by Alan Briskin | Collective Folly, Conscious Capitalism, Photography, Politics
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Ten
Corporate Persons
What Does Not Serve Me Shall Not Be My Concern
Time Range: 1985-Present
Who even knew that corporations had legal rights as if they were actual persons? In a strange twist of legal gymnastics, the originating idea of a corporation being birthed and legitimized by a government grant had been transformed into a corporate body beholden to no one but its owners.
Economic self-interest was the law of the land, and the corporate persons cultivated in such an environment could be as sweet as your dear auntie or as self-serving and weird as the guy down the block wearing just a raincoat. However, both would be legally obligated to prioritize their shareholder economic interests over other concerns such as the corporation’s effect on human beings or the earth’s resources. Economists even have language for this. Externality is the effect on others, positive or negative, by corporate action that is not calculated into the cost of the goods or services.
“An externality,” wrote the economist Milton Friedman, “is the effect of a transaction … on a third party who has not consented to or played any role in the carrying out of that transaction.” He offers a relatively benign example of a man who must clean his shirt more often due to smoke emissions from a local power plant. He tends to minimize the effects by calling them “neighborhood effects” or “spillovers.” In a free market, positive and negative externalities theoretically cancel each other out or are eventually internalized by the corporation. However, a less cheerful view might look something like this: persons who dissociate their actions from their effects on others are called sociopaths.
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
Sociopathic corporate persons would not hesitate to market cigarettes or foods high in toxic chemicals, trans fats, sugar, and salt. They would simply point to positive externalities such as jobs being created or the social benefits of smoking and snack foods. They would feel unjustly picked on, pointing out that government intervention is a slippery slope leading to arbitrary interventions. What next, they would ask, bread with too many carbohydrates? The same logic would be offered as a defense of corporations generating air and water pollution, battling safety regulations, depleting fish stocks, wiping out forests, or underfunding pension funds. Why pick on us?
Marx’s warning that capitalism would spawn a consciousness of immediate economic self-interest takes on darker shading when extrapolated through corporate externalities influencing climate change, epidemic rates of diabetes and obesity, international instability, and increasing numbers of retirees without adequate access to basic needs of food, housing, and health care. The point is not that these things are easily fixed or that government will always get the balancing act right, but that corporate sociopaths, with society’s legal approval, have a built-in incentive to muddy the water.
FLASH POINTS
Big
Tobacco says that smoking is about freedom and choices. But a battalion of
experts at Emory is showing that better choices can be made—and that not much
about tobacco is free…
“Industries like gambling, alcohol, and tobacco are ‘societal cancers,’ says [Ray] Gangarosa, that cause ‘exceptional social harm, including death, disability, addiction, and secondhand injury, on the scale of a commercial holocaust . . . (and have) escaped society’s usual controls by shifting blame for harmful commerce to their consumers, and then shifting associated downstream costs onto society. We must hold these harmful industries accountable for their costs.’
Gangarosa, who is working toward a PhD in epidemiology at RSPH [Rollins School of Public Health], was disappointed in the Master Settlement Agreement, in which he feels ‘some terrible compromises were made.’ But he acknowledges the complexity of the issue. ‘The tobacco industry doesn’t make enough money to pay for the social harm that they do. We would bankrupt them,’ says Gangarosa. ‘But if we don’t ask them to pay the social cost, then they are effectively being subsidized.’”
~ Public Health, Spring 2002
“After getting called out by an environmental group, General Motors has pulled support from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based nonprofit well-known for attacking the science behind global warming and climate change.
The automaker told the Heartland Institute last week that it won’t be making further donations, spokesman Greg Martin said. At a speech earlier this month, GM CEO Dan Akerson said his company is running its business under the assumption that climate change is real.”
~ Huffington Post, March 30, 2012
“Corporations Are Not People”
“Can grassroots victory in Green Mountain state spark national movement?
“With some results still yet to come in, reports confirm that at least 55 towns in Vermont approved municipal resolutions calling for an end to big money’s dominance in US politics and calling for a Constitutional amendment to reverse the Supreme Court’s ‘Citizens United’ decision that has opened the floodgates for secretive, unlimited campaign spending in US elections.
“The initiatives called on the Vermont Legislature and the state’s congressional delegation to support a constitutional amendment that clarifies that ‘money is not speech and corporations are not people.’”
