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Radical Chains for Chuckie Every sperm is sacred Men are afraid of my shoes?
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For what it’s worth, I don’t like Bitch Lab, I don’t read her, I don’t think she’s very bright, and I think the main thing she piggybacked on recently was a comment thread to a post she didn’t author. Nice appropriation, that.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
11-29-2006
Just go ahead and bitch
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First, it strikes me that it’s *not* an accident that liberal academics consistently muddy the concept of class. It’s a facet of the class war. The ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas, right? If workers were consistently class conscious, the fight would be over in a blink of an eye. So there’s a lot of reason to obscure the real nature of class relations.
You mentioned the woman in a workfare program, and how you couldn’t see how Marxist ideas would help her. As an atomized individual, there’s not a hell of a lot you can do. Workers depend on each other.
More and more, it seems to me that most of the radical left has completely lost touch with the importance of the concept of the revolutionary party. The pamphlet’s usually referred to as the Communist Manifesto, but it’s properly The Manifesto of the Communist Party.
WEll, it’s not that I don’t think Marxist ideas won’t help her, because I think they will. I think she had some pretty damn good ones sitting around drinking coffee when she dropped off the kids the first coupla days of the training program!
But, it’s as you say, in and of themselves, they aren’t going to make much of a dent because I pubblish an obscure dissertation. and, in fact, the reality was that my work, if anyone read it, *would* get taken up to create ever better ways to craft programs that “work”. Yes? What my research would have revealed was how she and others were transformed from highly critical women who had profound understandings of the systemic operations of capital, to women who not only were made to buy into worker obedience, but learned to see their old selves as inferior. (Which is what very commonly happens in these worker retraining programs)
So all I really ever would have done in the end was help tighten the noose around the working class in general. I might have written something people would mention in grad seminars or some shit, thereby sparking an radical idea or two along the way, but big fuckin whoopee.
but there’s a limit to which I will go here, and be a totally despondent bitch about it. I’m not saying you’re saying this, but I remember Yoshie Furahashi once drove right over the edge when she started in how a real Marxist policy would be to simply ignore the whole issue as to whether non-custodial parents should be subject to laws the force them to pay their child support. Here reasoning was that such a policy wasn’t really working toward a radical marxist end of getting rid of the class society and, thereby, the whole notion of the privatized nuclear family where responsibility for children falls to parents.
Considering I’d had to fight a child custody battle from a man who waged one simply to get out of paying $25/week during the 3 weeks vacation his son spent with him, I was a little incensed. I was totally incesnsed considering that his dicking around with child support had thrown us into deep economic crisis and I had to dump grad school.
So, having been on the other side of this, where sometimes Marxists (not saying you) come of as shock therapy types, I tend not to go there. I get irritated and spew, but I don’t see what good it does us to completely ignore the fact that there are real people out there right now in real need.
Off topic- but your gingerbread people header, once I picked my jaw up off the floor, made me laugh and slam shut the computer so my kids wouldn’t see it.
Hmm. I remember some arguments on Alas, A Blog about child support — mostly because of the occasional MRA who’d come through. Anyway, the general consensus was, it’s not perfectly fair, but it’s the least unfair approach we can think of under present circumstances. I’d say it’s necessary to overcome the division of sexism within the working class, for what it’s worth.
Furahashi’s argument reminds me of how the Bolsheviks supported breaking up large estates and redistributing land among peasants. They knew this would lead to problems in the medium term, but it was the fundamental demand of peasants, and so supporting land redistribution was critical to winning peasant support for the soviets.
Marxism isn’t supposed to be a bunch of abstractions. The point’s working class power.
I’m not quite sure what you thought I was getting at.
Oh! So very sorry FO. I tried to make clear I wasn’t talking about you at all. I was responding telling you what I thought my own research might have been “good” for (not much) in a way that was even worse than simply being useless abstraction. It was tagging on to your talk of hte ruling ideas thing. But then I pulled back from that view to say, but….. Even though I know this intellectually, I can’t take the position of, say, Furahashi where the only thing we can do is completely ignore anything that smacks of liberalism or helping people out as best we can in the short- and medium-term, though “helping out” is really the wrong term. But I think you know what I mean.
So very sorry if that sounded hostile to you — coz I’d never read you to sound much like that kind of “the worse the better’ argument I’ve sometimes heard. Not often, but every so often I hear it from Marxists and my blood boils. In fact, I don’t think I’ve every reader a blog or email post that put it all as succinctly as you did on the post aboutt Twisty over at Punkass blog earlier this summer. It was *perfection*. I really must go back and look up what you wrote and archive it!
