Things I hate about the Sterling “scandal”:
1. it’s only the obvious, old-fashioned, individualistic racism that Americans have any sense of how to oppose. But the big stuff is less personal, more complex, more structural and cultural, and takes a different angle to oppose.
2. um, freedom of speech.
3. nobody went apeshit over his blatant housing discrimination, which actually caused major material harm
4. again, freedom of speech, which is precisely about the freedom for people to say things you DON’T like
What I love about the whole thing:
* Sterling is being removed as boss by a group of powerful workers — the richest, most powerful group of black workers on planet earth, in fact — who threatened to withhold their labor during the busy time if they didn’t get what they wanted, which was for Sterling not to be the boss anymore.
I’m a bit torn here , but the power of the NBA players — when they even intimate the possibility of a work stoppage during playoffs — to expropriate the property of a dickhead boss… I think that one’s got my heart.
Free riding and the slacker politics of energy
The man says solar energy is bad because it’s “free riding.” Well, the cats behind ALEC may be evil, but they certainly ain’t dumb.
ALEC calls for penalties on “free rider” solar panel owners
As usual, the representatives of capital are crystal clear about the fact that the slacker ethic is an enormous threat to their bottom line, perhaps the biggest one they face. They deploy the Protestant work ethic to attack energy sources that are unprofitable, but this line only works as politically effective discourse if we all buy the idea that free riding is somehow bad. Shameful, even. That’s why there is no more important political goal for those who oppose the logic of capital, than a transvaluation of precisely these values.
Because ALEC is absolutely right — solar energy is free riding. But rather than shy away from this reality, we have to embrace just this characteristic of solar — which is exactly what makes it so environmentally superior. It’s passive. It’s free. It’s slacker energy.
Resentment against free riding is not so hard to stir up among an overworked population. But how difficult is it, really, to help people tap into just how much they want it? I mean, free. riding. Sounds like surfing, like taking a motorcycle on the open road, like rock and roll, like good times. People love that shit. So for starters, I think that all our pro-solar enviro ads should now be set to the classic track “Free Ride.”
What solar panels show us is that there is simply no scarcity of energy on earth. There’s plenty. And it’s basically free. Time to lose the resentment and work ethic — generated by an artificially perpetuated scarcity — that ALEC is relying on to continue profiting from the creation of this fake scarcity. Free riders: don’t beat em. Join em.
The Dude Abides
Because I have written a book claiming that the surfer is the most important archetype of resistance to work and to the artificially perpetuated scarcity that capital uses as a weapon against our natural aversion to colonized time, I am certainly pleased when I see a story like this, about the food stamp surfer dude, icon of the right to be lazy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP_izYhdehY
But I’m mad, too. This story came out two months ago. And I have not seen ONE SINGLE defense of this Spicoli-esque surfer slacker who is audacious enough to assume that there is enough food in America that he could just, you know, have some.
Resentment has given this story quite the pair of legs. Objectively, it’s dumb — a right-wing falsehood about who food stamp recipients really are. Of course the truth is that the vast majority of food stamp recipients actually work, or are elderly or children. Welfare exists (to the extent that it still does) to help those who are disadvantaged in the labor market. And it’s obvious that the poor have less opportunity to work for wages sufficient to meet their needs. That’s what makes them poor. Thus, we have a social wage organized on the preferential option for the least advantaged. Seems reasonable. However, it’s precisely this aspect of American welfare that has made it so vulnerable. To liberals, throwing down to help out the poor is no biggie, so the right-wing anti-welfare crowd must just be a bunch of assholes. But for those of us interested in making American life less desperate, this moralism just doesn’t cut it as analysis.
Consider that the only income transfers that survive are policies that benefit everyone — like Social Security and Medicare. That’s why capital’s political servants have been trying so hard, for so long, to introduce means-testing into the calculations for these programs. They know that if they begin the process of making it a program for the needy, it’ll soon enough be vulnerable. And then they can privatize all that public wealth and fritter it away on the Wall Street casino tables while their media lackeys repeat the mantra, “there’s not enough.” Americans have successfully resisted this for a long time — until, that is, their beloved “progressive” president Obama proposed a form of means-testing that would be the death knell of those programs. There is no middle ground here. If these programs stop being universal, they stop being universally popular. And then they will be murdered by the same resentment that’s endangering food stamps. So if we don’t want to be eating cat food or begging for health care when we’re old, we’d better understand this basic dynamic of social policy. If everybody benefits, the program is hard to kill. If some pay in and others benefit, it’s basically already gone.
Why? Why can’t people just be cool and give according to their abilities and take according to their needs? Work. Work is why resentment festers and bubbles up when a working taxpayer subsidizes someone else’s perceived nonwork. It’s a big part of the reason that social welfare policy in the US is such a disaster: the intended beneficiaries are the poor, who in the right-wing anti-welfare discourse that has totally shaped public policy since the eighties, simply won’t work. It doesn’t matter that food stamps and income transfers of one kind or another make up such a miniscule portion of the budget, or that corporate subsidies exceed it by a factor of, well, around ten gazillion. Or that most poor people work their asses off.