~ Common Dreams, March 7, 2012
Next Week:
Chapter Eleven: Booms and Busts
The bull market of the 1980s saw greater numbers of people investing and realizing larger returns. A whole new financial investing industry was growing up alongside corporate growth. Workers were working longer hours and taking on second jobs, but day traders could get rich in an instant. As we headed into the ’90s, the political focus was on the economy, stupid. A new president argued that government could smooth out the economy’s rough edges, and by playing by the rules and working hard, we might finally see an end to capitalism’s wild gyrations.
by Alan Briskin | Collective Folly, Conscious Capitalism, Politics
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Seven, Part Two
How Wealth Became Concentrated and the Poor Were to Blame: What Should Be Done with the Poor?
For the record, Harrington tried to address the dilemma of what constituted poverty, but his efforts backfired. He acknowledged that poverty was a social and historical construct, different in different time periods and cultures. He believed, like Roosevelt, that those without minimal levels of health, housing, food, and education were poor — especially when those same resources were available to the larger population. It is with this definition that he arrived at the 40–50 million figure of poverty in 1962.
Harrington came to believe that poverty was a function of reinforcing social elements that shaped an individual’s outlook. The outlook of the poor was different from the outlook of those who, like my parents, had hope for a better future. In that context, he believed that government had a critical role to play, but the real backdrop was the inadequate functioning of our economic and social institutions. Poverty resided in diverse physical locations and with different populations, but all faced similar obstacles. What were they?
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
FLASH POINT
Mitt Romney Criticized By Franciscan Friars For Comments On The Poor
Alex Becker
Huffington Post
Posted: 08/09/2012 2:36 pm Updated: 08/09/2012 3:55 pm
WASHINGTON- The Franciscan Action Network (FAN), a Catholic faith-based advocacy and civic engagement organization, is strongly criticizing Mitt Romney’s recent ads and rhetoric regarding welfare programs and welfare recipients, urging him to spend some time in low-income communities.
“Our Christian tradition teaches that we are to treat the poor with dignity and to prioritize the poor in our policies as a society,” the organization said in a press release on Thursday. “At a time when millions are struggling financially, it is degrading to talk about the ‘dependency’ of people hurting in this economy, as Gov. Romney did recently.”
Rhett Engelking, a secular Franciscan in Milwaukee and member of FAN, has even personally invited Romney to visit with the low-income people he assists. “Political leaders would not talk about the poor in demeaning ways or cut job training programs if they spent more time with the people they are affecting with their policies,” he said.
While faith-based anti-poverty and charity organizations have often criticized candidates and lawmakers for a perceived unwillingness to highlight and tackle issues affecting the very poor, FAN claims Romney’s rhetoric goes a step further, unfairly using welfare recipients as political props.
He understood something that has only recently been supported statistically by studying geographic zip codes. Harrington argued that poverty was a toxic mix of factors that included poor health, minimal access to health care, high-crime neighborhoods, hostile police presence, failing schools, generational cycles of unemployment, low income, family instability, and inadequate diets. Overcoming any one of these factors was possible, but together they represented a vicious cycle of cumulative obstacles whose aggregate outcome was failure. For example, I have estimated that there are zip codes in my hometown of Oakland, California, in which the chances of an eighth grader eventually graduating from a four-year college are less than 6%.
A few miles away in another zip code, on the border of Oakland, the figure is closer to 90% graduation with 98% planning to attend some form of college. Naturally, the attitudes and resources of the group in which 98% aspire to college will be different from those with little evidence that they will succeed. It was in this context that Harrington attempted to address a “culture of poverty,” and the term stuck in the worst possible way.
What Harrington was hoping to communicate was the hellish interlocking forces that resulted in a systematic repudiation of individuals and the groups they came from. He added that it was not uncommon to find an attitude of futility and lack of self-worth within these settings — but he stressed that these attitudes were the symptoms, not the disease. For Harrington, the absence of what he called positive aspirational qualities was the psychological demarcation separating this new form of poverty from others, enclaves so beaten down that the individual response was passivity, self-destructive behavior, and outbursts of violence. He believed that somehow if the larger society became conscious of such a destructive spiral, they would be inspired to change it.
Looking back with hindsight, we might wonder what the hell he was thinking. Instead of altruistic regard, a backlash against the symptoms of poverty became the rallying cry for both the left and the right. The left wanted to create legislative policies and fund government programs to fix the problem; the right vilified the subjects of Harrington’s findings – the poor and marginal – as failing due to their own poor attitude and dismal culture.
