Karl Marx

Are GMOs Bad For Me?

Jacques Delacroix Current Events , , , , , , ,

I am vaguely perceiving that there is a battle brewing someplace about labeling food containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs). It happened in California before. The initiative lost by referendum.

Of course, I am almost always in favor of more information for the public (even when it’s likely to be used for mischief). However, I can’t avoid wondering why sellers of food products don’t just do it on their own to gain a marketing advantage over their competitors. Not getting an answer to this question, I am wondering whether this is not just another case of a minority using the power of the state to impose its views (by force) on the indifferent majority. Keep in mind that this is what the word “law” means: If you break it, you expose yourself to official violence.

I honestly don’t know what’s wrong with GMOs. I only know that they (one?) allowed for a reduced use of pesticides. This has to be a good thing because exposure to large amounts of pesticides is bad for the health of producers and handlers. (I doubt today’s pesticides cause much harm to consumers but I always wash fruits and salad components.) I invited a local libertarian who addressed the topic on Facebook to write an essay for this blog explaining the answer. That was only a couple of days ago. He has not responded. I repeat the invite, to anyone.

What am I supposed to do, I, simple citizen and consumer not especially well equipped to ascertain if GMOs are a threat or not to my beloved? As I keep telling you, fortunately, I don’t necessarily have to go to graduate school yet three or four more years to get an idea. Instead, I look at the proponents I know.

In my area, the people who fight GMOs are mostly (but not only) foofoo heads who overlap a great deal, I think, with those who cancel erotically promising dates on the basis of astrology. They are largely the same people who advocate policy which, taken together, would take us back to what Karl Marx called, “the idiocy of village life,” with a life expectancy hovering around thirty five and a 30% infant mortality They, themselves, wouldn’t survive there more five weeks or less, by the way, because they are too coddled, too self-indulgent, and not alert enough. The wolves about which they keep crying now and here really lived then on the outskirts of such villages. They would gobble up anti-GMOist for a snack.

All the same, I keep an open mind. Anyone who wants to post a comment on GMOs can be sure it will not be censored or modified in any way. I will also consider with great interest any essay on this topic for this blog. Anyone can also send me reading assignments. I will post them but I will not read them unless the sender explains clearly why I should, beginning with the source. (See the standards I apply here)

La Complainte du travailleur francais immigré en Californie.

Jacques Delacroix Liberty , , , , , ,

Voici, ci-dessous, le texte complet de mes memoires en Francais. Mes memoires en Anglais,- 400 pages – vont paraitre bientot: I Used to Be French: an Immature Autobiography. ($17)

Du métro Botzaris aux rives du Pacifique, ça fait quand même une bonne trotte. Bien sûr, je n’ai pas fait le trajet à pied ni en vélo mais cela m’aura quand même pris un demi-siècle, pratiquement. Physiquement, j’y suis arrivé plus vite que cela, bien sûr. Mais après avoir initialement planté mes pieds dans le sable, pour vraiment m’installer, pour m’y retrouver bien à l’aise, il m’aura fallu un bout de temps.

Que je parte là-bas, ça devait arriver puisque je suis né dans le quartier de Paris qui s’appelle (qui s’appelait?) « Carrières d’Amérique ». J’y étais donc bien prédisposé; c’était plus ou moins le destin qui le voulait! Par deux fois ou plus, j’ai donc mouillé mon ancre « Made in the dix-neuvième arrondissement » en Californie, cette fausse île merveilleuse et imaginaire qu’inventait Herberay des Essarts au début du seizième siècle, (à moins que ce ne soit l’Espagnol Rodrigues de Montalvo).

En réalité, je triche un peu en évoquant mon installation aux « rives » du Pacifique. En fait j’ai bien un modeste voilier dans le port mais ma maison n’a pas la vue sur la mer. Elle est même située à plus d’un kilomètre de l’Océan Pacifique. Il s’en est fallu de peu pourtant, d’un petit million de dollars, à peine. J’aurais dû être plus hardi à réclamer des augmentations. Ou alors devenir chirurgien-cardiologue. (Mais je n’en avais ni la patience ni le talent ni le courage, enfin, rien!) Ou bien, faire carrière dans la police locale – celle du shériff – avec une excellente retraite à cinquante-cinq ans et un emploi à mi-temps pour finir de payer les traites. (Mais je n’y ai même pas songé; c’est trop bête!) De toutes façons, avec mon accent francais, aucune chance d’être élu shériff; je serais resté employé et donc subalterne, (« Sheriff’s Deputy » – Oui, Sheriff, c’est un poste électif.)

Quand j’étais ado, à Paris on nous disait, on dit toujours aux jeunes, je crois: « Passe d’abord ton bac ». Moi, j’ai eu de la chance en devenant deux fois de suite non-bachelier. Le première fois, j’avais même obtenu la mention « Très mal ». On m’avait tellement seriné que sans bac on n’arrivait à rien que je me suis tiré en douce, presque sans prévenir.

Avant que je ne parte pour de bon, il y avait eu plusieurs aller-retour entre Botzaris et la contrée de mon choix, comme autant de rêves complexes et détaillés. Un jour, ayant raté le dernier métro, je suis parti à pied d’un bistrot des Halles pour rentrer chez mes parents, Avenue de la Porte Brunet, sur les boulevards dits « extérieurs », ceux « des Maréchaux ». Et puis, je ne sais pas trop comment, je me suis retrouvé à Sausalito en Californie. (C’est la petite ville charmante de Jack London, exactement de l’autre côté du pont dit du « Golden Gate ».) J’ étais assis au « No Name Bar », (au « Bar sans nom », comme son nom l’indique) à baratiner une blonde un peu grasse mais pas plus vulgaire que ça, somme toute. Un autre jour, j’ai quitté la cascade en béton armé des Buttes-Chaumont pour arriver, en fin de compte, au Grand Canyon, en Arizona. Tout près de là, j’avais acheté dans un Mont de Piété situé dans un réserve indienne un beau collier Navajo en argent et turquoise au motif dit de la « fleur de courge ». C’était un cadeau de mariage pour ma petite soeur, en France.

Par deux fois, pendant que je faisais mes études aux Etats-Unis, je suis vraiment allé rendre visite à mes parents à Paris. La première fois, faute de fonds, je l’avais fait en auto-stop. Je suis revenu ici, chez moi, en Californie, de la même façon. Bon, je suis bien obligé d’admettre que pour traverser l’Atlantique nord dans les deux sens je n’ai pas fait de bateau-stop. Je le regrette beaucoup. Quelle histoire cela ferait! J’aurais pu au moins essayer de faire la propreté sur un cargo pour payer mon passage. (Mon service dans la Marine Nationale, «la Royale », aurait suffit pour faire entendre au capitaine que je ne souffrais pas trop du mal de mer.) En fait, j’ai simplement acheté un billet bon marché sur un paquebot d’étudiants, une fois, New York – Le Havre, dans les deux sens. La traversée a été la fête à chaque fois. Le passager le plus âgé devait avoir environ vingt-cinq ans. Etre en croisière a un effet d’énervement sur les sens des jeunes filles, un peu comme Venise ; les jeunes filles reviennent souvent jeunes femmes des croisières en mer.

Le plus dur dans cette traversée n’a pas été le trajet Los Angeles-Chicago (la « Route 66 » de Nat King Cole ) comme on pourrait le penser. Le plus difficile, ça a été le tronçon Le Havre-Paris. C’est d’ailleurs une des raisons qui m’ont fait rester en Amérique pour de bon. Quand je poireautais au grand soleil de plomb, en plein été, dans le Midwest, les petites vieilles sortaient de chez elles portant un plateau de citronnade glacée à mon intention. En stop sur les routes de Normandie et d’Ile-de-France, les petites vieilles…rien. Que vous-dire? Et bien la vérité toute simple, tout simplement: En France, si on est inconnu, on est toujours un peu le Boche de quelqu’un.