Facts don’t matter in politics. Ideas do. The image of the welfare cheat, the lazy surfer, the slacker sponger, trumps the numbers every time. Why? Because it tells us something — something potentially unifying and revolutionary, even — about American culture.
Namely, that we hate work. If Americans loved work as much as we say we do, we’d whistle while we work and gladly give away the pecuniary rewards to the poor needy fellows or the misguided slackers who don’t have enough of it. Instead, Americans use the work ethic as cultural cover for their resentment against the perceived slacker who is taking some of what they have earned with their sacrifice. But it’s not the work ethic that makes them hate on the slacker surfer or the Cadillac-driving welfare queen. Just the opposite. It’s the fact that it seems so unfair that surfer boy (or his parallel, ghetto girl) gets to be free and the working stiff watching him on tv is so profoundly unfree.
What we ought to get across to the resentment crowd is not that they need to be more realistic or altruistic, but that it’s ok to embrace what makes them so pissed about the lobster-eating food stamp surfer — his freedom. And their lack of it. The left rejoinder to the food stamp discourse should not be the cold facts — food stamp recipients work really hard, honest! It should be… hey, it sounds like you might wanna go surfing and eat free lobster too. Let’s talk about that. That’s where altruism ends and solidarity (and hey… a guaranteed annual income for all?) begins.
the anti-work discourse is gaining steam
Check out this essay of Joseph Kay’s, which references this one by David Graeber on bullshit jobs, who also wrote this great new one calling out neoliberalism as a war on the imagination above all. What’s so exciting is that the anti-work line is not only being embraced but also being framed in terms of political imagination and everyday life.
Slacker politics is having a moment. Let’s build it.
Oceanic Futures: the Mataroa Summer Seminar
Reflections on Mataroa
Anyone who talks about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life — without grasping what is subversive about love and positive in the refusal of constraints — has a corpse in his mouth. Raoul Vaneigem, 1967
Nearly a year ago, I wrote a short piece about the policies of austerity and the Euro “crisis” entitled, in part, The Ikarian Dream. Little did I know then what this dream of mine was about to produce. I should have, though, because I am constantly making the case that there is nothing more materially transformative than a dream, nothing that fuels radical movements more powerfully than the imagination. That was in large part why I wrote the essay in the first place — to situate the American fantasy about the culture of southern Europe within the politics of a refusal of alienated labor and an embrace of all the vital forces that collude to resist it.
Well, thanks to that little piece, within the year, I miraculously found myself on Ikaria. Wacky! It all still feels like a dream to me — one in which all the wonderful, myriad attachments that I am deeply grateful to say form my very full life, were, for the first time in years, absent. I was free. Halfway around the world in the place I’d imagined. And just as it’s incredibly difficult to articulate the meaning of one’s dreams, without the help of an analyst anyway, I’m finding Mataroa really hard to write about with any rational power.
I have to start somewhere, though, so I suppose I should begin with the sea. Everything else in this world does. And it was fully the dominant motif, in form and in substance, of the Mataroa seminar, named, of course, after the storied ship of exiles that set sail from Piraeus and headed to Paris carrying its world-shaking exile cargo, especially the brilliant, severely underappreciated Greek anti-Stalinist then-Trot Cornelius Castoriadius, who went on to found the school of thought that in large part inspired the uprisings we call Paris 68. “All power to the imagination,” the Paris graffiti shouted, invoking Castoriadus (the Situationists never acknowledged their debt to him, but whatever). “Workers of all countries, enjoy!”
But within the Mataroa seminar, the sea wasn’t just a metaphor. It was fully, as American hip hoppers say, in effect. Look, it’s no accident that Freud calls our deepest, most primitive, most unconscious and radically creative psychic space “oceanic.” One simply can’t relate to the sea without tapping, in some way, into the deepest parts of the unconscious, the phylogenetic and ontogenetic well that is the creative fount of language and of all attempts to intervene in the world once we’ve come to the traumatic realization that we are not, sadly, totally one with it. When we see the sea, we remember/imagine that there is enough, that we are all connected, that gratification and flow can be the true order of things. And that we could dive back in if only we’d just free ourselves.
Castoriadius was a heavily psychoanalytic cat, and I keep wondering if he had a thought like this on his Mataroa journey. That unconscious memory, our imaginary of connection, of pleasure, of peace, of abundance in time and in material life, of everyday vitality not deferred but really lived, is at the root of all liberatory politics. And like the psychoanalytic one, this political practice can’t be effective on the level of the abstract. The transference has to really happen. The oceanic relentlessly insists on being, on creating. Castoriadus recasts Lacan’s imaginary as a poeisis, less an insubstantial image than a producing, a bringing-forth:
“…we are beings of the imagination and of the imaginary. The emergence of these determinations itself manifests the creation and vis formandi that appertain to being as such, but these determinations also concretely realize the mode of being of the creation and vis formandi specific to the properly human. Here we can do no more than note the fact that this vis formandi is accompanied, in the human sphere, by a libido formandi: to the potential for creation found in being in general, the human sphere adds a desire for formation. I call this potential and this desire the ‘poietic’ element of humanity.”
When the imaginary is in effect it unfolds, becomes, as method actors say, really real.