Rootie toot — considering how much I love you, I’m thrilled to death I gave you a giggle but sorry about the kids! I really have to get the theme switcher going so those of you who have to be careful aren’t subjected to potential job loss, ridicule, or embarassing moments with spouse/child.
“the worse the better’ argument - Hey it makes sense to me. In a time of profound crisis the people will turn to us for leadership. Because they sure as hell wouldn’t turn to us in any other circumnstances.
Oh yes, and I made the mistake to showing the ginger bread to one of the young men who works for us here. He was shocked - literally speechless. What is wrong with 20 year olds these days. (If you don’t get the audio, I’m banging my cane on my desk.)
Ah,
As so often happens “class” like so may other things falls to the problem of vagueness. Much like “race”, or the definition of”matriarchy/patriarchy” or even is light a wave or a particle(?).
I tend to thihink in terms of functional definitions of class, acess to resources, health indicators, lifestyle. This is a materialistic definifintion, so when I was a grad student with no health insurance poor diet living in shitty housing and no money to burn(and just above the poverty line) thats lower class, cuz if I fell and brooke my leg, my ass was in financial hell. Though I also dont have parents who can bail me out of financial trouble-people who do have such parents though they mmight also be grad students may have access to different resources). This definition also doesnt take mobility into account. If I am in grad school I have a greater probablility of jumping up to upper middle class, whereas someone with the same income and insurance situation who was working, maybe at c Borders, wouldn’t have the same probability of making a jump. But again, my definition is very mechanical(also the mobility issue seems to imply the reverse of the American ideal, that is maybe one of the elements of being lower class is lack of clas mobility, whereas it is easier for upperclasses to move up or down depending)In this case I cant call the creative class a class by itself.
It’s okay, B|Lab. I did see that you were careful to say that my views weren’t the same as those you were critiquing. But I wasn’t sure if you meant my views, taken “too far,” would lead to Furahashi’s views, or something like that. Anyway, I’m certainly gratified if you thought I’d made the point well in the past.
I’ve had a couple of conversations with Maeve (she’s posted here a couple of times, but reads frequently) about how a lot of people who read Marxist theory don’t, unfortunately, take Lenin and Trotsky as seriously as Marx. I think they’ve got a lot to say on what Marxism means in the context of dynamic political movements.
Chuckie, sounds like you’re running into a very different group of twenty-somethings than I am. I’m mostly embarassed by my lack of sexual experience relative to people ten or fifteen years younger than I am.
Chuckie —
Are you trying to wrangle that five bucks outta me? :)
I like to call this view Crisis Marxism (after the old Crash List run by the Stalinist Mark Jones (or so he was called). Mark, as an aside, once called yours truly a “trollope”. heh.
Doug Henwood calls it Depressive Marxism. heh. Kinda rude, yah? But it was called Crash List, IIRC, because I think it spun off of some heated debate that emerged in 98 or 99 re: what appeared like an impending stock market crisis.
It was, in the abstract, almost hilarious to watch as email shot back and forth, spotting signs of portending doom when we might get the joy of hearing about stock brokers jumping to their death as they did in the 20s.
For one, on a purely practical level, I don’t think you could ever really count on this sort of crisis ever really happening. It seems to me that, what we’re up against is a world where, in a way, ‘they’ learned their lesson. What our most progressive folks are doing is crafting the seemingly radical views that allow us to create social policies that prop up the system so there will never be any such crisis state again if anyone can help it. Doncha think?
On another speculative level, I wonder if it’s too great a risk. Why assume anyone would turn to socialism?
Very concrete level: what leaders? I mean, seriously? What marxists out there could be such a leader — in this country. Who’s an engaging, interesting Marxist ‘leader’? Who writes stuff that speaks to ordinary people in a way that doesn’t make them feel beat over the head? Cause I often feel that way when reading some of the ‘zines online.
Or will those people just emerge from the mists ready to take their rightful place in history?
I remember Yoshie Furahashi also once saying something like this right after 911, when it was clear 90% of the population wanted war on Afghanistan and people were just crying in their beer. She said, “Chin up. War presents an opportunity. It could go one way, But it could also go “our” way.”
To which I could only say “our”?
It was not that she was an advocate of war, of course. She was simply engaged in real politk. This was inevitable. But it was distatseful to me, because it was just the exact same thing Osama bin Laden had said.