Comme presque tous les immigrants, j’ai commencé par faire la plonge en Californie. C’est une expérience salutaire, égalitaire. A force de faire la plonge, plus tard mais assez vite, j’ai pu m’offrir le luxe de devenir plongeur (sous-marin) dans mes loisirs. J’ai même fait un petit livre la dessus avec un copain de plongée, américain de naissance lui, pas un livre sur la plonge, mais bien un livre sur la plongée. (Free Diving in California.)

Pendant un moment, pour gagner ma petite vie d’étudiant, j’ai même fait le guignol. Je ne veux pas dire que j’ai fait le con sur une estrade. Plutôt, j’ai appris aux enfants d’un centre de loisirs et de plein-air à fabriquer des marionnettes et puis à les mettre en scène. (Comme c’était un centre de loisirs juif, je me suis abstenu de mettre en scène la Nativité. Pas si bête!) A une autre époque, j’ai enseigné la natation à des bébés. C’est un attrape-couillon pour les mères super-compétitives de la classe moyenne, bien sûr. Il n’y a pas de bébés nageurs. C’est une question de développement musculaire. La plupart des bébés, si on les lâche dans la piscine, ils coulent à pic avec un grand sourire aux lèvres. C’est comme si ils se souvenaient de l’apesanteur dans le ventre maternel. Le grand sourire permet néanmoins de faire des photos impressionantes qu’on agrandit en affiches formidables, toutes truquées dans leur intention.

La deuxième fois que j’ai quitté la France en dehors des vacances universitaires, c’était pour de bon. J’ai laissé derrière moi, un très bon job (comme on dit en Franglais) dans la fonction publique, et aussi, la mort dans l’âme, le pâté de campagne. Mais, de l’autre côté, j’ai découvert le guacamole tout frais. On le fait en écrasant la chair bien mûre de l’avocat avec du jus de citron, plus des ingrédients secrets. Il y avait même des avocats qui pendaient au grand arbre d’un petite cour secrète de mon université. Je parle des fruits nommés à partir du Nahuatl, la langue des Aztèques cannibales. Les autres types d’avocat, ceux qui portent la robe noire, on les pend normalement à des potences.

Ici, en Amérique, il y avait des livres, des livres partout. On avait le droit de les toucher sans se faire engueuler par la préposée, même à la bibliothèque. Il y avait aussi des biblothèques partout d’ailleurs. Celles de la moindre petite ville contenaient plus de livres que, plus tard, la bibliothèque centrale du centre de Paris, au Centre Pompidou. Même dans les librairies on avait le droit d’ouvrir les livres, de les parcourir. En plus, on pouvait s’y asseoir confortablement pour boire du café tout en feuilletant les ouvrages qu’on n’avait même pas achetés, qu’on allait pas acheter du tout. Jamais vu, ça!

Tout seul aux Etats-Unis, au début, ça n’a quand même pas été facile tous les jours. Mais, il y avait les filles, des tas de filles, une avalanche de filles. J’ai même bien failli y laisser ma peau! Je ne veux pas dire que j’ai manqué mourir d’épuisement. Je veux dire que je risquais a tous moments de me faire trouer la peau par une balle bien placée. Enfin, je passe!

Pendant que tout le monde en France était « Marxiste » à ce moment-là, j’étais aux premières loges tandis qu’on transformait les vergers de pruniers (façon Béziers) en un immense parc industriel. Je veux dire le parc surnommé “Silicone Valley” qui a changé la vie pendant ma vie. En France, comme je l’ai dit, tout le monde s’affairait alors à devenir Marxiste ou à le paraître. Ceci bien longtemps après qu’il soit devenu impossible de prétendre ne pas être au courant des horreurs du Goulag ni de celles du « Grand bond en avant ». Ceci, alors que Fidel s’entêtait toujours et encore à mettre les homosexuels en prison, pour leur donner une bonne leçon.

C’était aussi au moment où son copain Che Guevara (« le fusilleur») allait libérer les paysans boliviens. Ces petits propriétaires terriens avaient tellement envie de libération qu’ils l’ont livré à l’armée. On connait la suite. Il aurait dû me demander mon avis, Che. J’y étais, dans la même Bolivie rurale, juste un an avant lui. (J’y étais grâce à une bourse de la Fondation Ford, les salauds !) Je lui aurais dit, au Che: « N’y vas pas, Ducon ». Il s’était avéré que le Che n’avait pas lu Marx, ou mal lu. Il en est mort. C’est ce que j’appelle des études rigoureuses, sans laxisme.

Il y avait aussi cette vieille salope de Jean-Paul Sartre, bien sûr, qui ne voulait à aucun prix désesperer Renault-Billancourt. Plus haut sur l’échelle sociale, perchait l’imbittable escroc de grande volée Claude Lévi-Strauss qui avait réussi à intimider plusieurs générations d’intellectuels francophones, moins deux (le courageux Jean-Francois Revel et le noble et digne Raymond Aron). A mon sens, Lévi-Straus avait construit une grande carrière universitaire exemplaire sur la base d’un tout petit livre de voyage charmant que tout le monde avait lu « Tristes tropiques » et d’une série de gros ouvrages aussi impénétrables qu’improbables que personne n’avait lus. Je ne me souviens que vaguement de cet autre intellectuel parisien, un philosophe, “Marxiste” lui aussi, qui avait assassiné sa femme. (“Nobody is perfect!”)

Disgression technique: Je ne blâme pas Karl du tout pour la lamentable bêtise de l’intellectuariat parisien des années 60, 70, jusqu’à 80. Non seulement il savait écrire, lui, Karl ; mais il savait aussi lire. Il avait même lu “La Richesse des nations” d’Adam Smith, ce dont on ne saurait accuser ses disciples hexagonaux. D’ailleurs, il avait pris soin de mettre les choses au point de son vivant. “Je ne suis pas Marxiste”, avait-il affirmé avant de mourir. (Marx, pas Adam Smith, Adam avait passé l’arme à gauche bien avant.)

Moi, pendant tout ce temps-la, je progressais sans états d’âme. Au beau milieu de l’un des derniers vergers de Palo Alto, du mauvais côté de l’autoroute, à deux kilomètres de Stanford, il y avait un petite château. Je veux dire un château d’eau tout en bois, comme un énorme tonneau sur échasses. La vieille dame noire entreprenante à qui il appartenait l’avait transformé en studio rustique, avec cuisinette et douche, qu’elle louait. C’est là que j’avais tranquillement rédigé ma thèse. On y montait par un long escalier de meunier en bois. On y entendait de loin, de tout en haut, le clapotement des talons des filles qui grimpaient l’escalier en vitesse parcequ’elles avaient pris sur elles de venir soulager ma solitude.

On disait de la localité qu’elle avait l’un des taux de criminalité les plus élevés d’Amérique. Moi, je ne voyais de mon perchoir que des abricotiers en fleurs, puis en feuilles, et une tribu d’écureuils gris. J’étais trop pauvre pour valoir qu’on m’agresse, ou qu’on m’y cambriole, d’ailleurs. Les malfaiteurs locaux, tous noirs, n’étaient pas racistes; ils volaient les riches et les presque-riches sans distinction de couleur. De moi, ils devaient se dire: «Il est complètement timbré ce blanc-la, descendant de son baril en pantalon du surplus de l’armée éraillé, avec ses liasses de paperasses sous le bras. Même ses godasses ne valent rien, le con!»

C’était juste après que je sois rentré d’enseigner à Hawaï, dans une belle île où on ne me payait pratiquement pas. Mais la plongée sous-marine y était fabuleuse et le soir, on allait contempler l’éruption volcanique à deux pas au lieu de regarder la télévision. Un peu plus tard, j’ai eu un doctorat, un «piechdi», comme on dit, les doigts dans le nez, sans blague. Je suis quand même resté inadmissible en première année des universités françaises. Je n’invente rien! A propos, mon diplôme était en sociologie, qui n’a à peu près rien à voir avec la discipline française du même nom. (En Amérique, on a bien suivi le chemin tracé par le Français Durkheim, Emile, en France, pas tellement.)

