e.g., “how should I spend my free time today?”). Much of what we learn from society consists in answers to intimate questions like these. And the social mechanisms of shame and esteem are ways of compelling us to answer such questions in the same way as everyone else. Despite its rhetorical emphasis on freedom (i.e., do what you want within the limits of everyone else’s rights), American society is heavily oriented not only by consumerist attitudes and practices, but also by the Romantic archetype of the self-made man.[3] All this is to say that a comprehensive political vision simply cannot be formulated within the terms of rights alone, whether these are the rights of citizens or those of all human beings. Some consideration must also be given to a society’s basic values and to the way(s) of life that they promote.

III

The same is true, to an even greater extent, of a utopian social ideal. Moyn is concerned with the ability of human rights to continue carrying the burden of representing the last utopia. In particular, he’s concerned with the complex stresses that this status places on such rights. But what about the burden carried by the other participant in this relationship? What about the stresses exerted upon the utopian imagination by virtue of its habitual association with human rights? Here human rights have an impoverishing flipside. Of course, it is true that any plausible social ideal would respect the human rights of its members, and that a fully just world would, among other things, protect and promote the human rights of all persons. But this only begins to scratch the surface. For, a genuine utopia would be a world in which we not only find our rights and the rights of others respected, but also find ourselves living well both individually and collectively. That is to say, it would be a world in which the quality and satisfaction of our social interactions was high, in which we as individuals and society as a whole were productive in a variety of important ways, in which we would benefit from that productivity, and in which we would be able to properly look after not only others but, critically, ourselves. Much of the utopian appeal of Marxist humanism lay in its vivid description of what such a world would be like. But such a world cannot be depicted exclusively in the language of rights. A utopia has to be more than just a world in which reciprocal obligations are fulfilled, as a matter of right. In addition to being a world of giving, abstaining, and receiving (i.e., a world defined by rights), a utopia also has to be world in which we live a good life.

This means, among other things, knowing how to make proper use of our rights-based entitlements. Rights or entitlements can only help us live a good life up to a certain point. For instance, rights to education or to the free access of information can help us make good use of our rights to employment, liberty, and equal opportunity by increasing our knowledge of available options. But what we ultimately do with our social entitlements is up to us, and the choices that we make will either bring us closer to the good life or farther away from it. This is why broader questions of value are so important to the description of a utopia. Would a utopian society be consumerist and materialistic? Or would it endorse some variety of Buddhist transcendentalism and realize a society-wide state of nirvana? Regardless of how we might answer these questions, the point is that a utopia cannot be merely a world of individual rights or entitlements. It must also be a social world that orients us towards the good, towards our own betterment, or towards making the most of our rights.

The fact that human rights have become the dominant ideology of our time has had the unfortunate effect of making us lose sight of this greater role for society. Instead of striving to cultivate human virtue or excellence in all its forms (athletic, intellectual, moral, artistic, etc.), we tend to think it is good enough for society to observe and enforce certain minimum constraints on action and politics. Well, perhaps this is an exaggeration. Not all of us are so complacent. Many of us do think that society is (and should be) in the business of promoting human virtue. But it is precisely this great expectation that is threatened by making politics and, even worse, utopia all about rights. For, once we have come to see human rights as not only necessary standards of politics, but also as the full embodiment of utopia — i.e., as describing the best of all possible worlds — we have in effect given up on the idea that there is anything more than rights that is worth striving for. That is a deeply cynical and ultimately dangerous form of complacency.

Such complacency is not only dangerous — because it shrinks our sense of what we can imagine and strive for — it is also unwarranted. We can and should expect more than just guarantees of rights from society, from politicians, and from others; our human betterment depends on our expecting and striving for more than that. And so, rather than worry about how we might preserve the utopian status of human rights into the future, which is one of Moyn’s concerns, we ought to worry about just the opposite: how to rescue utopia from the clutches of human rights. This need not involve denying the importance or centrality of human rights in morality and politics. Rather, all it requires is that we adopt a sober distance from the ideological clichés of our times and allow human rights to simply remain there in their proper place, i.e., as rights and not as utopia.

Adam Etinson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Research in Ethics at the University of Montreal (CRÉUM).

[1] Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010)

[2] For a history of this general form, see: Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001).

[3] The latter is surprising given the unusually low rates of social mobility in the United States as compared to other high-income nations See: Tom Hertz, Understanding Social Mobility in America (2006). Published online at: www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/04/b1579981.html

After Utopia?

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:34:00 -0500

By Samuel Moyn.

“There is a risk that human rights will be called on to do so much, precisely because no powerful imaginative alternatives exist, that they will lose even the minimal promise of transformation that allow the norms to inspire so many.”

A response to Adam Etinson.

_________________________________________________________________________

After Utopia is the title of a little-known book — her first — by the great political theorist Judith Shklar, one of my favorite authors. In her autobiographical lecture, she commented amusingly that she didn’t even give her book its title (her editor did). But she found herself swept up in Cold War debates about the status of utopia in political theory anyway. In his insightful commentary, Adam Etinson thinks I am like Judith Shklar: I wrote a book with utopia in the title, but forgot to comment on the topic. I beg to differ. The concern about what happens to the utopian imagination once it becomes rights-based is in fact the book’s main question, one that determined how I wrote it, and inhabits it from beginning to end.

In the book’s first half, I try to show that there were other utopias than international human rights all through modern history. And I also try to show that, to the extent there were rights-based utopias, they were very different from ours. The greatest prophet of the rights of man in modern history, I think, remains the Italian Giuseppe Mazzini, who lit the world on fire by insisting that individual protection is inseparable from political emancipation. And in the rest of my book, I try to document how it was that the romantic conjunction of these two aspirations was fatefully put asunder, as people lost faith in the utopias of nationalism and socialism. At stake in this approach is precisely seeing how the “last utopia” of international human rights did not simply arise on the ruins of predecessors, but conquered what it might mean to have hope in the world. Indeed, to borrow a formulation from the book, human rights have conquered the terrain of the imagination much more than they have changed the world itself. International human rights captured the utopian imagination, which in theory is supposed to fight free of imprisonment in any single reverie. For this reason, both the introduction and epilogue to the book end by asking whether utopia ought to fight its way free of human rights in the future.

But Etinson is probably correct that I left the consequences for utopia in the rise of human rights too implicit in what I wrote; and so I am grateful for his wise commentary on the need to recall the independence of utopianism from rights, with which I basically concur. He has pursued that topic far more philosophically and constructively than I could. And I appreciate his impressive venture. Yet it is not just because I look backward as a historian rather than forward as a philosopher that I chose the emphasis at the end of my book that Etinson singles out for attention.

After all, asserting the claims of the imagination against human rights today is important but can’t stop there. For the fact is that there is an equal and opposite risk that human rights will be called on to do so much, precisely because no powerful imaginative alternatives exist, that they will lose even the minimal promise of transformation that allow the norms to inspire so many. In the crisis of utopia today, of which the prominence of international human rights is simply one sign, the task therefore has to be to seek the next utopia, while making sure the last one is not destroyed in the meantime. It is much better to have a disappointing utopia than none at all, and to guard the flame of utopia in its defective forms rather than to see it put out altogether. Perhaps it could even help light other fires.

Samuel Moyn teaches history at Columbia University.

Occupy Wall Street and the Rediscovery of Politics

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 13:13:00 -0500

By Jeremy Kessler.

“In taking to the streets with their peculiar brand of leadership and organization, the Occupy Wall Street movement taps into a deep American tradition of outdoor politics: for much of American history, the motor of progressive political change was the assembly of the people out-of-doors, coming together to debate and organize beyond the prescribed avenues of official political reform.”

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The Occupy Wall Street movement seized Zuccotti Park on September 17, three years and two days after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and the United States entered its most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression. Many have wondered what kept the Occupiers waiting. To weary eyes that have witnessed three years of economic hardship and our country’s repeated flirtations with economic collapse, a movement that just now chooses to occupy the physical center of national finance looks almost belated. And yet there is good reason why the Occupation’s moment has come today, rather than in 2008 or 2009. The key to Occupy Wall Street’s timeliness can be found in the movement’s essentially political – rather than economic – character.

To the extent that the American left did have an economic response to the financial crisis of 2008, it was the election of Barack Obama and the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act less than two months after Obama took office. The Tea Party, in turn, arose in direct opposition to this relatively modest left-wing attempt to ameliorate the stiff recession that rocked the country in the wake of the 2008 crisis.

Two years of skirmishing between left and right culminated in the surreal debt-ceiling crisis of last summer, when Republicans steeped in tea and Democrats paralyzed by ideological ambivalence manufactured a national emergency. Media, political, and financial elites all began to suggest that the current American regime no longer had the political will to govern itself. Meanwhile, legitimation crises swept the Middle East, North Africa, and the European Union, as workers, students, and the mass unemployed flooded the streets of their cities not just to protest the policies of their governments, but to contest their governments’ right to rule.

It was not economic recession but these political crises – in the United States and abroad – that provided the conditions of possibility for Occupy Wall Street. To be sure, economics and politics are impossible to disentangle, and every current political crisis — from the debt-ceiling debate to Tahrir Square – has deep economic roots. But when comparing Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, the two populist movements that currently structure American political discourse, it becomes clear that the Tea Party merely issues a checklist of middle-class economic demands, while Occupy Wall Street offers a truly political critique of modern American society.

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The Tea Party does seem to be political. After all, Tea Partiers are deeply interested in the Constitution. But in fact their devotion to the Constitution only serves as a blueprint for depoliticization. Indeed, Tea Partiers believe that the nation’s founding documents enshrines a de-politicized vision of property relations: they believe “government” and the “free market” to be two distinct forces locked in a zero-sum contest. As government grows, the marketplace shrinks; as government shrinks, the marketplace grows. While the market is the sacred source of whatever the Tea Partier possesses, the government is an unholy and alien threat. What’s more, the Tea Party’s preferred theory of constitutional interpretation – a simplistic version of “originalism” — works to banish actual democratic politics to a distant past. This theory holds that the Founders were not just the best statesmen, they were the last statesmen: What the Founders believed (properly understood) remains the true, unchanging law. Ever since then, the only role for politicians is to respect these inviolable laws which secure for the water-carriers what they have won in the marketplace.

The Tea Partiers’ thin account of democratic statecraft helps explain their surprising comfort with modern American electoral politics. Though the Tea Party has plenty of bad things to say about Washington, it is happy to keep sending its representatives there. The task assigned to these representatives is, of course, to shrink the government and to expand the reach of the marketplace. The Tea Party’s commitment to electoral politics – as an entirely non-revolutionary means of maintaining existing property relations – most clearly distinguishes its version of populism from that of Occupy Wall Street. While the Tea Party begins with an economic vision and uses extant political channels to realize it, the Occupy Wall Street movement begins with a critique of politics.

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The practice of Occupation offers radical answers to three basic political questions:

1. Who are the legitimate political leaders?

2. How do they govern themselves?

3. Where do they govern?

To the question, “Who are the legitimate political leaders?,” the Occupation answers “We are.” Many of the men and women who seized public parks and city squares earlier this fall were eager Obama voters in 2008. While the Obama campaign maintained a grassroots aesthetic – its base of small donors (since eschewed) and its adoption of the United Farm Workers of America’s catchphrase “Yes We Can!”— its heart was plebiscitarian. The people were called upon to put their leader in power, and they did so with passion. But as Obama supporters watched their beloved representative quickly surround himself with banker-economists, a Republican Secretary of Defense, and two brash and amoral chiefs-of staff, disillusionment set in.

While the Occupiers may not have a ready-made alternative to their country’s failing political institutions, they do have a practical response to their feeling of disempowerment: they will now lead themselves. The Occupation’s roots are in anarchism, a surprisingly radical source for a contemporary American oppositional politics. One of the early members of the movement, the anthropologist David Graeber, cites the “refusal to work through the government” and the “determination instead to act for oneself” as core, anarchist principles of occupation. This emphasis on autonomous action is a clear rebuke to the rhythms of representative democracy, which demand the people’s passion for election-season contests and expect popular passivity the rest of the cycle.

Each person who arrives at an Occupied camp site or meeting is encouraged to take control, to propose and realize their ideas in real time. No credentials are required to run discussions, plan marches, handle finances, reach out to the media, or care for the sick. Even today, after the November 15 eviction from Zuccotti and several other evictions at Occupied sites around the country, the movement’s distributed leadership rolls along. In New York, countless working groups and general meetings continue to develop new “direct actions” (targeted protests of certain political and economic institutions) and solve logistical problems – such as where to house all the people the NYPD threw out of the Park.

At a recent panel discussion, several audience members offered suggestions to one long-time Occupier about how he and his colleagues might better represent the 99 percent. His answer was not so much a dismissal of the audience’s concerns but a call for them to mobilize their own beliefs. “Come on down to the park,” he counseled, his deeper meaning being: the direction of the movement is determined by whoever acts in its name. This focus on autonomy is one reason why the Movement has never produced a single set of demands. In making a demand, one calls upon others to do something. From the beginning, the Occupiers have emphasized doing things on their own.

If the Occupiers are their own leaders, then how do all these leaders govern themselves? At the heart of the movement is the General Assembly (G.A.), where proposals are discussed and plans made for future action. Each Occupied site or city has its own General Assembly. The composition of these G.A.s is entirely fluid: anyone may participate and whoever shows up on a particular day becomes a decision-maker. All proposals require a ninety percent super-majority to pass, ensuring that when the movement speaks or acts as a whole, it is not representing a select few, but mobilizing a near-consensus.

Because of its size, of course, a G.A. is not always the best forum for deliberation and decision. A variety of working groups – media outreach, direct action (planning protests), medical support, housing – emulate the direct democratic structure of the G.A. but focus on specific needs. Working groups are composed of volunteers and funded by a Spokes-council, a streamlined arm of the General Assembly to which each working group sends representatives. These representatives must rotate every meeting to prevent – as much as possible – the crystallization of leadership blocs within working groups or the Spokes-council itself. These Occupied forms of deliberation and organization constitute a clear, if cumbersome, rebuke to “indoor” politics, which the Occupiers perceive to be plagued by hierarchies – of money, secrecy, credentials – and thus inaccessible to many Americans.

The anti-hierarchical ethos of the Occupy Wall Street movement goes deep, and has influenced its relationships with the wider society – from the press to the police. Most political organizations have privileged decision-makers who coordinate with outside groups. Worried that these liaisons would develop special relationships with powerful outsiders such as politicians and police chiefs and thus become a vanguard, the movement eschews such forms of coordination. While this rejection of coordination limits the ability of the movement to grow rapidly, it also prevents professional outsiders from imposing their preferred hierarchies on the Occupiers. As a result, the movement retains a critical ethos, inherently antagonistic to the forms of order with which political and social authorities are comfortable.

The more that Occupy Wall Street’s leadership and organization function as a critique of extant political institutions, however, the less they seem to offer a viable alternative to those institutions. It seems impossible for tens of millions of people to participate in a General Assembly or for autonomous groups with uncertain authority to run a country’s defense or health-care systems. In other words, Occupy Wall Street’s vision of direct democracy does not appear to work on a national level. Here, Occupy Wall Street’s answer to the third question – “Where do the people govern?” – suggests why the movement’s alternative politics need not be fully scalable to be considered successful or coherent. The movement’s answer to this question of place is “Outside, in the streets.”

In taking to the streets with their peculiar brand of leadership and organization, the Occupy Wall Street movement taps into a deep American tradition of “outdoor” politics. “Outdoor” political movements arise to oppose “indoor” politics – the current set of representative political institutions and actors. “Outdoor” political movements derive their name from literally assembling out of doors – beyond the corridors of power – to make themselves heard and to demonstrate their political will. For much of American history, the motor of progressive political change was the assembly of the people out-of-doors, coming together to debate and organize beyond the prescribed avenues of official political reform.

Pillars of modern American democracy – women’s suffrage, the welfare state, racial equality – all rest upon the surprisingly fluid foundations of outdoor and anti-institutional assemblies of motivated citizen. From the suffrage movement’s conventions and parades to the labor movement’s sixty year campaign of strikes that begain in the 1870s to the civil rights movements sit-ins and putatively “illegal” marches – all these movements seized the public square to broadcast their views. They did so to assert their right, as popular sovereigns, to the public land so often dominated by the officials whose political dominance they opposed.

Occupy Wall Street’s repertoire of spatial tactics continues this august tradition. Most notable are the movement’s occupations themselves – seizures of public or semi-public land for the purposes of 24-hour political organizing and action. But even in the wake of violent police clearances of these static sites, the Occupy movement has insisted on the holding of public space; in New York, marches snake through the barricaded streets of the Financial District and around police cordons at City Hall, while G.A.s and working groups continue to meet in parks and public atria to debate and organize.

Like Occupy Wall Street, earlier “outdoor” political movements were also intent upon fulfilling the promise of popular – as opposed to oligarchic – rule; their members saw themselves as taking direct control of the ship of state from untrustworthy captains, just as the Occupiers see themselves today. And just like the Occupiers, earlier “outdoor” politicians adopted models of leadership and organization that were widely seen as peculiar in order to distinguish themselves from the status quo.

“Outdoor” political movements, then, are neither protests, petitioning the current government with a list of demands, nor parties, offering themselves as an electoral alternative to the ruling machines. Rather, “outdoor” political movements threaten the social and political order, forcing everyday Americans to reckon with alternative ways of life and changing the national agenda. They do so through direct confrontations with the representatives of order – whether police or pundits – who seek to maintain the dominance of “indoor” politics and its self-interested regulations of appropriate kinds of political actors and modes of discussion. The medium of “outdoor” political movements is an integral part of their message: the very spectacle of disfavored groups – such as women, blacks, or workers – engaging in political discussion and action (sometimes illegally), altered the national consciousness and thus the conditions of representative politics. Similarly, Occupy Wall Street’s economic populism – to name one facet of the movement – is already challenging the moral shame which attaches to debt in contemporary American social and political life.

There is one important disanalogy between Occupy Wall Street and previous movements of outdoor politics in American history, however. For, although “outdoor” politics has always been America’s vital supplement to representative democracy, it has grown increasingly endangered by the power of professional police forces and the presence of standing armies. In recent decades, police suppression of the people-out-of-doors entered a new phase, first in response to the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle and, most dramatically, as an adjunct to the war on terror. The militant police response to the Iraq War protests of 2003 and the Presidential Convention protests of 2004 and 2008 was audacious, typified by the construction of Orwellian “designated demonstration zones” – barbed wire cages only within which protesters were permitted to express themselves without fear of officially-sanctioned assault or detention.

Today, in order to assemble legally out of doors, groups must generally obtain costly permits from political officials and coordinate their every action with heavily-armed urban police forces. Under these conditions, “outdoor” politics is stamped with the barriers to entry and hierarchical structures of “indoor” politics. The Occupy Wall Street movement, however, has self-consciously refused these contemporary constraints on outdoor politics, occupying land and conducting marches without permits or police coordination. The intentional chaos these unpermitted actions produce has attracted intense media attention and galvanized citizens jaded by docile protests that seem to recapitulate the talking points of political leaders. Thus, it may well be that Occupy Wall Street heralds a return to “outdoor” politics.

In resisting the modern war on “outdoor” politics, the Occupiers are, ironically, the true inheritors of the Tea Party tradition. Unlike their namesakes, contemporary Tea Partiers are piously committed to the letter of the law. Thus, Jenny Beth Martin, a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots organization, told the New York Times that “We have worked very hard to be respectful of the laws.” Similarly, Tim Philips, the president of Americans for Prosperity and a Tea Party supporter, explained to Politico that the Tea Party would only benefit from the disreputable “lawbreaking” and “radical vision” of Occupy Wall Street. Yet American history shows that true political change only comes when citizens push the envelope of what contemporary political institutions are willing to authorize. The Tea Party’s absolute commitment to legalism indicates their lack of interest in such deep change.

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But even if Occupy Wall Street marks a renaissance in “outdoor” politics, does the movement have an end-game? To be sure, the Occupiers’ unorthodox approach to political leadership, organization, and location performs a vivid critique of our paralyzed and corrupt representative institutions, a critique in which Americans excluded from “indoor” politics can participate. But to what can this critique possibly lead, other than more Americans in the streets complaining about the way things are? After all, in apparent contrast to the outdoor political movements of the past – women’s suffrage, labor, civil rights – Occupy Wall Street does not have a silver-bullet policy prescription toward which it moves: the 19^th amendment, labor protection laws, the end of Jim Crow.