I know I’m supposed to beliee so strongly that “we” are in the right, that no one could compare the two ideological frameworks employed by two very different people who were nevertheless saying the same thing: we didn’t create this situation, but we can exploit it to get what we want and we are so possessed of the absolute correctness of what we are saying, we can’t imagine anyone would be horrified.
Coz, sorry, really I was.
And personally, I just don’t buy Lenin’s thesis in the tract from which she was,I think, drawing her claim. Do either of you remember the name of it? It was the one where Lenin explains why the inevitable future of capitalism was world war and, thus, the place we must put our energies was in organizing around an anti woar movement.
he was basically following up on the thesis that you can’t get beyond trad unionism among the working class. They’d be too paroachial, but with resistance to capitalst war machines, that was when people could see their common interests extend beyond borders.
I’m not much of a reader of the theorists you guys talk about and never read much of lenin or Trot or that sort of thing, so I may have it wrong.
And I’m also aware that I might be pissing you off, coz I have often done that before with people who know more about Lenin.
FO –
HA. I was posting as you were, but yeah: me guilty of not knowing a lick of Lenin or Trotsky. My learning about Marxism early on was shaped by people who’d been in groups like the one you were in. In fact, there were a bunch of folks who’d swooped into my hometown, from a group that used to go to work in factories in the 70s with the idea that they could get some action going on the shop floor. I can’t remember their names, but it’s well known enough for you to likely know who I mean.
But I never joined any group, which is where people really tend to get mentored in the work of Trotsky, don’t you think? Whatever I know, I absorbed from simply being involved in whatever was going on around me — habitually being involved in whatever was going on that needed attending do: clicnic defense work, fighting to get plant closing legislation passed, fighting the nuke dump citing in my hometown, union activism for nursing home workers and that sort of thing. There, I obviously probably ran with people who were there also because they were more schooled in Lenin and Trot.
I don’t know anyone who reads Lenin or Trotsky in college or universities as a regular part of studying Marxist theory. This is not just because it’s all too radical for people, but because — and again speaking from complete ignorance — to what degree are Lenin and Trotsky doing the kind of social theory that fits into the limited constraints of academic defs. of what that is?
I don’t know if you can answer that question - if I’m even making any sense. But I guess i’m thinking that the parameters of what counts as social theory tend to define their work out of the picture?
Sorry, It’s a joke. Who in their right mind would want to follow anyone who believes stuff like “the worse the better”? I had a friend who spent several years in a Maoist/Hoxhaist cult, but probably not one anyone here will ever have heard of, and we used to laugh, cry, tsk, shake our heads whenever this argument turned up in the sectariana we used for light reading. The day the REAL reason for this argument, dawned on us, (see above, who would follow these bozos unless they had lost all hope and most of their wits) we nearly fell out our chairs laughing. I personally might not follow them even if there was a REALLY REALLY BIG crisis.
So could you like add maybe a font and a button for “potentially ambiguous comic remark” like some of those folks have for block quotes and such.
Or for personal use, you could observe the maxim, if the sentence doesn’t include the reverential mention of at least one Dead Central European Socialist of the 19th or 20th Centuries, Chuckie is probably just being silly.
This is getting out of hand. All I was going to do was apologize for lack of discernable irony, and add that all I want to do tonight is add another link to my personal thread of chains, and here I am about to spill on my personal relationships with Vladdie L. and LT. Stop the madness.
I have three important “things to do tonight” and the caffeine is kicking in, so hopefully by ten I’ll be able to put my radical chains back on.
I’m certainly not taking any offense. This is quite an amicable discussion.
I’m not sure. I’d guess Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. At the time he wrote it, the increasingly prevalent line of thought throughout much of the Second International was that the increasingly close economic ties between European nations made war increasingly unlikely. He argued, on the contrary, that those very economic ties would eventually lead to large wars between the imperial powers, as they did. I don’t recall Lenin ever arguing about an “anti-war movement,” per se, though it was the complete failure of the Second International to oppose WWI that made it clear that the Bolsheviks were fundamentally different than any other socialist group then in existence. One of the critical issues in the Russian Revolution was that the popular demand that Russia pull out of the war was a major reason why the Tsar was overthrown — and a major reason for the October Revolution was that the Provisional Government also refused to pull out of the war.
I’m not clear on what Furahashi might have been getting at. I know that when 9/11 happened, I realized, and my comrades all realized, that as a matter of principle, we had to come out against the war immediately and strongly, and that we were going to be dragged through the mud for it. Anti-war protesters certainly were dragged through the mud in the mainstream media at the time — I’ve never seen so much blatant lying about what we were actually saying. On the street, we’d get open hostility, but also profuse thanks for actually opposing the war. Aside from it being a matter of principle, we knew that the people who were serious about opposing the war right away were the ones most worth talking to. Others would come around in time.