Il y avait du soleil presque toute l’année en Californie. Ce n’est pas la faute des Francais, bien sûr, ni même du Parti Socialiste, ni des fonctionaires, si leur pays se trouve à la latitude de Terre-Neuve (de Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, si vous préferez.) Mais cette septemtrionalité n’arrange pas l’humeur des ces méridonaux exilés que sont les Français. Sur moi, la brièveté de l’automne et de l’hiver californiens a fait l’effet des lumières de la rampe s’allumant d’un seul coup. Cela a transformé ma mentalité, la vision que je jette sur le monde, à jamais. La grande lumière m’a fait plus tolérant, plus entreprenant; elle m’a même rendu plus gentil, du moins, à la longue, du moins, dans une certaine mesure.

J’ai habité un moment à San Francisco-même. J’y faisais des affaires. Je faisais le conseil en commerce international. C’était juste après que mon livre (avec mon co-auteur, Eric Multhaup) ait gagné un gros prix francais. C’était un livre sur le quoi et le comment de faire des affaires aux Etats-Unis: « Les Clefs du labyrinthe. » San Francisco-ville, c’était gai jusque à ce que « gay » ait finir par signifier « triste » parce que tous les amis étaient en train de mourir du SIDA.

Je suis devenu prof finalement (dans plusieurs universités) parce-que j’étais curieux et paresseux à la fois. J’ai assez vite découvert ma vocation, ma mission d’enseignant. Elle consistait à faire admettre aux autres, aux jeunes comme aux moins jeunes, qu’ils étaient plus intelligents qu’ils ne le pensaient. Parfois, c’était à coups de pied au cul. Il faut ce qu’il faut! Je dis «aux moins jeunes» parceque, pendant longtemps, j’ai enseigné dans un programme de MBA où la moyenne d’âge des élèves était de vingt-huit ans. Cela se passait au beau milieu de Silicon Valley. Plusieurs des mes élèves sont devenus millionaires par la suite. Encore plus nombreux sont ceux qui ont simplement atteint une belle prosperité. Foutu capitalisme! Ça parait injuste! C’était moi qui donnait les notes, après tout!

J’ai passé quarante ans et plus dans les universités américaines, trente comme prof. J’y ai fait des travaux scientifiques tellement calés que je ne les comprend pas tous les jours moi-même. Et j’ai enseigné aux centaine, peut-être aux milliers, toujours les mêmes trucs, tellement peu de trucs que je pourrais presque vous les résumer ici. Pendant longtemps, j’ai assez aimé ce métier. Comme Socrate, je corrompais la jeunesse. De plus, on me payait pour le faire. On me payait aussi pour lire des livres. (C’est cela qui rendait difficile d’exiger des augmentations sur le ton indigné qui fait mouche avec les patrons.)

En fin de compte, ce qui m’a vraiment decidé à rester aux USA (comme on dit en Franglais), c’était la musique d’abord et puis, l’eau, ensuite. La musique, c’est assez évident. 90% de la gastronomie du monde entier a son origine en Chine ou en France. De la même façon indisputable, 90% de la musique, des chansons, viennent des Etats-Unis. C’est tellement vrai que rare est le film « Made in France » qui ne comporte pas au moins une chanson américaine. Les réalisateurs français se rendent bien compte qu’il n’y a plus de « cool » – comme on dit en Franglais – dans la chanson française depuis longtemps, depuis Brassens, au moins, depuis François Villon, le voyou-poète, peut-être.

Et l’eau maintenant. Dans toute mon enfance, dans toute ma jeunesse en France, et au cours de mes nombreux séjours dans mon pays d’origine, je ne suis jamais arrivé à ce qu’on me donne plus de deux glaçons dans mon verre de boisson fraîche (jamais, never, nunca, nimmer!) Pas à n’importe quel prix, dans n’importe quel établissement, aussi cher soit-il, à n’importe quelle heure du jour ou de la nuit. « Faut pas exagérer » pensent les garçons de café tellement fort qu’on les entend presque prononcer les paroles. Et aussi : « On n’a pas toujours ce qu’on veut ». Presque partout, en Amérique, on place un verre rempli de glaçons à côté de vous automatiquement dès que vous vous asseyez, même si vous n’en voulez pas (sauf sécheresse exceptionnelle).

Par ailleurs, il y a la cause des douches chaudes, vraiment chaudes, à durée indeterminée. On en rencontre en France, de temps en temps, j’en conviens, chez des particuliers et même dans certains hôtels plus ou moins mal gérés ou, par négligence, on ne règle pas le thermostat vers le bas. Pourtant, c’est toujours un peu la lotterie. La chasse à la douche chaude doit épicer la vie des Français, je me dis, sinon, ils auraient résolu le problème depuis longtemps. Ce n’est pas le savoir-faire plombier qui leur manque, en tous cas; ils ont quand même inventé le bidet.

Je suis persuadé que la vie, c’est la vie de tous les jours, que c’est le quotidien qui compte. Alors, mon idée simplifiée du bonheur, c’est de déguster, sans me presser, une boisson froide dans un verre rempli de glaçons assis bien à l’aise sur une chaise en bois, tout nu sous une douche brûlante. Un rêve à peu près irréalisable en France, je crois bien! Demandez-vous donc pourquoi. (Je ne vais pas vous le dire car je n’ai pas besoin d’ennemis supplémentaires, même loin de chez moi.)*

En vertu du même principe de ce que la vie, c’est la vie quotidienne, je tiens le compte des têtes de con rencontrées sans les chercher. Voici la définition scientifique d’une tête de con: C’est quelqu’un qui est désagréable avec moi sans me connaître assez bien pour avoir des raisons de l’être. Je crois bien que j’en rencontre plus en France en quinze jours qu’aux Etats-Unis en quinze mois. Les gens sont simplement beaucoup plus gentils, en moyenne, dans ce pays-ci qu’en France. (Même si on y tue plus qu’en France. On ne peut pas tout avoir, comme pensent les garçons de café.)

Je sais bien que la France est pleine de jolies villes pimpantes. En Amérique, par contre, la plupart des villes sont d’apparence quelconque et il y a souvent des détritus dans les caniveaux. Ça fait un peu Tiers-Monde, à dire vrai. Cela m’irrite, bien sûr. Et puis, je me rappelle que beaucoup de ces jolies villes françaises ferment trois heures avant le coucher du soleil en été. Ici, nos villes ont de l’animation. Les ville françaises, elles, ont des animatrices. Pas du tout pareil!

Malgré les apparences et malgré la distance, il y a beaucoup de continuité entre mon passé et mon présent, entre mon ancienne vie et celle d’aujourd’hui. Par exemple, à chaque fois que je gare ma voiture près de la Plage du Port à Santa Cruz, Californie, deux mouettes se relaient pour chier dessus en altitude. Je donnerais presque ma main à couper que ce sont les mêmes qui chiaient sur mon bus Volkswaggen quand j’étais hippie, brièvement, en 1967, au Portrieux (dans les Côtes d’Armor, autrefois mieux nommées: “Côtes du Nord” à cause de la température de l’eau de mer). Mais, je me raisonne. Ce n’est pas possible, ce doit être leurs petites-cousines.

«La France vous manque-t’elle, cher ami», on me demande à tout bout de champs? Oui l’île Saint-Louis me manque un peu, et aussi les côteaux de Bourgogne. Mais comme je n’avais été ni invité à l’une ni propriétaire dans les autres, ce n’est pas grave.

