Seems to be several different variants of Douglass. Dickey yields this:
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Aye, them’s the ones. /Raises glass
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But of course, what that means is that caring about other people isn’t just assigned no value by the market, it’s assigned a negative value.
One of the interesting things about the labor theory of value is that it centers on the question of where new value enters the system. Not that I’m very knowledgeable about mainstream economic theory, but on the rare occasions I’ve asked someone expounding on a mainstream or conservative theory where new value comes from, I’ve been surprised at how unprepared they are for what seems to me to be a fairly fundamental question: how can it be that we produce more than we consume?
The interesting thing about that negative valuation to caring is that I think it’s actually a key part of how people in general can be satisfied by receiving far less than the value of what they produce. It’s pretty rare, for instance, for a boss to try to encourage better work by offers of higher pay and benefits, or to punish poor work by withdrawing them. The usual method is to ask people to think about the way in which your work will affect other people. Are you increasing the burden on your co-workers by working slowly or cutting corners? Does that look like a sandwich you’d want to eat? Someone’s going to be walking across that catwalk, so are you satisfied with those welds? Is this driver going to work the way our docs say it will?
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Yeah, I’d remembered it as one of the most eccentric of the group of demo applets from Xwindows when I first encountered it around 1989. I recently switched from Fedora to Debian; xtartan wasn’t in the current repository, but I found a source package in old Debian Squeeze, the version from a few years ago. Source packages are a wonderful thing, now that I’ve finally learned how to use them.
Using it to actually weave tartans sounds like an interesting idea. But we’d best clear that with General Ludd.
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I read an article some time ago about how we need to have a revolution of the “caring class.” The problem is that the caring class doesn’t seem like the sort to have a revolution, since revolutions hurt people. But I think we need to look starkly at what goes on and admit that this is how thing work: people who don’t care exploit people who do care to make themselves more money, knowing that people who care won’t fight back for fear of hurting people they care for. Every time teachers go on strike the government stigmatizes them by saying they don’t care about kids, they are just in it for the money (never mind the demands the teachers are making might not include raises but better classroom conditions instead). It’s gotten to the point that you if you enter a caring profession, you are stigmatized for not caring enough to work for very little rather than being lauded for caring enough to do the thing.
In some ways I’m knowledgeable about mainstream economic theory and in other ways I’m not. But it seems like every time I challenge the very basic ideas no one supports classical economics has any answer at all. From the outside, it looks like everything from the law of supply and demand, to the principle that people act on self-interest or response to incentives, to the market pricing things “efficiently” or “well”, to the market being responsible for wealth creation in the western world over the last few hundred years, to the idea of using dollar values as a utilitarian calculus, it’s all supported only by models based on untested hypotheses. You ask for data and there just isn’t any, and usually it looks like the data says the opposite of what they claim. Capital in the 21st Century actually looked at a ton of data, and concluded that Capitalism, as it actually exists in the world, is a path to back to serfdom. My family economist said, of the conclusion that return on capital is greater than growth, “I find that hard to believe.” There’s nothing to believe. It’s what is.
If you read Adam Smith, he actually basically tells you everything that is wrong with Capitalism. He just flat out states that when things go well everyone does well but when things go badly the rich keep taking their cut and everyone else suffers. This and dozens of other observations about how the market economy is dystopian are flatly pronounced in the Wealth of Nations. I haven’t read any Marx, but I find it hard to believe that he actually said anything worse about capitalism than Smith. I don’t understand why people could think it was a good idea to take a book that talks about a world where there is no trust and no caring and turn that into a manifesto for how we ought to run things.
The #1 most valuable thing in society is our trust in one another. Economic theory talks about a world with no trust and economics based policies try to create a world with no trust. That’s a world where we are all improverished, and I don’t mean some kind of improverishment of the spirit. I mean scrounging for food.
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I think that there is no inevitability of revolutions hurting people in any meaningful way. Not to sound condescending, by “meaningful” I mean as in the distinction between “feeling hurt” and “being injured” - it need not be anything which people can’t safely get over. For example, I think of the modern adoption of cybernetic and programmable computers has been revolutionary, without directly causing suffering.
I think that one of the purposes behind money and a market economy is precisely to put forth the illusion that people all care about the same things - because these things can now be conveniently symbolized as money, which appears rational - in the sense that it can be measured with less dispute than a concept such as “progress” or “liberty”.
But the reason for this illusion is the difficulty in accepting and working around the fact that it can be said that all people care somehow, but they do not care in the same ways, about the same things. So it can be approximated as being encapsulated in a symbolic representation. It seems quite obvious to me that commerce is very much more about the desires and games of people than the commodities they fuss over.
Just saw this on twitter…
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The problem is that the caring class doesn’t seem like the sort to have a revolution, since revolutions hurt people. But I think we need to look starkly at what goes on and admit that this is how thing work: people who don’t care exploit people who do care to make themselves more money, knowing that people who care won’t fight back for fear of hurting people they care for.
That’s an apt description of the dilemna.