I don’t remember Lenin drawing that connection. But Lenin wrote a great deal more than I’ve read. Anyway, there’s a comment in What Is To Be Done, written in 1902, in which he says that workers, on their own, only get as far as “trade union consciousness,” and socialist ideas come from outside. He later wrote that he’d been sorely mistaken, and that the 1905 Revolution made it clear to him that workers (under the right conditions) were spontaneously socialist, and that intellectuals with conservative expectations had held things back.
(There’s also Lenin’s theory of the aristocracy of labor, which gets brought up now and again, but which is just flat wrong.)
It makes perfect sense. Anyway, I’m not that thoroughly grounded in academic discourse on Marx, but my sense of it is that much of it reduces Marx’s thought to abstract idealism, but Lenin, etc., go unmentioned. I’d bet that academics in Russia, etc., probably have experience reducing Lenin to abstract idealism as well.
My roommate told me about having been invited to some grad student discussion on whether the pre-war US South actually represented a more advanced form of capitalism than the industrial North. He found he was surprised by how fluent the other grad students were with Marxist terminology — but they knew almost nothing about the history of slavery and the economic development of the South, and were only talking in abstractions. He, in turn, was condemned for having raised “irrelevant historical facts” and having ruined a perfectly good discussion of Marxist theory.
Anyway, I think most academics aren’t really interested in rocking the boat, and prefer non-threatening abstract idealism. For those that are interested in rocking the boat, the idea that Lenin leads to Stalin, or that Leninism is identical with Stalinism, is so much a part of “common sense” on the left that most are dissuaded from studying Lenin, Trotsky, etc., to begin with.
I haven’t read Gramsci, which is unfortunate; I hear a lot of good things about him. I have the impression that academics DO read Gramsci, and I’ve heard the theory that the reason Gramsci is read, when Lenin, etc., aren’t, is that Gramsci had to rephrase a lot of what he wrote to get past prison censors, which leads some to assume that he’s working on some sort of theory distinct from Leninism, when in fact he was basing his work on Lenin’s and was grappling with the concrete problems of creating a revolutionary socialist party.
ps:
http://www.amazon.com/phrase/modernist-autonomization only 4 books use that frayz. Why? Not culturally creative enough you reckon?
pps: just got around reading the buzzy ‘looks’ post you had here a while back and to my shock i read about the suicided dutch poet you knew .. ..BUT NEVER TOLD ME NUTTIN ABOUT .. suppose you assumed i know all the poets who worry about peace in the middle east and depressions that are sourced there???
…. oh thrill, i can touch a bitch button..
ppps: see a piccy here http://www.sargasso.nl/archief.....ent-188860 of the longest running tv show in holland (20 years), sure shaped me it did. The indian below was his pal.
pp — wotchewtalkinbout? buzzy looks post? i know one poet, well two: gary and Kevin andre elliot. wait, there’s also Blackamazon who’s most definitely a poet.
“That seems to ignore the entire history of the community college system in this country which was created to keep the unwashed masses out of the real colleges and universities, the same way vocational tracks in high school were meant to keep the unwashed masses from wanting more out of life and maybe not playing their proper role in the factory. On that score, I suspect votech type colleges would dramatically work against any effort to produce people who are the creative class types RF is talking about. ”
Thing of it is, this country is massively short on skilled tradespeople, and truly, not everyone is cut out for college (that would be me, one of my kids, and most of the people who work for my husband). Someone getting certified as an electrician, or a plumber, or getting a carpenter’s license can make as much as many (if not most) college professors. But, our culture emphesises going to college for a 4 yr degree, and looks down on skilled trade. Currently, my husband hires electricians and mechanics starting at $20/ hour, (and this is a very low cost of living area), and is always contacting the local technical school for more.
If a person is truly creative, and ambitious, they can take their carpetner’s license, or plumbing certificate, and turn it into a profitable business. Our local vo-tech has an agreement with the business school at the local university, so tradespeople can take the business courses they need to run their own enterprise.
Honestly, not everyone is meant for college. Here in Georgia, everyone has the opportunity, via HOPE scholarships, if their high school grades are high enough, but some folk really, truly, do want to work on cars, or plumb houses, so they can take the weekend and go to the river. There’s nothing wrong with that. Our country runs on those people. Once the working class is gone, and we become dependent on other countries for services, we cease to be an autonomous nation.