Ici, la banque et moi possèdons une jolie maison de style victorien sise exactement entre la mer et les sequoias. Mes grands-pères étaient encore gamins quand elle a été construite. Il y a dans ma cour arrière un pommier, un cerisier, un figuier, et deux citronniers, plus un prunier, qui donnent tous. (Heureusement, pour le prunier; il y a beaucoup de mecs de mon âge qui ont du mal à aller. Moi, ça va toujours pour aller mais on ne sait jamais. Un de ces jours je vais aller dans la direction où on ne va plus si facilement.) Le tout n’est déjà pas mal. A propos de rien: La police a capturé un puma derrière l’officine de mon dentiste il y a seulement un mois. Ici, on a su construire les villes à la campagne. (A propos, on a envoyé le puma, un jeune, un ado, en colonie de vacances dans la Sierra Nevada en lui interdisant de revenir.)**

Non, ce qui me manque vraiment parce que c’est introuvable et même inconcevable dans ce pays-ci, c’est la tête de veau sauce ravigotte. J’ai bien pensé à me la préparer moi-même en suivant une recette sur l’Internet (cette belle invention francaise. Ah, non, je me trompe, c’était le Minitel!) Ou alors, je pourrais essayer d’en trouver la recette classique dans mon exemplaire écorné de «La Cusine familiale et pratique» de Pellaprat (édition 1974).

J’aurais sûrement mis mon plan à exécution depuis longtemps si je vivais dans le Midwest où les gens sont plus conventionnels et plus proches de la terre. (J’en suis sûr, j’y ai habité quatre ans, en Indiana pour être précis.) En parlant d’éxecution, chez moi, à Santa Cruz, Californie, on est très écolo-sensible. Je saurais préparer une sauce ravigotte mais couper la tête du veau dans mon arrière-cour ne parait pas pratique, vu d’ici. La voisine de gauche, la garce qui a eu trois maris tués sous elle, appelerait les flics.*** Et je n’ai pas envie de devenir la préférée de la branche locale de Mafia mexicaine en prison, même pas pour une seule nuit!

Depuis longtemps immigré, j’éprouve une constante angoisse: D’un côté, la tête de veau ravigotte, et la tête de con, les paupiettes, la blanquette, le foie gras. (Ce dernier est franchement hors-la-loi en Californie, contrairement à la cannabis, par exemple.) De l’autre côté, un potentiel sans limites de créativité parmi des gens aimables, et des livres en abondance. Comme je vous le disais plus haut, on ne peut pas tout avoir.

Bon, alors, je m’arrête. Je voulais seulement vous donner une idée de mes souffrances existentielles de travailleur immigré. Et puis, il faut bien préciser avant de vous quitter que je n’étais pas parti m’installer à l’autre bout du monde grâce aux sous de Papa. (Il n’en avait pas de sous, Papa; je suis fils de flic.) Non, j’ai fait tout ça avec seulement ma bite et mon couteau (mon canif, quoi).

Pour finir, un mot de La Bruyère (dans « Les Caractères » : 80-IV):
«Ceux qui nuisent à la réputation ou à la fortune des autres plutôt que de perdre un bon mot méritent une peine infâmante.»

Ça, c’est moi tout craché (comme disait ma mère, Yvette).

*  « The Watershed » Liberty Unbound June 2010 24-5.
** Ce n’est pas la première fois, et de loin, qu’un puma (un cougar) se promène par chez moi. Voir mon l’histoire vraie, le conte, sur ce mon blog : « Les Pumas de Bécon-les-Bruyères. » factsmatter.wordpress.com
*** Voir le conte : « C’est presque pareil partout. » sur mon blog.

© Jacques Delacroix 2013

Bientôt, d’une manière ou d’une autre, mes mémoires (quatre cent pages) vont paraître en Anglais. Suivez mon progrès et partagezle  sur mon blog: factsmatter.wordpress.com

What I learned in Community College

L. A. Repucci Liberty , , , , , ,

A salvo:  As a returning student in my thirties, I must admit I am thoroughly enjoying the community college experience — it blows my mind that I have the freedom to return to the academic environment and pursue my education in a convenient and cost-effective manner.  Surely this is a testament to the community college system, and for that, I am grateful.

Now that I’ve established my gratitude, I’d like to outline briefly what I’ve learned in my first semester back in school, and solicit the well-educated community that is notesonliberty.com for a bit of guidance.  Hopefully, you fine lot will provide me with some direction and perspective.  I intend to apply to a California school upon completion of my transfer program at the end of the 2014 academic year.

Here is what I’ve learned in a semester at Cabrillo college in Aptos, CA:

GEOG 3, Physical Geography:  Anthropogenic climate change is a fact.  Humanity is a juggernaut exhausting the planet’s resources, polluting, heating and overpopulating the environment.  The planet’s ability to support us is quickly and undoubtedly reaching the breaking point, and the solution is radical and immediate de-industrialization and depopulation.  The fact that industrialized nations and economic development provide innovations that result in efficiency and sustainability, as well as a negative replacement population rate matter not.  Humans must cease to eat anything but primary energy producers (plants), and ‘enact policy’ to curtail fertility by all and any means necessary to save the planet.

CG 65, Leadership:  Democracy is fair and effective.  It is just and fair to allow the tyranny of the majority to compel by force the theft of property from individuals in the form of taxation for the ‘common good’.  The importance of understanding the electorate’s will is secondary at best to mastering the process by which I as an individual can gain power and privilege through the exploitation of the democratic process.  Open manipulation of the will of the masses is the only just means to gain dominance over my neighbors and co-opt their liberty and resources.  Individual ability is meaningless, and it is unethical to use superior individual ability, labor and intellect to succeed, because that would be unfair to the dull-witted and lazy.  Those who have no power or ability have been exploited by individuals with power and ability, which is unethical.  The ethical way to exploit the public is as a group.  Everyone has equal value and ability, and it is wrong to favor individual performance based upon merit.  An individual’s worth is based on their ability to consent to the democratic process, and there are no natural leaders — leadership is a learned skill.

ACCT 151a, Financial Accounting:  All systems of accounting exist solely for the expressed purpose of paying the state.  I am compelled to violate my own right against self-incrimination by ‘voluntarily’ providing the state with a detailed log of all of my economic activity, so that I can ‘voluntarily’ send them a portion of that which I have earned by way of participation in commerce.  I must use Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and keep meticulous records, based on a system codified by a medieval Jesuit named Fra. Lucca Paccioli, which he derived from ancient Sumerian systems of accounting and transcribed in the margins of a bible.  Should I participate in commerce in any other manner, or fail to disclose exactly what I’ve done with every dime that passes through my hands, I will be fined or imprisoned.  Corporations (that is, ideas drawn on paper) are people who never die and have rights that supersede the rights of natural people.  This system exists for my benefit…somehow.

SOC 2, Introduction to Sociology:  The ‘sociological imagination’ is a process by which unique individuals are grouped and classified as either privileged or victimized.  Race does not exist biologically, and gender has nothing to do with sex — paradoxically, people of western European ancestry with testicles are inherently evil, unless they are homosexual and socialist.  The laws of the natural, biological world are immoral when applied to society, even though Sociology as a field proposed the theory of Social Darwinism.  Central planning is needed to control the actions of individuals, and a free society is inherently unjust.  Though the ‘sociological imagination’ has given birth to the greatest evils of human society — Totalitarianism, Eugenics, and Human Bondage, sociology is somehow the salvation of human civilization.  The ‘great sociologists’ include Marx, Sanger and Mao — three people responsible for the death of millions.  Enlightenment thinkers and individual liberty is wrong, and Thomas Jefferson’s ownership of slaves somehow invalidates the merit of any concepts he wrote on human liberty.

With all of that being stated — I pose a question to you, the great minds of notesonliberty.com:  To which schools within California shall I apply?  To which programs?  Is there any merit to a college education that has a legitimate basis in Art and Science, or is education within the college system simply a continued exercise in political indoctrination?  I write this in earnest — my thoughts aren’t in the least tongue-in-cheek.  Please, please, please, guide me to quality schools and baccalaureate programs for a libertarian thinker, so that I may not abandon my quest for a degree.

Help me, Obi-wan Kenobi.  You are my only hope.