On Ikaria, it did. It transcended the ideas in people’s papers — broadly speaking, that another world is possible, and being fought for as we speak — and came to life. Still, the ideas were pretty fucking cool too. To me, they felt like home. Many of them I’d been writing about, advocating for, for a long time, so that was exciting. For starters, awhile back I’d abandoned that old Marxist canard about crisis being an unintended consequence of the logic of capital, and one that the working class can exploit for revolutionary purposes. Not. Crisis is a weapon used relentlessly, and increasingly, since the 1970s to discipline the working class by cultivating conditions of fear and impotence in those who would otherwise never accept the economic and political logic that this discourse supports. Crisis is a neoliberal strategy that must be met with refusal, not embrace. Mataroa knows this.
Most heartwarming to me was the Mataroan sensibility about the cultural politics of freedom. In our fight against the forces that would make every moment of the lifeworld and every iota of nature into fodder for profit, that would let nothing just be, I know that culture is our strongest and most resilient weapon. In particular, a culture that embraces the aspect of Mediterranean life that our oppressors disparage as “laziness” — what I call slacker politics and others called “de-growth” — was all over the meeting. This refusal to accept paid labor as the center of life and pleasure as marginal to it, is what essentially opposes the dominating logic of capital. In my analysis, this refusal is both a means to a better life and more power — through the fact that when the working class oversupplies a commodity like labor, its leverage to make effective demands goes down, and vice versa — and an end in itself. Among highly-paid workers and the working poor in America, in the high-tech first world and the proto-slavery of the third, overwork is both killing our bodies and spirits and compromising any leverage we might have to make a change.
I love the inspiration that the Mediterranean gives to all those stuck in the cultural prison of the Protestant work ethic — the idea that it’s good that we should spend our precious moments working, doing useless shit to promote a destructive system, rather than, you know, really living. It’s a scam, but because it’s tapped into people’s guilt about desire and pleasure and connection, it’s had some insanely powerful effects, even now, when capital has amassed more guns and money and big data on all of us than it would seem to ever need. Why? Because capital knows, just like Max Weber did, that without the cultural intervention of the Protestant uptightness about valorizing work and avoiding pleasure, it can’t stay in power. It knows, as us Mataroans do, that a new imaginary can change the whole game.
Ultimately, that was what was so powerful about Mataroa. We enacted a different imaginary. We didn’t just talk about ideas of liberation and connection and leisure. We lived them. We swam. We roadtripped. We danced. We kicked it in an open air taverna on the sand, eating sardines, drinking wine, staring out at the impossibly blue sea while we talked and laughed and talked some more. Everyone seemed really open, even, shockingly, me. I dove in. I loosened up, open to thinking new thoughts, and I feel more alive because of it. And that feeling of being alive — that’s where all good politics begins.
I allowed myself to imagine things I’d previously resisted. Although I went in pretty critical of one of the animating political ideas of the conference, the commons, ready to argue that the whole idea is based on stultifying, non-cosmopolitan concepts of identity and mutual obligation and rights to land and resources that resemble the conventions of property more than I’m comfortable with, instead, I listened. And what I heard was that the commons is more than an idea for me to critique — it’s the stakes of people’s very real struggles against the imposition of crisis, poverty, desperation. Most important in this respect, I went to a panegiri, the meaning of which was framed for me by one of my hosts and comrades, as an instance of this thing, the commons. Well, if a giant village party tangibly buzzing with libidinal energy, where people are drinking and dancing all night to a seriously fabulous band, is the commons, then hey, I’m in.
I haven’t changed my mind about this entirely. I’m an American girl, so I like the commercial market more than my Mediterranean (or even other American) comrades do. Not as a totalizing logic, of course, but as a space. In Mediterranean parlance, I prefer the wildness, the potential for novelty, the mystery and the strangers and the tricksters of the souk to the earnest communitarianism of the commons. And although I will never move from certain central principles, the Mataroa oceanic has opened my mind to other ideas, other spaces, other logics. I have come to see that if pleasure and connection and a more natural rhythm of life is the animating principle of your political imagination, then we are allies.
Out of Mataroa, we comrades will build a radical network. A think tank, taking a strategic page from the insanely successful playbook of Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys. They imagined a new world, analyzed the state of friendly and opposing forces on the ground so that they’d intervene most effectively, and never stopped pushing their ideas. Now we live in the world their audacity built; their dream is our nightmare. But where they gained power because they planned the violence and domination that could follow the cultivation of economic crisis, we will get stronger every time we strategize on the basis of cultivating the anti-crisis — the pleasure imaginary that connects us all through our oceanic origins. Where they imagine the profits that shock-and-awe crisis make possible, we imagine the transformations that appealing to the desires of vibrant, pulsating beings, fully embodied, experiencing joy and pain and anger and deep laughter, and love, can produce. Because of this, we will win.
Anyway, this is what I’ve always meant when I’ve advocated for a vitalist cultural strategy to oppose the cold dominating logic of capital. I dreamed it, and then it happened. In Ikaria, everything I’ve always said about political strategy came true. Substance and form – the ideas and the fabric of everyday life – came together. Because you simply can’t oppose the logic of crisis — the idea that everything is so fucking serious that you’d better just put your heads down and get to work, now! and leave the thinking to the authorities, by the way — by reiterating that kind of very dead seriousness. You can only really do it with an everyday politics that opposes that logic not just at the level of substantive ideas but of formal relations of time and space as well, relations that first and foremost privilege the life force, the power of comradeship and laughter.