There are several, partial responses to concerns about the nebulousness of the movement’s goals. None of them may be entirely satisfying. But, taken together, they suggest that a quick dismissal of the future prospects of Occupy Wall Street is unwise.

First, although the Occupy Wall Street movement does not organize itself around an agenda of parliamentary reform , it may well be that more reformist political actors can capitalize on the political energy, anxiety, and even antagonism that the movement produces. Describing the impact of Occupy Wall Street on a recent union-backed repeal of an anti-collective-bargaining law in Ohio, Damon Silvers, the policy director of the AFL-CIO, explained, “They helped define what it was that was going on, and gave people a sense that you can do something about it.” Meanwhile, Democratic politicians have increasingly adopted Occupy’s rhetoric of class antagonism – the 1 percent and the 99 percent. And it was the proliferation of Occupations in October that punctuated a stark shift from summer talk of austerity to autumn talk of “income inequality,” even among some Republicans. If the movement proves long-lived, traditional political actors may be able to work in parallel to it, capitalizing on – or being compelled by – the attention that Occupy Wall Street draws to political and economic failure.

Second, the perception we have today of earlier outdoor political movements as efficient vehicles for the delivery of concrete and coherent policy goals may itself be misleading. Although, in hindsight, these movements appear to culminate in obvious policy reforms, much of their work was in self-constitution. Before it makes sense to talk of vindicating a group’s interests through policy change, there must be a group and there must be interests. Even in the seemingly clear-cut case of the movement for women’s suffrage, the very idea that women were not represented by current political institutions had to be carved out of the stony edifice of virtual representation. And even then, class and racial divisions threw into question whether there was such a general social group – “women” – that required emancipation. Decades of ostentatious organizing and action – in which women increasingly adopted postures of leadership, solidarity, and defiance previously considered unnatural if not impossible – constructed the systemic figure of a “woman without a vote.” Only once such a figure existed did the passage of the 19^th amendment make sense as a serious goal.

Third, there may be something unique about Occupy Wall Street’s discontent that explains the ambiguity of its end-game. Even if one accepts that social movements must struggle over time to construct the “group” and “interests” they represent, the coherent group and consistent set of interests that Occupy Wall Street might one day come to embody seem particularly obscure. This obscurity partly arises from the political situation that the movement seeks to critique. In 1990, reflecting on the future of the Left, Jürgen Habermas noted the difficulty of organizing around political economic discontent in a democratic welfare state:

The classical conflict over the distribution of wealth in the society based upon labour was structured against the background of the interests of labour such that both sides were in a position to threaten the other. Even the structurally disadvantaged side could resort, in the last instance, to a strike; in other words, to the organized withdrawal of labour and the concomitant interruption of the production process. Today this is no longer the case. The conflict over the distribution of wealth has been institutionalized by the welfare state in such a way that a broad majority of people in work confront a minority of marginal groupings thrown together to form a heterogeneous mass without the power to set up any similar sort of embargo. If they do not just give up, and resort self-destructively to illness, crime or blind revolt to deal with their burden, the marginalized and the underprivileged can, in the last resort, only make their interestes known by means of a protest vote.

The social, economic, and political differentiation of modern capitalist democracy prevents any sort of constructive, direct action, such as a general strike, aimed at the sources of systemic inequality. But Habermas does not merely find a general strike improbable. Rather, according to him, the same systemic complexity that impedes such an extra-parliamentary attack also makes it ethically dubious. For Habermas, modern capitalist democracy is so complex that attempts to alter its basic economic and political structures risk terrible disorder. The old hope of the Left – to dissolve and reconstitute existing property relations – becomes a piece of nihilistic adventurism (“crime,” “blind revolt”) when there is no way to vouchsafe a non-violent, economically sustainable, and persistently democratic transformation. In other words, things might not be perfect, but overly-invasive and ambitious reforms will only make them worse.

Sustainable, gradual reform, then, will come not through the organization of a vanguard party or the escalation of competition over interests (whether economic or cultural), but through the minority’s moral appeal to the majority. By “introducing morality into the debate” and highlighting the plight of “the homeless and the beggars … . the areas of town that have been reduced to ghettoes,” Habermas argues that the minority can lead the majority in self-reflection and “self-correction,” consolidating “electoral support” for reform. This is a story familiar to Americans, a story about the efficacy of minoritarian moral outrage. Our country’s signal example may be the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The example that Habermas chose in 1990 was successful protest against the installation of medium-range missiles in West Germany.

Unlike these reformist protests, however, Occupy Wall Street arises from discontent with the system itself. Indeed, the sense that animates the Occupiers is that moral appeals about economic and political inequality no longer stand a chance of being translated into systemic reform. Perhaps the system of political economic power that administers society has become entirely unmoored from social influence. Habermas admits the possibility of just such a situation, in which “the network of intersubjectively shared and communicatively structured lifeworlds is torn so definitively that the autonomous system of the economy, and, with it, the self-programming processes of state management, will never be brought back within the horizons of the lifeworld—not even by the most indirect types of regulation.” Whether such a situation obtains is a question that Habermas argues cannot be “answer[ed] adequately at the level of theory, and must therefore [be] reformulate[d] practically and politically.”

Habermas does not, however, make clear how one can verify that such a disastrous situation obtains. Nor does he say what citizens should do once they believe that, in fact, system and lifeworld have entirely parted company. The Occupy Wall Street movement stands near the edge of this uncertainty, where no one can say for sure whether the system is beyond democratic control, and no one can say for sure what the proper response to such democratic failure would be.

The movement’s self-conscious refusal to promulgate demands expresses this uncertainty by means of a disturbing silence. Similarly, its self-conscious refusal to seek permits – a refusal that transforms every moralizing protester into a criminal – accentuates the disturbingly thin line between democracy and crime that exists when the legitimacy of a democratic state is in doubt. That the Occupation has remained non-violent, on the other hand, distinguishes it from a traditional revolutionary movement, a movement confident about the total illegitimacy of the prevailing system.

Of course, anger at the current economic crisis and political paralysis may peter out soon enough. If it does, then traditional politicians will not be able to continue to capitalize on Occupy Wall Street’s oppositional energy; nor will the movement have lasted long enough to develop a socially significant sense of group identity and needs. On the other hand, if the European Union collapses, the United States enters a second, deeper recession by its own devices, or a Republican Party truly intent on austerity budgeting takes control, there may be many more Americans – out of patience, out of their jobs, out of their homes – looking for a new form of public life. In such a case of obvious systemic failure, Occupy Wall Street’s reinvigoration of outdoor politics will seem timely. People will look back on the fall of 2011 as a moment when American society developed a form of political action capable of exerting immediate pressure on the broken institutions that preserve control of the public sphere.

Jeremy Kessler is a J.D./Ph.D. candidate at Yale Law School and Yale University’s Department of History.

Thatcher and Conservatism

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 10:16:00 -0500

By Timothy Stanley.

“Ask a Conservative what kind of society they’d like to live in and they’ll generally identify the 1950s. This is highly ironic, because the faithful, decent national community that we imagine the 1950s to have been was also economically highly regulated and strongly wedded to the postwar consensus that Margaret Thatcher tore up.”

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When I was a boy, “Thatcher” was a curse word. My family loathed Mrs. T with a passion that burned hotter than the sun. They weren’t particularly political: my father was a lapsed trades-unionist and my mother was too well bred to vote. It was simply axiomatic that “she” was the enemy and “she” had to go. They drank a toast when she resigned from office.

I carried that burning faith well into my twenties, before I discovered history and retired from politics. Now it is with mixed feelings that I discover that a Hollywood movie has been made about Mrs. Thatcher’s life. For starters, it’s too early to make a film like this. Emotions are too raw for it to be watched objectively, and the lady is too advanced in years to offer a fair rebuttal. The kind of sordid details that make a biopic worth watching can only offend her family. The inevitable absence of the stories of ordinary people caught up in the Thatcher Revolution will equally offend the rest of us. Margaret Thatcher did not single handedly drag Britain into the postmodern era. We got there ourselves by putting pins through our noses and marrying the servants. (At least, that’s how mummy did it).

But the movie does offer those of us who are the “children of Thatcher” an opportunity to reflect on her legacy, especially now that the Credit Crunch has called so much of it into question. Since leaving the world of my parents far behind, I’ve settled into an idiosyncratic brand of conservatism that allies me more comfortably with the Right. Yet, I’m still uncomfortable with what happened to Britain in the 1980s and I lack the enthusiasm that many of my peers feel for Mrs. Thatcher. My critique of her is a Tory one, but it is critical nonetheless.

Margaret Thatcher’s analysis of what was wrong with Britain in 1979 was spot on. Militant unions, spiraling costs, outdated infrastructure, punishing tax rates – all these things crippled our industrial base and prevented growth. Then, as now, we were spending too much and taking too little in. A restive Left complicated matters. The Seventies breed of trades-unionist had less interest in a good deal for their workers than they did in replacing Parliament with a Supreme Soviet. In this climate, the medicine that Thatcher applied was correct: tax cuts, regulations on union power, privatization. Her measures were sensible enough for most other Western governments to copy them. Even social democratic parties in Germany, Sweden, and Australia cut and privatized their way out of recession.

But the sense of social dislocation that resulted from these policies was far bigger in Britain than anywhere else. Reaganomics could be equally as harsh, but Reagan’s approval rating was consistently high and he died a father figure appropriated by both Left and Right. So why does Mrs. T get such bad press?

The answer partly lies in the severity of the early Eighties recession, which still looms large in the public imagination. As the government cut off subsidies to failing businesses, the fall in productivity was the largest since the Great Depression and unemployment tripled to three million. Rioting in major cities became ubiquitous and crime soared. Thatcher’s policies tore up a “postwar settlement” that had promised an ever increasing standard of living through full employment. Right-wing ideologues saw that settlement as a shameful sell-out to socialism that swapped empire for welfare state. But the settlement had endured for so long because it was supported by consecutive Conservative governments. Those Tory grandees felt a sense of duty to the men they had fought and died alongside in the trenches, so they accepted the consensus regardless of its financial cost.

By dismantling the postwar settlement in the name of rescuing Britain from decline, Margaret Thatcher became a more revolutionary figure than her Labour Party opponents. In an excellent piece in the Daily Telegraph, Charles Moore writes that she redefined conservatism as “insurrection”. By so doing, she created a paradox. The point of conservatism is to preserve as much as possible of the social order that we inherit. It can be necessary sometimes to throw out the bad to preserve the good – which is why previous Conservative governments emancipated the Catholics or expanded the franchise. But the idea of purposefully uprooting the social order – even to return to a pre-Lapsarian, pre-socialist past – contradicts the conservative instinct for cohesion and order. A more traditional Conservative leader might have responded to the crisis of 1979 by trying to build a new consensus for piecemeal reform – to defend what was best about the postwar settlement by discarding what was worst.

Instead, the Thatcher government regarded its task as starting the world over again, and they approached it with the unbending fervor of the ideologue. As much was recently acknowledged by Norman Tebbit, the former “enforcer” of Thatcherism. In 1981, in response to the suggestion that rioting was the natural response to unemployment, the then Employment Secretary said, “I grew up in the 30s with an unemployed father. He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking ‘til he found it.” The paraphrase “on yer bike” became shorthand for the government’s firmness in the face of social protest. In 2009, Tebbit admitted that Thatcherism, particularly its conflict with the miners, had resurrected the British economy at a terrible price: “Black-hearted old Tory that I am, I recognize that in those mining towns and villages crime was very low, as was school truancy and yobbish behavior, because here there was a close-knit social structure in which there was a great deal of social stability. The rapid collapse of the coal mining industry did break up those communities in a terrible manner. I think it was a contributory factor to what was going on in society and the change in a lot of our old inner cities, where once, even if you were Norman Tebbit, you could walk safely through the streets.”

It should be stressed that the decline of the mining and industrial sectors was inevitable and germane to the Western world: Thatcher didn’t start it and she couldn’t have stopped it. But something about her government gave the impression that she didn’t really care about it, that her policies were class war masquerading as public policy. It wasn’t just the brutalism of her manifesto, or the fact that she was (inaccurately) quoted as saying there was “no such thing as society”. It was the lady herself. Her terrifying, patiently rehearsed vowels rang with the fiery anger of the Puritan. Her frightening stare barely contained the rage of the overtaxed haves against the indolence of the have nots. She was the silent majority personified, on the phone yet again to complain about the late delivery of the post or the foul language of the garbage men. Such a Conservative woman is infinitely more chilling than their male counterparts. She could not be mellowed by Rotary Bridge or public school frolics. She was the revolutionary vanguard of a late-to-liberation, female bourgeoisie.

Since 1945, Socialism and the welfare state have been responsible for the deaths of many great British characteristics, particularly frugality and chivalry. But Capitalism has done a lot of damage, too. The deregulated marketplace has brought competition, but also ugly chain stores, a taste for drugs, pornography, violent television, avarice, and materialism. Post-Thatcher, the Conservative Party seemed to lose sight of the fact that the freedom to make money isn’t the only pillar of the Good Society (although it’s a strong one). Ask a Conservative what kind of society they’d like to live in and they’ll generally identify the 1950s. This is highly ironic, because the faithful, decent national community that we imagine the 1950s to have been was also economically highly regulated and strongly wedded to the postwar consensus that Margaret Thatcher tore up.

If there is a psychological problem with the post-Thatcher generation of Conservatives, it is that they lack the emotional condition that forged the postwar settlement. I don’t expect them to endorse it or revive it, but the kind of Tories who signed up to it in the 1950s were men and women who had greater sympathy for the Britain of yesterday and today. They took pride in Church and Empire and they loved the people who had stood by them at Ypres and Dunkirk. They governed Britain because they felt they owed it something. They were burdened, even blinded, by duty. Mrs. Thatcher had her own faith, and it was strong enough to pull Britain out of the abyss. But I see little such passion or compassion in George Obsorne or David Cameron. These are ambitious young men with little experience of the world beyond Westminster. Their forebears might have called them vulgar. At least Margaret Thatcher had conviction and wit, and the withering tone of voice that gets things done.

Timothy Stanley, an historian, is the author of The Crusader: The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan.

The Age of Uncertainty

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 19:00:00 -0500

By Sheri Berman.

“Particularly in the West, what seems striking about the current period is the widespread sense of the need for change combined with the lack of any coherent plans for it.”

On discontent and its failure to effect transformation.

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We seem to be living in an age of uncertainty. Wherever one looks, there are protests and uprisings. A democratization wave is sweeping the Middle East. The United States has witnessed the rise of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, while right-wing populist parties are overturning Europe’s traditional party systems. Almost all corners of the globe seem to be in the midst of upheaval.

Because discontent has appeared in so many places at approximately the same time, it is perhaps natural to view these events as connected and to conclude that their appearance is foreshadowing a period of fundamental transformation. We can see these tendencies clearly, for example, in recent discussions of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has been referred to as America’s “Arab Spring.” Indeed, both participants and commentators frequently draw attention to the similarities between the two movements’ forms (“youth driven, hyper-networked, grass roots”) and revolutionary goals (overthrowing a regime “based on the greed and corruption of the 1%”). Are such comparisons appropriate? Do these movements collectively herald the dawning of a new era? Is ours a passing moment of discontent, or the beginning of a lasting transformation?

To start answering these questions, we must first distinguish between two things that are so often conflated in contemporary discussion, namely discontent and transformation. The most popular approach to explaining why seemingly stable societies suddenly transform focuses on social and psychological factors: the accumulation of societal grievances; the development of pervasive discontent, frustration, and (relative) deprivation; a growing discrepancy between the values of an existing regime and its citizens. These factors are linked to the formation of broadly based popular movements which then seek to overthrow an existing order. From this perspective, in other words, understanding instances of revolutionary change requires focusing, as one important scholar of revolutions noted, on “why, when, and how large numbers of individual men and women become discontented”[1]; fundamental transformations, in other words, are the products of revolutionary movements animated and powered by widespread social discontent.

Despite its familiarity and superficial plausibility, however, this view is fundamentally flawed – most obviously because it does not fit the historical record very well. Discontent as well as the revolts and uprisings it generates are fairly commonplace; periods of revolutionary transformation are, however, exceedingly rare. As one of history’s great revolutionaries once noted, “the mere existence of privations is not enough to cause a [revolution]; if it were, the masses would always be in revolt.”[2] Why then do some periods of discontent lead to lasting transformation while others do not? What lessons does the historical record provide to those interested in trying to figure our whether or not today’s discontent is likely to produce revolutionary change or simply peter out?

One important historical lesson that seems particularly relevant to our contemporary moment is that it is much easier to be negative than positive. Or, to be more precise, it is much easier to mobilize against an old order than to generate consensus for a new one. There are many historical examples of widespread, even cross-national movements held together by opposition to an existing regime. But such movements are often unable to agree on what they want to replace it. And without some sense of what sort of new order should be created, oppositional movements tend to lose steam over time: all too often, they fall prey to internal squabbles or are eventually overwhelmed by resurgent forces of the ancien régime (or both).

A good example of this dynamic, in fact, can be found in the set of revolutions which the contemporary period is often said to evoke: 1848. (The very term “Arab spring” consciously or unconsciously invokes this time, which was known as “the springtime of the peoples.”) In 1848, oppositional movements to existing dictatorial regimes broke out in almost every corner of Europe and even in some other parts of the globe. As the great historian Eric Hobsbawm observed, few revolutions in history have “spread more rapidly and widely, running like a bushfire across frontiers, countries and even oceans.”[3] Indeed, within a matter of months dictatorial leaders and regimes that had seemed completely secure crumbled under the onslaught of popular movements and mobilizations unlike anything the world had seen before. The height of this revolutionary ferment was reached with the downfall of the long-standing chancellor of the Austrian Empire, Klemens von Metternich, who – perhaps like Hosni Mubarak in the Arab world today – was the ultimate symbol of the sclerotic and reactionary order that had reigned in Europe for decades. And yet, all the regimes that had been overthrown were restored within eighteen months of the original uprisings. How could such a dramatic turn-around occur? How, in the face of massive, cross-national discontent was the old order able to stage a come-back?

Basically what happened in 1848 is that the opposition lost the game before the old order could come back and win it. In the years preceding 1848 discontent had been rising in many sectors of European society. Authoritarian monarchies excluded the vast majority of citizens from political power and, especially in Europe’s east, ignored or repressed the growing demands of national and linguistic minorities. By 1848, in other words, many different groups were united in having significant grievances against the existing order. But once this order collapsed, divisions among the discontented came to fore. Members of the middle class wanted economic liberalization while some workers demanded more radical economic and social change; liberals favored opening up the political system even as they remained opposed to universal suffrage while democrats would settle for nothing less than full democratization; finally, various communal groups each wanted to control their own fates (and often territories) but were often unwilling to recognize the right of other groups to do the same. Once the old order collapsed, in other words, the glue that had been holding oppositional movements together dissolved, bringing their lack of a common vision or set of goals for the “new world order” to the fore. This was the opening the forces of the old order needed: within about a year and a half of the initial democratic “wave” in 1848, all these oppositional movements had collapsed into infighting, fallen apart or been crushed. Some form of dictatorship returned to every place from which it had disappeared.

The failure of 1848, though it is perhaps a particularly dramatic example of the inability of protestors to translate their discontent into real transformations, is closer to being the rule than the exception: there are many more examples of massive discontent with an existing order than there are of successful attempts to create a new one. Our time period may one day be counted as yet another one in this long series of failures to translate widespread discontent into true political transformation.

Today, we are certainly living through a period of massive discontent. Sclerotic and unresponsive political regimes, economic downturns, and financial crises have created grievances and dissatisfaction in many corners of the globe. But much of this opposition remains focused more on what it opposes than on what it wants, better able to articulate why it wants to do away with the existing order than able to convey viable alternatives to it. This is truer in Europe and the U.S. than it is in the Arab world, where problems were both greater and the basic alternatives clearer (i.e. democracy vs. dictatorship). But even in the Arab world, divisions within oppositional movements emerged rapidly in many cases, particularly between those who favored more “liberal” democratic regimes and those who favored more “Islamic” ones. In Europe and the U.S., meanwhile, surveys continually show widespread agreement that existing political economies are “out of whack” – unfair, unjust, too unequal, etc. And yet, a coherent alternative capable of attracting widespread support is lacking on both sides of the Atlantic. As a result, in Europe protests have been disproportionately filtered through right wing populist parties that direct their growing discontent at immigrants and European bureaucrats, while in the U.S. movements on both the right (the tea party) and left (Occupy Wall Street) proclaim to represent “the people,” but have little in the way of positive, attractive plans to offer those who do not already support them.