The Federal Shutdown, the Debt Ceiling and an Extremist’s Morning After

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , , , , , ,

The fake government “shutdown” is already over. I hardly had time to enjoy it. I was just beginning to make a list of federal services that are “non-essential” according to the federal government itself. I was kind of hoping that the EPA, for example, would bite the dust. I does not seem fair.

The debt ceiling problem is also dealt with for the time being. It’s another expression of the same underlying problem that led to the “shutdown.” (See below.)

OK, after the crisis that just ended temporarily, it feels to conservatives like Great Britain in August 1944. The Luftwaffe rules the skies. Our few remaining pilots keep getting shot down. Our central city is bombed nightly. Everyone else who is civilized has already folded. Nightly, they are opening the Champagne in Berlin. We stand alone. It does not mean that we are wrong to stand.

Still, it also feels like the morning after. Time to look into it.

The so-called crisis is suspended for about four months. Nothing is solved. The Republicans collectively took a public opinion drubbing, it’s true. Speaking for myself, I will repeat what I said earlier: I am not attached to the Republican Party. I care only about limited government conservatism. Until now, the Republican Party was a not-so-bad vehicle for that view of the world. If it does not have the backbone to carry it further, so be it. Yes, I think that even if there is no other likely large vehicle in sight. I want to avoid pointless imaginings about my meaning by saying it clearly: What I fear most is not just another electoral defeat but a meaningless and useless electoral defeat such as the Republican Party suffered in the last presidentials. What hurts the most is the large number of nominal Republicans who just stayed home. Gov. Romney’s program was not the hill you want to die for. Gov. Romney was not the kind of commander who could induce you to die for that hill.

Here is the central conservative issue in a capsule. The phony government shutdown and the reappearing debt ceiling issue are parts of the same dark cloud:

A federal government that is deeply and routinely corrupt as well as shockingly incompetent keeps borrowing mindlessly to sustain the ordinary business of government.

It’s despotic; its’ a waste of resources; most of all, it’s immoral.

The mindless, nearly automatic borrowing is the worst part.

Myself, I think that I, my children and the federal government should only borrow under two circumstances:

  1. When the loan is to be applied directly to the acquisition of a tool that will contribute to greater earnings in the proximate future. I use the word “tool” liberally. Better freeways, for example, could easily qualify.
  2. When there is a strong presumption that we will earn more tomorrow . That’s with or without the condition in 1 above. This is separate. In the case of a country, for example demographic growth may by itself create such a presumption.

The present federal government’s borrowing fulfills neither condition. It’s borrowing to meet everyday expense. It’s as if I borrowed to buy bread for my lunch sandwich. There is also no reason so far to believe that the United States economy will grow a great deal tomorrow. (This could change the day after tomorrow if we had, for example, sudden access to new cheap energy. The Obama administration is doing its best to prevent precisely this from happening – Makes you think along dark lines, doesn ‘t it?)

Routine even legal, systemic federal government corruption: The widow of (wealthy) Senator Lautenberg received $174,000 from Congress because her husband took the trouble to die while in office. (WSJ 10/18/13, p. A12)

Federal Government incompetence: See the health insurance exchanges, in preparation for four years! Enough said! Note: I am not sure whether I am more afraid that its implementation will succeed or that it will continue to fail in exemplary fashion.

Mindless federal borrowing: It has become an integral part of the culture that the government must borrow to live. I said “integral part of the culture.” Below, an illustration I could not invent if I wanted to.

Larry Fink is the CEO of BlackRock, by some defensible measure, the largest investment firm in the world. Mr Fink said 10/16/13 or 10/17/13 (WSJ):

I have been in this business for 37 years. For 34 years I did not know there was such a thing as a debt ceiling.

Our point exactly! One of the highest placed business executives in the land takes government borrowing so much for granted that he does not know it’s subject to Congress-imposed limitations. He even sounds incensed when he learns the truth.

That’s what makes us conservatives, “extremists.”

Why do I care? I care because, unless there is another wave of fast economic growth lasting for several years, we are guaranteeing that our children and grand children will live in poverty. It’s wrong; it’s immoral.

And then, there is the growing phoniness of the public discourse including discourse by the mainstream privately owned press.

During the two days following the cessation of the pretend-government “shutdown,” the main media are eager to pretend that the multitudes feel great relief. They talk as if the average folks out there had experienced tremendous suffering because federal non-essentials were furloughed. I, for one, feel no relief at all. I don’t know anyone who does. (Agree, it’s an unsystematic sample but it’s a sample.) This is all the media’s deliberate exaggeration or a misplaced identification with federal public servants. It’s becoming more and more obvious that such public servants are overpaid and that they enjoy too many unearned privileges. (State public servants also, in some states, such as mine, California.) I don’t identify. It pisses me off. The more I know, the more pissed off I am.

They, the mainstream media, echo dumbly the noises coming from the administration about the alleged “costs” of the “shutdown” to the national economy. No one takes the trouble to do a net calculus, even to raise the issue of a net calculus. Isn’t it true that for each day certain federal bureaucracies are unable to do their job, some of the main producers in the nation are better able to produce? Again, the EPA comes to mind. And the IRS, of course. And a number of federal agencies whose names I don’t even know.

Besides, it’s an empty formula, a truism that (theoretical) wealth that fails to be produced usually is not regained, as the administration says gravely.

N. S. ! That’s what happens with Columbus Day and with Presidents’ Day, for example. (When only public servants and bank employees don’t work. When nearly the whole private sector keeps on producing wealth.) Why not cancel both holidays if non-production is a cause for worry? Why not make federal public servants come to work on both days if the president is worried? He only need issue an executive order. Bet you, he won’t even mention the possibility. And why do I have to state the obvious? Why aren’t the media doing their job? Have they been hypnotized? And, I almost forgot: if the president loses sleep over the missed production of federal employees, he could imitate the French in reverse and institute the federal forty-four hours work week. Would anyone notice?

Something else does not add up in the media’s discourse. For days, during the so-called “shutdown,” both administration officials and supposedly independent pundits threatened us with a world economic abyss because of number of non-essential federal employees were prevented from going to work. (I am not making this up; I am not exaggerating that we were told this ad nauseum; go back to those recent days, you will be amazed.) Yet, the day he current agreement is announced, the day we jumped form the edge of the supposed abyss, the markets reacted limply. The Dow Jones Industrial gained a lackluster 175 points that day. Now, that’s nice; it’s a gain for sure. However it’s no more of a gain than happens, for example, when the international price of the oil barrel comes down by ten dollars. The next day, the Dow Jones was flat. Trouble over; no big deal after all. Forget what we said yesterday. Forget the alarm. We were just kidding!

The Republican cave-in saves us from falling into the Grand Canyon and the market gives us a small hot dogs party by way of celebration! Does it make sense?

President Obama’s deftness never ceases to amaze me. No mistake seems to stick to him. On the day of the agreement, he declared that the new debt ceiling is not really debt. No one in the mainstream press questioned this absurd statement. Let me repeat, by the way, that I don’t think he is lying. He really does not know better. Academia is overflowing with his type of intelligent ignorance.

Perhaps, I am not grasping what’s going on, culturally. Perhaps, the reservoir of white American guilt concerning the long atrocity that was slavery, concerning racial segregation and discrimination also, is far from exhausted. Perhaps, the president can write checks on this for a long time to come. Or maybe, as Rush Limbaugh suggested, he struck a giant chord with the millions by giving them a chance to see themselves as victims. If you are a victim, almost any grotesque behavior is permissible. Soon only my wife, our grown children and I will be the only non-victims left in America. It will be a lonely existence. And, I wonder how long we will be able to support the victims because two of us are long retired (thus mirroring American demographics to come).

At one point one of Mr Obama’s servants referred gravely to the global reputational damage the shutdown has caused to the United States. (I don’t remember exactly who or when but I heard it with my own ears.) The “red line” in Syria about using chemical weapons does not in any way affect the credibility of the US, I suppose. The hundreds of civilians who died from chemical weapons died and all is forgiven. In the words of Pres. Obama’s former Secretary of State, “What difference does it make now?”