Harrington’s analysis, viewed as initially catalyzing John Kennedy’s interest in the subject of poverty and later Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, inadvertently provided fodder for the belief that poverty was simply other. The poor were subject to character flaws of epic dimensions. These included lack of impulse control, limited sense of self, manipulativeness, unwillingness to contribute to society, and being destitute by nature if not by choice. Daniel Moynihan, a drinking buddy of Harrington’s at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village and former assistant secretary of labor under both Kennedy and Johnson, compounded the problem with a report a few years later focusing on the inner city titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.
Now poverty would be construed as other and black, though some might question that as redundant. What is unquestioned is that the same forces that polarized during Roosevelt’s time in office now found a new subject to disagree about with each other. What Harrington tried to portray as a byproduct of failing economic and social institutions cutting across age, race, and geographic region instead became the stigmatization, if not demonization, of the poor. The culture of poverty was for many the confirmation of an existing belief. The poor were to blame for having too many children, fostering negative attitudes, lacking personal responsibility, and demonstrating an absence of respect for law and order. The poor would drag us all down if we let them.
A decade or so later, Ronald Regan would campaign against welfare queens driving Cadillacs and taking money out of our collective pockets with their welfare checks. His message was that government should not aid and abet personal misconduct. Years later, Bill Clinton would negotiate new welfare reform legislation that mandated “chastity training” for poor single mothers. As Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out in an article on the 50th anniversary of The Other America’s publication, the language of a “culture of poverty” began as a jolt of social consciousness but devolved into the cornerstone of conservative ideology. The assault from the right was that poverty was caused “not by low wages or a lack of jobs, but by bad attitudes and faulty lifestyles.”
Meanwhile, the ghost of Karl Marx snickers on a stool at the Red Lion Pub. Ehrenreich, who knew Harrington, noted the subterranean forces that may have driven Harrington to use the “culture of poverty” as an explanatory principle. “Maurice Isserman, Harrington’s biographer, told me,” she wrote, “that he’d probably latched onto it in the first place only because ‘he didn’t want to come off in the book sounding like a stereotypical Marxist agitator stuck-in-the-thirties.’” Harrington, a socialist, probably didn’t want to be dismissed for evoking the one who could not be named.
In many respects, Harrington succeeded by not being identified with Marx. However, by avoiding one pitfall, he fell into another. By offering up the idea of culture as a way to understand what was happening in America, he provided an escape valve for both sides of the debate. One side viewed the poor as evidence of an unfulfilled contract within an affluent society needing remedy; the other viewed them as a danger to society. Neither really wanted to talk about the distribution of wealth or the structural basis of social inequality. Icebergs will melt and buildings will fall before we get to that one.
Next Week:
Chapter Eight: Planetary Consciousness Arises, Cautiously
by Alan Briskin | Business, Collective Folly, Community, Conscious Capitalism
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Three:
Ghosts of Past, Present, and Yet to Come
Time Range: 1911, 2011-12
Would not progress and economic growth lift all ships? Rather than economic cycles leading to greater economic division and social fragmentation, would there not transpire higher levels of educational attainment, greater entrepreneurial opportunities, and increased social mobility? In time, isn’t it logical to think that an investment class would value knowledge and motivation for its workers, leading to better working conditions, not worse? How could it be otherwise? With time, progress would surely come.
Like the ghosts of Past, Present, and Yet to Come in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, recently published as Marx trekked his way toward the Red Lion Pub, Marx’s portrait of the rich and poor tweaks the imagination and conscience. With little sentimentality, he predicted that society would repeat a pattern of boom and bust, with causalities counted, surprise voiced, and renewed commitment to the same pattern over and over again. His writings suggested that we would all be caught in a matrix of exploitation and protest already calculated into the design, until the final act — Judgment Day. Is it true? Are we simply trapped in a version of the movie Jerry Maguire, with the Cuba Gooding Jr. character shouting, “Show me the money!”?
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
FLASH POINT
New York City, March 15, 1911
In the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, 146 garment workers died. The doors and stairwells to the exits had been locked to prevent theft and employees’ taking unauthorized breaks. Most of the workers who died were Italian and Jewish immigrants aged 16 to 23. Many died leaping from the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors.
In the 20th century, with the exception of one other fire and the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, it was the deadliest disaster in New York City’s history.
There were no eight-leaved clovers here, only actual working people. The fire stirred public outrage and forced city agencies to initiate safety reforms. The devastation also stimulated the growth of the International Ladies’ Garment Union in their efforts to battle sweatshop conditions.