In Castoriadus’s words, “To pose the question of a new society is to pose the problem of an extraordinary cultural creation. And the question that is posed, and that I pose to you, is the following: Do we have before us, some precursory and premonitory signs of this cultural creation?” He is asking if there are signs of the oceanic imaginary at play within contemporary society. From the Mediterranean comes the answer: yes.
Mataroa Summer Seminar Video
I am pleased to announce that a short video about the Mataroa Collective and the seminar in Ikaria that founded it is up online. I am so incredibly proud to be part of this. Do yourself a favor and check it out here!
Libido and the slacker politics of war and peace
Why can’t America stop bombing other countries? Seriously now.
Is it that we are a warmongering, aggressive nation? It’s certainly plausible. We’ve got more than our share of guns, racism, bullying, road rage. And it’s a basic tenet of psychoanalysis that aggressiveness is unleashed when the libido is repressed. Libido (love and other yummy stuff) and destrudo (anger, aggression, the will to punish) are the two poles of our primitive psyche. According to Freud (and Marcuse, my favorite interpreter) when libido goes unsatisfied, the will to destroy gets stronger. In hippie talk, only love — fiery, strong, sweet, passionate — can keep the wolves of our nature at bay. Well, all twerking aside, the American libido looks like shit these days. Maybe this is our problem.
Overwork, underpay, stress, boredom, the ever-ascendant bullshit of the bean counters at the top and the slave drivers at the bottom — no wonder we are subjected to a constant barrage of pharmaceutical ads hawking pills that will make it tolerable to get through the workday, and make it possible to get it up once it’s over. Take a pill to fall asleep. One to wake up. And don’t forget the one that keeps you from killing yourself at that stupid meeting. From the looks of things, Americans are in bad shape.
If you don’t believe me, check out this ad, seriously the most pathetic fucking thing I think I’ve ever seen. A market research department for a giant, highly-profitable corporation came to the conclusion that enough Americans could identify with this poor fucking sap that they ought to put this commercial on television. Here, my friends, is what is wrong with America in a convenient disposable cup:
Here’s the thing. This poor guy is not getting off on bombing anybody. The dark angels of his nature, the destructive passion within, is getting no more satisfaction from American imperialism than his fun time desires are from that stupid pudding.
The wasted energy that he calls his life has just been beaten down by the work and the traffic and the boss and the bullshit. It’s not even aggressiveness. It’s worse. He’s numb, deadened. That’s why this guy may even know quite well that we go to war not because it’s right or we’re angry but because folks who are rich and powerful benefit from it. But he feels totally powerless to do anything but make himself fat with the only happiness in his life, some fake chocolate and a mildly affectionate but totally boring relationship with his long-suffering kid.
Sure, we have armed tea partiers and radio call-in yellers and right wing angry-ass nutbags, and many of these guys do provide the regime major cover for their imperial adventures. But so do “liberals.” The politics of aggression don’t explain why most Americans oppose going to war in Syria — even under the sway of a mainstream media that frames the debate as either saving the Syrians or not saving the Syrians — but are resigned to the reality that it’s going to happen no matter what.
As David Graeber points out in a brilliant recent essay here, the neoliberal project over the last several decades has been, more than anything else, a war on the imagination. On the sense that things could be different, that another world is possible. That, for instance, all the incredible wealth on planet earth could nourish people and places rather than destroy them. That people could be free. That life could hold greater, far more intense pleasures in it than the consumer goods that are supposed to make up for all the concessions of everyday life.
And why? Why has quashing people’s dreams been even more strategically important to the Man than, for instance, even making money? Because our imagination is fueled by libidinal desire, a desire that roundly rejects the depressing numbness of the work-squandered life of pudding man. And all the contemporary insanities, like endless war and chronic disaster, that this kind of life makes people tolerate as inevitable. Elites around the world are still constantly guarding against another libidinal revolution, against the demands for a free and pleasurable everyday life not centered around the banality of the workplace but the joys of really living it up. From the police state hysteria around any whiff of collective protest to the massive private national security and intelligence-gathering apparatus, what looks like power might actually just be shrill, hysterical, and massively insecure.
What are they so terrified of, anyway? The most powerful force in the world, that’s what. Perhaps they know that we are done settling for pudding.
What I learned this summer
I guess my summer began in earnest when I broke my face.
It was really weird. There I was, after a wild and super fun night with lots of good friends and music at a bar down the street from my house, riding home on my bike. Fast. I always ride fast; it’s an outlet for aggression, or something. On my bike, I feel like a badass. I feel silly saying this, after smashing my face on the asphalt, but riding quick and sure makes me feel cool. It’s sort of a kid moment.
But I’m not a kid. I’m a grown woman with two kids of my own, and I have no business riding that fast, standing up, acting like a thirteen-year old boy. I guess I also had no business riding down the giant hill in Prospect Park standing up with outstretched arms either, but I used to do that about twice a day. I’m glad I didn’t kill myself any of those times. But I’m also glad I had those experiences. It was stupid, but it was fun as hell. It felt like flying.