Prognostication is always a difficult and dangerous business. Perhaps we are still in the early stages of our “age of uncertainty.” Powerful and attractive plans for changing the status quo might soon emerge. But if history is any guide, the chances of that happening are slim. Particularly in the West, what seems striking about the current period is the widespread sense of the need for change combined with the lack of any coherent plans for it. When we think back on history’s great revolutions in particular, or the periods of lasting transformation more generally, we can (at least in retrospect) see both what people were fighting for and against. Take, for example, the last two periods of fundamental change in the West’s modern history — 1945 and 1968. In 1945, the struggle was to bring to an end the horrors of fascism and National Socialism, and finally to put (Western) Europe on the path to stable capitalist democracy. In 1968, the struggle was to transform Western societies, to bring social change in line with the political and economic changes that had been wrought after 1945. Maybe the early 21^st century’s John Maynard Keynes, Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, or Danny the Red is out there and will soon emerge to help lead us out of our season of discontent. We are all waiting with baited breath. But, for now, this unlikely figure of hope is nowhere to be found.

Sheri Berman is a professor of political science at Barnard College. Her latest book is The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century.

[1] Charles Tilly, “Does Modernization Breed Revolution?” in Jack A. Goldstone, ed. Revolutions: Theoretical, Comparative, and Historical Studies. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1986), p. 49.

[2] Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution (NY: Monad Press, 1961), quoted in Skocpol, “Revolutions in the Third World,” in Skocpol, ed., Social Revolutions in the Modern World (N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 260.

[3] Hobsbawm, Age of Capital, p. 4.

Towards a New Manifesto

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 11:33:00 -0400

By Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.

“We cannot call for the defence of the Western world.”

In 1956, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer sat down to write an updated version of the Communist Manifesto. These are previously unpublished notes from their discussions.

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12 March 1956 (as recorded by Gretel Adorno and translated by Rodney Livingstone.)

Horkheimer:   Thesis: nowadays we have enough by way of productive forces; it is obvious that we could supply the entire world with goods and could then attempt to abolish work as a necessity for human beings. In this situation it is mankind’s dream that we should do away with both work and war. The only drawback is that the Americans will say that if we do so, we shall arm our enemies. And in fact, there is a kind of dominant stratum in the East compared to which John Foster Dulles is an amiable innocent.

Adorno:    We ought to include a section on the objection: what will people do with all their free time?

Horkheimer:     In actual fact their free time does them no good because the way they have to do their work does not involve engaging with objects. This means that they are not enriched by their encounter with objects. Because of the lack of true work, the subject shrivels up and in his spare time he is nothing.

Adorno:    Because people have to work so hard, there is a sense in which they spend their spare time obsessively repeating the rituals of the efforts that have been demanded of them. We must not be absolutely opposed to work.

Horkheimer:     We ought to construct a kind of programme for a new form of practice. In the East people degenerate into beasts of burden. Coolies probably had to do less work than today’s workers in six or seven hours.

Adorno:    ‘No herdsman and one herd.’ A kind of false classless society. Society finds itself on the way to what looks like the perfect classless society but is in reality the very opposite.

Horkheimer:     That’s too reactionary. We still have to say something to explain why mankind has to pass through this atomistic stage of civilization. Nowadays people say: treat us nicely and productivity will rise. The fact that this is said openly is worth a good deal in itself.

Adorno:    The reason why this entire question of spare time is so unfortunate is that people unconsciously mimic the work process, whereas what they really want is to stop working altogether. Happiness necessarily presupposes the element of effort. Basically, we should talk to mankind once again as in the eighteenth century: you are upholding a system that threatens to destroy you. The appeal to class won’t work any more, since today you are really all proletarians. One really has to think about whom one is addressing.

Horkheimer: The Western world.deal in itself.

Adorno: We know nothing of Asia.

Horkheimer:   What are we to say to the Western world? You must deliver food to the East?

Adorno:    The introduction of fully fledged socialism, third phase in the various countries. Everything hinges on that. What about the Communist Manifesto as a theme for variations?

Horkheimer:   The world situation is that everything seems to be improving, but the world’s liberators all look like Cesare Borgia.

Adorno:    I have the feeling that, under the banner of Marxism, the East might overtake Western civilization. This would mean a shift in the entire dynamics of history. Marxism is being adopted in Asia in much the same way as Christianity was taken up in Mexico at one time. Europe too will probably be swallowed up at some point in the future.

Horkheimer: I believe that Europe and America are probably the best civilizations that history has produced up to now as far as prosperity and justice are concerned. The key point now is to ensure the preservation of these gains. That can be achieved only if we remain ruthlessly critical of this civilization.

Adorno:    We cannot call for the defence of the Western world.

Horkheimer:     We cannot do so because that would destroy it. If we were to defend the Russians, that’s like regarding the invading Teutonic hordes as morally superior to the [Roman] slave economy. We have nothing in common with Russian bureaucrats. But they stand for a greater right as opposed to Western culture. It is the fault of the West that the Russian Revolution went the way it did. I am always terribly afraid that if we start talking about politics, it will produce the kind of discussion that used to be customary in the Institute.

Adorno:    Discussion should at all costs avoid a debased form of Marxism. That was connected with a specific kind of positivist tactic, namely the sharp divide between ideas and substance.

Horkheimer:     That mainly took the form of too great an insistence on retaining the terminology.

Adorno:    But this has to be said. They still talk as if a far-left splinter group were on the point of rejoining the Politburo tomorrow.

Horkheimer:     What are the implications of that for our terminology? As soon as we start arguing with the Russians about terminology we are lost.

Adorno:    On the other hand, we must not abandon Marxist terminology.

Horkheimer:     We have nothing else. But I am not sure how far we must retain it. Is the political question still relevant at a time when you cannot act politically?

Adorno:    On the one hand, it is ideology, on the other, all processes that might lead to change are political processes. Politics is both ideology and genuine reality.

Horkheimer:     You spoke in the subjunctive; you evidently do not really believe in these processes.

Adorno:    My innermost feeling is that at the moment everything has shut down, but it could all change at a moment’s notice. My own belief is as follows: this society is not moving towards a welfare state. It is gaining increasing control over its citizens but this control grows in tandem with the growth in its irrationality. And the combination of the two is constitutive.   As long as this tension persists, you cannot arrive at the equilibrium that would be needed to put an end to all spontaneity. I cannot imagine a world intensified to the point of insanity without objective oppositional forces being unleashed.

Horkheimer:     But I can. Because mankind is destroying itself. The world is mad and will remain so. When it comes down to it, I find it easy to believe that the whole of world history is just a fly caught in the flames.

Adorno:    The world is not just mad. It is mad and rational as well.

Horkheimer:   The only thing that goes against my pessimism is the fact that we still carry on thinking today. All hope lies in thought. But it is easy to believe that it could all come to an end.

Adorno:    And that no one will carry on thinking. But even Mr Eisenhower will be unable to choose Nixon as his running mate for fear of a preventive war.

Horkheimer: Perhaps. But what is that compared to the murder of twenty million Chinese?

Adorno:    The fact is that there is an authority that has the potential to prevent total catastrophe. This authority must be appealed to. It is the instinct in American voters that would refuse to tolerate Richard Nixon as Vice President.

Horkheimer:    That is a reformist position.

Adorno:    I have the feeling that what we are doing is not without its effect.

Horkheimer:   More or less, depending on whether we have a clear idea of what ought to be done. We cannot rely on the assumption that people will still have any memories of socialism. That can easily lead to arrogant criticism of the kind practised by Marx and Karl Kraus, where you have the feeling that their criticism is based on a mistaken theory. That only strengthens the wicked. What is dubious about Kraus is a kind of crowing, because whatever underlies his position is not something we can approve of. We have to defend the view that the West should produce so that no one will go hungry.

Adorno:     This must first be applied to the West itself.

Horkheimer:     What should happen? In France, for example? Should they make better laws?

Adorno:    Recorder    culture    is    spreading throughout Europe. We shall hear tomorrow that Rosenstock-Huessy has been made adviser to Eisenhower.

Horkheimer:     How would it be if we were to withdraw to the position of saying that we want to see to it that as much as possible of this Western culture is taken over into the next stage of history, in particular the tradition of rationality.

Adorno:    We cannot advocate that. Schelsky is simultaneously stupid and shrewd.

Horkheimer:     In addition to work we still have the concept of freedom.

Adorno:    On the one hand, we are facing questions today that can no longer simply be expressed in economic terms; on the other hand, anthropological questions can no longer be separated from economic ones.

Horkheimer:     Today it is no longer possible to distinguish between good and bad.

This is an excerpt from Towards a New Manifesto, which is out from Verso in both Great Britain and the United States this month.

What is Populism?

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 18:23:00 -0400

By Jan-Werner Mueller.

“What populism necessarily denies is the pluralism of contemporary societies: in the populist imagination there is only the people on the one hand and the illegitimate intruders into our politics, from both above and below, on the other.”

An account of what populism is, and why it is dangerous.

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It has become conventional wisdom that populism is on the rise across the West. The prime homegrown example is the Tea Party; in Europe, there are the Front National in France—which according to some polls has a chance of winning the first round of the presidential elections next year—Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord in Italy, and assorted parties that actually feature liberal-sounding concepts such as “freedom” and “progress” in the their names. The most prominent and arguably the most powerful of these is Geert Wilders’ strongly anti-Islam Freedom Party, at whose pleasure the current Dutch governing coalition stays in power. The Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev—one of the sharpest analysts writing on Western democracies today—has even declared our time an “Age of Populism.”

But what is populism? Many of us think that we know it when we see it: more or less open xenophobia, calls for lower taxes, appeals to working-class and petty-bourgeois fears of social decline, and resentment of traditional urban and cosmopolitan elites all seem to be hallmarks of populist parties and rhetoric. Yet can we really rest content with such a laundry list of attributes when populism, at least in some historical contexts—particularly in the United States—has also been associated with progressive politics? And what to make of politicians who advocate policies that appear on our list, but who are clearly part of the traditional political class? In what sense, if any, are Tony Blair and Nicolas Sarkozy populists? Would we like Obama to have been more of a populist in defending “Main Street against Wall Street” (as the somewhat clichéd phrase goes)? Is Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard professor, the last best hope for “true populism,” as some commentators seem to think?

For all the talk about populism, it’s far from obvious that we know what we are talking about. We simply do not have anything like a theory of populism, or even coherent criteria for deciding when political actors have turned populist in some meaningful sense. All politicians—especially in poll-driven democracies—want to appeal to “the people”; all want to tell a story that can be understood by as many citizens as possible; all want to be sensitive to how “ordinary folks” think and especially how they feel; all want to gain political advantage by pointing to perceived threats, whether from the inside or the outside; and most of them most of the time also prefer lower taxes. So what makes a politician particularly populist?

The lack of a theory of populism is not for want of trying. Over the past few years thinkers on the left have done the most to understand populism better—and sometimes even to redeem aspects of it. The Argentine philosopher Ernesto Laclau, the most sophisticated theorist of populism in recent times, has argued that populism is about the creation of “cultural hegemony”: populist leaders and movements focus on one demand (such as lower taxes) with which many people can identify—so far so obvious—but which also comes to stand in for many other demands that supposedly aren’t addressed by the system as it is. One struggle turns into the equivalent of many others.

Laclau has drawn fire from fellow leftists who charge that populism always relies on the creation of enemies and is even “proto-fascist.” Laclau, however, argued that all politics is about the creation of popular identities through conflict; his point was to overcome conventional, pejorative meanings of populism and make the Left understand that “constructing a people is the main task of radical politics.” (According to this logic, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement are also populist.) This is an original theory, but one that (consciously and purposefully) expands the meaning of populism to such an extent that the term loses all analytical value in understanding the “populist” phenomena that, for better or for worse, many observers feel are not simply explained by the nature of political struggle in general.

So is a populist simply a successful politician one doesn’t like? Can the charge of “populism” itself be populist? I would argue that populism is not about a particular social base (such as the lower-middle class or what the French call les classes populaires), but is rather a form of political imaginary. It’s a way of seeing the political world that opposes a fully unified—but essentially fictional—people against small minorities who are put outside the authentic people. It is a hallmark of populism—and a structural one, independent of any particular national context or policy issue—that it construes an “unhealthy coalition” between an elite that doesn’t really belong and marginal groups that don’t really belong either. Classic examples are liberal elites and racial minorities in the United States, or socialist elites and ethnic groups such as the Roma in Central and Eastern Europe, or “communists” (according to Berlusconi) and illegal immigrants in Italy. The controversy over Obama’s birth certificate made this logic of outsider resentment almost ridiculously obvious.

What populism necessarily denies is the pluralism of contemporary societies: in the populist imagination there is only the people on the one hand and the illegitimate intruders into our politics, from both above and below, on the other. There is, according to the populist Weltanschauung, no such thing as a legitimate opposition—which, after all, is one of the key features of liberal democracy, understood as a form of conflict between competing factions that is contained by an underlying consensus about the legitimacy of democratic disagreement.

This desire for an unachievable unity—and the denial of legitimate disagreement and divisions—shows a surprising affinity between the populist political imagination and totalitarianism, as theorized by members of the postwar French Left such as Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis in the 1970s and 1980s. These thinkers, all staunch socialists and democrats, claimed that totalitarianism is not a regime that makes total claims on its subjects—no regime could ever achieve this, short of putting its populations permanently into camps—but rather the vision of a completely unified society (or people), literally embodied in a leader like Hitler or Stalin.

Does it follow from this that the Tea Party or Geert Wilders will lead us back to the Gulag? No. While there is an important affinity in the political imaginations of populism and totalitarianism, their political aims and actual methods are not equivalent. But that affinity is not trivial. The opposite of populism is not elitism, but pluralism, and populism is by (my) definition illiberal. And this has implications for how left-wing parties and movements ought to think about populism.

Should the Left mobilize against irresponsible (what Krastev calls “offshore”) elites and neoliberal policies? Should it articulate a vision of society that all citizens could potentially share? By all means—but through making political arguments and with policy proposals, not by relying on a populist imaginary. To think that liberals can only win if they adopt the populist playbook is a kind of defeatism, for which many parties in Europe—both on the moderate left and the moderate right—have already paid a high price. They can never be as populist as the populists themselves, but they also can’t easily reverse course once they have adopted a rhetoric according to which, for instance, “multiculturalism has failed” (Angela Merkel and David Cameron), or “British jobs [are] for British workers” (Gordon Brown), or “refugees need to be fought” (Flüchtlingsbekämpfung—a term used by Merkel that evokes “pest control” and that shocked many political observers in Germany).

Populism is not the necessary corrective to elitism in mature democracies, as is sometimes claimed. It does not follow that all criticism of (and political mobilization against) the powerful involves illiberal exclusions. But there is no reason to stick to the label “populism” to capture the former, when the p-word is now so clearly associated with illiberal politics and simplistic views of policy (even if in the United States it still might evoke warm feelings among progressives with a long memory). Populism, on the understanding advanced here, is always pernicious. It needs to be taken seriously. But it does not need to be imitated.

Jan-Werner Mueller is Professor of Politics at Princeton University. His latest book, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth Century Europe is out with Yale University Press.

This article originally appeared at Dissent.

A Lack of Leadership

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 21:47:47 -0400

By Timothy Stanley.

“Most voters are conservative in that they want peace in the streets yet liberal in that they don’t want to use water cannons to get it.”

What Britain can learn from America’s reaction to the riots of the 1960s.

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The riots in London made me think instantly of the urban disorder in America in the 1960s. There are big differences: size, scale, and lack of political motive this time around. There were three different reactions to the disorder of the 1960s. Two – left-wing pandering and right-wing populism – were on display in this nice vignette from the 1968 Chicago riots.

The local police had horribly over-reacted to the presence of 10,000 antiwar protestors during the local Democratic Convention, using nightsticks and tear gas to dispel the largely peaceful crowds. The demonstrators gathered in Grant Park, across from the hotel where the conservative pundit Pat Buchanan was lodging. He stayed up all night with the left-wing writer Norman Mailer, drinking cocktails and watching the fight down below. The city had imposed an 11pm curfew on the demonstrators and when they failed to move, the police charged them with teargas and truncheons. Mailer leant over the balcony and screamed at the cops, “Pigs! Fascists!” Meanwhile, Buchanan leant over and shouted, “Hey, you’ve missed one!”

Those were the two responses to the crises of 1968 that most people are familiar with, and both are getting a big play in London 2011. In the 1960s, several conservative populists called for a take-no-prisoners answer to urban chaos: no recognition of supposed grievances, 100% support for the police, zero tolerance for offenders. Presidential candidate George Wallace promised to hand the streets over to the cops for 24 hours, all civil liberties suspended and no questions asked.

Left-wing commentators in the 1960s expressed far greater sympathy for the rioters than what one might find today. The Kerner Commission of 1968 blamed the disturbances entirely on racism and poverty, with little consideration for personal responsibility. It concluded that “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal,” and proposed massive federal spending projects as a solution. That view, incidentally, is still popular within my own field of historical research. The consensus within the academy is that the disorder of the 1960s was a legitimate response to white racism and an unjust war, while the stunning popularity of conservative politicians like Wallace, Buchanan, or Ronald Reagan reflected an underlying mainstream fascism.

What is forgotten about 1968 is that there was a “third way” response to the violence, and it had a big constituency. It was the approach taken by Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey: toughness informed by compassion. Humphrey was a liberal before the term became submerged within radical left-wing discourses in the 1970s – before it became synonymous with socialist economics and identity politics. Nor did it have anything to do with obscure British philosophers: Smith and Mill probably sounded like undertakers to Hubert. Rather, it was a politics shaped by the misery of the Great Depression and the violent grandeur of the Second World War. Humphrey’s liberalism was tough and sinewy. He loved his fellow man, but he understood that part of love is censorship and reform. Man is born in sin: people used to get that.

When he accepted his party’s nomination in Chicago 1968, the same week that Mailer and Buchanan watched the cops and demonstrators duke it out in the street, Humphrey opened with the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi: “Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light.” Then he said:

“Rioting, sniping, mugging, traffic in narcotics and disregard for law are the advance guard of anarchy and they must and they will be stopped. But may I say most respectfully, particularly to some who have spoken before, the answer lies in reasoned, effective action by state, local and federal authority. The answer does not lie in an attack on our courts, our laws or our Attorney General. We do not want a police state, but we need a state of law and order. And neither mob violence nor police brutality have any place in America.”

It was a complex formula, perhaps too nuanced for the angry spirit of the age. But it balanced what many citizens were looking for: a definition of law and order that keeps in check both the criminal individual and the over-mighty state. Humphrey went on to say:

“Nor can there be any compromise with the right of every American who is able and who is willing to work to have a job, who is willing to be a good neighbor, to be able to live in a decent home in the neighborhood of his own choice … And it is to these rights – the right of law and order, the right of life, the right of liberty, the right of a job, the right of a home in a decent neighborhood, and the right to an education – it is to these rights that I pledge my life and whatever capacity and ability I have.”

What Humphrey meant was that law and order and social reform are not contradictions as the Marxist Left would have us believe: they are two sides of the same social contract. Peace guarantees the opportunity for progress and progress irons out the iniquities that spur disorder. It’s a forerunner of that blunter paradigm, so beloved by Tony Blair: “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. For those who, frankly, want to see some criminals get a good thrashing but who also don’t want to give up on the dream of urban renewal, this is a powerful promise. It was popular enough in 1968 to take Humphrey to within one percentage point of winning the presidency.

As we have come to expect, Britain’s political leadership has been singularly lacking throughout these riots. A few have offered jingoisms, while a former mayor has unwisely suggested that the hoodlums need love. There is a space – a wide vacuum in fact – for a reasonable statesperson to ask, “Can’t we all get along?” Most voters are conservative in that they want peace in the streets yet liberal in that they don’t want to use water cannons to get it.

One solution is transformative leadership. Robert Kennedy offered something of that when he spoke in Indianapolis on the night of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination. He said:

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”

He asked the crowd to go home and pray, and they did. Indianapolis was one of the few major US cities that didn’t experience riots that night. I pray that, despite the absence of decent leadership to provide it, a similar recourse to reason is still possible in this crisis.

Timothy Stanley, a research fellow in American history at Royal Holloway College in London, is the author of The Crusader: the Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat Buchanan

England Burning

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 17:00:00 -0400

By Alexander Lee.

“If there is a single underlying cause for the riots, it is to be found in the shocking social problems in Britain’s depressed suburbs and in the gradual abandonment of social questions by mainstream political discourse.”