(from me, the wife a a former pipefitter/carpenter/forktruck driver)
Chuckie –
about that header. I’m so pleased people saw it. It made me laugh when I stumbled over that web site.
As for this young man, I bet he was just horrified that I’d defiled the gingerbread cookie. there are certain ways a gingerbread cookie should be, and that ain’t it, no matter how much you might otherwise enjoy food porn.
or maybe he was freaked out by the assfucking gingerbread women?
FO — we need to have an exorcism ritual or something like that for you. We must escise the remnants of the radical feminist inculcation of fear of Teh Sex that you went through. Eviscerate it!
Carpenter –
as for class mobility, one of the more fascinating research projects is the Luxembourg Income Studies: http://www.lisproject.org/.
What they found about the US in a comparative international study is that the US is very volatile, mobility-wise. But, it’s not just upward mobility that goes on, there’s just as much downward mobility. The other thing I notice, which I tend to call structural economic mobility, is that (I think) and I have no data to back me up, though perhaps someone has done it, is that so much of what counts as mobility is based on structural economic change over which individuals have little control.
When you study statistics, one of the favored examples of why you have to be careful about assuming a direct correlation between education and income is a situation in the 70s, where people who attended community colleges managed to luck out because they happened to study COBAL or something. Their incomes were very high as a consequence, skewing the data for median income for community college grads.
What I mean by structural is that it was because those folks worked harder and made, they just happened to have taken the class and lucked out. Had something else developed in the economy, who knows who would have been the alternative beneficiary and they, merely receiving the typical salary of a comm. college graduate.
Another issue is, of course, subjective perceptions. When I did a study of unemployed managerial workers, there was a small subset of men who’d goten into even though they hadn’t gone to college. Through a variety of circumastances, they just happened to ride the crest of economic expansion to become VP of Sales or Director of Finance. They came from working class backgrounds and forever felt like imposters, like they didn’t have that … something … they didn’t have a word for it. They fumbled, trying to put their finger on it. But what they were talking about was cultural capital. One guy told the story of how he’d go to the library to learn about art and literature because he felt that he needed to know this stuff in order to schmooze at cocktail parties.
And I think using college students as examples of working class — in the sense you mean — is very problematic. People who live on ramen noodles b/c they blew their allowance drinking aren’t poor or working class. Nor are kids who’s parents typically pay for their insurance in grad school — as most of my grad school cohort did. They spent their vacations traveling to Europe, even though they may have learned how to shop at thrift shops or lived in crappy housing instead of loft apartment in some upscale gentrified neighborhood.
I think when we’re talking class in the conventional sense like that, those things can matter.
But also, they can matter to something I think FO and Chuckie were talking about: how your subjective perceptions can make you identify.
KH, in the other long thread where the topic was first raised, talked about Amanda at Pandagon vocalizing what seemed to be a kind of embarassment about her background that truns into a contempt for the people (class) she came from.
There’s something to that, possibly, and that can’t be good for much can it? It bespeaks the notion that the problem with “those people” is that they failed to ‘get out” — with “getting out” seeming to mean, not so much aspiring to a higher income level, but simply changing their political attitudes or something. I’m not sure and maybe I read her completely incorrectly, but it did feel that way as I read her commentary on why it’s necessary to export creative class types to red states.
Which interesting enough Richard Florida doesn’t advocate himself. He actually advocates what Amanda’s critics in that thread advocated.
Bitch | Lab » If it looks like bullshit, smells like bullshit …
Amanda: I think most Bitch Lab-led criticisms of me are trolling … iow, as I see it: your wearing high heels, giving blowjobx, generally presenting as a …
http://blog.pulpculture.org/20.....es-higher/ - 311k -
found adding poezienotities to high heels and Bitch | Lab (only hit)
Rootie –
Where do you live. We’re moving, your husband can hire R. You’re lucky to get $12/hr and the cost of living *is* high around here. it’s disgusting. I’ve applied for work requiring a Master’s degree in the social sciences where they expected me to be on call for a lousy $30k.
All of this would require a long rant, but my point was more that the community college system was built specifically to keep the masses out, who were clamoring at the time for a college degree. they wanted to read Shakespeare. But, the leaders of places like Standfor,Harvard, and Yale were terrified that, were they to buckle into the demands of the masses, they might have to mix it up with “them”. Business leaders feared they wouldn’t be prepared to take their place doing factory work or skilled trades. They feared they might learn something that would make them restless — that maybe something wasn’t right with the way things worked — economically or socially. So, they specfically crafted such schools to divert the masses into vocational schools that taught folks that they weren’t cut out of reading Shakespeare. And, of coruse, they continued to keep in place college programs that weren’t built to accomodate such students.