My face is fucked up forever now, but it’s not that noticeable, everyone tells me. I notice it, though. I am asymmetrical. And that’s just how it is for me now. My only consolation came when I was reading about American movies in the seventies and came across the phrase “the broken-faced good looks of an Al Pacino.” I have reframed my disfigurement as broken-faced good looks. Framing is everything, I have always found.
I have learned a couple of things from my accident. The first is about pain and trauma, which I didn’t understand before. But in the days afterward, the pain was unbearable when the pills wore off. And it wasn’t just the intensity of the pain. I mean, I’ve borne children. No, it’s the fact that after trauma, the pain holds the experience within it. It’s incredible, actually. But the pain is the feeling of the event. The pain in my face was one with the feeling of the impact, the bones breaking, over and over. It’s intense, and terrible. So I’d like to take this opportunity to give a little shout out to painkiller. It is merciful and good.
But another lesson came my way too. About attachment. I have tried for so many years to be zen and non-attached, to lose my hooked-ness, my neurosis, my inability to just let life be. I’ve made some progress, but I’ve never lost it. Until, it seems, now. I don’t know how long this will last, but for the very first time in a long time I actually feel free.
Let me give you an example of what I mean. The last entry on this blog was my take on capital’s attack on Greece, told through a discussion of the image of one of its islands, Ikaria. Through the magic of the internet, my essay got me invited to a conference on that very island. I’ll have much more to write about that conference on these pages. It was one of my very favorite experiences, ever, and the whole project is overflowing with inspiration and ripe with possibility. For now, remember this word: Mataroa.
Anyway, I was thrilled to be invited, but I was scared. I am generally scared of flying, and I’d never traveled by myself before. Much less to a place where I knew no one. But after my accident, something changed. I got on the plane and, as is my wont, ordered two giant glasses of wine to numb my terror of takeoff. I had a couple of sips, but I stopped. For some weird reason, I couldn’t feel my fear. Where the fuck was it? Shit, if I wasn’t afraid – maybe I was going to die. I think I used to see my fear as protective. Like, if I worried enough, I’d be safe.
But this time was different. The plane started moving, fast, and it felt – shockingly – exhilarating. I was in the back, so I felt the immense power of the engines under me, lifting the plane into the air. It was awesome. As in, I felt awe. And I stopped fearing my own death. For the first time in my life, I knew in my gut – and not just my head – that, in Jim Morrison’s immortal words, “no one here gets out alive.” We’re all going to die. Worry all you want. You can’t change it. Looking down at the Atlantic, and then later at the Aegean over the Greek isles, I felt not afraid but privileged to be up there. Shit, I thought, even if the fucking plane does go down, this is still amazing. Why waste this? Enjoy it.
So I did. I also enjoyed the bumpy landing in the small plane on the windy island. And the winding bus rides on skinny mountain roads, even at night, with no streetlights. Everyone else was fine, but ordinarily I would have been shitting a brick. Not this time. I felt lucky to be driving on those roads, looking down those deep ravines, lucky to be alive.
Being me, I can’t help but see the politics in this. Fear and attachment impede radical politics, as the Man is well aware. For example, the Federal Housing Administration offered cheap home loans to returning (white) veterans in the post-World War II period in the US. Why? Because before the war, during the Depression, the American working class had been getting pretty anti-capitalist. American culture had never been so communist before or since, and we all know the story of the sit-down strikes and the unemployed marches and all the rest.
The welfare-warfare Keynesian response of the postwar US state had a lot of moving parts, but the example of pushing mass homeownership is a key one here. The strategic idea was that homeowners would be less likely to strike, because they’d be afraid to lose the homes that were now “theirs.” To some extent, it worked – the American working class has, since that time, been arguably less militant than its European counterparts, who tend not to own. Property is a form of attachment. So is nationalism, and the new favorite, debt. There are others.
So the Man knows that attachment and fear of loss encourage a docile working class. That means, I think, that an existential being in the moment, a fearless presence with the world and with one another, is a big part of what our side needs to cultivate. (Not least because what we are up against, in terms of the repressive apparatus of the state, is scary as hell.)
I am extra neurotic, but you all don’t need to bust your pretty faces to do what I’m doing now. Take a deep breath. Listen. Feel the breeze on your skin. Vibe the vitality of the people around you. Stop thinking I’m corny. Just do it. It’s so precious, this moment. Defend it.
That, I’m thinking now, is where we begin.
postscript, from late summer 2013: check out Eleni’s Blog in Ikaria, where she wrote this beautiful response, by which I am very touched: http://islgr.wordpress.com/2013/07/30/my-dear-blog-ツ-summer/. Read all the other posts, too… this is one super cool person.
Ramadan Slackers
Perhaps the hours issue can bring together what imperialist war hype has kept separate for too long. The cultural particulars are different, of course, but the essential dynamic is the same there as it is here.