Chengdu, China, May 2011
“[An] explosion ripped through Building A5 on a Friday evening last May, an eruption of fire and noise that twisted metal pipes as if they were discarded straws.
“When workers in the cafeteria ran outside, they saw black smoke pouring from shattered windows. It came from the area where employees polished thousands of iPad cases a day.
“Two people were killed immediately, and over a dozen others hurt. As the injured were rushed into ambulances, one in particular stood out. His features had been smeared by the blast, scrubbed by heat and violence until a mat of red and black had replaced his mouth and nose.…
“In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.
“However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants.… Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms.”
~ New York Times, January 26, 2012
Mike Daisey, creator of the one-man show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, defended his theatrical license when confronted with inaccuracies in his portrayal of certain events and dialogue based on interviews in Chengdu:
“I stand by my work. My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity. Certainly, the comprehensive investigations undertaken by the New York Times and a number of labor rights groups to document conditions in electronics manufacturing would seem to bear this out.”
~ Huffington Post, March 16, 2012
“Foxconn Technology Group will keep on increasing worker salaries in China and cutting the hours of work, Chairman Terry Gou said on Sunday, after it came under fire for poor working conditions for employees making Apple iPhones and iPads.…
“We have a saying now in the company, ‘You work fewer hours, but get more pay,’ Gou told Reuters at the 2012 Boao Forum for Asia in China’s Hainan island province. ‘We won’t stop here and will continue to increase salaries.’”
~ Reuters, April 2, 2012
Next Week: Out of Depression and War, a New Vision of Wealth Distribution
by Alan Briskin | Collective Folly, Conscious Capitalism, Politics
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter Two:
The Calculus of Capitalism
1847 – 1880
What Marx provided was a theoretical blueprint for cracks that lay in the foundation of a new economic edifice called capitalism. And he did it in the way many intuitive but slightly skewed geniuses operate: by masking it in endless obsessive formulations that make one cry uncle and then demanding that no one deviate from its precepts. Clever. But his insights deserve a closer look if we think of them not solely as literal but also as allegorical intuitions about society, the collective.
Marx had an uncanny grasp of how systems evolve and become unstable. His insights are of particular importance today, when even some of our most successful capitalists are questioning capitalism’s further development and many feel the need to insert the word “conscious” as an adjective to describe the kind of capitalism that is sought. In this light, Marx can be seen as a forerunner of Freud, bringing illumination to unconscious capitalism. And to achieve his purpose, he used not personal dreams but the concept of surplus value, a hypothetical construct from which countless threads of connections were made.
Like dreams, surplus value was something obvious. Every business needed profit to survive. But like dreams, what at first seemed inconsequential or even innocent proved to have hidden meaning. Behind the obvious lay a labyrinthine set of relationships with very real consequences.
HDR photography involves multiple shots at different exposures combined into one image so the viewer can see more of what’s there.
FLASH POINT
New York City, 1890
“The truth is that pauperism grows in the tenements as naturally as weeds in a garden lot. A moral distemper, like crime, it finds there its most fertile soil. All the surroundings of tenement-house life favors its growth, and where once it has taken root, it is harder to dislodge than the most virulent physical disease.”
~ From How the Other Half Lives, written by Jacob Riis
Marx’s discussion of surplus value and the commentary from others that followed remind me of Talmudic debates about how far a person should be permitted to walk without wearing a skullcap on his head — i.e., endless debate with circular arguments that leave one pondering what, if anything, is being said. One can easily become overwhelmed by the debate and even wonder whether God could be so petty. But behind the debate regarding surplus value lay an insight about an invisible force competitive with any theology: the force of money, power, and influence.
Surplus value was the theorized amount that a worker labored beyond what was needed for his or her minimal subsistence. Each additional hour was a surplus that accrued to someone, the worker or the owner of the labor. At the time of Marx’s writing, factory workers spent on average 80 hours a week working, and much of it was surplus value. The question, of course, was who would benefit from the surplus increment.
Marx’s answer was the owner of the factory, the person who owned the means of production, a relatively small class of people who Marx wrote “created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces, machinery … clearing of whole continents for cultivation … what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?”
Most critically, the calculus of surplus labor provided the ability to project profit after all costs of producing the product or service were removed. And this allowed one to attract investment capital, which created further growth, a never-ending cycle of wealth accumulation.
Consider Facebook today as an example of a company that attracted billions of dollars of investment before selling even one dollar of advertising. Its projection of profit was the attractor. Or Apple, whose Chinese factories and low costs of manufacturing ensured profitability from its ever-expanding network of products. The ability to favorably leverage surplus value fuels confidence among investors that greater and greater wealth is possible. How cool is that?