I don’t think peole have to go to college. Most of what I learned, I didn’t really learn in college. And when I finally went to a real college, I was in grad school, where most of what I did was on my own anyway. Sure, I learned some stuff, but so much of what you do in a grad seminar isn’t learning a whole hellua lot of the Sage on the Stage.
But like I said, huge long rant that happens to be a pet peeve because, while you’re not saying this I don’t think, I find it tiresome to listen to people suggest that, somehow, it’s useless or unimportant or whatever to , say, know the things RenEv knows about history or Belledame knows about religion. It especially irritates me when people with college degress rabbit on about it> Oh, I read that stuff in college. What a waste of time. Don’t you people worry about it.
But a more practical question about your Christian faith. Maybe I’m making assumptions, but when I used to go to bible school with a friend who was in a christian church, they seemed to take reallly seriously the study of the Bible. Why is it that you’re cut out for that, if that is something you do, and not college, and, say, taking seriously the study of the literature of the South or what have you? I mean, the Bible is and can be studied as a work of literature, and the entire tradition of what they call hermenetics (interpreting literature, essays, etc.) is taken from the tradition of studying the bible — interpreting it.
I’m probably typing to fast and not being careful, but I really don’t want to sound hostile — coz I’m not at all. I’m just really curious.
piet in 21 –
I’m not clear — still!
You’re talking about comments in this thread at punkass:
http://punkassblog.com/2006/10/09/the-greatest-trick-the-devil-ever-pl ayed-was-making-you-think-he-was-a-lib/
Ooooo. There is is again. The Bitch | Lab led trolling meme.
You know Kevin, if you’re reading, I’m going to have to disagree with you about not burning bridges. I see no reasons to make exceptions here.
Rootie –
also, my point wasn’t a put down of those workers. I have been, I may still be one still. R’s been one all his life. My son is. My wasband is. Most people I know are.
My point was that the votech system is part of why people put those jobs down. Not the only reason, but part of it. And the people who created them, put the funds behind them to create them, and got the legislation going, knew what they were doing when they created them: they wanted to cement status snobbery like that and this was a way to do it.
The GI Bill after World War 11 made college possible for the regular guy. Before that, the only ones who went were folks like my grandparents, and great grandparents-wealthy elites. My husband grew up very poor, and paid his way through school first by going to vo-tech and getting pipefitters certification, then by repairing cars. Now he has a degree in Chemistry and is in upper management, because he was willing to work hard and take risks.
When someone goes to college, they get a degree in something they’re good at (hopefully), and can use to earn a living. They are not promised a 6-figure income for all degrees, but should understand that there are other forms of compensation. Teachers don’t get paid much( I believe too little), but they get massive amounts of vacation time, and they know how long each work day will be. My husband works 70 hour weeks, gets no overtime, and only gets vacation one day at a time…even for Christmas.
But he gets paid well, and his efforts provide good livings for 150 other people. He has been accused of being an elitist, “The Man”, Rich Whitey. No one saw us living in a 30 yr old unheated/unairconditioned housetrailer 19 years ago. We are where we are because he and I have worked very, very hard at it, and tried to make sure other people could come up behind us and benefit.
My point is this: Some jobs just pay more. Some jobs require more, physically, mentally, and spiritually, but don’t pay as much. I suppose we could just make this country a Communist one, where everyone gets paid the same regardless how hard they work. Do you really think that would be better than a free-market system?
We live in South Georgia. Cost of living example: My 19 yr old son earns $6/hour,44 hrs/wk and supports himself completely. Houses run $65-70 per square foot. Land is $1500 an acre out of city limits, $5000/acre in new developments. Property taxes on a 3000 sq ft house are $1000/year. My husband starts his new hires at $8/hr, with merit raises every 3 months. Depending on the skill level of his hires, certifications, training (particularly military), an individual can earn up to $20/hr. He hires men and women in all positions, as long as they are physically strong enough to so the work. He is not atypical. There are several manufacturing facilities here, all of whom recognize the need for skilled labor, and pay scales are very competitive.
If the company were not bought by a family of rich elitist industrialists several years ago, who then fed money into it and brought it out of bankruptcy, 150 people would be out of jobs. They hired my husband to make the place work, to bring it into the 21st century enviromentally, and to develop new processes that are unique. He was able to do these things because he grew up poor and ambitious. His mechanical skill and his farm-boy ingenuity were fed by the vo-tech system, and allowed him to be the first person in his family to go to college.