The day after the agreement the president gave another speech in which he advised those who don’t like something to just win elections in order to be able to change the something. I don’t think it was mistake. It was Freudian slip. President Obama does not believe that tea party Senators and Representatives who oppose him so tenaciously were just as elected as he was. It sounds familiar to me because I know history rather well and French history very well. The weakling tyrant, Louis-Napoleon, the Emperor Napoleon the Third (there was no Second) was initially elected. His supporters really thought that if you were elected by a sizable majority, you were morally allowed to do anything. They thought that was democracy. (There is a very nice readable piece by my old buddy Karl Marx on this topic for your reading pleasure where and when it rains: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Abstract of Chapter I.)

Thus do we drift fast toward a one-party state. I warned about this a long time ago, before Mr Obama was even elected. (See also on this blog: “Fascism Explained“)

The unspeakable Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid said after the agreement was reached: “This is a time for reconciliation.” I don’t think so. I hope not.

Some reflections on the Right to Private Property

Tibor Machan Current Events, Liberty , , , , , ,

[Editor’s note: the following is an essay by Dr Tibor Machan, professor emeritus in the department of philosophy at Auburn University, and current holder of the R. C. Hoiles Chair of Business Ethics and Free Enterprise at the Argyros School of Business & Economics at Chapman University in Orange, California. He is also a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a former adjunct faculty member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Machan is a syndicated and freelance columnist; author of more than one hundred scholarly papers and more than thirty books. We are extremely grateful for his generosity in regards to sharing this article.] 

Private Property Rights

The first step in the destruction of capitalism must be the abolition of the right to private property. Marx and Engels were clear about this in The Communist Manifesto. And many who sympathize with his idea of a socialist political economy agree. This is one reason many such thinkers and activists are champions of land use, eminent domain and related legal measures that render even the most personal of real property subject to extensive government control.

Of course, there are others who have argued that the right to private property is not only the basis for vigorous commerce but also the foundation of other individual rights, including freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of the press. It is arguably, in a somewhat roundabout way, the conceptual foundation of the right to freedom of political participation. Without some safe haven, one’s private domain, to return to after the vote has gone against one’s way, one will be vulnerable to the vindictiveness of the winners! And political advocacy without exclusive jurisdiction over one’s domain is difficult to imagine since advocacy, support and such political activities could not be carried out independently of other people’s permission.

Accordingly, it is no mere academic curiosity whether the idea of private property rights is well founded, sound, or just. Within American political and legal history there has been some confidence in the soundness of this principle but the basis of it has not gone unchallenged over the last two centuries. One need but consider the recent work by Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel, The Myth of Ownership, Taxes and Justice (Oxford University Press, 2001) to appreciate how vulnerable is that confidence. Indeed, it is mostly members of the discipline of economics who see merit in the idea of private property, and then not as a feature of justice but more as a feature of an efficient system of resource allocation.

Yet, there is reason to think that the right to private property is a good idea, that everyone should be understood to have this right and that the institutions built upon it should be preserved. Indeed, they should be extended into areas where other ideas have held sway (for example, environmental public law). Let us consider this idea, then, and see whether we can be confident in its validity as a sound political-legal concept. 

From Mixing Labor to Rewarding Good Judgment Continue reading →

The Labor Theory of Value

Brandon Christensen Economics, History, Religion ,

From Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Karl Marx:

Suppose that such commodities take four hours to produce. Thus the first four hours of the working day is spent on producing value equivalent to the value of the wages the worker will be paid. This is known as necessary labour. Any work the worker does above this is known as surplus labour, producing surplus value for the capitalist. Surplus value, according to Marx, is the source of all profit. In Marx’s analysis labour power is the only commodity which can produce more value than it is worth, and for this reason it is known as variable capital. Other commodities simply pass their value on to the finished commodities, but do not create any extra value. They are known as constant capital. Profit, then, is the result of the labour performed by the worker beyond that necessary to create the value of his or her wages. This is the surplus value theory of profit.

Read how Marx got this wrong here.

There is more:

Although Marx’s economic analysis is based on the discredited labour theory of value, there are elements of his theory that remain of worth. The Cambridge economist Joan Robinson, in An Essay on Marxian Economics, picked out two aspects of particular note. First, Marx’s refusal to accept that capitalism involves a harmony of interests between worker and capitalist, replacing this with a class based analysis of the worker’s struggle for better wages and conditions of work, versus the capitalist’s drive for ever greater profits. Second, Marx’s denial that there is any long-run tendency to equilibrium in the market, and his descriptions of mechanisms which underlie the trade-cycle of boom and bust. Both provide a salutary corrective to aspects of orthodox economic theory.

Your thoughts please.

What I Did Not Write About Enough in 2012

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , ,

Climate change

Nothing new there. Alarmists keep lying, making up data, cherry-picking data, exaggerating grossly the consequences of what does happen on the climate front. Not really worth dealing with. Instead, go to the “What’s Up With That” blog every so often. There is a direct link to it on the front of this blog and here also, is the link: Masters, McKibben and Droughting Thomases.

It’s not exactly a dead horse though; it’s a new religion that will find its place among others and perhaps, next to the “Maya Calendar End of the World” cult. Or, maybe not, or maybe, it’s a little more: It looks like one of those widespread but lightly held beliefs. It may become soon like the rule that you don’t walk under a ladder. It might influence legislation yet, but, I think not in a major way. I believe we got off easy.

Belief in global warming plays an important role in my life though. It helps me separate in seconds those who are real skeptics, like me, from those who merely play at pretending to be skeptics in order to glean the social benefits of such skepticism.

And, in case you are wondering, here is my current understanding: There is no warming that is global, and of significant duration, and that’s man-made, and that constitutes an emergency for humankind. Continue reading →

Karl Marx and Special Interests

Brandon Christensen History, Politics , , , , , , , , , ,

[Note: this is an old musing of mine written back in May of 2011. I hope it is still as fresh today as it was back then.]

Karl Marx’s economic theories have long been disproved (theoretically as soon as they came out, and practically with the fall of the Berlin Wall), and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of individuals have perished under communist regimes.  People were either murdered, “relocated”, or starved to death through the attempts of Marx’s acolytes to remake man in their image.

Despite this horrific record, his theories continue to persist throughout modern political discourse.  In the United States his myths are still promoted in the academy and among the hard Left, but very few take them seriously (unfortunately).  However, in much of the rest of the world his ideas are still prevalent in everyday political action.  In order to go about showing you why this is may be the case, I am going to switch from Marxist economic theory (the labor theory of value is so out of step with reality and public discourse that I feel it is unnecessary to debunk it here) to Marxist political theory.

In fleshing out Marx’s political thought, I hope to show my loyal readers (all two of you) a couple of things: 1) that Marx’s ideas on political organization were nothing new (in fact Marxist thought on political organization is actually very old), and 2) that although Marxist ideas on political organization are not taken seriously by most Americans, the few who do take them seriously are very smart people in very high places.  Failure to recognize the subtle exposition of Marx’s political thought in public discourse could lead to dangerous consequences if we are not more aware of what it is that Marxists are attempting to destroy and what it is that they are attempting to replace it with. Continue reading →

Whither Hobsbawm’s Left?

Brandon Christensen Current Events , , , , ,

Self-described socialist Mike Beggs writes:

Academic survival is, of course, cold comfort. Does Marxism have a political future? Hobsbawm is clearly not optimistic […] Those of us who have come so very late to the party, so to speak, inevitably have a different perspective. We discovered Marx long after the flaws of Marxism and “really-existing socialism” had become obvious, in a period of protracted recession in the labor movement. And yet, we still found something of value. Many, probably most, of us learned much of our Marx at university, deeply impressed by that intellectual flowering of the 1970s which Hobsbawm sees as the high-water mark. The course of his life has followed an epic rise and fall which naturally shapes his conclusions. For us, there is a lot more future to come.