But Marx saw it all in a dispassionate glare, not the dream of social good fueled by producing ever more products and services but a fierce, never-ending conflict swinging tragically among groups vying for domination. There were flies in the wealth-accumulation ointment.
Marx foresaw competitors and counterforces lurking everywhere. Other capitalists would try to horn in on your product. Workers would demand higher wages. Governmental forces might interfere with your enterprise and would need to be neutralized. A ceaseless battle would ensue among those struggling to achieve wealth and others trying to hold them back. New classes of wealth producers would eventually replace older ones, such as in the case of the commercial classes of 17th-century Europe edging out the privileged bloodlines of the aristocracy or early-19th-century English capitalists overcoming the landed gentry. Wherever one turned, struggle and exploitation would be the rule.
In this new institution of commerce, labor-saving machinery would play a pivotal role as a means to reduce labor costs, but technological innovations would ultimately prove unsuccessful as the source of profit. In Marx’s hypothetical world, the costs of creating and purchasing labor-saving technology would cancel out its ability to generate surplus value even as each competing capitalist would be forced to incorporate the technology into his enterprise or be at a disadvantage.
Labor-saving machinery would result in greater unemployment, initially moderating worker demand for higher wages but influencing a drop of consumption as fewer people could afford new things. The downward spiral would lead to an ever more desperate attempt to find new markets and compete effectively with other capitalists. Larger enterprises would swallow up smaller ones, and, as in a game of musical chairs, consolidation would lead to fewer job opportunities, lessening or even lowering the demand for wages. Finally, surplus value would reappear and the cycle would continue.
Workers would again seek self-interest through higher wages, new kinds of labor-saving technology would be conceived, larger enterprises would swallow up smaller ones, profits would swell until limits were reached, often due to corruption, and economic collapse would follow. In Marx’s dark vision, the consistent element was that only human labor could provide surplus value, but with ruinous consequences. This is why Marx, never shy of the provocative metaphor, compared the capitalist class to the undead, because “vampire-like, [it] only lives by sucking living labor.”
Beyond the hypothetical cycles of boom and bust, Marx somehow also intuited a fundamental psychological conflict between the structure for making goods and the superstructure that owned and profited from the enterprise. The first required high levels of integration, cooperation, and concerns for interdependence. Multiple processes had to be aligned to produce the final product. A certain measure of fairness and motivation needed to be stimulated among those working together. What every organizational consultant today knows is necessary for successful enterprise was somehow foreseen by Marx, working out his obsessive formulas in isolation.
But Marx saw something else, a psychological quality that most of us do not want to see. It was this: The majority of owners would exhibit mirror-opposite tendencies. They would be highly individualistic, idiosyncratic, seeking autonomy more than anything else, wary of anyone with too intrusive a social conscience. They would be, for the large part, disdainful of the collective, particularly those elements of society that were not successful. Words like personal responsibility and accountability would take on almost a sacred tone when addressed to subordinates. What would primarily concern the ownership class was their privilege, solidifying their capital accumulation, passing it on to their children, and expanding their freedom to do exactly as they desired. Forces on behalf of social planning, with its requirement for a modicum of social cooperation, would thrust themselves against the psychology of individual privilege, and they would grind away at each other like tectonic plates just below the surface.
Main Sources
The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert L. Heilbroner
The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Grand Pursuit, by Sylvia Nasar
Next Week: Ghosts of Past, Present, and Yet to Come
Would not progress and economic growth lift all ships? Rather than economic cycles leading to greater economic division and social fragmentation, would there not transpire higher levels of educational attainment, greater entrepreneurial opportunities, and increased social mobility? In time, isn’t it logical to think that an investment class would value knowledge and motivation for its workers, leading to better working conditions, not worse? How could it be otherwise? With time, progress would surely come…
by Alan Briskin | Collective Folly, Conscious Capitalism, Humor, Politics
A serial journal of cogent reflections and irreverent insights on the social effects of capitalism and the roots of partisan politics. Pairing prose with HDR photography and “flash points” drawn from current and historical perspectives, the author seeks to recover lost wisdom and courageous action beyond the shouting and noise of today’s headlines.