I’ve said more than I intended to. It’s just that I get the impression that Socialism is the Ism of Favor, and I wanted to try and show an example of free-market(ism) that works.
Ahh. WEll, we don’t have much to discuss on that score, Rootie. But I’d enjoy an answer to the question about studying another literature as something important in life because it’s about more than college for training for jobs, but about learning in general — just as Bible study ought to be or is? I’m not sure if it is, just assuming. If you have time.
ok, i have to revoke, repeal, annul, void and most of all correct my (#16th) comment; I had the url right but it was chabert who said:
“a regular reader of my blog, Jeroen Mettes, killed himself a few weeks ago. He was born in 1978. He was a poet. Another regular reader reminded me that once he had written on my blog why did he see no poems about Chavez and his small victories for poor people, and so much refining on the minutae of the feelings of very privileged people? The world he could not bear is really made unbearable mainly by the ruthless quest for profit but also by what makes it possible, the egotism, the willing selfpitying collaboration with merciless ruthless power, the admiration for it, that is so completely expressed by sofia coppola’s work….”
——–
Found out yesterday that kid was quite upset with the likes of Leon de Winter and I share that wholeheartedly. LdW authors a blog at the elsevier weekly a right wing dutch version of ‘The Economist’. He sorta paved and led the way for Ayaan Hirsi Ali (still at AEI far as i know; the woman doing http://ayaanhirsiali.web-log.nl takes the web-log.nl software as far as it could possibly go by the way).
And on that note, another minor tiff i have with most blog formatting.
Since I strip all of it (saving as txt strips all serial spaces and linebreaks down to a single one (each)) to save paper which makes it hard to miss “’s unless adding a little something like — or :::.
When i prepare a print that means adding these sucker symbols by hand (specially when the quotation marks are stupid giffie like things) which i’d just as well not have to.
piet –
phew! maks sense now. i remember chabert’s discussion of the poet.
as for the giffie thing, bite me. :)
naw. here’s the deal. i like my giffie thing, so when i get a moment, i will make you a special theme that has de nada in the way of image. plaint HTML, no piccies. ‘k?
btw, piet, you once bitched about the autolinks. you understand i did that so that people’s blogs would be automatically linked whenever anyone typed their name in comments. it was a way of helping other people learn about other bloggers. i bring it up be/c i realized your autolink isn’t operational, but i don’t know which blog you want me to use?
piet, you wrote: “tiff”
forgot to say: *snort*
I’ll try, at some point. My thinking tends to plod, so I have to study on it a while. Sometimes my high horse takes an alternative route and winds up confusing anyone involved. Sorry about that.
$30k for a M.A. in social work. Granted I’ve been here in pink collar land for a while, but when the new fiscal year rolls around, I’ll “officially’ be making 30K for a job that requires a high school diploma and the ability to deal with the public while not drooling. Of course, somewhat more than $5K of that is actually my “contribution” to the cost of my health coverage. Why don’t they just pay the insurer straight up, and say that they pay me $25K? Is $5K/year that I will never ever see or be sick enough to recoup supposed to make me ascribe higher status to my job? Like the fact that we are officially referred to as the “salaried staff” even though my personal info page at Human Resources has my hourly WAGE right on it?
shit. i have to remove that. b/c dang me if he might read it. i’ll disguise details and rant later.
but not even social work dude. that’s always been poorly paid. they’re asking for someone who’s a quantitative analysis. It’s Nielsen fucking ratings. They want you to have mgmt responsbilities and be on call weekends. Which reminds me Rootie Toot. I can remember the handful of times when I’ve actually worked a 40 hr week. I’m not stretching the truth on that one in the least. In other words, I’ve been working 60-70 hrs weeks for 20 years. A light week was 50-55. The only time I didn’t, was when I wasn’t in the paid labor force, but then I worked 24/7 because it was the time between birth and 1 year when I was a full-time mom to my son and three step sons. After that, it was part-time work, part-time college, and still with the full0time mothering. I have to say it: that anyone thinks that they need to tell me about hard has work infuriated me maybe more than this millionaire jackass I’m dealing with at the moment.
this one will do but i’m not blogging actively this mo, nor last mo (though i stuck all those digitstirries up at http://poetpiet.googlepage.com in one go), nor next one); I’m holding out till somebody offers me fat enough money for a doggy splinternetprime hope scope scoop day to pay for pulling all my disaggregation together a little (than i’ll start doing youtubies surrounded by the books via which i’ll dig into memories and the next stage of curved treehousingmarket and such high hopes for all and sundry and stuff).