You can read the rest of the article here. EJ Hobsbawm was a prolific Marxist historian, and I have come across his own work in my studies on national identity. You can find a decent list of his books here. RIP.

Sex and Economics (And Karl Marx Too!)

Brandon Christensen Economics , , , , ,

The concept of economic reproduction is emphasized in the Marxian school of economic thought. In Marxist theory, the conditions for production are continuously re-created as a circular flow. The concept of the circular flow of both goods and of factor-inputs was first developed by the French economists of the 1700s, who called their theory of natural economic laws “Physiocracy.” The factors or categories of inputs are land, labor, and capital goods.

From co-editor Fred Foldvary. Do read the whole fascinating article. Many conservatives in the US (as well as libertarians) don’t give Karl Marx the time of day he deserves in order for thoughtful, polite discourse to take place. Many on the Right decry (and rightly so) the various strawmen that Leftists erect when attacking the proponents of private property, personal wealth and international trade, but are we any better when it comes to debunking Leftist arguments? Continue reading →

Occupy Wall Street; Don’t Attack Grandma: The New Class Struggle

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Liberty , , , , , ,

Behind the verbal incoherence, behind the posturing, behind the bad children’s tantrum, behind the trash, behind the grotesque self-regard of those who would borrow $120,000 to earn a degree in “German Studies,” there may be legitimate resentment in the “Occupy” movement. It’s true that it’s difficult to get from the demonstrators an answer to a straight question that does not make you laugh or cry, or both. However, you may not have to await their answer to understand.

To the extent that you can trust television cameras at all, they seem to show largely demonstrators between their mid-twenties and their mid-thirties. That would be people born between 1975 and 1985. Those cohorts had only known ease and prosperity until 2008. They were brought up by easy-going parents who sent them, or allowed them to attend schools that nurtured self-indulgence more than intellectual curiosity. I have two children near the younger edge of these age groups. I am guilty too. When they were playing soccer, they never heard anything from coaches except “Good try.” I remember clearly one little kid ( not one of mine, God forbid!) garnering this very accolade after he had marked a goal against his own team. (Would I make this up?) These American cohorts were not in any way prepared for a world where jobs are difficult to get because companies are not hiring and where the jobs you get don’t pay well because companies don’t have to pay well since they won’t invest in you for the long-term because there is no long-term they can see. Continue reading →

Karl Marx Was Right (Pretty Much)

Jacques Delacroix History, Politics , , , , ,

Karl Marx spent a lifetime arguing that the motor of history, what caused social change, was the “class struggle.” (Marx said other, more complicated things in relation to the class struggle. I don’t care to talk about them right now because they are obscure and there is little agreement among Marxists about what they mean.) Marx also did not assign enough importance to technological progress, it’s true. That would happen largely as a result of ever greater densities of population, irrespective of any political system. Many people in close contact in cities are more likely to come up with better ways to get things done than few people who barely ever meet anyone outside their small group. Literacy also helped of course by helping preserve accumulated knowledge. With these major lacunas, I think Marx was mostly right.

Marx had an elaborated conceptualization of social class that he never really completed. First, what “class” is not, according to Marx (also according to Delacroix). Class explicitly does not refer to “the rich and the poor” as many think. That would have been of limited usefulness when Marx was writing and it would be utterly useless now. The fact is that the distribution of wealth in modern, capitalist societies (the ones Marx had in mind) is continuous, that is, there is not break-up point. Next to the person, or family who owns $1,000, 000 there is one that owns $999,000, and next to that one, there is another that owns $998,999. Likewise, next to the person or family who owns $50, there is one that has $51 in wealth. And so forth. Moreover, who owns what is not fixed except at the lowest end. I was poor when I was thirty, I am not anymore. People who own vast wealth are liable to lose large portions of it in a day or two, thanks to the normal operation of the stock market, for example. Thus, there is frequent re-shuffling and rich and poor are pseudo-categories and therefore, useless.

Marx explained at length that what social class one belongs to is determined by one’s “relation to the means of production.” This is a bad translation of the bad German that prevailed at the time Marx was writing. Generations of Marxists everywhere have striven to conserve this opaque language because it made them sound profound, not least in their own eyes, and because it made them look like possessors of higher, “scientific” knowledge. Let me dispose of the scientific claim right away. It’s pure propaganda, deliberate bullshit, one of Marx’s public relations achievements. He made his claims seem more serious than they otherwise would have seemed by calling them “scientific” at a time when the word conveyed much intellectual prestige. Again, it’s bullshit. What makes anything scientific is that it can be refuted by comparison with reality. Another way to say nearly the same thing is to say that scientific claims can be tested. (Don’t worry about the “nearly” in the previous sentence; the statement is good enough for our purpose.) Marx’s claims cannot be tested in a rigorous, logical manner. All Marxists can do is to cry, “See, Marx said so,” after the fact, whenever something develops more or less according to one of Marx’s many unclear predictions. One issue about which Marx was clear was the class struggle. More on this below.

The world in which Marx lived was different from ours in important respects two of which are crucial for understanding the idea of social class in the 21st century.

1 When Marx was observing and writing, in the second half of the 19th century, land was losing much of its age-old importance as a source of income, in comparison with manufacturing and mining, and later, railroads. While agricultural productivity was making steady gains in the richest countries, manufacturing and, in its wake, mining, were growing explosively thanks to the Industrial Revolution. (Note what I am not saying: Income from agriculture was not shrinking in absolute terms, it was expanding.) It was clear to most observers then that the quick way to riches was to capture the fast rising income generated by those industries. The best spigot was thus the material industries of manufacturing, mining and later, railroads.

The claimants to this income were uncommonly well-defined. On the one side were a small number of mostly family-based companies like the Krupp in Germany, the Schneider in France, the Rockefeller in America, and so on. These highly visible companies owned the manufacturing plants, the mines, and later the railroads. Here is a useful digression: Marx seemed not to have understood the importance of publicly owned companies in which small people and other groups could invest their small savings. He probably thought big corporations would remain in a tiny number of hands forever. Correspondingly, he did not understand well the role of stock exchanges either. He was wrong on this, wrong by large omission.

The other claimants to manufacturing, mining and railroad income were also highly visible. They were the masses of workers flocking to the cities and mining centers from the countryside. Those people were visible because of where they lived, near the centers of cities. Originally, they were also poorly paid and overworked. Marx observed that they were in a favorable situation to organize along labor union lines and also politically to an extend unimaginable by their peasant forebears. This, because of their geographic concentration and because of their ability to realize that they shared a certain type of misery.

From these accurate observations, it was fairly natural to predict that there would eventually be a clash between the super-rich owners of the means of production, manufacturing plants, mines and railroads, and those who toiled for them. It looked like there was at any time, a zero-plus sum game being played: Whatever the owner took, the workers did not get, and vice-versa: capitalists (owners) vs proletariat (industrial workers, broadly defined).

But everyone who was not a worker was not a capitalist in that sense, and everyone who was not a capitalist was not necessarily an industrial worker. The lawyers who serviced the capitalists could be expected to join with them. The tavern owners whose own income came from workers’ drinking would side with the workers, and so forth. This scheme makes it clear that a starving lawyer could be in the capitalist camp and a prosperous pub owner in that of the workers. Hence the idea that people would line up politically according to their “relationship to the mean of production.” This is a more sophisticated idea and also one much more applicable than the “rich vs poor” of the popular imagery of social class.

2. The second big difference between Marx’s time and ours is the size of government. Throughout the 19th century, governments everywhere were small and poor. There was no income tax; they derived revenue largely from customs (border taxes) and from excise taxes. Governments then were a fiscal burden on everyone if not equally, then commonly, but a fairly light burden most of the time.

Today, governments in the developed world are large to huge. They consume anywhere between 40% approximately and 70% of Gross Domestic Product. They are also everywhere by far the largest accessible source of income.