The Politics of Austerity and the Ikarian Dream
As a longtime fan of the leisurely aspect of European culture, I am always thrilled whenever it makes its way onto the radar screens of Americans, who are, it’s clear, grievously overworked by comparison. Too often, images of Europe are portrayed in the context of a grim new discursive “common sense” about the European lifestyle that say it is a) an unsustainable anachronism and b) onerous and not something Americans would want anyway. When more celebratory images of Euroleisure emerge, I like to think that Americans wonder why we can’t have what European workers have successfully pressed for – long vacations, relatively short hours of work, and the generous social wage that makes free time enjoyable rather than stressful. And when Americans start asking themselves these questions, all kinds of liberatory possibilities open up. In the context of the current continental battle over austerity, which is more than anything a speed-up imposed on the European lifestyle, these images and their reception here in America become especially important.
This is why the buzz around one recent article in particular really warmed my heart. On October 24, 2012, the New York Times Magazine profiled a small Greek island where, as the title proposes, “People Forget to Die.” The author investigates the extraordinary health and longevity of the residents of the island, Ikaria, and finds that their secret is pretty simple – in addition to eating a plant-based, legume-heavy, locally sourced, generally organic diet, the residents of Ikaria are just amazingly chill.
Ikarians have no alarm clocks; they just start the day when they wake up. They work at a leisurely pace and take long lunch breaks and daily naps. Meals are always an occasion for socializing and wine. Life, according to this profile, is relatively carefree and filled with the pleasures of friends and family. The Ikarians’ relationship to time is the polar opposite of ours – whereas in the “developed” world, the abstraction of the clock dominates the concrete reality of each moment, in Ikaria, it’s the reverse. A typical resident is quoted:
“People stay up late here…we wake up late and always take naps. I don’t even open my office until 11 a.m. because no one comes before then.” He took a sip of his wine. “Have you noticed that no one wears a watch here? No clock is working correctly. When you invite someone to lunch, they might come at 10 a.m. or 6 p.m. We simply don’t care about the clock here.” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/magazine/the-island-where-people-forget-to-die.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
The article points out that the typical Ikarian has never really experienced the stress of being late.
In terms of the incredibly longevity of the Ikarian people, there are a number of interlocking factors at work: exercise and healthful food are integral to everyday life, a feeling of communal solidarity leaves no one at the mercy of isolation and loneliness (unlike in the US, where we warehouse our elderly in grim wards), everyone gardens and walks a lot, but most important, I think, is the simple fact that the central pursuit of Ikarians seems to be enjoying life. Where Ikarians make pleasure – relaxing, eating and drinking wine with friends, dancing – the center of their lives, Americans have accepted the idea that relaxation and pleasure must be marginal to the real center of life, paid labor and its associated stresses.
The differential effects in terms of health and happiness are clear – the article begins with a story of an Ikarian immigrant to the US who was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, moved back to the island, stopped stressing and started hanging out with his old friends, and regained his health. Here in the US, we see this kind of lifestyle as “unrealistic.” What is realistic to Americans, though, is actually quite unreasonable – overwork, stress, and an epidemic of preventable disease. Maybe it’s time to rethink our definition of realistic.
The Ikaria article was widely e-mailed and discussed, and the affluent nutrition-obsessed sector of Americans were quick to consume other articles, like “How to Eat Like an Ikarian,” And although almost all of the online commentary waxed nostalgic about this seemingly idyllic, pre-modern lifestyle, not one commenter made the connection between the Ikarian lifestyle and the struggle currently raging in Greece.
Which is strange, given the fact that it’s a more modern and cosmopolitan version of just the kind of relaxed lifestyle identified in the Ikaria article that is precisely the object of the European banking troika (the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the IMF) and its insanely punishing austerity policies. The very week that the Ikaria article came out, the Times coverage of the Greek crisis included a story on the attempt by the troika to link changes in Greek labor law to a new round of so-called “aid” from the ECB (85% of which goes to recapitalize banks, not to the people who are made to pay for it). In exchange for billions of euros that will keep Greece tied to its European lenders, the government is to continue to sell off public assets, raise taxes, raise the retirement age, cut pensions and public services, and “streamline” “rigid” labor laws that keep the country from being “competitive.”
In the midst of the heated negotiations going on between the Greek government (tilted leftward since last summer’s elections) and the troika, the Greek people themselves continue to demonstrate and resist. Sadly, the American people, potential allies similarly subject to policies of public-sector austerity and the imperatives of private-sector “competitiveness” (also known as profitableness for corporations and banks), seem to be buying the bankers’ analysis of the crisis in the Euro zone. According to this analysis, the Greeks, in the streets striking and rioting against this punishment, are somehow just being unreasonable. This logic insists that they should stop complaining, suck it up, and get to work.
It’s not surprising: all of the “legitimate,” supposedly unbiased news sources approach the issue with the same tone of disdain for the Greeks, who, in this narrative, actually caused the entire European crisis with their lazy, profligate ways. According to the story told by the New York Times, NPR, and the rest of the mainstream media, Greece lied its way into the Eurozone, borrowed beyond its means, blew all the money, and is now in the streets refusing to work off its debts.