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For four days and nights, England burned. Catalysed by the shooting of 29-year-old gang member Mark Duggan by police, a wave of violence fanned out across the country. Beginning in North London, riots quickly spread to Birmingham, Nottingham, Salford, Gloucester, and Bristol. Mobilised through social media, tens of thousands of rioters confronted police in debris-strewn streets in an orgy of looting and destruction. Shops of every description were stripped bare, innocent bystanders were killed, and countless homes and businesses went up in flames. Still grossly outnumbered despite a massive campaign of reinforcement, police struggled to contain the chaos.

Even by comparison with similar incidents in the past, the scale and brutality of the riots beggared belief. Images from the streets of Britain’s largest cities revealed huge, angry mobs comprising individuals of every age and ethnicity committing acts of staggering brutality and wantonness. By the time the riots finally subsided on August 11, more than 1,500 arrests had been made across Britain, and over 600 people had been charged with offences ranging from arson, assault, and burglary to dangerous driving. Tens of millions of pounds of damage was done to property, hundreds of businesses were ruined, and dozens of people were left homeless.

Commentators have been at a loss to explain these events. Although all are agreed that the death of Mark Duggan was little more than the spark which ignited the inferno, no consensus has yet emerged as to the causes. Both left and right appear to be struggling to comprehend the terrible events of recent days. The riots have been attributed to everything from consumerism and social media to “gangsta” society and racism, and from the “swamp of dependency” to spending cuts and weak policing.

As a consequence of the lack of consensus with respect to the causes of the riots, similar confusion has arisen with regard to solutions. Everything, from increased police powers and the reintroduction of a culture of “discipline” to the extension of outreach programmes and the withdrawal of welfare support has been proposed. Considered collectively, such suggestions are remarkable for their lack of both clarity and consistency. Although some – including Timothy Stanley – have rightly drawn attention to the fact that liberal discourse in modern Britain is ill-suited to dealing with violent unrest, it is nevertheless apparent that in the absence of a clear understanding of the underlying causes of the disturbances, no adequate measures can be taken to prevent future riots.

THE RIOTS WERE a complicated affair: just as the targets of the violence were very diverse, so too those who took part in the riots differed wildly in age, race, origin and socio-economic status. Although police records indicate that the majority of rioters arrested in London were aged between 15 and 24, some 31% were aged over 25. Far from being restricted to those of Afro-Caribbean origin – as some have suggested – the rioters were drawn from almost every ethnic group, and images from the riots in Birmingham, London, and Salford reveal the inadequacy of classifying the unrest as having been the preserve of any one ethnicity.

This is not to say that there was no consistency whatsoever during the riots. In socio-economic terms, a pattern does emerge. Despite the fact that schoolchildren, the unemployed, and blue- and white-collar workers were represented, the overwhelming majority of those arrested fell within groups C2 and DE, and the unrest itself was largely confined to areas with high rates of unemployment, high ethnic diversity, low average incomes, and a low incidence of higher education. So, too, the ‘targets’ of the riots display a measure of consistency. The majority of attacks against property was confined to buildings connected with the state (such as the Handsworth police station, which was burnt down), and private businesses. While some of the enterprises targeted were sizeable concerns, the greater part of businesses his were small retail shops or modest-sized retail chains, and although everything imaginable was stolen, looting mostly focussed on shops selling electronic items, clothing, and jewellery.

The diversity of the riots perhaps helps to explain the range of interpretations offered in the British press. But there is nevertheless sufficient clarity to suggest that none of the explanations is completely adequate in isolation. To one extent or another, they are all partly correct, and it would be invidious to dismiss any one of these interpretation in its entirety. However, there is sufficient clarity to suggest that none of the explanations is completely adequate in isolation. It would therefore be equally inadequate to say that the riots can simply be explained by a random hodge-podge of different causes. In reality, an analysis of the backgrounds of the rioters and of their targets indicates that all of these explanations can be traced back to a fundamental crisis at the heart of British – and European – political life.

THE RIOTS THAT transfixed France in 2005 provide an instructive parallel in seeking to uncover the underlying cause of the disorder in Britain. Beginning with the protests in Clichy-sous-Bois which erupted after the deaths of Bouna Traore and Zyed Benna during a police chase on 27 October 2005, a campaign of civil disorder fanned out across France. For three weeks, Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon, Lille and many other cities were consumed by brutal street battles. The violence was particularly pronounced in the banlieues, the vast, concrete suburbs inhabited by the poorest and most ethnically diverse elements of French society.

It is not difficult to see why the deaths of the otherwise unknown Zyed and Bouna acted as such a powerful catalyst. Two African immigrants living in a depressed suburb of Paris, they encountered the worst examples of first-world poverty. Lacking the security of education, income, or employment, they turned to crime; although their death in an electrical substation was accidental, it was almost inevitable that they should have been chased by the police. To those who lived in the run-down banlieues, in which poverty and crime were a way of life, and in which the state was a distant irritation, the deaths of Zyed and Bouna were a tragic encapsulation of their dissatisfied, downtrodden lives.

Like the riots in England, the unrest in France in late 2005 was underpinned by a multiplicity of different problems. Low incomes, appalling employment prospects, poor education, and a failure to integrate immigrant groups all played their part in the violence which followed the deaths of Zyed and Bouna. Similarly, a widespread hostility towards the police undoubtedly did much to fuel the disturbances.

But a far more serious political problem lay beneath the surface of the French riots. All of the social issues which contributed to the unrest in 2005 had been evident in France since at least 1993, when similar riots highlighting the social afflictions of the banlieues broke out after the shooting of Makomé M’Bowole, a Zairean immigrant. In the ten intervening years, however, the French government consistently failed to address the social issues which had driven the disturbances. Once the unrest had been suppressed, living standards, social identity and integration, and popular relations with the organs of government quickly passed from the centre of policy debates. It was as if the riots had never happened.

In fact, French political discourse progressively moved further and further away from the “social” as a sphere of human action between 1993 and 2005. Even amongst the centre-left, economic liberalism and a free-marked ideology became the watchwords for a new crop of politicians who saw themselves in managerial terms. While the shift in political manner from Mitterrand to Sarkozy may have been eminently sensible in itself given global economic changes, the effect of abandoning the social dimension of politics was devastating. In the banlieues,living standards continued to fall, the incidence of crime remained high, racial tension escalated, and the sense of dislocation from politics grew more pronounced. The frustration that this generated grew to new and more violent proportions. A powder keg was created, and the deaths of Zyed and Bouna were merely the spark that lit the fuse.

Even after the 2005 riots, the French government continued to overlook social issues. As the global economic situation worsened from 2008 onwards, Sarkozy’s government remained implacable in its adherence to its fiscal policy, and its preference for cuts over the amelioration of social conditions in the most run-down areas of France. Even on the centre-left, the growth of managerialism only accelerated.

IT IS ANGLO-SAXON hubris to imagine that France is unique. The riots in Britain this summer arose out of the same social problems, and were fostered by the same political failures.

The majority of the rioters were from the most down-trodden suburbs of the United Kingdom’s largest cities, and endured social conditions comparable to those in the French banlieues in 2005. The areas from which they came – Tottenham, Salford, Winson Green, Handsworth – are among the poorest in England. They have staggeringly high rates of unemployment, poor standards of education, and a high level of ethnic diversity. These areas have been hardest hit by recent economic developments. The adverse effects of declining consumer confidence, lower investment, and rising unemployment which have accompanied the global economic downturn have been felt more severely in the run-down suburbs of London, Birmingham, and Manchester than anywhere else. The aspirations of consumer society remain high, but those in the lowest socio-economic groups have found themselves being drawn further and further away from their dreams of comfort and security.

At the same time, British politics has moved progressively further away from constructive policy solutions to the social problems in the inner cities. Among the opposition, the transformation has been radical. The Labour Party – still recovering from its defeat at the 2010 election – has continued down the managerialist path first trodden by Tony Blair. and driven by the capture support from the political centre ground has The party has substituted vague talk of “social justice” for its former communitarianism, drifting even further towards a moderate form of economic liberalism. As for the government, despite David Cameron’s much-vaunted talk of the “Big Society,” both the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats have overlooked social issues in favour of wide-ranging budgetary cuts, and have embarked on a series of unpopular measures – especially with regard to education – which have restricted, rather than increased, opportunity.

The effect of this has been to produce a lethal combination of worsening social conditions in inner-city suburbs and a dislocation of the most disadvantaged socio-economic groups from mainstream political discourse. Confidence in the government has declined significantly in recent months, and the violent protests in London in November 2010 and May 2011 are a testimony to the extent to which dissatisfaction with both government and opposition has taken hold amongst certain elements of society. This has been accompanied with a growing tendency either to look outside mainstream political discourse for solutions, or to abstain from the political process altogether. At the same time as electoral turnout has declined in recent years, the fortunes of minor – and often extremist – political parties have improved. Having quadrupled its share of the vote in the period from 1997 to 2005, the British National Party succeeded in having three MEPs elected in the last European elections, all from the region around Manchester. Meanwhile, parties like the hard-right UK Independence Party or the left-wing populist Respect alliance have seen their support grow in the inner cities.

Worn down by severe social problems, lacking prospects, dislocated both from government and mainstream political discourse, and staring economic crisis in the face, frustration – perhaps understandably – reached boiling point amongst the inhabitants of Britain’s run-down suburbs in early August. Longing for a prosperity which they could not attain, and abandoned by Westminster, the people of Tottenham, Winson Green, Salford, Handsworth and similar areas simply took matters into their own hands. The seemingly anarchic riots were little more than an outpouring of justified anger and political dislocation, and the looting and violence were an expression of an inchoate sense of addressing the bewildering multiplicity of frustrations which their participants felt welling up within them.

IF THERE IS a single underlying cause for the riots, then, it is to be found in the shocking social problems in Britain’s depressed suburbs and in the gradual abandonment of social questions by mainstream political discourse. There is no simple or easy solution. What is needed is a complete transformation of British political thought. As the economic outlook grows more bleak, the pressures on the public purse will inevitably grow more intense – but throughout everything, there is a pressing and burning necessity for the socio-economic conditions of the poorest and most marginalised sections of society to be improved dramatically and quickly. This requires a recognition that the lives of ordinary men and women cannot be figured merely as numbers on a balance sheet: notions of social identity, of the collective, of the function of government, must be reconsidered anew. A new communitarianism, marked by a desire to help those with least rise from their privations, is essential, and the economic liberalism and anodyne managerialism of the past must be set aside.

Should this not be accomplished, privation, hatred, and violence will rise to a level greater than ever experienced, and the riots of August 2011 will prove to be but a taste of what is to come.

Alexander Lee is an editor of The Utopian.

Seeing King Lear

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 10:34:00 -0400

By Charles Petersen.

Will there ever be a persuasive staging of Lear, or is the aging king condemned forever to remain most at home in the theater of the mind?

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There is a long and celebrated tradition of talking about books you haven’t read — see last year’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (which I haven’t read) — but less well known are the pleasures of talking about plays you haven’t seen. Charles Lamb, the great early nineteenth century essayist and gourmand, wrote that “The Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted” and that “Lear is essentially impossible to be represented on the stage.” What Lamb neglected to mention was that he had never actually seen King Lear, or at least not the Lear of Shakespeare: between 1681 and 1838 the original play was banished from the English theater, deemed too bleak and cruel for public consumption. A notorious revision by the Restoration dramatist Nahum Tate, in which both Lear and Cordelia survive, took its place. This, rather than the Lear of Shakespeare, is the play Lamb saw.

Even after Tate’s revision was repudiated, Lear remained, until the 1950s, rarely staged and more rarely seen. The play contains some of Shakespeare’s most emotionallyharrowing and most extravagantly allegorical lines, as when the old king announces his daughter’s death — ”Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones! / Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so / That heaven’s vault should crack” — both declaring the immensity of his own grief and calling forth theapocalypse. Shakespeare’s combination of such personal sorrows with themes of deep philosophical, even cosmic scope, and his creation of characters who aresimultaneously empty vessels and terrific individuals, resulted in the sense, lasting several centuries, that Lear was simply too huge for the theater.

The play’s fate changed at mid-century, amidst the mood of cultural doubt brought on by the Cold War, when new critical takes emerged. In 1962 the director Peter Brook famously put on a Lear in the spirit of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame,and in 1964 the critic Jan Kott placed the play at the center of his influential study, Shakespeare Our Contemporary. For Brook and Kott, Lear’s very bleakness, and the play’s almost absurd mixture of minutely human and grandly mythic themes, made it all the more effective on the stage. Brook’s production cut the few redemptive lines, going almost as far as Tate — if only in the opposite direction — to remake the original to fit the vision of his time. The playhas since become one of Shakespeare’s most often-performed.

For me, however, growing up in the desert of Lewiston, Idaho, at the mouth of Hells Canyon, later studying Shakespeare at a small college in the Midwest, Lear’s popularityhas remained, until recently, little more than rumor. As for most Shakespeare fans of the past four centuries, my experience of Lear was limited to the theater of the mind — a standard any real production would find tough to beat. A.C. Bradley, professor of poetry at Oxford, and no provincial, expressed my feelings exactly a little over a century ago: “There is something in [Lear’s] very essence which is at war with the senses, and demands a purely imaginative realization.” It was thus with something of an anachronistic feeling that I walked into BAM’s Harvey Theater to see what after a string of sold-out performances at the Donmar Warehouse in London is being hailed as perhaps the greatest production of King Lear inrecent memory.

DIRECTED BY MICHAEL Grandage and starring the legendary Derek Jacobi in the title role, the Donmar production succeeds in part precisely because it leaves so much of the play’s essence to the imagination. The set amounts to nothing more than a series of large planks laid out on the floor and erected as walls to the rear: with a splattering of white paint and the occasional smudge of wood showing through, the boards create the effect of an old house stripped down to the studs, its plaster walls and ancient flooring removed. Against this backdrop, Lear’s announcement that he will pass on the kingdom to his daughters seems almost superfluous; the House of State is more than ready for renovation.

Derek Jacobi, as Lear, dominates every scene. I found myself watching him nervously for each new sign of decline, as one might one’s own aging parent. He circumvents the problems of the first act, where Lear asks his three daughters to compete for their inheritances by proclaiming their love, through an ingeniously careful reading. Instead of presenting this “love test” as a premeditated scheme — in which case it can seem only a dramatic expedient, unimaginable as the work of a wise old monarch — Jacobi acts as if it were only a spur-of-the-moment jest. He then listens to the “glib and oily” praise of his older daughters, Goneril and Regan (a pair easily confused for evil twins, here well set-off by the icy Gina McKee and the schoolmarmish Justine Mitchell) not as if their words were deeply satisfying, but rather as merely another round in the endlessly ironic game of life at court.

When Cordelia, the youngest daughter (played with warmth and assuredness by Pippa Bennett-Warner), subsequently attempts to bring some earnestness into the proceedings — “I cannot heave / My heart into my mouth” — Leary’s fury, and his sudden decision to disown her, becomes not an inexplicable outbreak of madness but an instance of what might be called, in the language of our time, a “senior moment.” Lear can be his playful old self as long as his daughters stay within the bounds of accepted social niceties, but the moment Cordelia insists that her once-great father exercise a more than mechanical form of judgment, going beyond the bounds of etiquette to real thought, the impoverishment of his mind becomes terrifyingly evident.

The king’s decision to surround himself with such candid and fearless servants as Kent and the Fool leads one to presume that, in his right mind, he would have been far more pleased with Cordelia’s insistence on changing the rules of the game than with the unctuous praise of his older daughters. The tragedy is that Cordelia loves her father so much, at least as he once was, that she refuses to recognize how much he has changed, and insists that he love her as he once did, or else not at all.

As the first acts move forward, Jacobi’s alternation between the imperiousness proper to a king and the whining of an old man in decline, culminating in the frenzied denunciations of each of his older daughters — “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child!” — allows us to see the great range of the king’s emotional capacities. His performance shows the extent to which Lear’s righteousness is mixed up with a need to terrorize his offspring, as well as a longing (after the expulsion of Cordelia) for his own self-destruction.

YET, FOR ALL the ingenuity of the Donmar King Lear, I still found myself longing for the richness of the unadorned text.

Coleridge stated the problem plainly: “Lear is the only serious performance of Shakespeare, the interest and situations of which are derived from the assumption of a gross improbability.” Like Lamb and other early 19th century critics, Coleridge meant this observation not as a criticism but as a statement of fact: the idea that an experienced old king — and everyone on stage suggests that Lear deserves this reputation — would partition his kingdom at all, much less by making his daughters declare their love, must at the outset be admitted as absurd. (The decision to partition a kingdom among one’s heirs had by Shakespeare’s time been acknowledged as one of the worst decisions a monarch could make.) The premise of Lear is not something out of the well developed political tradition of Shakespeare’s history plays, but rather something out of fairy tales or myth — as its setting in pre-Christian England, and its source in the clearly legendary early sections of the Elizabethan historian Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, would lead one to expect.

It may well be possible, as this performance has shown, to make Lear’s demand that his daughters compete for their portions of the kingdom by declaring their love seem almost plausible. But to diminish the feeling of improbability — not something Lear works in spite of, but something it works through — is to damage the rest of the drama.

The next scene, where the bastard Edmund persuades his brother Edgar that their father, Gloucester, intends to kill him (for no discernible reason), is thrown off balance by the naturalism that precedes it. After the mad division of the kingdom and the expulsion of Cordelia, this scene should appear as, at most, no more incredible than what has gone before. In the Donmar production, despite fine performances by Gwilym Lee (Edgar) and Alec Newman (Edmund), the scene cannot help but come off as completely unpersuasive. If the “love test” can be made to seem plausible through some ingenious readings, there is simply no way to make an audience believe that a bastard who has been away from court for nearly a decade could persuade his legitimate brother that their father intends to kill him, based on no more evidence than his word. This scene should serve rather as another sign that we are not in the world of history but in that of myth, or what might be called “pre-history,” where actions take on the force of allegory.

WHEN READING LEAR, it is far easier to maintain a double awareness, a sense that we are both hearing the words of a specific old king named Lear, and the words of an archetype of a particular form of kingship. When Lear says, “I am a very foolish fond old man, / Fourscore and upward, not an hour more nor less,” he is both a half-crazed old man and a figure out of allegory, an epitome of old age. This holds true for other characters: When Edgar strips down and becomes a wandering beggar, he is both a particular nobleman brought low and what Lear calls “unaccommodated man.” When Cordelia revives her father, and he says, “You are a spirit, I know: when did you die?,” she is both Lear’s daughter and an angel of grace and forgiveness. When Kent, at the end, mysteriously intones, “I have a journey, sir, shortly to go; / My master calls me, I must not say no,” he is both Lear’s tenacious servant and a figure of loyalty, declaring that he will follow his master even into the grave.

Given how little patience many now have for allegory, and how much more interested we tend to be in the particularities of character than in old-fashioned concepts like loyalty, kingship and grace, it can be tempting simply to ignore the allegorical possibilities in Lear. In another age, of course, it may have beenequally tempting to ignore the shadings of character and concentrate instead onthe implications of allegory. The problem with Lear, and the greatness of the play, is that through some mysterious alchemy it combines the most specific characterizationwith the widest allegory. Shakespeare makes Cordelia’s death both the murder of a singular daughter and the end of grace itself, of “a chance which does redeem all sorrows.” This, at least, is the richest experience I have had reading the play, and it is an experience that seems almost impossible to convey on the stage, where it is so much more difficult to suggest both the broadly cosmic and impossibly intimatemeaning of each line.

The mid-twentieth century Shakespeare critic Maynard Mack compared the play to great allegorical works like The Divine Comedy, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Finnegan’s Wake, and said, ”When we are given a Lear in the theatre that honors both its intimate humanity and its position in the company of such works as these … the problem of the play will be solved. But not before.” Mack’s point remains valid. Having seen a great Lear only further persuades me that, despite its dramatic form, transferring the play to the stage in anything approaching its full meaning would be about as easy as making The Divine Comedy, or indeed Finnegan’s Wake, into a play. Despite many new revelations, Lear remains for me, as it always has been, most at home in the theater of the mind.

Charles Petersen, Associate Editor at n+1, has written for the New York Review of Books and the Nation.

The People Who Might Still Make the Egyptian Revolution

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 18:20:00 -0400

By Martin Eiermann.

“If you are confused”, Amado assures me, “you are on the right track. Everyone in Egypt is confused.”

A Letter from Cairo.