Superficially, the amorphous, ill-defined “service sector” seems even larger since it accounts regularly for more than 70% of GDP (in rich countries including the US). However, it’s fragmented, heterogeneous, controlled (to the extent that is is controlled) by a myriad of owners. Much of it is not very profitable, as opposed to 19th century manufacturing, for example. The services workforce is also extremely fragmented and it tends to be transient. It would be difficult for that workforce, or for anyone else to get together to capture anything of value. There is not much to take from the service sector and it would be hard to get.

By contrast, the large to very large chunk of money that is in governments’ hands at any one time is easy to capture. It does not take much more than a well-engineered vote to get one’s own hands on it. Furthermore, unlike the private sector’s funds that depend on the vagaries of the market and on management’s competence, government grants in various forms tend to have a long shelf life. The WWII subsidy to chinchilla farmers was only repealed about ten years ago, fifty years late! Civil service pension funds are another case in point. Obtaining money from government entities is well worth the effort. The government is both a big spigot and an easy one to turn on.

I know I promised to tell you that Marx was almost right. Well, what we see in America today is a classical Marxian class struggle. The classes in conflict are not those Marx described because he was writing almost 150 years ago and he had not foreseen the monstrous growth of government. (No one else had.) The Obamanian/Obamist faction of the Democratic Party has engineered and is engineering an alliance between the main social class of today, government workers, on the one hand and a few other, opportunistically selected groups, on the other hand.

First among the government workers class allies are the small minority of workers in labor unions (maybe 7 or 8% of all employed and unemployed people). Labor unions have always used government to grab what their own muscle failed to achieve. Second, are the majorities of racial minorities. Many – but not most – are poor for reasons that ceased a long time ago to be related to racism. The largest racial minority, so-called “Latinos,” is heterogeneous and many of its members are immigrants or one generation removed from immigration. The Obamists are trying to grab them before they meld into the traditional American dream.

The second largest minority is “blacks.” Only about half of so-called “African-Americans” are descendants of slaves with a historical grievance that is supposed to be addressed by affirmative action. Many in that half, of southern church background, are addicted to resounding speeches about injustice and to the idea that the remedy to their ills can only come from government. They will vote for the best “injustice speech” giver irrespective of what they gain afterwards. (Usually nothing. The Democratic Party had been using and abusing blacks for thirty years.) The other half of Americans with African blood are immigrants and their children. Like Obama himself, in my book, they have no historical claim on the nation. That second half of the second minority might surprise us soon, politically. They are experiencing normal American social mobility, like general Colin Powell for example, the son of Jamaican immigrants. They are at best temporary members of the Obamian recruits, I think. He, and his Left-Democrat conspirators cannot count on them for the long haul.

A flat and slow-growing economy is always especially hard on immigrants. That’s the main reason western Europe has always – until now – had worse immigrant problems than we have. Immigrants in America open a small business and their kids go to college and they become the doctors and lawyers and engineers our normally expanding economy requires. Immigrants in France, for example, go to college and then remain underemployed forever because the French escalator is hardly moving at all.

There are no other racial minorities in America today that want to be considered minorities. They are all doing well without recourse to government favor. Many may have voted for Obama without understanding what they were doing. If I were an American communist trying to take over by legal means, I would not count on them further. In the same breath, I would refer to the scarce but disproportionately influential American Jews. I think more than 75% voted for Obama. That was a downright perverse and obstinate vote. I don’t think many are communists. I suspect many more are coming to their senses right now. (I may be placing too much confidence in an unsystematic sample here. All the Jews I know are conservatives. Ten years ago, I did not even know of Jewish conservatives.)

Finally, the Obamists exercise control over a large under-class that they are trying to enlarge yet: All those who are not working but who exist temporarily or permanently thanks to government payments. Marx had described something like this when he spoke of the politically unstable lumpenproletariat, the sub-working class “dressed in rags.”

So, here we are: On the one side, the large and growing class of government employees and the small allied class of union members. Both classes earn considerably more in wages and benefits than the employed in the private sector, nearly twice as much on the average. One bus driver in my small town belongs to both classes, as a government employee and as a union member. Last year, he earned $160,000 (that’s with overtime, let’s be frank). The job requires a high-school education. (I hope he is the one bus driver in this town who is not habitually gruff.) This is the same town where coffee shop baristas with a college degree earn $9/ hour if they are lucky, with no benefits. (I am speaking of Liberal Arts and Environmental Studies majors. Again, let’s be frank!)

To summarize: Government employees and union members owe their superior earnings to their relationship to the means of re-distributing income forcibly, government. They seek to extend and consolidate their hold on government with the help of precariously allied ethnic minorities and of unstable recipients of welfare under various names. On the other side is everyone else, everyone who does not work for government and who pays the taxes that feed the others. They too are defined by their relationship not to the “mode of production,” (see above) but to the spigot of government.

Here is a key figure: Almost 50% of Americans paid no federal income tax last year. That’s a lot of people who are not against the government confiscating legitimate income though legal means.

Once you start looking at the events and policies of the past 18 months as elements of a normal class-struggle, you gain much clarity. And, incidentally, this thesis does not contradict my repeated statements that the Obama administration and the President himself, are not very bright. They are relying on an old play-book that tells them pretty much what to do and that does not require much inventiveness.

I am astounded – if I say so myself – by the predictive power of my historical explanation. We even have the third highest elected official in the land ( third in order of succession to the President) engaging overtly in fascist intimidation: Speaker Pelosi threatened around August 16th “to investigate” those who oppose a mosque near Ground Zero! (See my column on this: “The ‘Ground Zero’ Mosque Issue Clarified”)

And, by the way, for those of you who got Cs in public school, or Bs in private school because the school needed the tuition, no, I am not confused. The Obamians are a species of communists and, communism is just one brand of fascism. See my two essays on the topic on this blog:“Fascism Explained,” and “How About Communism?”

More Musings on Colonialism

Brandon Christensen History , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I recently attended an excellent lecture at Cabrillo College, located in central California, by an International Relations scholar who focused on the effects of colonialism. We took a solid look at the ‘World Systems Theory’ of why the developing world is, well, developing, and it was great to go over this school of thought’s main arguments.

For those of you who don’t know, World Systems Theory is a Marxian analysis that basically states that poor countries are poor because of the effects of colonialism, and the evidence supporting their claims is pretty damn solid. Basically, the World Systems theorists argue that when the various European powers gained outright control of non-European lands (this process in itself took centuries, by the way, and I deplore the historical narrative that argues Europeans set out to conquer foreign lands and divide up the spoils of war for reasons outlined in the link provided), the European powers set up states that were designed specifically to export raw agricultural materials to European factories, to be produced by European workers, and to be consumed by European (and elite non-European) consumers.

This is pretty much what happened, and explains why most of the developing world is dependent upon raw commodity exports (that are shipped to European markets) for most of their well-being. Unfortunately, the very solutions that the World Systems theorists propose to dismantle the structural inequalities that exist in this world will (and have) actually led to more of the same structural inequality.

Allow me to explain. Continue reading →

Communist Dinosaurs

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , , ,

I watch a French two-and-a-half-hour weekly television show that’s pretty good in most respects. It mixes no- hold-barred interviews of politicians with talks with movie directors, authors and artists, including singers.  There is a presidential election beginning in France too. It relies on an an incomplete primary system. To make a long story short, anyone with a grievance or an idea who can get 500 signatures of I don’t know whom can run. That makes for a lively and exotic first round of  balloting. In the second round, things get serious. In any case, this time, there is an explicitly “communist” candidate (Trotskyst branch). She runs for an organization that calls itself “Workers’ Struggle” (Lutte ouvriere).

It’s not clear what her party considers as “workers” but from the candidate’s choice of examples of struggle in her interview last night, there is a strong preference for conventional blue-collar and pink-collar workers. Of course, manufacturing jobs are vanishing from France as they have been doing here. People employed in manufacturing are becoming accordingly scarcer. Bad strategic bet that, defining yourself as a workers’ party when you also define workers that way, (going away, going away, gone!).

The “communist” candidate discourse is loud as it is transparent. Let me summarize: Continue reading →