This story, of a lazy and irresponsible culture, is best told by influential lightweight Michael Lewis, in his Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World. His chapter on Greece, disparagingly titled “And They Invented Math,” identifies Greek dishonesty and overborrowing as the problem, and Greeks buckling down to pay the piper as the only possible solution: “But this question of whether Greece will repay its debts is really a question of whether Greece will change its culture, and that will happen only if Greeks want to change.” Lewis calls what’s happening in Greece in the wake of the crisis a “total moral collapse” of the society and ends the chapter with a crescendo of paternalistic twatter: “Even if it is technically possible for these people to repay their debts, live within their means, and return to good standing inside the European Union, do they have the inner resources to do it? Or have they so lost their ability to feel connected to anything outside their small worlds that they would rather just shed the obligations?”
The only major challenge to this obnoxious discourse in the mainstream media has come from reliably Keynesian lefty economist and NYT columnist Paul Krugman, who, importantly, corrects the narrative regarding the responsibility of the European banks for the crisis in Greece, but only at the expense of leaving Greek culture out of the matter entirely. And, it seems to me, the culture of the Greek working class is precisely the point.
And although Krugman mistakenly takes the austerity hounds at their word that the policies are therapeutic rather than disciplinary – even in the face of the reality that austerity is actually increasing Greek debt by shrinking the economy – he points out some basic facts that everyone should understand, first and foremost:
Fifteen years ago Greece was no paradise, but it wasn’t in crisis either. Unemployment was high but not catastrophic, and the nation more or less paid its way on world markets, earning enough from exports, tourism, shipping and other sources to more or less pay for its imports. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/18/opinion/krugman-greece-as-victim.html
In other words, before central bankers in Germany and France decided that money could be made by bringing Greece and other mellow European countries into the Euro, Greece was fine. Unemployment was relatively high, but unemployment is a far less threatening matter when extended families live together, government pensions are generous, and “unemployed youth” are happily sipping coffee at the café with their friends all day. “Greek culture” simply wasn’t anybody’s problem; in fact, it was a major tourist draw. The country basically had enough to pay its own way and distribute its surplus however its internal class struggle determined. Which was, given the militance of the Greek working class, pretty generous as far as the people were concerned. This was never anyone else’s business, until Greece joined the Euro, was flooded with cheap money, and spent it. Now, the logic goes, the Greeks must suffer for their sins.
Anthropologist and organic intellectual of the Occupy movement David Graeber, in his 2011 Debt: The First 5,000 Years, lays out the ways in which debt has traditionally been used by those in power to accomplish two things: to make people work and to create markets. This was especially true of the European colonial powers taxing their subjects, but Graeber’s analysis traces this dynamic to the economic beginnings of the colonial powers themselves. Debt has always been used as a mechanism to bring people to heel.
Today’s massive lending and its aftermath, the drying up of credit, is working to have precisely this effect. Like the Third World debt that preceded it, Greek debt is a means to compel the Greek people to work harder and longer now that the Euro has linked the largely self-sufficient Greek economy to the larger market of Europe much more intensely. Cheap money and economic integration encouraged Greece to import all kinds of new goodies as well as necessities like food that used to be produced at home, and the withdrawal of credit by international markets is, as we are all witness to today, resulting in a punishing burden of austerity, the object of which is twofold.
First, austerity in public budgets means that public services become unsustainable and selling them off to the highest private bidder seems the only possibility (sound familiar?). From water to airports to government services, the Greeks are indeed being pressured to sell off public assets to pay their bills. So creating indebtedness is, in this case and others, a privatization strategy, attempting to transform public goods into privately profitable ones. Second, the artificially-produced scarcity that austerity policies induce functions as a means to compel populations to work, and work harder. Scarcity breeds desperation, and desperation kills cultures like the one in Ikaria, in which people work to live instead of living to work. So indebtedness and the austerity that results leave only two possibilities for its subjects: stop enjoying life and start hustling to work off the debt. Or resist.
In light of all this, Krugman’s analysis of Greece as victim of the Euro, and his resulting anti-austerity position, is a really welcome corrective to the moralizing about Greek culture that stands in for economic analysis in the American mainstream press. It can help Americans to understand that the Greeks didn’t break Europe – if anything, Europe broke the Greeks. Thus, it’s not really fair to extract payment for northern European lenders off the backs of the Greek people.
However, Krugman’s position, in a classic progressive mistake, discounts the cultural question to avoid “blaming the victim,” but at the expense of understanding the important contours of the struggle. The class struggle, in Greece and elsewhere, rages between the logic of capital on one side and on the other, the counterlogic of the working class, which dreams of life on Ikaria, among other things. Culture is central to the economic battle raging in Greece and around the world; in fact, the culture of leisure and pleasure and people’s autonomy over their own time is precisely what opposes the imperatives of capital to make every moment of life and every iota of the lifeworld into a means to the end of profit.
The story of the struggle against austerity in Greece, and the attitude that similarly-situated Americans ought to have toward Greek resistance, can best be understood when we’re thinking about how smart the Ikarians are to enjoy their lives with friends, food, wine, and plenty of rest and sunshine, and how stupid we are, to waste our precious lives stressed out and working ourselves to death. Gardening your own food is not for everyone, and many of us prefer big-city life to the old-fashioned village. But these are cultural preferences that come to the fore when people are free to constitute time on their own terms. The Ikarians are an image of a culture that privileges pleasure over labor, and that’s the key political point, in Europe and beyond.