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On January 28, tens of thousands gathered on Cairo’s Tahrir Square for a “Day of Rage,” setting in motion the ouster of Hosni Mubarak. Now, on the square’s Eastern edge, maybe a hundred people mingle in front of a set of speakers, undisturbed by the traffic. Teenagers test the sound system on their scooters; a lone policeman attracts a small crowd that dissipates as quickly as it appeared. Vendors with revolutionary memorabilia – flags, pins, shirts, buttons and face paint – have occupied the surrounding area. An elderly woman sits on the ground, a selection of postcards spread out in front of her: Idi Amin, Stalin, Milosevic, Mao, Mubarak. It costs less than a dollar to send your favorite dictator to friends and loved ones: “Greetings from post-revolutionary Egypt! The weather is hot and the people are liberated.”

Some of the first people I meet in Egypt are organizers for the April 6 Movement. It dates back to 2008, when young activists began to organize in support of industrial workers who had threatened to go on strike. The movement now claims over ten thousands adherents in Cairo alone. Its networks and tactics formed much of the backbone of the January 25 protests. Amal, the group’s spokesperson, has invited me to join them for one of the nightly get-togethers that happen frequently at one of the group’s four apartments in Cairo or in one of the city’s cafés.

We crowd into a back alley next to a coffee shop. The TV is showing a soccer game. Amal’s little daughter showcases her English skills and otherwise sits consumed with her cell phone. People drift in and out of the gathering while the core group trades news, strategizes, and tries to explain the burdensome task of managing a revolution to me. For all of their show of relaxed familiarity, this is a serious endeavor. “I didn’t sleep for eighteen days during the revolution. I didn’t enter my house for eighteen days”, Amal says. Her list of media contacts – managed from a laptop and a cell phone – has reached the quadruple digits. Her eyes are framed by dark rings. Over the course of our meeting, she races through half a pack of cigarettes. Revolution is a stressful business.

Yet, somehow, Amal and her fellow organizers have pushed on. Many of them are veterans of political dissent, having joined the ranks of April 6 long before the ouster of Mubarak. They have sacrificed time and careers to build a better Egypt. To them, January must have been a time of immense liberation and validation. “What about the optimism”, I ask, “is it still there?” Amal looks straight at me. “You cannot be revolutionary without being optimistic”, she tells me. “You have to be able to keep going. We want this country to be better. We want to put an end to dictatorship.”

Nawal El-Saadawi agrees. She is one of Egypt’s first and most well-known women’s rights activists and – at age 80 – she did what so many Egyptians did in January: she went to Tahrir and refused to leave. If you have looked at photographs from that time and seen an old woman, her face wrinkled by decades of relentless activism, prison stints and exile, standing defiantly on top of the makeshift barricades, you have probably seen Nawal. Her daughter had arranged a call, and Nawal was eager to talk. “I have dreamed of this for 70 years”, she said. “No political power can stop change when it is so deeply embedded into the consciousness of a people.” The people had dared to dream, they had dared to act, and – Nawal was convinced – they still wanted more. “We are not satisfied… The members of the old guard must stand trial for their actions,” she said with unwavering conviction. Her Egypt was dazed with enthusiasm, swept along by the great momentum that unfolded in the streets and squares.

“There was a Tahrir Square in most towns”, says Ahmed, another activist I meet in Cairo. He is now running an initiative that offers democracy education and networking opportunities for activists. “Wherever you went in February, people would be talking about politics.” Again, I ask my question: “What has happened to that optimism?” Ahmed laughs. “Politics is not just about ideas”, he says. “It is about power and about the ability to implement your ideas. Many activists were really energized by the ideas themselves. And when the revolution happened, they said: ‘Well, that’s it.’ But the truth is: A revolution is a process.”

It took eighteen days to oust Mubarak. But when can the revolution be counted as a success?

TO THIS DAY, the various oppositional groups lack a unified agenda. Activists energetically disagree about the merits of holding elections (scheduled for late September) before drafting a constitution; they disagree about economic policy; they also disagree about the prospects of collaborating closely with the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and its civilian representatives. What will it take to carry out trials of former government officials and police officers? How can entrenched loyalties and rivalries be softened to allow for the reshaping of institutions and constructive dialogue about Egypt’s future? For all the avenues that the revolution has opened up, it has often remained short on concrete answers.

“I don’t mind if it takes a lot of time”, Ahmed continues. “But we have to make sure that we are moving forward, not backwards like Iran. We have lived without rights for thirty years. So obviously there will be fights.” The urgency of now has started to be replaced by the realization that much of the ultimate legacy of the January protests will be determined not by ideas, but by the passage of time – and by the persistence with which the ideals of the revolution are articulated over and over again.

That sentiment is echoed by many activists I meet. Ibrahim is one of Cairo’s district organizers with the April 6 movement. Amal introduces us, and Ibrahim draws his chair closer for a chat. He is young, tall, with a calm eye and broad shoulders – the kind of guy whom you would want by your side when the going gets tough. His voice is calm and introspective. “January wasn’t the revolution”, he says. “It was just the first step towards a revolution.” Ibrahim seems to cling to that idea - the revolution is still happening, the doors of change are still wide open. It is as if any notion of finality would imply that the job of the revolutionaries is over, that their achievements will be tallied and their power will have to be handed back to the guardians of stability and the caretakers of normalcy. As long as there’s still a revolution, there is still a purpose. There is a reason to carry on and keep fighting. They might not embrace it, but they have begun to accept it.

And Ibrahim is in dire need of a dose of optimism. “The end of Mubarak does not mean the beginning of democracy. In January everybody was out in the streets. Not anymore. That is the big struggle now. People need to live their lives”, he says. Many have settled back into normal life, and not everybody has returned when the revolution kept calling on them. For the organizers of the April 6 movement, the real work has only just begun. I turn to Dina, a member of the Women’s Coalition who was swept into the arena of activism by the revolution. She shrugs her shoulders: “In March, people would ask us: ‘When are we meeting? We must organize!’ Now we call a meeting and invite 50 people, and only ten show up.” While the core group of activists has stayed around – and quite significantly, it includes a mix of political veterans and those who joined in January or February –, the rank and file have significantly decreased in numbers. That comes as no surprise to anyone involved. The thrill of revolution has in many cases been replaced by the more tedious work of training a generation of democrats that will be able to build a different Egypt. The country has been under military rule since 1952, and even though the early years of Nasser’s reign are generally seen as a period of cultural liberalism, few Egyptians can remember what it means to live in a society where the people are sovereign and where votes matter.

EDUCATION, IT THUS turns out, is key to the future of the revolution. “Many people think that democracy means the domination of a minority by a majority. But that’s not democracy”, says Ahmed, the activist who runs educational classes. Under Mubarak, he says, political participation became habituated to the extent that people regarded voting as an act of civil obedience without significance. You knew whom you had to vote for, and you knew that the ultimate outcome would not be determined by your votes anyways. “A soviet mindset”, he calls it. “Revolution is no magic potion. We cannot solve the underlying problems just by protesting.” And so the work starts from the ground up: “What is a constitution, how does democracy work, what do these basic terms mean?” That’s what Ahmed wants to teach his fellow Egyptians. “The idea that normal people are stupid is false. But we need to talk about the gains from democracy, not about the system itself.” He is convinced: “In this election people will vote for whomever they are used to. It will take one parliamentary cycle for them to realize that votes now matter. That’s what happened in Palestine: People voted for Hamas once, but never twice.”

The revolution, on Ahmed’s view, will contine for at least another four years. And there are problems that might take even longer to solve. For a revolution that was at least partially fuelled by economic discontent and a general sense of stagnation, few of the underlying causes have been addressed or fixed. Youth unemployment still hovers around 25 percent. When the military council created several thousand jobs in April and May to tackle the issue, tens of thousands showed up at government offices to sign up.

The revolution hasn’t helped. In 2010, tourism contributed around six percent to the country’s GDP, bringing in an estimated 12.9 billion dollars. Yet numbers have plummeted since January, and still hover far below last year. In April, food prices were up 48 percent while the average Egyptians continues to live on just over 700 Egyptian pounds (120 US dollars) a month. The transitional authorities have already agreed to subsidize essential foodstuffs to prevent starvation and food riots. The International Monetary Fund estimates that inflation will reach 12 percent by 2012, with unemployment persistently high and national debt levels climbing up to 63 percent of the country’s GDP. And after thirty years of nepotism, mismanagement and corruption, there is still no plan for a balanced state budget and long-term debt reduction. In other words: Egypt is headed for financial trouble.

DRIVING OUT OF Cairo towards Giza, the evidence of waste and mismanagement is clearly visible. The two-lane highway is blocked by piles of trash that have been growing since the state’s infrastructure collapsed during the revolution. Some of them are smoldering. Because Egyptians have to pay property taxes only on buildings that have been finished, many houses are left in a state of perpetual construction. Families crowd into windowless, unfurnished rooms . Communally used power lines tap the official grid and save money.

In a sharp contrast to downtown, here there are no revolutionary murals or Egyptian flags painted on walls and buildings. “How do you reach the people who live here”, I ask. Almost thirty percent of Egyptians are illiterate, so the leaflets and websites of the activists won’t do much good. According to a World Bank study, youth illiteracy rates are somewhat lower – around fifteen percent – but still present a major obstacle in the path of political and economic progress, especially if one considers how minimalist the definition of literacy is: the ability to “read and write a short, simple statement on… everyday life.” And while the educational policies of Mubarak’s regime are often blamed for creating an uneducated underclass, the gaps that divide different parts of society have not magically closed with his resignation. Tahrir Square in February was not just a fertile ground for revolutionary ideas, it was also a melting pot that brought together people whose paths were unlikely to cross in any other way.

The activists I talk to are well aware of these divides. “We are canvassing the poor neighborhoods”, Amal says. “But it is obviously a struggle to reach them. We must focus on building a network first.” She does not sound especially optimistic. Dina, from the Women’s Coalition, is more frank: “”We are not reaching the illiterates”, she declares . “We try, but we only reach a small percentage.”

Indeed, for all their egalitarian rhetoric, the activist crowd is a relatively privileged bunch. Ahmed suggests that we meet at café Groppi in downtown Cairo. Founded in 1908 by the Swiss chocolate manufacturer Giacomo Groppi, the café soon became a favorite hangout for the see-and-be-seen crowd, who would sit under fans in the large art déco tea room for a chat, a drink and some pastries. Those days are long gone now; the paint is peeling from the ceiling and the tables have been spaced out to hide the emptiness of the room. Still, two teas come out to 29 Egyptian pounds, several times the price you would expect to pay just two blocks down the road, away from Talaat Harb Square.

The activists I meet with don’t seem to mind. Most of them come from the educated middle-class of Egyptian society. All are under the age of thirty. And thanks to early bilingual education, most speak fluent English . Salma is a good example. I meet her and her friend Nourane at Cilantro, another upscale café. Her uncle is the president of one of Egypt’s parties, and she remembers dinner conversations about politics from an early age. She has attended private schools in Egypt and has taken trips abroad, including a summer camp at Yale to learn “how to run an election.” Salma is only 22 years old but already a veteran of Egyptian activism, having joined her first demonstration in 2007, when riots broke out over low wages and water shortages. She has, as one senior diplomat put it to me when discussing Egypt’s youth more generally, “learned more about politics in five months than you and I have learned in twelve years of school.” Salma seems acutely aware of the importance of building a broad democratic consensus. “The poor people are the foundation. Without them, the building becomes unstable”, she says. But when asked to explain what progress is being made, she too is at a loss. “There are speeches”, she declares with enthusiasm. “Last week in Alexandria, two thousand people came. And we will canvass.” “How many people are doing that,” I ask. She looks at Nourane for help: “I don’t know. There are people. But it is clear that our outreach is not effective yet.”

THE RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT, which has begun to dominate Western news coverage of the revolution , is greatly helped by the growing sense of stagnation. “The average Egyptian is not very religious”, Ahmed says. “But sharia law and promises of heaven are the easy way out when unemployment looms large.” Ahmed is a particularly interesting person to ask about religion: until 2004, he was a Salafist, one of Islam’s more fundamentalist groups of believers. But, he says now, “the Salafists don’t have a program. They always oppose this or that, they are never really for anything. In the long run, the religious parties are losing. Not many people will elect them.”

And the revolution clearly hasn’t changed the fact that Egyptian life is almost always conservative, and often openly patriarchic and receptive to religiously infused rhetoric. Harassment of women continues in the streets and behind the closed doors of Egypt’s homes. Even as the unveiled faces of women still stare at me from old family portraits, memories of a more liberal age continue to fade. “My mother never wore a veil. Back in the 1950s, miniskirts were okay,” says Mohamed, who works at the German Goethe Institute in Cairo. Thirty years of Mubarak have changed that. “The country has become more conservative, even after the revolution.”

The revolution might provide a window of opportunity to change some of those norms. But the red lines that existed don’t seem to have vanished. Instead, they have often been replaced by a more opaque set of customs. If might be okay to talk about sexuality or argue for the separation of church and state in one context. But those same words and thoughts could get you ostracized – or worse – elsewhere. In a country where much is in flux, speech and social norms are no exception.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a case in point. Their secular branch, the Freedom and Justice Party, has now entered an agreement with the secular Wafd party; one of the Brotherhood’s assistant chairmen is a Christian. Yet for all the liberal rhetoric around its edges, the core of the Muslim Brotherhood has remained staunchly conservative. “The Muslim Brotherhood has a different agenda every day. They are primarily interested in power, so they will bend and twist to get what they want”, says Amado, an artist who has met me for lunch. He clinches his hands and shakes his head. “They call that ‘flexibility’ these days.” Yet numbers and statements mean little when their half-life can be counted in days or hours, not months or years. Indeed, Amado’s assessment is mirrored by the results of now-frequent polls. Estimates of the Brotherhood’s electoral strength range from five to forty percent. Mohammed ElBaradei, one of the liberal contenders for the presidency, has scored almost forty percent in a recent poll conducted by the military council. A day after the numbers were announced, a rival responded with another poll that saw him near the bottom of the pack.

So, if anything is clear, it is that nothing is really clear at all. “If you are confused”, Amado assures me, “you are on the right track. Everyone in Egypt is confused.” In a testament to the fluidity of the situation, five thousand people clashed with police in Tahrir just a few days after I left the country. A week later, tens of thousands came to set up tents and raise banners without police interference. On a good day, democracy is in the air. On a bad day, the hospitals are once again filled with wounded and beaten men and women. This resembles not even a pendulum of mood swings, for the revolution lacks the predictability that comes with the monotone oscillation patterns of a pendulum. Rather, Egypt seems engaged in a large-scale experiment in chaos theory: Change can happen quickly, unexpectedly, and without a clear direction. The rules of the game might change overnight, taking people – including the military council – by surprise.

BUT EVEN IF the canvassing progresses, even if the discussion between political parties does not degenerate into outright fighting, even if the influence of religion over the young state can be contained and the break with Mubarak’s confidantes proceeds, there’s an unanswered question: Who should the people of Egypt vote for? Who should they trust with the future of their revolution and their country?

Taken together, the two chambers of the Egyptian parliament have 718 members, of whom 618 are elected by the people. But while there is no shortage of potential candidates for president, the situation with the rank-and-file is less clear. Especially outside the cities, representatives are traditionally elected based on local allegiances, monetary prowess or family ties. For much of the past fifty years, their policy has been one of quiet collaboration with the central authorities, mixed with a dash of nepotism here and there. In the cities, the only way to make a career in politics was by knowing the right people, giving and accepting favors, and proudly wearing the colors of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party. The job of the parliamentarian was to quell critical thought and to grant the air of legitimacy to decrees passed down from the president. If what Egypt needs is a creative re-imagination of its politics, these are the wrong people to talk to. But who else is there?

“We are no politicians, we are no political party”, Amal tells me. The April 6 Movement is trying to preserve its neutrality towards all political parties while campaigning for specific causes. And when people like Amal talk about “the politicians,” one cannot help but notice the faint tone of rejection in their voices. Thirty years of Mubarak have tainted the image of all politicians. “Politicians tend to be close-minded. They know a lot about a subject but don’t have the ability to think outside the box”, says Salma, the 22-year-old. “I want to work in media, on women’s rights and human rights. I don’t want to be a politician.” But who will do the job if the young generation won’t?

That problem illustrates the precarious state of Egyptian politics right now. The old guard is on its way out, the military council is regarded with suspicion – and after five months, their successors have yet to be found. Political posts will be filled, no doubt; there are always people who gravitate towards positions of power. But all the private political campaigns that have emerged since February have done little to address the void that is perhaps bigger and more significant than the lack of personnel: the lack of trust in politicians as true representatives of the people and as guardians of the emerging democracy. There is certainly no shortage of advice and advice-givers. But ultimately, it will be up to the people of Egypt to build a democratic system and – more importantly – fill it with life.

I am left with a group of admirable Egyptians who, at times, seem to be as confused by their own country as I am.

“I am worried”, says Salma. “Worried but optimistic. We don’t know how to practice democracy, but we are learning.” Maybe that is the optimism you need to persist when change is ambiguous and progress slow. You need to stare the odds in the face with defiance, and keep pushing. For all the problems, this is still a window of opportunity for Egypt. And while it is vastly unclear where the road might take them, at least the people I speak to are still determined to embark on the journey.

“My generation is one of the luckiest”, Ahmed tells me as we shake hands at the end of our meeting. “I have been jailed, and now we will be in power. We have no choice but to go into politics… Not twitter politics, but the hard work of running a country.” This makes sense to me. In a country with an abundance of choices and uncertain consequences, that might be the one option that knows no alternatives.

Martin Eiermann is Managing Editor of The European.

The Demonization of “Chavs”

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 20:10:00 -0400

By Owen Jones.

“Demonizing people at the bottom has been a convenient way of justifying an unequal society throughout the ages.”

An Anatomy of Britain’s supposed underclass.

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It’s an experience everyone in England has. You’re among a group of friends or acquaintances when suddenly someone says something that shocks you: an aside or a flippant comment made in poor taste. But the most disquieting part isn’t the remark itself. It’s the fact that no one else seems the slightest bit taken aback. You look around in vain, hoping for even a flicker of concern or the hint of a cringe. I had one of those moments at a friend’s dinner in a gentrified part of East London one winter evening. The blackcurrant cheesecake was being carefully sliced and the conversation had drifted to the topic of the moment, the credit crunch. Suddenly, one of the hosts tried to raise the mood by throwing in a light-hearted joke. “It’s sad that Woolworth’s is closing. Where will all the chavs buy their Christmas presents?” Now, he was not someone who would ever consider himself to be a bigot. Neither would anyone else present: for, after all, they were all educated and open-minded professionals. Sitting around the table were people from more than one ethnic group. The gender split was fifty-fifty and not everyone was straight. All would have placed themselves somewhere left-of-center politically. They would have bristled at being labeled a snob. If a stranger had attended that evening and disgraced him or herself by bandying around a word like “Paki” or “poof,” they would have found themselves swiftly ejected from the flat.

But no one flinched at a joke about chavs shopping in Woolies. To the contrary: everybody laughed. I doubt that many would have known that this derogatory term originates from the Romany word for child, “chavi.” Neither were they likely to have been among the 100,000 readers of The Little Book of Chavs, an enlightened tome that describes “chavs” as “the burgeoning peasant underclass.” If they had picked it up from a bookshop counter for a quick browse, they would have learned that chavs tend to work as supermarket checkout cashiers, fast-food restaurant workers and cleaners. Yet deep down, everyone must have known that “chav” is an insulting word exclusively directed against people who are working class. The “joke” could easily have been rephrased as: “It’s sad that Woolworth’s is closing. Where will the ghastly lower classes buy their Christmas presents?”

Yet it wasn’t even what was said that disturbed me the most. It was who said it, and who shared in the laughter. Everyone sitting around that table had a well-paid, professional job. Whether they admitted it or not, they owed their success, above all, to their backgrounds. All grew up in comfortable middle-class homes, generally out in the leafy suburbs. Some were educated in expensive private schools. Most had studied at universities like Oxford, LSE or Bristol. The chances of someone from a working-class background ending up like them were, to say the least, remote. Here I was, witnessing a phenomenon that goes back hundreds of years: the wealthy mocking the less well-off. And it got me thinking. How has hatred of working-class people become so socially acceptable? Privately educated, multi-millionaire comedians dress up as chavs for our amusement in popular sitcoms such as Little Britain. Our newspapers eagerly hunt down horror stories about “life among the chavs” and pass them off as representative of working-class communities. Internet sites such as “ChavScum” brim with venom directed at the chav caricature. It seems as though working-class people are the one group in society that you can say practically anything about.