I keep thinking of an episode of the old, weird TV series, The Prisoner. The main character resigned as a spy, and then is kidnapped, waking up in a strange holiday resort. A central problem was that it was difficult to tell who were the prisoners and who were the guards. In one episode, the Prisoner believes he’s worked out a method, and proceeds to recruit other prisoners to plan a revolt. The guards, he says, can be recognized by their confidence and lack of fear; the other prisoners, by their fearfulness. His plan was defeated because the other prisoners applied the same test to the Prisoner, and concluded he must be a guard who would betray them.
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Recently in Salon,
My trigger-warning disaster: “9 1/2 Weeks,” “The Wire” and how coddled young radicals got discomfort all wrong
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Your whole “just look at this salon article” is a microagression.
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Let me be perfectly clear, since I am usually opaque and oblique: I think “microagressions” are so much horse shit.
(N.B.: the article in question does not cover microagressions.)
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Please don’t make me write an essay called Archie Bunker: Patron Saint of Microagressions.
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If you’re going to cite fictional white, male bigots as object lessons, at least give us a trigger warning.
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What makes you call him a bigot?
Knee-jerk liberal reactionarianism?
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So I’m usually pretty dismissive of “'Elp! ‘Elp! I’m bein’ oppressed by trigger warnings!” articles. This one made more sense than most of them. But it strikes me that the problem isn’t trigger warnings, is the model of trying to accommodate every possible issue that anyone could have all at once. That isn’t realistic. When we are scheduling an event at work, we put a note in the email that says, “If you need any accommodations, please contact me.” If someone needs to be seated near the front because of their poor vision, have a hearing aid device set up, have sign language interpretation or bring along their support rabbit, they tell you, and then you figure out how to make that work for that person. What you don’t do is have hearing aids and support rabbits at the door just in case anyone happens to need one.
For a course on sex in film, as the author says, it kind of goes without saying that you are going to see sex in film. One warning during the first class (and printed on the syllabus) that advises students that they are going to watch graphic sexual material from various points in film history would do. In that warning, tell students that if they have any particular concerns or would like to be warned of any particular kinds of content, they should contact you, and you will accommodate them.
I keep seeing people present the idea, “I can’t deal with absolutely everything.” Of course you can’t, but you can do better than nothing, and you can offer support for individuals who need it.
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Yeah? Well…
All of your microagressions are really an agromicretion!
ETA: And stuff…
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Today’s disruption-news:
which links to https://medium.com/matter/living-and-dying-on-airbnb-6bff8d600c04
Michael Moorcock’s Starship Stormtroopers - (From Michael Moorcock’s “The Opium General” Harrap (1984), reprinted from Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review 1978)
Another example: in 1967 Judith Merril, a founder member of The Science Fiction Writers of America, an ex-Trotskyist turned libertarian, proposed that ’ this Organisation would buy advertising space in the sf magazines condemning the war in Vietnam. I was around when this was proposed. A good number of members agreed with alacrity – including English members like myself, John Brunner, Brian Aldiss, Robert Silverberg and Harry Harrison were keen, as were Harlan Ellison, James Blish and, to be fair, Frank Herbert and Larry Niven. But quite as many were outraged by the idea, saying that the SFWA ‘shouldn’t interfere in politics.’ Okay, said Merril, then let’s say ‘The following members of the SFWA condemn American involvement in the Vietnam War etc.’ Finally the sf magazines contained two ads – one against the war and one in support of American involvement. Those in support included Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein, Ann MaCaffrey, Daniel F. Galouye, Keith Laumer and as many other popular sf writers as were against the war. The interesting thing was that at the time many of the pro-US-involvement writers were (and by and large still are) the most popular sf writers in the English-speaking world, let alone Japan, the Soviet Union, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, where a good many sf readers think of themselves as radicals. One or two of these writers (British as well as American) are dear friends of mine who are personally kindly and courageous people of considerable integrity – but their political statements (if not always, by any means, their actions) are stomach-turning! Most people have to be judged by their actions rather than their remarks, which are often surprisingly at odds. Writers, when they are writing, can only be judged on the substance of their work. The majority of the sf writers most popular with radicals are by and large crypto-fascists to a man and woman! There is Lovecraft, the misogynic racist; there is Heinlein, the authoritarian militarist; there is Ayn Rand, the rabid opponent of trade unionism and the left, who, like many a reactionary before her, sees the problems of the world as a failure by capitalists to assume the responsibilities of ‘good leadership’; there is Tolkein and that group of middle-class Christian fantasists who constantly sing the praises of bourgeois virtues and whose villains are thinly disguised working class agitators – fear of the Mob permeates their rural romances. To all these and more the working class is a mindless beast which must be controlled or it will savage the world (i.e. bourgeois security) – the answer is always leadership, ‘decency’, paternalism (Heinlein in particularly strong on this), Christian values… [emphasis added]
What can this stuff have in common with radicals of any persuasion? The simple answer is, perhaps, Romance. The dividing line between rightist Romance (Nazi insignia and myth etc.) and leftist Romance (insurgent cavalry etc.) is not always easy to determine. A stirring image is a stirring image and can be ,employed to raise all sorts of atavistic or infantile emotions in us. Escapist or ‘genre’ fiction appeals to these emotions. It does us no harm to escape from time to time but it can be dangerous to confuse simplified fiction with reality and that, of course, is what propaganda does.
Thanks to @GilbertWham for directing me to the text
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