Simply put, there is a hidden politics to Ikarian culture that goes even beyond the fact, unmentioned in the New York Times Magazine, that Ikaria is one of the most consistently Communist-voting blocs in all of Greece, and among the most militant in the nation in resisting the new taxation schemes designed to pay bank debts out of the peoples’ incomes, which are already estimated to be down by 30-40%. If you dig Ikaria, whether you know it or not, you support their anti-austerity cultural politics as well as their left-wing electoral politics.
In tracing the origins of capitalism, Marx explains the centrality of human desperation to the ability of capital to generate profit, that is, to exist. From the British enclosure movements that privatized common village lands and thus left the peasants little choice but to look for work to survive, to the contemporary privatization of public goods all over the world, especially in the U.S. (frequently framed as a result of the necessity to pay back debt), capital needs a population with nothing but their labor-power to sell on the market in order to have a reliable, reliably profitable, working class. Artificially created scarcity breeds docile workers; austerity is the creation of this scarcity. Overworked, stressed-out Americans would do well to understand how much the fight against austerity is our fight too.
This is also the story of what’s happening in Greece right now. George Caffentzis explains it best in his recent dispatch from the struggle there:
This experiment [austerity] is being run because the last century of social and class struggle in Europe has made the rate of exploitation and profit too low for capitalists in the Europe of the 21st century. The introduction of the Euro a decade ago was a failed experiment aimed at increasing the profitability of European capital (i.e., capital employed in Europe). It has been a grave disappointment to capitalists. The currency manipulation and the cutting of “transaction costs” the euro allowed were not able to challenge the structures that workers over many strikes, street demonstrations, and eventually war have built to make their lives safer, less risky and longer (and cut the profits of their bosses).
For European capitalism to survive this period of globalization, wages must be reduced, public property, instead of becoming common, must be privatized and whatever wealth workers have accumulated to deal with emergencies must be taxed away to pay the national debt that has been generated to prevent bank failures! Workers of all sorts, industrial and service, skilled and unskilled, undocumented and documented, material and immaterial must be made to cut their demands and accept the minimum (with thanks!). This crisis experiment is a desperate move on the part of the capitalists, of course, but its success depends on treating each country and working class one-at-a-time and keeping them separated as much as possible. http://blog.occupiedlondon.org/2012/08/26/george-caffentzis-summer-2012-a-report-from-greece/
One way to keep the working class of each country separated is to make sure that they never see their struggles as one and the same. The manipulation of the German public into an us-and-them discourse vis-à-vis the Greeks has been a victory for the ruling class on this front; the increasing popularity of the fascist anti-immigrant right in Greece itself is a troubling if not exactly surprising result of us-and-them divisions. However, the rejection of this strategy by the French, who decisively refused the divisive politics of austerity and its scapegoating of the Greeks in their spring 2012 presidential election was a victory for anti-austerity forces and the solidarity they require. And a recent daylong continent-wide general strike to protest austerity policies is an exciting sign that the European working class is resisting the divide-and-conquer strategy of an always quite solidaristic capitalist class.
What the anti-austerity forces need now is for the Americans to see their own budding struggles – for the eradication of student debt and for a restoration of decimated public services especially – as part of an international movement. Painting the Greek people as “irresponsible” for refusing the austerity that would make them desperate and thus docile workers, while encouraging Americans to identify with the interests of corporations, banks, and the seemingly impartial “economic growth,” has been a pretty effective cultural strategy to subvert this potential solidarity. But every now and then, another account slips through the official organs – this time, in the “Body Issue” of the NYT Magazine.
Americans ought to read articles like the one about the health and happiness of the Ikarian people with the understanding that the goal of capitalist austerity is precisely to bring an end to these last places of freedom, to make us all believe that it’s simply not realistic, that killing ourselves working rather than enjoying life with friends and family and good food and wine and dancing is the way life just has to be.
Michael Lewis ends his book with a chapter on America, which he says is next in this whole debt to austerity cycle. Of course, the European situation and the American one are different in key outlines, but Lewis is right on this one. Public and consumer debt – run up to finance wars, tax cuts for the rich, and massive bonuses for Wall Street shell-game scammers – is now being used as a stick to discipline the American working class into working harder for less in the context of increasingly starved-out and then sold-off public services. But this is only the most recent salvo in capital’s decades-long project to use outsourcing, union-busting, debt, and privatization to attack the working-class share of the social product in America and all around the world.
I submit that Americans will only have a fighting chance in the face of this attack if they take impulses like the happy fascination with the people of Ikaria and translate them into a politics of life and freedom against the austerity for the working class that makes profit for corporations.
What if Americans saw the Greeks’ insistence on privileging life over labor as something to celebrate? If we saw our own dreams in the culture of mellow Europe that the Ikarian image is an exaggerated version of? Judging by the reception of the profile of these free-living, fun-loving Ikarians, perhaps we are beginning to. The Occupy uprising of a year ago was a good start, and those movement activists have always been connected to European anti-austerity movements. Now that cross-border organizing needs to go really big. The Europeans are already doing it. It’s certainly too soon to hope that a majority of Americans will join them. But, I think, working to reframe for Americans the meaning of austerity and anti-austerity struggles, and our place in them, is a step in the right direction. Nurturing our Ikarian dreams is a start.