You would be hard pushed to find someone in Britain who hates chavs as much as Richard Hilton. Mr. Hilton is the chief executive of Gymbox, one of the trendier additions to London’s flourishing fitness scene. Known for its creatively titled gym classes, Gymbox is unashamedly aimed at fitness freaks with deep pockets, demanding a steep £175 joining fee on top of £72 a month for membership. As Mr. Hilton himself explains, Gymbox was launched to tap into the insecurities of its predominantly white-collar professional clientele. “Members were asking for self-defence classes, as they were scared living in London,” he says.

In spring 2009, Gymbox unveiled a new addition to its already eclectic range of classes (including Boob Aerobics, Pole Dancing and Bitch Boxing): Chav Fighting. “Don’t give moody grunting Chavs an ASBO,” its website urged, “give them a kicking.” The rest of the promotional spiel did not pull its punches either, in the voice of a vigilante with a good grasp of PR. “Forget stealing candy from a baby. We’ll teach you how to take a Bacardi off a hoodie and turn a grunt into a whine. Welcome to Chav Fighting, a place where the punch bags gather dust and the world is put to rights.” The leaflets were even more candid. “Why hone your skills on punch bags and planks of wood when you can deck some Chavs…a world where Bacardi Breezers are your sword and ASBOs are your trophy.” There were some who felt that glorifying beating people up might be overstepping the mark. When the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) was called in, Gymbox responded with technicalities. It was not offensive, they claimed, because “nobody in society would admit to being a Chav; it was not a group to which people wanted to belong.” Amazingly, the ASA cleared Gymbox on the basis that chav-fighting classes “would be unlikely to condone or incite violence against particular social groups …” You would have to speak to Richard Hilton to appreciate the depths of hatred that inspired the class. Defining “chavs” as “young Burberry-clad street kids,” he went on to explain:

They tend to live in England but would probably pronounce it “Engerland.” They have trouble articulating themselves and have little ability to spell or write. They love their pit bull dogs as well as their blades. And would happily “shank” you if you accidentally brush past them or look at them in the wrong way. They tend to breed by the age of fifteen and spend most of their days trying to score “super-skunk” or whatever “gear” they can get their sweaty teenage hands on. If they are not institutionalized by twenty-one they are considered pillars of strength in the community or get “respect” for being lucky.

It is no surprise that, when asked if so-called chavs were getting a hard time in Britain, his response was blunt: “No, they deserve it.” Apparently the class was a hit with gym-goers. Describing it as “one of the most popular classes we have ever run,” he claimed that: “Most people related to it and enjoyed it. A few of the PC brigade were offended by it.” And yet, intriguingly, Mr. Hilton does not think of himself as a bigot—far from it. Sexism, racism and homophobia, for example, were, he said, “completely unacceptable.” An extremely successful businessman, Richard Hilton has tapped into the fear and loathing felt by some middle-class Londoners towards the lower orders. It is a compelling image: sweating City bankers taking out their recession-induced frustrations on semi-bestial poor kids. Welcome to Gymbox, where class war meets personal fitness.

It is easy to gasp at Hilton’s unembarrassed hatred, but the crude image of the working-class teenager he has painted is actually widespread among the middle-class. Thick. Violent. Criminal. “Breeding” like animals. And, of course, these chavs are not isolated elements: they are, after all, regarded as “pillars of strength in the community.”

Gymbox isn’t the only British company to have exploited middle-class horror of large swathes of working-class Britain. Activities Abroad is a travel firm offering exotic adventure holidays with price tags often upwards of £2,000: husky safaris in the Canadian wilderness, Finnish log cabin holidays, that sort of thing. Oh, but chavs need not apply. In January 2009, the company sent a promotional email to the 24,000 people on its database, quoting a Daily Mail article from 2005 showing that children with “middle-class” names were eight times more likely to pass their GCSEs than those with names like “Wayne and Dwayne.” The findings had led them to wonder what sort of names were likely to be found on an Activities Abroad trip. So, the team had a trawl through their database and came up with two lists: one of names you were “likely to encounter” on one of their holidays, and one of those you were not. Alice, Joseph and Charles featured on the first list, but ActivitiesAbroad excursions were a Britney, Chantelle and Dazza-free zone. They concluded that they could legitimately promise “Chav-Free Activity Holidays.” Again, not everyone was amused—but the company was unrepentant. “I simply feel it is time the middle classes stood up for themselves,” declared managing director Alistair McLean. “regardless of whether it’s class warfare or not, I make no apology for proclaiming myself to be middle class.”

When I spoke to Barry Nolan, one of the company’s directors, he was equally defiant. “The great indignation came from Guardian readers who were showing false indignation because they don’t live near them,” he said. “It resonated with the sort of people who were likely to be booking holidays with us. It proved to be an overwhelming success with our client base.” Apparently, the business enjoyed a 44 per cent increase in sales in the aftermath of the furor.

Gymbox and Activities Abroad had taken slightly different angles. Gymbox were tapping into middle-class fears that their social inferiors were a violent mob, waiting to knife them to death in some dark alley. Activities Abroad exploited resentment against the cheap flights which allowed working-class people to “invade” the middle-class space of the foreign holiday. “You can’t even flee abroad to escape them these days”—that sort of sentiment. But both of them were evidence of just how mainstream middle-class hatred of working-class people is in modern Britain.

Chav-bashing has become a way of making money because it strikes a chord. This becomes still more obvious when an unrepresentative story in the headlines is used as a convenient hook to “prove” the anti-chav narrative. When ex-convict Raoul Moat went on the run after shooting dead his ex-lover’s partner in July 2010, he became an anti-hero for a minority of some of the country’s most marginalized working-class people. One criminologist, Professor David Wilkinson, argued he was “tapping” into that dispossessed, white-working-class, masculine mentality, whereby they can’t make their way into the world legitimately so behaving the way that Moat has behaved, as this kind of anti-hero, has, I think, touched a nerve.” White working-class men had, at a stroke, been reduced to knuckle-dragging thugs lacking legitimate aspirations. The internet hosted a vitriolic free-for-all. Take this comment on the Daily Mail site:

Look around the supermarket, the bus and increasingly now on the road, you will encounter ever-growing numbers of tattooed, loud, foul-mouthed proles, with scummy brats trailing in their wake, who are incapable of acknowledging or even recognizing a common courtesy, and who in their own minds can never, ever, be in the wrong about anything. These are the people who are getting sentimental about a vicious killer; they have no values, no morality and are so thick that they are beyond redemption. You are better off just avoiding them.

This form of class hatred has become an integral, respectable part of modern British culture. It is present in newspapers, TV comedy shows, films, internet forums, social networking sites and everyday conversations. At the heart of the “chavs” phenomenon is an attempt to obscure the reality of the working-class majority. “We’re all middle class now,” runs the popular mantra—all except for a feckless, recalcitrant rump of the old working class. Simon Heffer is a strong advocate of this theory. One of the most prominent right-wing journalists in the country, he has often argued that ‘something called the respectable working class has almost died out. What sociologists used to call the working class does not now usually work at all, but is sustained by the welfare state.”3 It has given way to what he calls a “feral underclass.” When I asked Heffer what he meant by this, he replied: “the respectable working class has died out largely for good reason, because it was aspirational, and because society still provided the means of aspiration.” They had moved up the social ladder because “they’ve gone to university, and they’ve got jobs in white-collar trades or professions, and they’ve become middle class.” Where the millions who remain in manual occupations, or the majority of the population who has not attended university, fit into all this is an interesting question. According to Heffer, however, there are really two main groups in British society: “You don’t have families any more that live in sort of respectable, humble circumstances for generation after generation. They either become clients of the welfare state and become the underclass, or they become middle class.”

This is the model of society as seen through Heffer’s eyes. Nice, middle-class people on one side; an unredeemable detritus on the other (the “underclass” who represent “that section of the working class that not only has no ambition, it has no aspiration”); and nothing in between. It bears no relation to how society is actually structured—but then why would it? After all the journalists producing this stuff have little, if any, contact with the people they disparage. Heffer has a thoroughly middle-class background, lives in the country, and sends his kids to Eton. At one point, he admits: “I don’t know a great deal about the underclass” - a fact that has not deterred him from repeatedly slagging them off.

There are some who defend the use of the word “chav” and claim that, actually, working-class people are not demonized at all; “chav” is simply used to designate anti-social hooligans and thugs. This is questionable. To begin with, no one can doubt that those on the receiving end are exclusively working class. When “chav” first appeared in the Collins English Dictionary in 2005, it was defined as “a young working-class person who dresses in casual sports clothing.” Since then, its meaning has broadened significantly. One popular myth makes it an acronym for “Council Housed And Violent.” Many use it to show their distaste towards working-class people who have embraced consumerism, only to spend their money in supposedly tacky and uncivilized ways rather than with the discreet elegance of the bourgeoisie. Celebrities from working-class backgrounds such as David Beckham, Wayne Rooney or Cheryl Cole, for example, are routinely mocked as chavs. Above all, the term “chav” now encompasses any negative traits associated with working-class people—violence, laziness, teenage pregnancies, racism, drunkenness, and the rest. As Guardian journalist Zoe Williams wrote, “ ‘Chav’ might have grabbed the popular imagination by seeming to convey something original—not just scum, friends, but scum in Burberry!—only now it covers so many bases as to be synonymous with ‘prole’ or any word meaning ‘poor, and therefore worthless.’”

To call people chavs is no better than public schoolboys calling townies “oiks.” “Chavs” are often treated as synonymous with the “white working class.” The BBC’s 2008 White season of programs dedicated to the same class was a classic example, portraying its members as backward-looking, bigoted and obsessed with race. Indeed, while the “working class” became a taboo concept in the aftermath of Thatcherism, the “white working class” was increasingly spoken about in the early twenty-first century. Because “class” had for so long been a forbidden word within the political establishment, the only inequalities discussed by politicians and the media were racial ones. The white working class had become another marginalized ethnic minority, and this meant that all their concerns were understood solely through the prism of race. They became presented as a lost tribe on the wrong side of history, chavs disorientated by multiculturalism and obsessed with defending their identity from the cultural ravages of mass immigration. The rise of the idea of a “white working class” fuelled a new liberal bigotry. It was OK to hate the white working class, because they were themselves a bunch of racist bigots.

One common defense of the term “chav” points out that “Chavs themselves use the word, so what’s the problem?” They have a point: some young working-class people have even embraced the word as a cultural identity. But the meaning of a word often depends on who is using it. When uttered by a heterosexual, “queer” is clearly deeply homophobic; yet some gay men have proudly appropriated it as an identity. Similarly, although “Paki” is one of the most offensive racist terms a white person can use in Britain, some young Asians use it as a term of endearment among their peers. In 2010, a controversy involving right-wing US shock-jock Dr Laura Schlessinger vividly illustrated this point. After using the word “nigger” on-air eleven times in a conversation with an African-American caller, she attempted to defend herself on the grounds that black comedians and actors used it. In all cases, the meaning of the word changes depending on the speaker. When uttered by a middle-class person, “chav” becomes a term of pure class contempt. Liam Cranley, the son of a factory worker who grew up in a working-class community in Greater Manchester, describes to me his reaction when a middle-class person uses the word: “You’re talking about family: you’re talking about my brother, you’re talking about my mum. You’re talking about my friends.”

Demonizing people at the bottom has been a convenient way of justifying an unequal society throughout the ages. After all, in the abstract it would seem irrational that through an accident of birth, some should rise to the top while others remain trapped at the bottom. But what if you are on top because you deserve to be? What if people at the bottom are there because of a lack of skill, talent and determination? Yet it goes deeper than inequality. At the root of the demonization of working-class people is the legacy of a very British class war. Margaret Thatcher’s assumption of power in 1979 marked the beginning of an all-out assault on the pillars of working-class Britain. Its institutions, like trade unions and council housing, were dismantled; its industries, from manufacturing to mining, were trashed; its communities were, in some cases, shattered, never to recover; and its values, like solidarity and collective aspiration, were swept away in favor of rugged individualism.

Stripped of their power and no longer seen as a proud identity, the working class was increasingly sneered at, belittled and scape-goated. These ideas have caught on, in part, because of the eviction of working-class people from the world of the media and politics. Politicians, particularly in the Labour Party, once spoke of improving the conditions of working-class people. But today’s consensus is all about escaping the working class. The speeches of politicians are peppered with promises to enlarge the middle class. “Aspiration” has been redefined to mean individual self-enrichment: to scramble up the social ladder and become middle-class. Social problems like poverty and unemployment were once understood as injustices that sprang from flaws within capitalism which, at the very least, had to be addressed. Yet today they have become understood as the consequences of personal behavior, individual defects and even choice. The plight of some working-class people is commonly portrayed as a “poverty of ambition” on their part. It is their individual characteristics, rather than a deeply unequal society rigged in favor of the privileged, chavs that is held responsible.

But, though we are all prisoners of our class, that does not mean we have to be prisoners of our class prejudices.

Owen Jones has worked in the British Parliament as a trade union lobbyist and parliamentary researcher. He is writing a PhD on the history of blue-collar America and the rise of the New Right. He lives in London.

This is an exclusive excerpt from Owen Jones’s book, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, published by Verso.

Shatter the Trees and Blow them Away

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 19:52:00 -0400

By Mark Chiusano.

“Like everyone else, someone had come up to me, put a pointer finger in the center of my chests, and said, serve your country. Make us the Gadget, they said, and your name will be forever.”

A short story.

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It was 1944 and they told us to take the overnight to Jemez Springs, New Mexico, and when I said, where’s that, the guy at the ticket counter at the Princeton train station said, middle a bumfuck nowhere, that’s what I know, and the guy in the conductor cap next to him said, why all the one way tickets to Los Alamos lately, and I said, some things are classified for a reason.

It was on that long train down to New Mexico that I saw her for the first time. She was in the aisle across from me. When she saw that I didn’t get off in Chicago like everyone else, she asked me if I was by chance a man of science, and I told her engineering. She did particle physics, and already we were sharing a secret.

The compound was built on the site of an old all-boys school. Everything was clap-trap, the wooden sidings, the paint above the windows. My room didn’t even have a shower although hers did, and I begged her to let me use it, an excuse to be close by, although the woman next door would yell from her bedroom when I was tramping into the shower, “Lise, is he here again?”

Everyone spent all day at work. You can’t understand it. Somebody had come to each of us, put a pointer finger in the center of our chests, and said, serve your country. We who were too scared to sign up for infantry, and spent all our post-finals beer money worrying if we’d lose our draft-exempt status. But they said, make us the Gadget, and your names will be forever.

I thought Lise and I would be the youngest, but graduate students were like leaves. All the professors who had been disappearing from class, or the Institute higher-ups who had become conspicuously absent, were showing up here, from Berkeley, Cambridge, Ann Arbor. There were mathematicians, theoretical physicists, chemists who knew all about fission, armaments engineers flown in from Normandy and their college buddies from MIT.

It was summer camp surrounded by barbed-wire fences. There was only the one cantina in the neighboring town and it was always packed with shirt-tucked-in scientists trying to talk to the locals. It was always a male crowd. The women were something special. They tended to be better than the rest of us, and there weren’t many of them either. Men danced with each other in order to keep dances alive. I was lucky to meet her on the train, I told her once. She rolled her eyes and said, whatever that means.

Meanwhile, I was busier than I’d ever been in my life. I used to imagine making whole flying cities when I was a kid, designing just the tallest pinpoint towers and letting the lessers take care of the rest, according to my dashed-off plans. In high school, I was into bottle rockets and roman candles, and then the University gave me an aerodynamics lab, and they brought me to the compound to work on the way the Gadget would fall. The third day there, I spent all afternoon doing exploded view drawings of the thing—from right to left: the nose casing, the uranium target, the uranium bullet that would set it off, and the explosive on the back end, which mattered most for me. The problem was that the explosive had to be triggered somewhere before it landed, or half of the Gadget’s power would go right into the ground. We had to know the drop-path and design the casing so the explosive could go off correctly at the right time. Four days later when I had a mock-up, they gave me an assistant from Texas Tech, and together we started dropping models off the top of buildings. Then the explosives engineers redesigned the bullet, and we had to redesign the casing, and it was back to square one.

Lise had an office all to herself at the far end of the compound. The guy next to her was also in particles and kept a carton of cookies on his desk. He was one of the last holdovers who didn’t believe in Special Relativity, but he was such a good ideas-man that they took him from U. Minnesota in case something hit him here in the heat. Lise argued with him all the time in the beginning, but eventually she just stopped by for a chocolate chip cookie in the morning and waved when he went out.

I had dinner breaks then and I would go visit once he was gone. Sometimes I kneaded her shoulders while she stared at her graphs. She had this idea that it might be possible to use entropy to model the explosion. She was spending her time trying to make the sum of the equations a convergent series. When she wrote integral signs the muscles in her neck twitched.

One of the times with my hands on her shoulders she stood up, took my hand, led me over to the extra chair and pulled it over to her plush one. We sat alongside one another, and she put my arm around her shoulder. She had her head turned away, towards the papers on her desk. I ran my fingers over her arm and let her hear my breathing get heavy. After three minutes she stood up and told me to get out, she had work to do.

I needed her to be with me. I set my watch by the point when we broke for lunch when she came and met me and hugged hello. I walked down different corridors to try to pass her when she didn’t know I’d be there. It was the way you can make yourself sick, and finally I was doodling abstract drawings at my drafting bench, running the .2-inch lead-pen up and down in geometric and sinusoidal patterns, putting in circles for her eyes and obtuse angles for her bottom lip.

***

Sometime that summer, the Army Corps made a baseball field out of desert and nothing, once they were done with the scientific installations. Oppie thought it was good to have us doing something other than working and drinking. It was mostly popular with the military guys, who played pepper and hit fungoes. But some of the scientists would go watch, and a few number theorists from California made a pretty good infield. Lise liked to sit behind home plate with a skirt on and her legs crossed.

Once when I was sitting in her office, she told me that she thought I could maybe apply myself in ways outside of work, so the next day I went down to the dugout when they were choosing up teams. All anyone wore was t-shirts and jeans then out west, except for the soldiers, of course, who did everything in semi-uniform. One of the number theorists knew who I was and told a sergeant to take me for right field. They gave me a glove and when I ran by, Lise raised her eyebrows and crossed her arms.

I only got one at-bat that day, because they rang an air-raid drill in the second inning. I walked on four pitches, and Lise clapped, and I was looking so much towards her that the private F.C. playing first base picked me off. I didn’t even go back to the dugout, just sat next to her on the bleachers, and she said to me, very sincerely, that it could have been worse. The whole time in right field, I had been terrified of getting a fly-ball. It was a high sky, and that sun was along the first-base line, and I imagined the ball and the sun in my field of vision obscuring each other. I felt sick imagining the ball making two-run-double contact with the ground.

Of course, the whole place loved Lise. When we sat together at the dances, she told me that she tried to time each turn with a guy so each one got two and a half minutes. Everyone asked her for dinner, and walks, most of which she declined. She liked being with me, she said, because she knew I was here for the right reasons. What are those, I asked.

She liked to listen to music while she worked, particularly piano, and I found her a record player from a second-hand store in town. Sometimes I brought my drawings into her office, too and watched her working, me tracing the air currents things leave when they fall at terminal velocity. There were more and more people running down the halls at that time, and sometimes they came and asked for our pieces of paper. Sometimes you heard people shout in the corridors, and nobody came out and checked if anyone was hurt anymore because it would just be someone doing something important.

***

Lise and I had been there for a few months, when they got enough uranium to run a test. On the morning of Trinity, I was the last one on top of the tower. We were dropping it from fifteen stories up. One of the chemists had asked a guy standing near me at breakfast that morning if the tower wouldn’t look conspicuous to everyone after we did the drop. The guy just looked at him.

I was at the top fixing the packaging, making sure the angle was right so it wouldn’t hit the scaffolding on the way down. The Gadget had a three-foot radius, and in the tests I ran it could have a horizontal variance of three inches right before the blow. I’d told them to make the drop chute at least eight feet wide, and they gave it ten. It was the middle of a rainstorm, and the lightning was coming down all around me. You could see it hit the desert and the chain link fences around our compound. It occurred to me that the top of a metal tower next to the Gadget wasn’t the safest place to be with lightning dropping, but someone had to do it. Two days ago, I had heard the theorist squad asking if everyone was sure this wasn’t going to blow holes in the atmosphere. Because then we’d really be cooked. I got off the tower and they drove us ten miles away to a bunker.

Two guys from DC were there to observe, and they were standing a few people away from me. Oppie told everyone to squat on their knees. Then he made us turn away from the tower. Ten seconds before it happened, he told us to cover our eyes with our palms. The DC guys looked at each other and one said, “what’ve we come all this way for, then?” But they did it and then it dropped and we saw our white bones under the skin of our hands.