Chapter One:
Eight-Leaved Clovers of the World, Unite
London, 1847
On a bleak November day, two men trudged along Great Windmill Street in London. They breathed in air yellow from industrial waste and pondered the extremes of wealth and poverty that had sprung up like gods and demons across the city landscape. Between their poor vision and the London fog, they could barely see a foot ahead of themselves, but in their minds’ eye, they saw a future of increasing economic division. Somewhere not too distant in time, they believed, anger would well up among the workers, culminating in revolutionary action.
One of them wanted to show the world with a simple parable, like an ancient prophet, why society’s self-destruction was inevitable. The other, the son of a Jewish family that adopted Christianity, was born into affluence and respectability, but called to forsake his relations, though not so much that he wasn’t willing to borrow money from them. So it was that these two compatriots, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, made their way to the Red Lion Pub.
HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photography by Alan Briskin: multiple shots at different exposures are combined into one image in order to show “more of what’s there”.
FLASH POINT
New York City, 1890
“These are the economic conditions that enable my manufacturing friend to boast that New York can “beat the world” on cheap clothing. In support of his claim he told me that a single Bowery firm last year sold fifteen thousand suits at $1.95 that averaged in cost $1.12 ½.”
~ From How the Other Half Lives, written by Jacob Riis
It was as if the two of them were destined to emerge victorious among a ragtag group of immigrants, intellectuals, utopians, anarchists, and protesters who had come together to chart a new social contract. Marx, full of himself, was never more alive than in a good intellectual battle, and Engels had the cheerfulness, adaptability, and good nature of a born organizer. “This time we will have our way,” he wrote to Marx before they arrived in London. And have their way, they did. The German Workers’ Educational Union, a convenient public relations front for the Communist League, voted to adopt their draft of the Communist Manifesto, which Marx had read portions of out loud to the group. However, what the group heard was in some doubt, given Marx’s accent and lisp. One witness recalled that when Marx said “workers,” some thought he said “eight-leaved clovers,” which must have been somewhat confusing.
Marx and Engels were early practitioners of a particularly speculative and ambiguous field of social science initially described as “political economy” and later shortened to “economics,” denoting a more neutral and quantitative perspective regarding society’s production and distribution of goods and services. Originally derived from an ancient Greek word, the root meaning of economics had to do with the management or administration of a household. But the household was now nations and transnational corporations.
Marx and Engels were visionaries, foreseeing a new economic institution that was still emerging, one that would harness the energies of human imagination in no less dramatic a fashion than Prometheus’s giving fire to humanity. Engels, in particular, was awed by what was occurring around them. He was not alone marveling at the extraordinary gifts of commerce, high culture, diversity, social mobility, new services, and hope that this new economic institution engendered. Capitalism was a dream for many of an ever-lasting prosperity. Marx and Engels sought to waken them to its true consequences.
In mid-19th-century London, the physical location where Marx and Engels delivered the Manifesto, their parable on social disintegration, there was no greater center of commerce in the world. It was a marketplace without comparison, a hive of activity where “at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs” could be found. Incomes were, on average, 40% higher there than in other English cities, and the results were palpable, with a level of escalating consumer demand driving entrepreneurial forces toward novelty, innovation, new technologies, and entire new industries.
These new economic arrangements were a thunderbolt challenging hundreds if not thousands of years of human history. Commerce of this proportion was a social retort to common beliefs about the inescapability of material deprivation for the masses. Capitalism was to be a buffering institution between the transcendent and random forces of God and nature on the one hand and control over one’s own personal destiny on the other. Trade of this form and intensity was a force for progress, freedom, and increasing liberty. What could go wrong?
The question hovers over us today as it did for Marx and Engels. They were witnesses to an emerging economic institution that still had no agreed-upon name. In the Communist Manifesto, they were more prone to talk about a bourgeoisie class than a capitalist class, but over the next 20 years, Marx would settle on words and terms like capitalist and capitalist mode of production, using them thousands of times in his economic discourses. But just as “eight-leaved clovers” had been mistaken for “workers,” audiences would hear different things, make wildly different judgments about their meaning and effects, and in the end polarize the choices between capitalism and communism, missing the collective context and dreams that had brought these words to consciousness in the first place.
Main Sources
The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert L. Heilbroner
The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Grand Pursuit, by Sylvia Nasar
Next Week: The Calculus of Capitalism
What Marx provided was a theoretical blueprint for cracks that lay in the foundation of a new economic edifice called capitalism. And he did it in the way many intuitive but slightly skewed geniuses operate: by masking it in endless obsessive formulations that make one cry uncle and then demanding that no one deviate from its precepts. Clever…
FLASH POINTS
