Progress isn't what it used to be
A worthy topic offered by James Howard Kunstler. Normally a rather loud mouth pessimist, this topics catches my imagination and parallels my thoughts - basically "How do you define progress and justice under an era of decline?"
One might imagine progressive in the era of the Roman Empire. As brutal as the empire was, it was large an inclusive one, at least given surrender of your wealth into taxes. Citizenship in the Roman Empire represented prestige and freedom, access to wider knowledge of the Greeks, freedom to travel and set your own destiny within the framework allowed, a practical economic engine.
I can't imagine what the slow decline of an empire felt like, and expect our "empire" based on faster access to everything will fall more quickly.
Back in the industrial power days raw human labor in factors offered some access to new wealth to the common workers, and unions expanded that shared wealth. Unions have lost a great amount of power, whatever your judgements on that are. I feel sorry for the pilot's unions and lower workers in the airline industry. In days of contraction, unions can demand whatever they wish, but they just give excuses to "industry" towards needed contraction.
Unions are perhaps the center of the issue of "progress" - that is to mean sharing the wealth of unsustainable exploitation of the environment. Even if I choose to admire Venesuela's loud mouth president and his idealistic socialism via oil wealth, I worry about consequences. I'm elitist enough to believe "easy wealth" is "easily wasted" and a generation or two of sharing oil wealth will breed unsustainable expectations. I'm glad literacy has expanded but I don't trust tha democracy (or even benevolent dictators) can last under easy wealth. I suppose my biggest concern is over population - easy wealth brings easy population gains which will stress the environment BEFORE wealth depletion throws them back into poverty.
The issue of immigration is a very "progressive issue" - letting ever new generations of Americans to lift up the older generations by cheap manual labor, but the "pyramid scheme" must end sometime and I fear when "peak oil" hits, there'll form a permanent underclass in this country who will never get a chance to share in the wealth they helped to create.
Slavery itself is claimed to be undemocratic, but I must imagine the nature of slavery will be stretched and turned as needed to power the next generation of wealth. You don't need slavery to mean "ownership of another person", if the power structures of society are sufficient at keeping those at the bottom in subsistent incomes. Slavery can as well be a claimed meriticracy, where a few are identified and pulled up, and the rest left to rot and care for their own needs.
I don't know what I'm really talking about, but I imagine DEBT can be the most powerful tool of slavery - convince people they OWE something, but don't allow them circumstances to ever escape their debt. This circumstances can be actual limits or just corruption - you like selling $0.05 popcorn for $5.00 at the movie theaters. Smart people MIGHT see how prudence can help people escape, but if people can't control their own urges, they'll dig a hole as fast as they try to rise out of it.
SO I'd probably define DEBT as the new-world-order of "class warfare". The idea for the upper class is to convince the lower class to stay in permanent debt. We can be SURE of this as bankrupsy laws become harsher, and inheritence wealth taxes become reduces so generations can maintain their power.
Myself, I'm lucky to think I can pay off my mortgage in 6 years. When our country started, only land-owners could vote. Perhaps someday voting as well could be restricted to wealthy. That seems easier than playing around with election equipment to maintain power.
Overall I think the future of unions is not to protect benfits for workers, but to help workers cooperate to escape cycles of poverty and debt. It's a "backstep", but seems necessary. Maybe unions are not the tool for this new "progressivism", but what else? Unions are too focused on specific types of labor, while I'm thinking more of organizations that encourage a wide variety of people to work together for common goals in improving their wider community.
Anyway, I liked Kunstler's questions, so I pasted it below.
http://www.kunstler.com/
May 15, 2006
Is it even possible these days to define a valid doctrine of political Progressivism? The notion of Progressivism per se really comes from that brief and amazing period in the early 20th century when technological advance was lifting so many out of misery that social justice actually began to seem a plausible political goal rather than an idealist fantasy, and social reformers raced to catch up with the advances of telephones, motorcars, and sanitary engineering.
Progressivism also may have been fatally tied to the accompanying reality of robust industrial economic growth, which itself was tied to abundant new energy resources, mainly oil. The belief that more of everything would become available raised the moral issue of allocating it fairly. Since we now face declining energy resources, and perhaps long-range economic contraction, we would appear to also now face the awful task of allocating less of everything -- which may be as impossible in practice as it sounds.
So the question now might be: what kind of economic justice is possible?