I made a bid to be allowed to use the 3 classroomsize former tropical forestry library building of the http://www.wur.nl now owned by a developer but to no avail.
Mike Ballard, a US expat in Australia, and Jennifer’s bunky sent this along:
It was enough to fight the commies, to send people to college back then. Love it.
BL
Interesting this about grad students and class I think becuase(I tried to adreess this a little) I agree that though one can be functionally lower class(working class Im not sure -hairy area but no not working class) ones social tied to middle/upper classes are a safety net or a teather to the upper classes. Though of course there are plenty of exceptions, my class ties are lower class friends of mine(both from lower class families) had kids in grad school, so not only did they have no net but they also had the burden of providing health care/insurance so they were literally scraping by. I guess again, this falls into the mobility question.
I remember having talks with dudes whowere big into telecom. Many of them mentioned bosses who never went to college but came up working for the phone company and learned the entire trade as it evolved-beepers, fiberoptic lines, celll phones etc. Now there guys are upper management and have a good sense of whats going on around them-not like young whippersnappers who just come outta buisness undergrad. I suppose that kind of apprenticeship learning get you good jobs without college. Im not sure if on the whole that sort of thing is increasing or decreasing or just moving from field to field. Certainly there is also downward mobility if a skill becomes obsolete or as buisnesses and industry relocate and more jobs become service oriented. I remember reading something about how in the US ones class correlates to ones parents class 80%, not a very mobile figure.
Dunno I am rambling now but yeah maybe class should inculde all emergency resources including parental input, in fact I think it def. should, so maybe it isnt eboug to look right at you, but instead look at the people immidiatley surrounding you. But then again I knew plenty of people in grad school with no saftey nets who were in different situation than those with parents to help out….but then if two people do the same job(grad student) they cant really be a different class can they?Unless you come up with some indicator that facotrs in what class they grew up…..confused now.
I want to go back to Bitch and FO’s comments 12-15 or so. Actually, I’m not much a Leninist, so I don’t know what Yoshi may have cited. It’s not Imperialism, which doesn’t talk much about the immediate political questions. It is almost certainly one, although I don’t know which of the polemics or party positions that Lenin wrote between the outbreak of WWI and the first international meeting of anti-war socialists late in 1915. The contexts are so different, however, that profound discouragement on the part of those opposed to the war would be the only common ground.
I only know Yoshi from face-to-face encounters, and we talked about very different topics on those occasions. But it is all too easy to get carried away on the ’scientific’ nature of materialist criticism. Specially if you want to break with humanism. And if you want to distinguish yourself from moralism. And specially if you want your kind of thinking to emerge as a leading force in democratic moving-to-revolutionary movements.
So I lean to the way Old Chuckie argued. ‘Capital’ is full of appeals to justice. But justice, as distinct from morality, does not appeal to universal and eternal standards, it expresses the specific grievances the people who make the class feel in their lives and recognize as unfair. Combines passion and reason. But no, we have almost exclusively pointy heads and sectarians formulating their own self-interested complaints.
Lenin only wrote two scientific works of the kind that you could even dream of teaching in classroom,”The development of capitalism in Russia; the process of the formation of a home market for large-scale industry,” which he wrote in the 1890s and which is mostly about the agrarian structure of the countryside. “Imperialism” is the other. What I find interesting is walk into your run of the mill Barnes & Nobles or Borders and you will find a good selection of the major works of Marx and Engels on the shelf. And not one single work of Lenin. Even if you were just curious, you’re being discouraged from examining.
And, Bitch, I know you were speaking to me and FO jointly, but for the record and out of filial piety to the originary chuckie, until Rudi H slipped in, the Original Old Chuckie would be the only one I ever cited. And that single-mindedness results from a decision made quite a few years ago, when I was visiting the history of the International Working Men’s Association, and decided that it offered lessons as least as important for us as those of the Bolsheviks and the 3rd International. Some really great failures, I mean.
And I really really really want to get back to relational class and the standpoint, but it won’t be tonight, which means not until Sunday at the earliest.
Class! Hmmm it always brings a wry smile to my face when Americans talk about class. We’d need an international dictionary to be able to communicate about that one. Then if you mix ‘class’ and ‘politics’ whew that’s a pretty explosive combination.
BEst wishes
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