That night, Lise and I climbed out of her window onto the roof. One of the German émigrés was playing Tchaikovsky two buildings over. She wanted to dance, and we did, and it was good to be doing something, getting the motion out of our veins. The dust was still coming down at the edge of the horizon, and it was still colored green and purple and pink from the radiation. The thing just blew. I wanted to jump, or pound my fist on the roof tops, or cover Lise with my entire heavy life up to now. Something happened. Something had changed. When Lise pulled my pants off, I almost ripped the top of her blouse. The chipped paint scratched up my back. Later, she asked me if it was my first time. I lied.

We heard the news about the Gadget going overseas one morning. There were loudspeakers set up around the compound on top of telephone poles. They played the national anthem and then a sober-voiced man said the tests had worked as well as our wildest dreams. There was champagne at the laboratory benches. Someone was pouring bourbon into beakers and we toasted.

Lise was with the observation team that was going over to help the crew’s training for three weeks and then observe. We put a chair under the doorknob in her bathroom and her roommate just knocked and knocked. They dressed the observation team in fatigues, and a lot of us, including Oppie, went to wave to the plane goodbye.

During that time, we played a lot of pickup baseball on the compound. We were waiting for the okay to get started on the new project, working with hydrogen, 400,000 times more powerful. Everyone was chomping at the chalkboards to get going, but DC said wait. Oppie was travelling back and forth from the East Coast.

The field was yellow with half straw at this heat in August, though the Army Corps people watered the diamond every other week. There was a layer of fine sand over the infield base-paths which made it easy to get grounders. You could just sit back and wait for them to die and swirl in the sand. I liked taking rounds and rounds of them with the number theorists and some privates, rotating who would hit and then getting in line, seeing who would let the ball through their legs first. The bat was made of aspen wood from a tree on the compound, and some genius had carved on the power spot, Los Alamos, Home of Explosions. We spent long afternoons there, lying in the dusty outfield, looking at the sun. It was a pulsing, living thing that summer, its image burned into our heads while we waited.

When Lise came back, I went to meet the plane, and I asked her if she wanted to go to the cantina for a drink. The particle physicist from the office next to hers was holding a banner, and they were pumping music through the loudspeakers. I tried to press the khaki of her shirt against my chest. But she pushed me off and said that she wanted to go to her room. When she came out, she was in civilian clothes and she wanted to get dinner. When we went into town, we were stopped at a green light waiting for jeeps to go by and she told me she wasn’t going to stay.

We argued. We sat against somebody else’s fence and never made it to dinner. I said that, technically, the military police could get involved. She said that the second bomb had shattered the trees rather than blowing them over. I told her she had an obligation to her country and her brother, a marine in the Fifth. She said the bomb left shadows of spiral staircases on walls they were leaning against; that the Enola Gay flew through a late moon in the East; that there were eight ships in Hiroshima Harbor. I stopped her and touched her hand and asked if she remembered the night of Trinity, and she said she hadn’t slept since somewhere over the Pacific, and the mushroom cloud was still in her head.

It took a week for her clearance to be revoked, and for all the papers to come in for her statements to be signed. She ate dinner with me once, but she wouldn’t come to the dance afterwards. She stayed inside with a handful of other scientists who were leaving while we toasted, in the middle of the street, next to the pagoda the Army Corps had just finished installing. We went for walks and sat on the bench in the dugout when the baseball field was empty, and towards the middle she was almost like she’d always been. But then that Friday she wouldn’t say a word, and she didn’t want me to touch her shoulders.

Two days later, she was gone and we got the go-ahead to get the H-bomb up and running. The war was over, but the Russians were working on their own Gadget, and it was only a matter of time before this one mattered. Everyone was ecstatic. We worked 12-hour days, did calculations and ran tests. I dropped metal from the rooftops to measure the lateral drift. She left and I hated that she had, with all this going on.

It started again, the nights in the cantina, the days in underground labs. The military men played baseball, but we had a war on here. Sometimes I caught myself panting in the middle of drafting, and I’d have to take a beaker of the bourbon before picking up the pencil again. I knew guys who had to be hospitalized because they refused to sleep. There was talk of changing our sleep schedules to make a 26-hour day. Day and night became interchangeable. She wrote a letter, saying she was somewhere in Arizona and trying to live. I threw it out. I wanted to see it again, the cloud coming over the desert. So loud that the deaf heard something outrageous and the blind asking if this was white. I went into her office, pored over her papers, sat in the plush chair behind her desk. I began to think that she took the answer with her. She knew how it could be done. There was a secret and it was lost to me. She was gone and we were waiting here for inspiration to strike.

Mark Chiusano lives in Cambridge, MA.

Decline

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 16:55:00 -0400

By David Hayes.

“In case of rams and horses, Kurnus, / We seek the highest class, / And select the finest specimens / Of ass to breed with ass.”

A new translation of Theognis 183-92.

___________________________________________________________

In case of rams and horses, Kurnus,

We seek the highest class,

And select the finest specimens

Of ass to breed with ass.

But the noble man no longer cares

To marry from the best

He takes his bride from foul stock

For feathering his nest.

Nor does a lady refuse to bed

The lowest of the low

If he displays a bank account

That’s very well-endowed.

Does this explain, Polypaus’ son,

Your sense of the decline

Of the lineage of Megara,

Your beloved town and mine?

It all comes down to money, Kurnus:

It’s fucking with our genes,

And the child is neither high nor low

But a shapeless in-between.

David Hayes is an assistant professor at the European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin.

Utopias, Vol I: Alastair Campbell

Sat, 28 May 2011 10:22:00 -0400

By Alastair Campbell.

“Just because something is unreachable should not deter us from striving for it. So here’s the vision…”

The Utopian inaugurates a series of utopias, written by today’s most interesting philosophers, social scientists, politicians and writers. First up: Alastair Campbell.

__________________________________________________________________________________

How rare is a six-letter word with four vowels? Rare. So rare they call it Utopia, an unreachable perfection.

Yes, unreachable. That is the point. But just because something is unreachable should not deter us from striving for it, so long as we are realistic and understand that once we think we are close, another challenge hovers into view.

So here’s the vision - the UK as a united people of well-educated, well-informed, politically engaged, tolerant, outward-looking, creative and largely contended citizens.

Given the relative peace and prosperity we have enjoyed since the Second World War, we should be a lot further forward. We are not helped by the media-driven culture of negativity, nor by the failure of the political class to challenge it better. Here are a few ideas that might help engender a deeper sense of citizenship.

Compulsory voting in all local and national elections. The lowering of the voting age to 16. The teaching of politics and citizenship in primary schools. Children are taught from an early age that sport is good for them, healthy eating is good for them, reading and writing are good for them. They should be taught that politics is as central to their lives as any of those things, and taught it from a positive perspective.

As for the media’s culture of negativity, how can we even believe we are near Utopia when so many of our fellow citizens read papers like the Daily Mail (nine letters, four and a half vowels)? Whenever I see people purchasing its bile, I have the same reaction I would have on seeing someone take drugs. Why deliberately poison yourself?

Of course we can all urge media change. But for all we might engage in earnest debates about social media, or whither the licence fee in the digital age, let us admit as a society that the real media stories of recent years aren’t Wikileaks or MPs’ expenses but celebrity magazines and reality TV shows. The media can blame dumbed down Britain on politicians or teachers if they like. They would be better off looking in the mirror. But it will not change unless the British people want it to change … which brings me back to the hope that one day we can be a united people of well-educated, well-informed, politically engaged, tolerant, creative and largely contented citizens.

Alastair Campbell, Director of Communications and Strategy for Tony Blair from 1997 to 2003, is the bestselling author of the The Alastair Campbell Diaries.

Nothing to Lose But Your Cubicles

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 17:29:00 -0400

By Ross Perlin.

How to earn nothing and learn little in the brave new economy.

The Intern Manifesto.

______________________________________________________________________________

“Do the interns get Glocks?”

“No, they all share one.”

—The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou

Picture unsorted mail forming menacing towers; websites, newsletters, and contact lists growing increasingly out of date. No one to get coffee, make Xeroxes, or run errands, but also no one to be mentored, no one to cover vital work during staff vacations, and no one with timid, bright ideas about reaching the youth demographic. The magic of Disney World would become a nightmare, and the iPod assembly lines of Foxconn would grind to a halt. Capitol Hill would grow hushed, as junior staffers took up administrative tasks and a slower pace of work set in. Nonprofits would make hard choices, focusing on core programs and pondering necessary hires. Companies would bring in temps and ask employees to put in overtime; eventually, some might even go out of business or never get off the ground. A general strike of all interns would show all that they contribute for the first time. Bringing a delicious, low-level chaos to the world’s work, it would demonstrate forcefully just how much intern labor now sustains a wide array of industries and offices.

For young people, the sheer scale of the internship arms race has made the raw credential unremarkable, a box to be checked, in economic terms a broken “signal” for college graduates just starting out. Its shelf life is short. Its power is largely negative—it seems risky not to have done one, it teaches you what not to do. Employers are increasingly aware that these experiences can mean just about anything: your parents are well connected, your school required it, you barely showed up at the office. Even elite internships turn on opaque, connections-based hiring processes and astronomical odds. An internship may occupy your days, but it’s hardly a summer break or a year off: more likely it’s a pressure cooker, another system of praise and censure. It keeps you out of trouble, but maybe “the organization kids”—the earnest, ever-striving millennials, aspirationally if not actually upper-middle class—could use a little trouble.

A whole generation has been utterly professional about their pre-professionalism, forfeiting the more relaxed jobs and leisurely summers of old, ignoring other paths of self-development. These young shock troops of the New Economy keep parachuting into the workforce, bristling with the armor of their credentials. They endured, even lapped up, the hyper-programming of childhood, every waking hour filled with karate sessions, piano lessons, after-school Spanish classes. Juiced for competition by parents and teachers, they keep blazing through private schools, magnet schools, and “gifted” programs, collecting Advanced Placement exams and chalking up extracurriculars, beating the curve with SAT tutors and gaining polish with foreign travel and study-abroad programs. Self-programming almost comes naturally by now, carrying to extremes every homily about work imbibed from relatives, friends, acquaintances, professors, and career advisors. Today’s interns cast their vote for careerism over curiosity, for networking over hanging out, for the office over the open road. Internships are boring us and they’re making us boring.

As education, internships pale in comparison to our universities. As training to work, they compare unfavorably with apprenticeships. As a form of work, they are often a disappointment, and sometimes a rank injustice, failing our expectations and violating our laws. They have come to embody the ethos that all free, unstructured time should be harnessed for résumébuilding and career development. Well-intentioned, jittery parents should not lend blind support, moral or financial, to anything labeled an “internship,” that magic word which suspends judgment. There have been decades of deliberate but half-baked efforts to help young people transition from the world of school to the world of white-collar work: and truly it’s a miracle that anyone can make the leap from Psych 101 to being gainfully employed. There is no single road. Paid work experience, personal projects, foreign-language mastery, community service, job shadowing, freelance work, academic research, registered apprenticeships, and just plain old living and learning are all possible ways forward.

Consider the entrepreneurs and artists who have tinkered with new ideas and inventions and then taken a risk. Figure out how to turn a job at the mall into something with a future: talking honestly about your ambitions to your supervisor, interacting with customers, pressing for better work conditions and career advancement. Strike out and develop a new skill—whether it’s taking a Spanish class or learning from a friend how to fix cars—and turn it into a career opportunity. Refusing to join the internship arms race need not mean losing your edge, resigning yourself to a second-tier career, or ending up on the unemployment rolls. Even in the fields where internships now seem a dominant prerequisite, employers will notice if driven, bright, and creative young people are finding other ways to break in. Young people need intense, structured learning opportunities and the space to be entrepreneurial. Why champion a onesize- fits-all way into work? You can make it without an internship.

Internships are a new way to work, with huge implications for higher education, access to the white-collar world, social inequality, and the future of laboring. Call it experiential education, volunteer work, participant observation, training, or apprenticeship—but most interns are now workers. Concocting all these different labels provides only the thinnest justification for taking away the rights of interns as workers, for keeping them from understanding what work itself is all about. The first intern, confined within the four walls of his hospital, was a medical apprentice, updated for the modern age by a profession seeking to burnish its reputation with standardized forms of practical training. By mid-century, Corporate America, in high Fordist fashion, was finding internships to be a rational form of workplace planning, guaranteeing a sufficient supply of skilled, credentialed labor to power economic growth. The transformation and massive expansion that has followed—the ever-accelerating explosion of the last few decades—now positions internships as the gateway to all white-collar work, in an era when decent jobs outside that charmed circle are increasingly hard to come by. Fired by this incentive, interns have become a craven, flextime labor force sanctioned and even mobilized by academia, available in two principal flavors: the privileged and the precarious.

Despite changing priorities, firms have found interns to be well worth the trouble—old motivations like standardizing the abilities of employees, guaranteeing a steady supply of skilled workers, and saving on labor and hiring costs are easy to grasp. The indifference and even collusion of government is unsurprising: non-enforcement of the Fair Labor Standards Act is part of a larger pattern of allowing New Deal protections to decay in the name of deregulating labor markets. The failure to measure or address the internship explosion is symptomatic: laws and regulations are simply not keeping up with the times. The indifference of unions bespeaks their own torpor, their inability to combat the rise of contingent labor, and their lack of a foothold in the white-collar world.

Refusing to offer or take internships in their current form is a feasible option, but many internships are already ethical and well paid, with strong mentoring and real opportunities for advancement. These model internships—fast-track positions for minority students arranged by INROADS, well-paid corporate internships in finance and engineering, life-changing stints at small companies and nonprofits that invest in training and mentoring, and so on—may still represent the best way to enter the workplace for many young people. Yet the better internships are, the more competitive they seem to be, unfortunately.

Any thoughtful approach to fixing the current system must proceed along two separate tracks: rectifying the indignities faced by current interns and ensuring greater access to internships that are worthwhile and meet basic criteria of fairness. The current system generates more and more opportunities—of increasingly lower quality. Few interns are willing to speak out. Many of those I’ve spoken to complained bitterly about their positions, but they worry that exposing illegal or exploitative internships would result in fewer opportunities across the board. Although widespread, this feeling has little evidence to support it.

Why jack up the quantity of internships before we’ve made a concerted effort to improve their quality? While it’s true that some individual employers might balk at paying minimum wage and feel moved to cut their programs, this would only separate the wheat from the chaff— the internships that are least valued by employers and interns alike are the ones that would disappear first. The excuse that a firm “doesn’t have the money” rings hollow: in the scheme of things, internships are never particularly expensive, and the question is simply whether they are valued enough to make it into the budget. And at least two important data points attest that raising the alarm and fixing abuses are unlikely to bring about an appreciable decline in internship offerings. First, mandating pay for interns is equivalent to closing a minimum wage loophole, and a substantial academic literature on the minimum wage has shown few adverse effects from instituting wage floors in the labor market. Second, as we’ll see below, the architecture profession moved decisively to combat unpaid, illegal internships and witnessed no apparent drop-off in the number of available positions.

Employers do need sufficient incentives to give young people a shot. No one would suggest employee status for a high school student shadowing a petroleum engineer or a banker for a week or two. Putting in fewer than ten hours a week at a nonprofit, on a flexible and occasional basis, may resemble volunteering or freelancing a lot more than regular work. Supply and demand will inevitably play a role in the internship aisle of the labor supermarket, and different norms will continue to prevail in different industries. But let’s insist on one simple principle: you shouldn’t have to work for free to break into the white-collar world. To allow that is to devalue work, threaten regular jobs, and exclude the less privileged. To enact this principle, companies, industries, schools, governments, as well as interns and their families, should try several different measures and see what works. Initiatives and experiments are needed from all quarters; together, their combined effect could be decisive, ending an unethical, inefficient drift with a sensible, professional, and humane approach to entering the workforce.

What employers can do is not a mystery: open advertising of positions; a strong training and mentoring component; discrete and manageable projects; a duration of at least a few months (for internships—less time for shadowing), allowing intern and supervisor to adjust to each other. What about the nature of the work? Most interns don’t and shouldn’t expect immediate glamor, writing legislation and designing the summer fashion line. Nearly everyone staples reports and makes coffee sometimes, but interns should not replace administrative assistants, janitors, couriers, or temps, for a dozen obvious reasons. College student plus work does not equal an internship. The term “intern” should be applied ethically and transparently to opportunities that involve training, mentoring, and getting to know a line of work—internships should reflect what a given industry is all about and what the organization actually does. Tasks should play to an intern’s strengths and account for the training she’s receiving. Academic credit, supervised by a professor, can be a valuable enhancement and a useful safeguard, if there is a genuine academic tie-in—but this applies to a distinct minority of internships. A project-based model allows interns to focus on achieving something tangible, instead of becoming a gofer or doing the work of a regular employee, only with lower standing. More geared to future managers, a rotation model can be equally effective, granting access to different areas and functions of an organization—but should not be confused with doing “a little of this and a little of that” dependent solely on the shortterm needs of a firm. Virtual internships and home office internships should be treated with suspicion, unless there are sufficient guarantees.

Having large intern cohorts can mean camaraderie and quality control, while individual situations may offer close mentoring and the chance to work on more momentous projects. When things are clicking, interns can do big things: unlock energy savings for companies, help start-ups get off the ground, lend serious technical expertise, and run marketing strategies and ad campaigns, to name just a few real examples. Whatever work the interns are performing, the question of pay is central. There’s a reason that money issues have been a key theme of this book, and why I have cast a much harsher light on the hundreds of thousands of interns, probably millions around the world, who receive less than the local minimum wage each year. All research indicates that pay radically changes the equation: broadening the applicant pool, providing powerful motivation, allowing interns to focus on their work, enabling longer and more fruitful stints, and publicly marking the seriousness of the position. Pay is about respect and livelihood—only the thinnest sliver of internships can, and should, be exempted from the FLSA by meeting the Department of Labor’s six-point test, providing such vital training, in return for so little labor, that pay need not be an issue.

People have asked me: if interns are from the elite to begin with, why bother paying them minimum wage? Aren’t companies being rational in spending their money on other things, when interns don’t seem to need it? These are valid and important questions—although it should be emphasized again that a clear majority of unpaid interns come from middle-class backgrounds, and they are likely making a sacrifice to be where they are. Indeed, even when a given group of interns is more privileged, these questions put the cart before the horse: if the firm did pay wages, they would attract a diverse, normal group of young people who certainly could use the money. An equally important point is that it is simply not possible, or ethical, for employers to discriminate about compensation in this fashion—the wage should match the work, not the family background of the worker. Nor is any employer in a position to decide who needs to be paid: especially in this day and age of long credit-lines and easily maintained appearances, one never knows when a well-dressed, cheerful young man is deep in debt.

Internships save firms money, but these savings can easily be dwarfed by the risks inherent in the current system— from bringing people who are mediocre or worse into an organization (if their parents win an auction, for instance) to blackening a firm’s reputation and attracting the undesired attention of employment lawyers and government regulators. A much safer and more reasonable strategy for saving money through internships, already pursued by many blue-chip companies, is to use them as a genuine recruiting tool. Even if there’s little hiring in the offing, consider that you’re ushering someone into an industry and may well do business with them again down the line. A firm’s best interests will be served by kick-starting the careers of its high-performing interns and helping them find work inside or outside the company. A firm can start by getting its own house in order, consulting, if in doubt, with HR professionals, legal counsel, and university career centers about what goes into a sound internship program. (In the interests of accuracy, the word “program” should only refer to cases where an organization, or one of its departments, is demonstrably working to shape a standard experience for all of its interns.) If an executive says a firm’s program is all about “giving back,” and boasts about the important work that interns do, let him put his money where his mouth is.

That’s just what the Atlantic Media company did, announcing in April 2010 not only that it would immediately start paying its interns, but also that the previous year’s intern class would receive retroactive pay. The company said in a statement that it had previously worked with outside counsel to develop an unpaid program where “interns work side by side with our editorial and business-side staff ” and can experience “a strong academic program with a formal curriculum including lectures, case studies, homework and exercises.” Nonetheless, a New York Times story about the proliferation of illegal internships and Department of Labor concerns brought about a rethink: “We had thought this was the way to structure unpaid internships but if it sits near a gray zone, it’s not for us.” Especially in the wake of the national discussion prompted by the Times story, the company reaped good publicity from the announcement—and the interns, of course, were thrilled. As Ross Eisenbrey of the Economic Policy Institute says, “Some companies will be scared into it. Other companies will do the right thing because it’s the right thing.”