The group that used to composed the broad American middle class of industrial workers and managers is disintegrating economically. What will concern them in the years just ahead will be their ability to barely hang on to what they've got, including the roofs over their heads and their health. They will be in no mood for a political movement that is preoccupied with pseudo-psychotherapeutic exercises in self-esteem building along racial and gender lines.
Allocating scarcity will probably be impossible on the grand scale, which is the federal level. The Republicans have succeeded in recent year by enabling the allocation of false wealth, credit, but their ability to continue that will come to an end with the housing bubble implosion, which will destroy the presumed value of the main asset all that credit has gone into: suburban houses. When that happens, there will be nothing to allocate but grievance.
True Progressivism sought justice in human affairs, that is, in socio-economic relations that people had some control over. What can we hope to control now? Not the price of oil in worldwide markets.
The entire thrust of American life the past forty years has been toward the privatization of public goods. That is why suburbia will turn out to be such a fiasco -- because the public realm, and everything in it, was impoverished, turned into a universal automobile slum, while the private realm of the house and the car was exalted. The private goods of suburbia will now have to be liquidated and we will be left with little more than parking lots and freeways too expensive to use.
A true Progressivism of the years ahead has to begin by concerning itself with a redefinition of what our public goods really are -- and in practical, not abstract terms. That's why I harp on the project of restoring the railroad system. Not only will it benefit all classes of Americans in terms of sheer getting around, but it would put tens of thousands of people to work at something with real value. It would also begin the process of healing public space ravaged by cars for almost a hundred years.
A true Progressivism would concern itself with the comprehensive reform of all land use laws, policies, codes, and tax incentives that promote more new car-dependent suburban development. A new Progressivism would put dwindling public monies into the re-activation of our harbors and shipping infrastructure. We're going to need it. It would direct remaining agricultural subsidies into explictly organic, local farming enterprises, not to the Archer Daniel Midland corporation. It would revive the legal practice of restricting monopolies in business. It has to lead us in the direction of making other arrangements for how we live.
The obvious problem, of course, is that the American public doesn't want to make other arrangements. It wants desperately to hold onto the old arrangements. The nation is stuck with its enormous investments in car-dependency, and what has remained of our economy lately is devoted to creating even more of it -- in the face of signals that we won't be able to run it no matter how much people like it.
Progress isn't what it used to be, and it isn't what it seems. If Americans get what they deserve they may give up on both progress and justice.
One might imagine progressive in the era of the Roman Empire. As brutal as the empire was, it was large an inclusive one, at least given surrender of your wealth into taxes. Citizenship in the Roman Empire represented prestige and freedom, access to wider knowledge of the Greeks, freedom to travel and set your own destiny within the framework allowed, a practical economic engine.
I can't imagine what the slow decline of an empire felt like, and expect our "empire" based on faster access to everything will fall more quickly.
Back in the industrial power days raw human labor in factors offered some access to new wealth to the common workers, and unions expanded that shared wealth. Unions have lost a great amount of power, whatever your judgements on that are. I feel sorry for the pilot's unions and lower workers in the airline industry. In days of contraction, unions can demand whatever they wish, but they just give excuses to "industry" towards needed contraction.
Unions are perhaps the center of the issue of "progress" - that is to mean sharing the wealth of unsustainable exploitation of the environment. Even if I choose to admire Venesuela's loud mouth president and his idealistic socialism via oil wealth, I worry about consequences. I'm elitist enough to believe "easy wealth" is "easily wasted" and a generation or two of sharing oil wealth will breed unsustainable expectations. I'm glad literacy has expanded but I don't trust tha democracy (or even benevolent dictators) can last under easy wealth. I suppose my biggest concern is over population - easy wealth brings easy population gains which will stress the environment BEFORE wealth depletion throws them back into poverty.
The issue of immigration is a very "progressive issue" - letting ever new generations of Americans to lift up the older generations by cheap manual labor, but the "pyramid scheme" must end sometime and I fear when "peak oil" hits, there'll form a permanent underclass in this country who will never get a chance to share in the wealth they helped to create.
Slavery itself is claimed to be undemocratic, but I must imagine the nature of slavery will be stretched and turned as needed to power the next generation of wealth. You don't need slavery to mean "ownership of another person", if the power structures of society are sufficient at keeping those at the bottom in subsistent incomes. Slavery can as well be a claimed meriticracy, where a few are identified and pulled up, and the rest left to rot and care for their own needs.
I don't know what I'm really talking about, but I imagine DEBT can be the most powerful tool of slavery - convince people they OWE something, but don't allow them circumstances to ever escape their debt. This circumstances can be actual limits or just corruption - you like selling $0.05 popcorn for $5.00 at the movie theaters. Smart people MIGHT see how prudence can help people escape, but if people can't control their own urges, they'll dig a hole as fast as they try to rise out of it.
SO I'd probably define DEBT as the new-world-order of "class warfare". The idea for the upper class is to convince the lower class to stay in permanent debt. We can be SURE of this as bankrupsy laws become harsher, and inheritence wealth taxes become reduces so generations can maintain their power.
Myself, I'm lucky to think I can pay off my mortgage in 6 years. When our country started, only land-owners could vote. Perhaps someday voting as well could be restricted to wealthy. That seems easier than playing around with election equipment to maintain power.
Overall I think the future of unions is not to protect benfits for workers, but to help workers cooperate to escape cycles of poverty and debt. It's a "backstep", but seems necessary. Maybe unions are not the tool for this new "progressivism", but what else? Unions are too focused on specific types of labor, while I'm thinking more of organizations that encourage a wide variety of people to work together for common goals in improving their wider community.
Anyway, I liked Kunstler's questions, so I pasted it below.
http://www.kunstler.com/
May 15, 2006
Is it even possible these days to define a valid doctrine of political Progressivism? The notion of Progressivism per se really comes from that brief and amazing period in the early 20th century when technological advance was lifting so many out of misery that social justice actually began to seem a plausible political goal rather than an idealist fantasy, and social reformers raced to catch up with the advances of telephones, motorcars, and sanitary engineering.
Progressivism also may have been fatally tied to the accompanying reality of robust industrial economic growth, which itself was tied to abundant new energy resources, mainly oil. The belief that more of everything would become available raised the moral issue of allocating it fairly. Since we now face declining energy resources, and perhaps long-range economic contraction, we would appear to also now face the awful task of allocating less of everything -- which may be as impossible in practice as it sounds.
So the question now might be: what kind of economic justice is possible?
The group that used to composed the broad American middle class of industrial workers and managers is disintegrating economically. What will concern them in the years just ahead will be their ability to barely hang on to what they've got, including the roofs over their heads and their health. They will be in no mood for a political movement that is preoccupied with pseudo-psychotherapeutic exercises in self-esteem building along racial and gender lines.
Allocating scarcity will probably be impossible on the grand scale, which is the federal level. The Republicans have succeeded in recent year by enabling the allocation of false wealth, credit, but their ability to continue that will come to an end with the housing bubble implosion, which will destroy the presumed value of the main asset all that credit has gone into: suburban houses. When that happens, there will be nothing to allocate but grievance.
True Progressivism sought justice in human affairs, that is, in socio-economic relations that people had some control over. What can we hope to control now? Not the price of oil in worldwide markets.
The entire thrust of American life the past forty years has been toward the privatization of public goods. That is why suburbia will turn out to be such a fiasco -- because the public realm, and everything in it, was impoverished, turned into a universal automobile slum, while the private realm of the house and the car was exalted. The private goods of suburbia will now have to be liquidated and we will be left with little more than parking lots and freeways too expensive to use.
A true Progressivism of the years ahead has to begin by concerning itself with a redefinition of what our public goods really are -- and in practical, not abstract terms. That's why I harp on the project of restoring the railroad system. Not only will it benefit all classes of Americans in terms of sheer getting around, but it would put tens of thousands of people to work at something with real value. It would also begin the process of healing public space ravaged by cars for almost a hundred years.
A true Progressivism would concern itself with the comprehensive reform of all land use laws, policies, codes, and tax incentives that promote more new car-dependent suburban development. A new Progressivism would put dwindling public monies into the re-activation of our harbors and shipping infrastructure. We're going to need it. It would direct remaining agricultural subsidies into explictly organic, local farming enterprises, not to the Archer Daniel Midland corporation. It would revive the legal practice of restricting monopolies in business. It has to lead us in the direction of making other arrangements for how we live.
The obvious problem, of course, is that the American public doesn't want to make other arrangements. It wants desperately to hold onto the old arrangements. The nation is stuck with its enormous investments in car-dependency, and what has remained of our economy lately is devoted to creating even more of it -- in the face of signals that we won't be able to run it no matter how much people like it.
Progress isn't what it used to be, and it isn't what it seems. If Americans get what they deserve they may give up on both progress and justice.
posted by Ares Olympus at 11:47 PM
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