Calling things by their proper names is another major step that organizations can take. Bosses who want to give back but can’t pay for work should consider setting up a shadowing program, so that students from local high schools and colleges can experience something of what it’s like to sell insurance or write software. Nonprofits should call on volunteers when that’s genuinely what they need—not full-time six-month interns, doing the work of regular employees without pay to further their careers. Offices committed to their interns should be publicly recognized and perhaps even rewarded—even calls for an “internship tax credit” (a measure of this kind was recently passed by the Philadelphia City Council) may be worth heeding. As it stands, feckless employers enjoy a dual benefit by not paying: a short-term competitive advantage over firms that do pay, and an outrageous exemption from recognizing interns’ other workplace rights.

But what if an entire industry changed its practices? The sky didn’t fall in when the field of architecture did precisely that in the mid-1990s, taking a powerful and effective stance against the mistreatment of unpaid, overworked interns. At the time, Thomas Fisher, dean of the architecture school at the University of Minnesota, wrote of a “cycle of exploitation that gets passed from one generation of architects to the next,” that “misunderstandings about the wage and hour law abound in the profession, and that non-compliance with the law, especially regarding interns’ overtime pay and consultant status, is widespread.” Architect Fred Stitt estimated that as many as half of small architecture firms were in violation of the law.

“There were a lot of problems with star architects,” says Kevin Fitzgerald of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), and interns would “be going to work for them basically for free, for nothing. They wouldn’t get paid, but they worked these crazy hours.” These firms, adds Fitzgerald, weren’t “budgeting projects very well and [weren’t] willing to pay for the real costs of having an employee.” The “ignoble tradition” of architects demanding free labor was considered deep-seated in the profession, wrote Fisher, with an impeccable pedigree dating back at least to Frank Lloyd Wright’s unpaid Taliesin Fellowship in the 1930s and the workplace practices of legends such as Le Corbusier and Bruce Goff. “My office runs on unpaid interns,” said one noted architect to Fisher. “A bit,” replied three young employees of another prominent practitioner, when asked by Fisher if they were paid. Summing up the different forms of exploitation still popular in the 1990s, Fisher notes that “some of the best-known firms do not pay interns at all” while others “engage in less obvious forms of exploitation, much of which is illegal and all of which damages the profession”—including misclassifying interns as independent contractors or consultants, not paying for overtime, and discriminating in the studio. “There is nothing unusual about such experiences,” wrote Fisher in 1994, although “it’s scandalous that the architectural community has looked the other way for so long.” Compounding matters was the fact that a multi-year internship (termed an IDP, short for Intern Development Program) is virtually required to become a licensed architect in the United States.

Since 1976, when the structure of IDP was first established, the program has become an indispensable career move for graduates of architecture schools who want to continue into the profession—typically a three- to five-year period spent working full-time at a firm, learning every aspect of the field. Small firms with under ten employees, quite common in architecture, might have one or two such interns; larger ones with multiple offices could have as many as thirty or forty young architectural interns at any given time. And not all architecture internships are structured IDPs—it’s still common for students and recent graduates to do more informal stints, not geared specifically towards becoming a licensed professional, undertaken for a summer or longer.

The fact that unpaid and barely paid interns were patently performing vital work, sometimes for years on end, stoked anger among many young architects, which finally boiled over during the recession of the early 1990s. The involvement of professional associations like the AIA in creating and managing the standards of IDP afforded a certain amount of leverage for reform; the understanding that these firms also violated federal labor law added further urgency. “We were the first to cry out,” says Je’Nen Chastain of her organization—she is currently president of the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS), an independent nonprofit that represents 30,000 architecture students and interns. First building its case at industry conferences, in journals and in newsletters, the AIAS Board of Directors then passed a resolution in 1993 strongly condemning unpaid internships. The student group lobbied other key professional organizations to follow their lead in establishing a strongly worded policy on the issue—which the AIA soon did, along with the organizations that represent architecture schools and the profession’s state licensing boards.

“The AIAS maintains that employers must properly compensate all employees,” states the policy, which is still in force today. “Compensation must be in compliance with the regulations for the jurisdiction in which they are working … In the past, it had been considered appropriate to ‘hire’ students or recent architecture graduates to work for an architecture firm for little or no compensation until they had obtained a sufficient amount of experience”—a practice that “ignores and belittles the contribution that each participant adds to an architecture project.” AIAS “denounces those firms, organizations, and individuals that do not properly compensate their employees” and “supports the efforts of interns who refuse to work” for such firms. Any student, intern, or architect wishing to participate in any AIAS event—as a speaker, awardee, jury member etc.—must sign a statement that they are neither engaging in nor making use of unpaid work.

Other key professional organizations in architecture soon endorsed the policy and sought a means of enforcement, ostracizing architects who continued not to pay—effectively making fair compensation part of the ethical code that all upstanding members of the profession are expected to follow. Deans of the different architecture schools began to scrutinize the postings for unpaid positions that came their way; a prominent architect, Peter Eisenman, was pointedly barred from speaking at a major conference after refusing to verify that his studio only arranges lawful internships. Five detailed surveys of young architects, undertaken since then, have enabled the profession to better understand what works and what doesn’t about internships in architecture. As a part of its ongoing mission, AIAS distributes a toolkit to members about “why unpaid internships harm students and the reputation of the profession and what to do to deal with those situations,” according to Chastain. The discussions of the mid-1990s even opened up the possibility that an offending architect could lose his membership in the professional organizations or his license to practice architecture.

But such drastic measures haven’t been necessary. “I think it is a different world out there now,” says Kevin Fitzgerald of the AIA. “I think most architects would shy away from not paying people these days: they’re wiser than that.” Brett Roeth, vice president of AIAS, adds that “it has become a part of our professional culture that internships should be compensated,” that anything else is “just not acceptable in architecture.” According to Roeth, “The early 2000s were a boom-time for interns,” with some even earning signing bonuses—clearly the need to bring fresh, still very affordable talent into the profession hasn’t gone away, despite a changed professional culture. Only lately, with the deepest recession in memory and 40 percent unemployment in the profession, have a small number of postings for unpaid architecture internships quietly reappeared.

Those in the profession are remaining vigilant—from professors of architecture to the bloggers who flag such postings to student leaders like Chastain and Roeth. Strongly supported by the major professional organizations in the field, AIAS remains “an independent, student-governed organization that represents the voice of emerging professionals in a strong way,” says Roeth, explaining the group’s success in spearheading the campaign. What architecture has achieved proves that a profession can take a practical and ethical stand against abuses—and win. Other student groups and professional organizations should follow suit.

There’s an old joke among architects, says Chastain, that the profession “eats its young,” who still face long years of demanding apprenticeship, challenging standards, and overtime work. But the worst is clearly over, and at least now an ever more diverse crop of young architects can stop worrying about basic issues of livelihood and get back to designing the world around us. Like professional associations, educators are in a position to initiate positive, momentous changes. Why have they allowed the casual exploitation of their charges, who are just on their first, fledgling attempts at self-discovery? Why do they encourage their students, already burdened with the need to find paying work, to take time away from school to work without pay, subsidizing the operations of cheapskate companies and spineless nonprofits? Evidently, schools believe they can control a system they have done much to create and have learned to benefit from. To a certain extent, the issue has simply flown under the radar. Although internships vetted by schools at least have some oversight, this doesn’t change the fact that American colleges and universities have disgraced themselves by pushing unpaid and illegal internships and by squeezing credit money from students while providing little in return.

Just as damning is the fact that, although perhaps unwittingly at times, economists, sociologists, psychologists, education theorists and career counselors have all provided intellectual justification for the internship explosion, attacking the idea of substantive training and helping to overturn the once deeply held concept of fair pay for hard work. Regardless of whether their students are tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, or come from impoverished backgrounds, they cynically assume that students can work for free, or pay their college to work for free.

Take sociologist Dalton Conley, who doesn’t think it’s worth the substantial effort to make internships transparent or investigate their role in widening social inequality, since “there’d be an uproar” and both nepotism and connections-pulling are only natural. Otherwise, he told the American Prospect, “it gets to where, for anyone to be in a summer internship, you have to do an ad in the newspaper and vet all résumés”—surely more effort than it’s worth, despite the decisive impact that internships are supposed to have on the rest of our lives. He arranged academic credit and some associated readings for a student’s internship at Vogue, which the magazine required and for which NYU received tuition, although he finds such situations “ridiculous.” Pointedly, Conley notes how the internship explosion is one of the “unintended consequences” of “a very progressive view of education from the ’60s that life experience is equally valid as classroom experience. And that was meant to help the working class.”

Past theories aside, schools must face up to their current responsibility for shaping the internship landscape—there are several steps they can take. From the perspective of interns, the most urgent of them is to stop the practice of making students pay to work. Charging tuition for a relevant, optional seminar is perfectly valid, as is assessing a fee for administrative services performed by the school. But directly assigning costly credit units to work that students undertake off campus, typically running into the thousands of dollars, is a heinous practice. The excuse that it’s just part of normal tuition simply doesn’t hold up. Schools are anxious about internships becoming a cheap way for students to rack up the credits they need to graduate—but the problem is one of the schools’ own making. If need be, they can exclude internship credits from the required total, or rethink the purpose of granting credit in the first place, but levying outrageous pay-to-intern fees is not the answer. The fact that many schools have earnestly raised small pools of money to support some unpaid positions is sadly overshadowed by these practices.

The use of academic credit to justify unpaid labor is poisonous, as many faculty and career center staff have started to recognize—the Department of Labor, which has discussed academic credit as a possible proxy for an internship’s educational and training content, risks making a serious mistake by doing so. Credit, as we have seen, is bought and sold with consummate ease and zero oversight—for the Disney program, for University of Dreams, for international students on countless J-1 visa schemes. Some institutions are awarding credit to students knowing nothing but their name and address and that a check from them has cleared at the bank. As described in Chapter 5, companies require students to get credit, and they in turn pressure their schools to help indemnify those employers, who are acting illegally. The least that schools can do is not penalize their students for being caught in this vise, not force them to subsidize an employer’s flimsy indemnification. In the long run, college presidents have to take a stand against the complete subversion of academic credit and the way that firms abuse it to hide from the law— instead of writing petulant letters to the Department of Labor, daftly averring that they have the situation under control.

Higher education also artificially inflates the supply of interns, weakening their negotiating power in the labor market. (Likewise, schools blithely create new degree programs, leading to an overproduction of credentials in fields that have few jobs: recipe for a desperate labor market.) At the same time, colleges effectively endorse thousands of internships, between career counselors touting them, professors arranging them, and university websites formally posting them. The promotion of illegal work opportunities in higher education must stop. It doesn’t take an employment lawyer to make these judgment calls, even a basic algorithm could do half the work: any unpaid internship that fails to lay out a clear training program should be summarily rejected or slapped with a warning label. Internship handbooks, internship fairs, and info sessions of various descriptions should go beyond describing the networking techniques and fawning flexibility needed to squeeze into the workforce—they should cover the workplace rights of interns and the concept that work demands reward.

Requiring internships is often tantamount to outsourcing part of a student’s education—in many cases, schools themselves should offer the applied opportunities if they’re really that vital, just as chemistry departments are expected to have lab facilities for hands-on work. Still, there may occasionally be educational grounds for a given department, or even an entire college, to require an internship for graduation. Yet it’s still a stretch to mandate that students pay the school to do this off-campus work and to disallow credit from appropriate, well-documented internships that students might have arranged on their own. Schools requiring internships should pledge to find paid positions for their students, negotiating with employers if necessary—and only charge when the school is providing something clear in return. If relevant, paid work proves impossible to find, schools should contemplate the use of shadowing or participant observation techniques instead, where learning can take place with no strings attached.

In short, schools should either keep their distance from the Wild West of sketchy internships, however much that might disappoint students, or take a few lessons from the cooperative education movement founded by Herman Schneider. A century old, that movement still represents a thoroughgoing approach to bridging the gap between education and work. Its collapse and comparative irrelevance are ascribed to its being too vocational, stressing work experience over a well-rounded education, and the fact that it relied financially on the changeable support of schools and governments, rather than the eternal anxieties of students and their families. Yet not only did coops provide career paths accessible to students of all backgrounds, they also by and large guaranteed honest wages for an honest day’s work, humane working conditions, and real training.

For too long, governments have informally counted on schools to form a first line of defense. After all, the original Supreme Court decision outlining the six-point test likened a proper trainee situation to vocational school. Yet the reality is that learning at school and learning at work are two entirely different things, pace Hamburger University—the first occurs because the institution is directing all its efforts to that end; the second comes as a byproduct of the economically useful activity that the worker is performing for an employer. The number of internships that are really school-like, full-time, dedicated training programs is vanishingly few. Overwhelmingly, the expectation of employers is that interns will labor and (somehow) learn simultaneously, and that their work will bring clear benefits to the firm.

There’s a reason that the Supreme Court understood an unpaid trainee to be someone who brings “no immediate advantage” to a firm: immediate advantage is something you should pay for. This criterion for FLSA exemption alone lays bare the fact that trainees and interns hail from different universes. Of course, employers expect to derive a material advantage from their interns—the interns are workers, often indistinguishable from regular employees, as we have seen. On the other hand, National Public Radio’s “Intern Edition” is a “fully featured,” internproduced “program,” brilliantly demonstrating that it is possible for employers to give interns serious, nonexploitative work that introduces them meaningfully to a profession. Employers who actually want to train the next generation, and not just squeeze it for cheap labor, should consider intern editions of their own.

The Department of Labor must start by enforcing the law—the same goes for governments around the world. Investigators should respond to all plausible hints or allegations that a firm is failing to pay minimum wage, but also actively seek out abuses, recognizing that interns feel understandably timid and have little incentive to come forward. As things stand, few firms will be able to pass the six-point test absolving them of employer responsibilities, even under the reasonable “totality of the circumstances” interpretation where interns are permitted to provide their employers with “immediate advantage,” but still must get at least as good as they give. Labor law tests of volunteer status should apply to those nonprofits that want to continue using unpaid interns. With overwhelming numbers of interns now doing the work of regular employees, the law should assume that the word “intern” means a type of employee, not a type of student. Legislators should start with interns in the political system, ending the unholy FLSA exemption for congressional interns, who should receive at least the same consideration as the high-school-age congressional pages. Elected representatives, perhaps even more than judges and DoL investigators, must close the significant loophole that permits the discrimination and harassment of interns at work, leaving interns like Bridget O’Connor in legal limbo.

If wisely used, federal, state, and local money used to support internships in government could have a dramatically positive effect, as the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) indicated in its 2009 proposal “Paving the Way Through Paid Internships.” Over four million college students aged sixteen to twenty-four come from working families whose combined income is three times the Federal Poverty Line or less—that is, under $67,000 annually for a family of four. When they’re even able to shell out thousands of dollars for a single summer of unpaid work, these families are making a considerable sacrifice. Alex Hertel and Kathryn Edwards of EPI have estimated conservatively that 22,000 federal interns each year would fall into this category and be eligible for income assistance under their proposal.

Providing as little as $3,500 for a low-income student to take a summer internship in D.C. or the state capital could significantly broaden the range of young people able to break into politics. According to EPI, an annual $500 million outlay could subsidize as many as 100,000 public service internships, harnessing for administrative needs the Federal Work-Study Program offices already installed at some 3,400 schools. Indeed, a much more significant portion of existing work-study funds could arguably be allocated to internships meeting certain criteria—as Gardner writes, “This sacred cow for institutions needs to be revamped to help students reach their career goals.” Any such programs would have to do better than AmeriCorps at ensuring that existing and potential fulltime jobs aren’t axed in favor of these government-subsidized internships. Even at the level they propose, say the researchers at EPI, only 4.3 percent of eligible college students would be covered—but it would be a good start.

If these fixes don’t improve conditions more broadly, members of Congress and state legislators should pass an Intern Bill of Rights (see Appendix A), or companies themselves should take the initiative by endorsing such a code of conduct. Recall what the Fitzgerald Act did for apprenticeships—a brief, straightforward piece of legislation and a tiny office in Washington D.C. have largely been able to set the standard for what constitutes a high-quality apprenticeship. The law’s success demonstrates that there are sufficient reasons for employers to participate in well-structured programs, held to a high standard and involving on-thejob training of young workers at a living wage. The past few decades have shown that demand for internships is more than robust, from young people and employers alike—and not just because it’s a lawless free-forall. With the right incentives, a Fitzgerald Act for interns might just work, providing firms with the best interns, still at a relative bargain, and placing them in situations where they can “earn and learn” at the same time. It could galvanize a political demographic that is famously lethargic, seeming to awaken with the 2008 election only to slumber again soon after. An Intern Bill of Rights would recognize internships as a distinctive and important form of work, worth taking on its own terms, measuring and evaluating, improving and protecting. Interns would enjoy the same rights and privileges that apprentices do today. After the titanic struggles of the early twentieth century, the industrialized world reached a surprising degree of consensus about work —a consensus which still remains substantially intact today. Whatever people think about politicized issues such as taxes, welfare, abortion, or gay marriage, they generally agree that ten-year-olds should be found in school, not in coal mines; that weekends and vacations should be available to all; that a minimum wage and basic workplace protections are part of a fair and just society; that workers should be able to organize around their common interests. Perhaps most of all, we continue to believe in the power of an honest day’s work, and in the virtuous imperative to spend some of one’s time in productive activities that require more than casual attention. William Faulkner wrote that “the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can’t eat for eight hours; he can’t drink for eight hours; he can’t make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work”—and we had best make the most of it. As practiced today and documented in this book, many internships represent a slow drift away from this firm, humane consensus about work. Along with the explosion of contingent labor and much scarier trends such as the resurgence of sweatshops in our midst and a global race to the bottom around labor standards, internships are turning back the clock. They are symptomatic of a drastically unequal, hypercompetitive world in the making—one in which, as so many Americans rightly fear, succeeding generations will work harder for less reward, for a lower quality of life with fewer avenues for getting ahead.

Present, former, and future interns, listen up and take action. Whether any particular internship is life-changing or completely forgettable, a month long or a year long, paid or unpaid—attention must be paid. We’ve had the professional mindset, believing we could defend ourselves, parley with the boss, complain to the career center, take the problem to mom and dad. Knowing nothing of grievance procedures, collective bargaining, or severance packages, all we could do was quit. Intern dropout rates would be shocking if anyone tracked them.

Up until now, young people have ceded everything, asking only for a foot in the door in return. It’s time to stop spreading the internship gospel without a second thought. Stop thinking your labor is, was, or will be worthless. Just because you have a student ID and live in a dorm doesn’t mean you’re not also a worker. Identify and organize as interns, and form alliances with like-minded groups such as temps or freelancers. Even if you’ve moved on, don’t forget the freshmen of the workforce, the unpaid kids doing menial and administrative work: the interns. Blow the whistle on illegal situations you’ve experienced or witnessed or heard about. Stand up for people’s right to get paid for an honest day’s work, whoever those people may be—7,000 miles away or just next door.

“How can you be the first to speak up?” writes the anonymous author of the blog Unfair Internships, which chronicles the hypocrisies of the Intern Economy—adding that what interns face is “a simple collective action problem.” Internships pass by quickly, and few interns are experienced enough to know the levers of power. “Internships are just a transitional situation,” as the blogger points out. “Students suck it up for a year or two and then get a job and move on. It’s not like some major issues of unfairness, such as gender and race, where it follows you all your life and, at any point, you have an interest in addressing the unfairness of the situation.” And so it always goes with injustices faced by the young— you forget about them as you grow older, then you perpetuate them, and the cycle repeats itself …

Legal protection for interns is not a pipe dream—it’s a reality within reach, a set of rights waiting to be claimed. Learning about a profession should include learning about the nature of work itself and issues such as fairness, compensation, protection, and solidarity. Interns can and should organize, as interning becomes near universal, and schools, employers, and governments continue not to do the right thing. Large-scale student organizations, the anti-precarity groups, and platforms for contingent workers such as WashTech and the Freelancers Union all represent possible models, though organizing interns represents a special challenge, given the diversity and transience of internship situations.

What has to change is more than a policy or a law—it’s a mindset. We are the future of work. The internship explosion is not an emergency, yet—it’s a slow boil, a simmering injustice, a glass ceiling half-built which there’s still time to tear down. This is more than just a phase or a fluke: when working for free becomes the norm, everyone loses, except at the very top. We’ve trusted too much. We’ve been free for the taking. When will our hours matter?

Ross Perlin is a researcher at the Himalayan Languages Project. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy.