The original draft of the book had the following appendix. We decided not to use it. An abridged version has been published at www.mrzine.org. Do you think I should have included it in the book?
We Meet an Economist
Karen and I were hiking in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the Atalaya Mountain Trail, which begins in the parking lot of St. John’s College. This college, like its sister college in Annapolis, Maryland, is dedicated to a “Great Books” program. Students read and discuss the “great books” of Western Civilization, beginning with the ancient Greeks, while at the same time studying languages and sciences. The goal of the college is to provide an education that seeks “to free men and women from the tyrannies of unexamined opinions and inherited prejudices. It also endeavors to enable them to make intelligent, free choices concerning the ends and means of both public and private life.”
Economics as taught in our colleges and universities and propounded by our pundits and politicians is a good example of a tyranny of “unexamined opinions and inherited prejudices.” Ironically, on our hike we met a man who embodied this tyranny. We had stopped to catch our breath on the steep path. Santa Fe is more than 7,000 feet above sea level, and we had not yet acclimated to the altitude. An older man was hiking with some friends, and when he saw us he said “hello.” We struck up a conversation, and he asked me what I was doing in Santa Fe. I told him that I was a writer and journalist and we were traveling around the United States gathering information for a travel book to be written from the perspective of an economist. He asked us what we had been observing in our travels. We told him that the three things that stood out most were environmental degradation, suburban sprawl, and growing economic inequality.
I could tell by his demeanor that he did not agree with what we were saying. When we finished, he said that he had a different take on things. He thought that almost everything was getting better. He said that he had been born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1934, and the air was better today than then, even though there were two million more people there. People were living longer and were healthier than ever before. What especially impressed him was the remarkable distribution system developed by modern retailers. People could get almost anything they wanted anywhere in the country, quickly and efficiently. “Why,” he said, “almost everyone in the country lives within an hour of a Wal-Mart Supercenter.” After we said that organic food was expensive and hard to get in much of the country, he launched into a long story about his battle against prostate cancer. He said that he had radically altered his diet and was eating natural foods, including organic vegetable juices purchased cheaply at Wal-Mart Supercenters. He suggested that anyone could do the same.
While we were talking, two more of his companions joined us. One of them said, “I see you have met the professor.” My interlocutor also had a PhD in Economics and had also taught in a college for a few years. I thought to myself, “Well, that explains a lot.”
The Dismal Science
Economics is a peculiar discipline. The dominant economic theory is called the “neoclassical” theory; it is the only one taught in all but a handful of graduate schools. It is the one I was taught, and it is the one the economist we met in Santa Fe was taught. It is preached with a zeal and demand for conformity that has led critics to characterize it as a religious cult. Newly-minted PhDs leave school convinced that they have a special knowledge unavailable to the ordinary person, and they devote themselves to giving this knowledge to others.
The main trick used by professors of economics is to draw their pupils into a make-believe world and then convince them that this world is a good approximation to the real world, enough so that the world in which we live can be studied effectively by analyzing the fantasy world. In fact, the professors also claim that this pretend world is a good approximation not just to the world of today but to the world of any time in human existence, so that any society can be studied through its lens. To them the neoclassical theory is as universal and timeless as the theories of Einstein. They see economics as the physics of the social world.
The economists take their analysis one step further. The hypothetical world of their theory is in all important respects an ideal world, the best we could have. Therefore any deviation from it that we observe in the world of existence should, in the interest of human happiness, be eliminated.
It is a curious thing to say that something should change in the living world because it does not conform to a world which does not, and, as we shall see, could never, exist. For example, a minimum wage set by the government interferes with the efficient operation of the ideal world by causing a loss of employment. The neoclassical economists then conclude that we should not have a minimum wage in the actually existing world. Or, the economists conflate the ideal economy of their theory with the real economy, which is capitalism. Since the imaginary economy is good, so too is capitalism. It is no wonder that economics has been compared to religion. To hold such views requires a strong faith.
It is instructive to look carefully at the model economy of economic theory. What the economists do is make a set of restrictive assumptions. They say, “let us assume we have an economy with the following features.” They then list these features and trace out their logical economic consequences.
According to the economists, an economy is defined as a system of markets, that is, as the entire set of actions we call buying and selling. They assume that in every market for goods and services (called product markets) and in every market for labor, land, and capital goods (called factor markets), there are numerous independent and isolated buyers and sellers. They further assume that each of these buyers and sellers is a single-minded “maximizer,” fixated in all of his or her actions on getting the most of something. Sellers of goods and services—business firms, for example—are assumed to be trying to maximize their profits. The business firm is assumed to be the equivalent of an individual; the relationships among people inside the firm are ignored and presumed to have nothing to do with the firm’s behavior. Buyers of goods and services, called consumers, are assumed to be trying to maximize their “utility,” the satisfaction they get from consuming goods and services. If consumers are faced with two collections of good and services with the same price, they will always pick the one that makes them happier. If the two collections give the same happiness, they will always choose the cheaper one.
In the factor markets, the buyers are business firms (the sellers in product markets), and they try to maximize profits by purchasing labor and the other building blocks of production only when these inputs add more to firm revenue than to firm cost. For workers to be hired, in other words, they must be productive enough to justify their pay. It follows that workers will not be hired if they are not productive enough or if they demand too high a wage rate.
The main sellers in factor markets are workers trying to market their ability to work. They supply their labor only if the wage offered by employers is greater than the joy they get from not working. Like consumers, they try to maximize their utility, by dividing their time between work and free time in such a way so that they are happier than if they had divided it any other way.
The economists assume that many thousands of independent and selfish buyers and sellers meet in thousands of market places and try to strike bargains. Each buyer and seller is assumed to be such an insignificant part of any market that no one of them can have any influence on what happens in the market. If one buyer decides to purchase one more unit, this buyer’s actions cannot create a shortage of the product for sale and make its price rise. The same argument holds for all sellers as well.
The end result of the haggling in the marketplaces by all the buyers and sellers is that there is established in each market a “just right” price and a “just right” amount of each good and service produced. This happens because each buyer and seller acts solely in self-interest. If a price is too high, the sellers will lower their prices rather than not sell the product. If the price is too low, buyers will offer higher prices rather than do without something that gives them “utility.” In the end, each price is neither too high nor too low, but “just right.” The amounts supplied are “just right” for similar reasons. If too much is supplied, the price will fall and less will be supplied by profit-seeking firms. If too little is supplied, the price will rise and more will be supplied.
The markets, then, deliver prices and quantities for all goods and services (and for all factors of production, since the same processes are working there too) that are optimal. No other prices and quantities are “just right.” The “just right” prices and quantities are called “equilibrium” prices and quantities, and these are the ones the markets give us.
The great thing about all this, according to the economists, is that it occurs without any human planning. No conscious human action is needed; the markets work automatically. As one of the gurus of the economists, Adam Smith, put it, it is as if there is an “invisible hand” guiding the selfish actions of the buyers and sellers toward an optimal outcome.
So far, then, the economists have assumed that there are large numbers of buyers and sellers in every market, so many that no individual actor in any market can make anything happen by its own actions. They have also assumed that all buyers and sellers act strictly out of self-interest, always trying to maximize something, whether it be profits or happiness. However, other assumptions are needed for the markets in the economists’ model economy to perform optimally. Each participant in the marketplace must be independent of every other participant. For example, what one firm does must not enter into the profit-maximizing calculations of any other firm in a market. If one company wants to lower its price because there is a glut of the product in the market, it might hesitate to do so if it thinks that its rivals will start a price war if it does.
Every player in every market also must have complete knowledge concerning everything that might influence his or her decisions. It is difficult to make rational decisions or assume that choices are free when market actors lack available information, either because they don’t know it is available or because someone else is monopolizing it.
How does neoclassical economics explain the large and rising inequality, uninspiring jobs, and environmental degradation we saw so much of in our travels? The analysis of the imaginary economy, which is at the heart of the theory, provides the answers. There are two possibilities. An answer might flow directly from the analysis of the ideal economy. Or the world of reality might not conform to that of the ideal one, and this could be the cause of the problem.
Let’s look at inequality. Since in the imaginary world, people are rewarded financially according to their productivity, those with low incomes must be less productive than those with high ones. Or, those who are poor might have stronger desires for leisure than those who earn large incomes. In either case, low wages or poverty are the direct result of choices made by individuals. People might have decided not to do the things that would make them more productive, such as obtain more education and training. Those who choose not to become computer literate cannot expect to a land a high-tech job.
It could also be true that society’s decision-makers—those in government, for example—have, perhaps out of ignorance or an uninformed desire to “do good,” created barriers to the making of better choices. The government might have mandated that employers pay a minimum wage, thus denying employment to anyone not productive enough to justify an employer paying that wage. Or perhaps the government has legislated money transfers to the poor, to help them out of poverty, without realizing that this will encourage them to be lazy, unwilling to work hard when they can get free money.
The theory provides two types of solutions to inequality. First, if some of us cannot improve our productivity because we are too poor to buy more education or training, the government can enact laws and programs that make it easier for us to do so. Low interest loans to students would be a good example. Subsidies to employers who hire and train the less advantaged would be another. Second, if there are currently in place public policies that have the effect of harming those who have low wages or are poor (harming them in the ideal world of the theory, that is), then these should be eliminated. Minimum wage laws and welfare programs would be two good examples.
What about bad jobs? Economists have approached this problem in two ways. It is implied in the theory of the make-believe economy that work is inherently bad. People work only to get the money necessary to buy the things that give them satisfaction or “utility.” Work, itself, give us only dissatisfaction or “disutility”; this is why we must receive a wage to work. So there is no use to complain that jobs don’t use our full human capacities; it is not possible that they could.
This rather biblical notion of work begs a question: why are some jobs so much worse than others? Here the theory must do some fancy footwork. The basic idea is similar to the premise of the movie, Field of Dreams. Build a baseball field in the cornfields of Iowa, and fans will flock to it. If people want better jobs, all they need to do is make themselves available for them. As possible employers see that there are hordes of people ready to do meaningful work, they will note that they can now supply such jobs at wages that will ensure them a good profit. The implication of this analysis is that there are not more good jobs because workers don’t want them. So employers have no incentive to offer them. If it were the case that some workers who want good jobs can’t afford to accept the lower wages that would initially be necessary of employers to supply the better jobs, the government could again offer subsidies to employers.
Thousands of articles have been written by economists on the environment. Much of it revolves around the so-called “tragedy of the commons.” In the make believe economy of the theory, every bit of property—the land, the air, and the seas—is private property. All of the selfish actors in the markets do everything in their power to preserve their property, and as a result the society as a whole benefits. Whenever there is common property, each person suffers no individual cost if he or she uses it up. You won’t litter your yard, but you might toss trash on a public beach or in a park. Only when property is private is there an incentive, for those who own it, to preserve it. Here is one situation in which the real world differs from the ideal world that cries out for an easy solution. The air cannot literally be made into private property, but people can be forced to treat it as if it were. If companies had to pay to pollute the atmosphere, they would either produce a smaller quantity of polluting output (emissions from power plants, for example), or they would find cost-effective ways to reduce pollution. In other words, it is necessary to create market conditions in cases in which previously something could be used without cost. To take another example, consider cars. Auto companies and consumers bear only part of the entire costs of car production and use. Society as a whole bears the costs of auto emissions, acid rain, and so forth. The solution is to privatize the costs society bears, by, for example, taxing gasoline to push the price up and force conservation. And charge high tolls for road use.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to provide a full-scale critique of mainstream economics. However, if neoclassical economics were a science, its practitioners would subject the theory to rigorous tests and reject it if it proved unable to pass these tests. The theory has repeatedly proven itself a poor model of reality, failing test after test: there is no evidence that a higher minimum wage causes a loss of employment; there is no correlation between a worker’s wages and a worker’s productivity; there is no evidence that providing people with needed resources, as in a welfare system, causes them to use their time unproductively; there is no evidence that jobs requiring skills are increasing despite the fact that hundreds of millions of people would like them; there is no evidence that people inevitably destroy property held in common or that making property private guarantees that it will be used in a socially beneficial manner.
Yet the neoclassical theory is taught universally in our colleges and universities, and every economic pundit and economic adviser in government is a believer in the theory. Why is this so? Why could nothing I might have said changed the mind of the economist hiker I met in Santa Fe? I think the reason is that neoclassical economics is a gigantic propaganda device aimed at covering up the power of those with money and convincing the rest of us that whatever bad things are happening are either inevitable or our own fault. You are rich because you are more productive (and hence deserving) than I. Or you are innately more future-oriented than I; you go to school so you will be productive in the future, while I would rather party now and have a menial job later. If things are going to hell in a handbasket, it is because the real world economy has not been structured to be exactly like that of the ideal economy of the theory. It’s my fault, or the government’s fault, or it’s human nature. It is never the fault of the system itself. This provides the best possible cover for the grotesque wealth of the few, the rotten jobs of the many, and the ruination of the environment.
Toward the Truth
They say that the truth will set us free. Well, here is the truth about the economy. The economy Karen and I have been witnessing firsthand is a capitalist economy. In such an economy the society’s productive wealth is owned by a small fraction of the population. This property is protected by the law, which means that is protected by police force, that is by the state’s use of violence. The vast majority of people own no or very little productive property and must depend on the few owners for their daily bread. This dependence takes the form of offering their ability to work to the owners in exchange for a wage. However, this exchange is not and cannot be one between equals; the party owning what the other party needs has a built-in advantage. Employers use their superior bargaining position to “negotiate” a wage and conditions of employment that guarantee them the ability to extract from workers an amount of labor sufficient not only to pay the workers’ wages and replace the capital used up in production but also to generate a surplus above costs. That is, workers are forced by the fact that they own nothing to work a number of hours greater than those that would pay their wages and the capital costs, and they must give up the output produced during these “surplus” hours to their employer. The employer owns all of the output, simply because the employer owns the business.
The surplus hours workers are compelled to labor are the source of the employers’ profits. If the workers had controlled production, they may have chosen to supply surplus hours (to generate funds necessary for the business’s expansion, for example), but the decision would have been theirs and not someone else’s. In capitalism, the owners own the output, and therefore they own the profits that come from the surplus labor. These profits are extracted from workers whether they like it or not.
Profits are the motor force of capitalist economies. Each business establishment is in a dog-eat-dog competition with other businesses—locally, nationally, and today, internationally. This competition dictates to the owners of each business that they must use the profits to make the business grow. A company that doesn’t get as much profit as possible from the labor of its workers and use this profit to grow is one that will not survive the relentless competition. A company that does not survive is one that does not confer on its owners all the perquisites of success in capitalism: consumer goods, status, and political power. Owners will do just about anything to ensure the survival and growth of their companies.
To extract profits and grow, corporate owners must try to put downward pressure on wages, to prevent them from growing at a pace that would eat into the surplus labor time. They are helped in this by their considerable political power; they can pressure the government, often successfully, to pass laws and utilize its police power to prevent or make it hard for workers to organize to push their wages up and improve their conditions of employment. They are also aided by the strong tendency of capitalist economies to create large reserves of surplus labor, a “reserve army of the unemployed.” This reserve is produced by the removal of people from farming (often by force), by the continual mechanization of production, by employer use of labor-saving and de-skilling techniques (see below), by shifting production around the world, and by the tendency of capitalist economies to sink into periodic recessions and depressions. Unemployed labor (including full-time homemakers and prisoners) is available to replace employed workers or at least keep them from demanding too much money, shorter hours, or better working conditions. The education system guarantees that nearly everyone in the reserve army has the capacity to do a variety of jobs.
Since profits are what make capitalist economies tick and since profits come from surplus labor, it behooves employers to exert maximum control over workers. This is done primarily by structuring workplaces in such a way that workers have as little opportunity to interfere with production as possible. What workers do at work—how they do their jobs, at what pace, and with what intensity—is called the labor process. Employers must control this if they are to make money. Control is the essence of capitalist management.
A grasp of just two concepts is necessary for anyone to understand modern work. The first is the Babbage Principle, and the second is Taylorism. The inventor and manufacturer Charles Babbage showed that an employer intent on making money must organize work so that the amount of skilled labor used on any job is minimized. If a job requires both skilled and unskilled work, don’t allow the skilled worker to do the unskilled parts. Skilled labor is expensive; unskilled is not. A skilled metal smith might go through several steps to make a large batch of tin funnels: making a template, tracing the design on sheets of metal, cutting out the funnel shapes, bending the metal shapes, connecting the ends, and finishing and polishing the funnels. Babbage taught employers to use unskilled laborers to repetitively perform just one of the last five steps, or “details,” of the task of funnel-making. Use cheap labor to replace expensive labor wherever possible. The Babbage Principle is a fundamental technique of capitalist management; few jobs are immune to it.
Taylorism is the name given to the management theory developed by Frederick W. Taylor. Taylor, the son of well-to-do Philadelphia Quakers, was sent to work by his father in a machine shop following an emotional collapse. There he was able to capitalize on his obsessive-compulsive personality in a war against the skilled machinists. After he learned the machinists’ trade, he was made foreman and began a lifelong campaign to find and enforce the “one best way” to do the work. Taylor became the founder and chief agitator for “scientific management.” Despite its high-sounding name, scientific management aims to systematize the Babbage Principle by placing all control over work processes in the hands of the employer. First, management, through the employment if industrial engineers, studies in minute detail what each worker does. Jobs are broken down into their fundamental motions. Then management writes a detailed description of each job’s motions, reorganizing them to minimize the time it takes to do each one. The employer next orders each worker to do the work exactly as the engineers say it should be done, using the Babbage Principle whenever possible. By systematic study of work and a willingness to fire recalcitrant workers, Taylor said that management could gain a monopoly of work knowledge and use this to control the entire work process. Taylor taught, and employers were apt pupils. Profits ultimately depend upon the ability of employers to control their workers. Skilled workers are difficult to control, so their skills must be destroyed.
To the capitalist mind, all objects are thought of in terms of their money cost. All things are commodities, to be bought and sold. Whatever else things might be is irrelevant in terms of what is most important to the system, namely the accumulation of capital, the extraction of maximum profits from labor and the use of these profits to achieve maximum growth of capital. We have just seen that our capacity to work is a commodity, bought at the lowest price possible and controlled and exploited to the maximum extent possible. However, there are other inputs that must be purchased beside labor. And these inputs as well as the commodities needed by workers for their survival (food, clothing, shelter) are either an intrinsic part of the natural world or produced in conjunction with it. Coal and iron must be removed from the earth before they can be used to produce steel. Ground must be planted before food can be produced; trees must be cut down or cleared before houses can be built. What is more, all production alters the natural world. The energy produced at a power plant throws all sorts of substances into the atmosphere. Some crops may deplete the soil of its nutrients. The production and use of some products can even alter climates.
All production affects nature, and economic systems prior to capitalism damaged the environment. However, two features of capitalism radically distinguish it from all previous political economies. First, capitalism produces goods and services on a scale unimaginable even four hundred years ago. Even if employers tried their best not to harm nature, their collective size would make the task a daunting one. But there is a second unique feature of capitalism. Everything is viewed through a calculus of private cost. Or to put it in more academic language, capitalism tends to commodify everything, to turn every object into something for sale. Nothing else matters except that resources be available when needed and at a low price. Lumber companies want trees no matter what other functions these trees might serve or that they might be beautiful objects for us to contemplate. If companies can get away with dumping wastes into our rivers and oceans or into the air, they will do this, figuring that if they do not some rival might. Dangerous products will be foisted on the public, even if the harm they might do is known by the producing company, as long as the monetary gain from doing so is greater than any cost arising from lawsuits or other consumer actions. The political power that modern giant corporations wield insulates them from severe governmental regulation or legal penalties.
The Proof is in the Pudding
If what I have said about capitalism is true, what would we expect to see with respect to inequality, jobs, and the environment? With a small group of people owning and having near absolute control over the entire society’s productive resources, it is inevitable that there will be large income inequalities. Productive property (land, buildings, machinery, factories, and the like) is inherently unequally distributed. Since this property generates income (rents, interest, and profits), these will be unevenly divided as well. Unless workers are organized, the very nature of the system confers so much economic and political power on the owners that they are able to leverage their initial economic advantages and make them grow larger. There will be significant impediments to the organization of workers, including the reserve army of labor, so under typical conditions, capitalist economies will exhibit large and often growing inequalities of wealth and income. These will translate into many related inequalities, including housing.
What about jobs? Today the Babbage Principle and Taylorism are built into every workplace and are so common that they are taken for granted. Almost no jobs are immune to them; they might be so for awhile but not over the long haul. This means that there will be few good jobs available in a capitalist society (again, the organization of workers can, again at least temporarily, offer workers some hope here). Among all the animals, human beings are unique in their ability to transform the world around them by their labor. This ability, in turn, hinges on the human capability to conceptualize what they do before doing it. We can think about our work, plan it out beforehand. This gives us enjoyment as well as lots of output to consume. Unfortunately, capitalism blocks us from taking advantage of our innate human capacities.
There is no reason to expect that capitalism will encourage wise social use of the environment. Quite the contrary, if the natural world is seen merely as a set of exploitable commodities, we would expect to see a short-term profit orientation that views resources, and human beings, as expendable.
The evidence in support of my analysis of capitalism is overwhelming. Just consider the following facts:
1. 2.8 billion people, about one-half the world’s population, survive on less than two dollars per day, and 1.2 billion on less than one dollar per day. Even supposing that some of these people get some goods and services outside of the money economy and that prices for some foodstuffs and other necessities are very low, these are appalling numbers.
2. The richest fifth of the world’s people consume 86 percent of all products, while the poorest fifth purchases 1.3 percent— everything from meat to paper and automobiles.
3. The three richest persons in the world have assets greater than the combined GDPs of the 48 poorest nations (note that this is a comparison of wealth to income). So, if the three richest persons sold their assets, they could buy the total output of these 48 countries.
4. If the poorest 47 percent of the world’s people (about 2.5 billion persons) pooled their yearly incomes, they could just purchase the assets of the world’s wealthiest 225 individuals.
5. The richest 1 percent of people in the world get as much income as the poorest 57 percent. The richest 5 percent had in 1993 an average income 114 times greater than that of the poorest 5 percent, rising from 78 times in 1988. The poorest 5 percent grew poorer, losing 25 percent of their real income, while the richest 20 percent saw their real incomes grow by 12 percent, more than twice as high as average world income.
6. If we look just at the United States, we see similar results. The rich are asset heavy, especially with respect to financial assets (those which yield income), and debt poor, while the opposite is true for those with the lowest incomes. In 2001, the richest 1 percent of households owned 44.8 percent of all common stock (excluding stock owned through pensions); the poorest 80 percent owned 5.8 percent. This suggests that the poorest 10 or 20 own a minuscule share of stock. Even including stocks held through various pension arrangements, in 2001, those households with yearly incomes less than $15,000 held 1.1 percent of all stocks, while those with annual incomes equal to or grater than $250,000 owned 40.6 percent of all stock. Debt, on the other hand, bears down most heavily on the poor. In 2001, debt service payments made up 40 percent or more of yearly household income for 27 percent of those households with less than $20,000 in income. For households with yearly income between $90,000 and 100,000, the percentage was 2 percent. Thirteen percent of the former group were sixty days or more late paying their bills; for the latter group the rate was 1.3 percent.
For at least the past thirty years, the distributions of wealth and income have become more unequal, nearly everywhere in the world.
The evidence on jobs is just as devastating as that on inequality. While economists and pundits babble on about all the good jobs that high tech is bringing, the truth is that most new jobs created don’t have much cachet. As I said in another venue,
Nearly 30 million persons labor as teaching assistants, food preparers and servers, counter attendants, cashiers, counter and rental clerks, bookkeepers, customer service reps, stock clerks and order fillers, secretaries, general office clerks, assemblers, sorters, helpers, truck drivers, packers and packagers, and laborers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the ten occupations with the largest job growth between 2000 and 2010 will be food preparation and service workers, customer service representatives, registered nurses, retail salespersons, computer support specialists, cashiers, general office clerks, security guards, computer software engineers, and waiters and waitresses. Of these, nurses and software engineers are the only obviously “good” jobs, and even these are rapidly being rationalized or outsourced by cost-conscious managers.
Today high-tech and low-tech jobs alike are shifted around the world by firms competing in the global marketplace, and this is going to continue into the indefinite future. As is the operation of the Babbage principle and Taylorism. And if you think most jobs in the United States leave a lot to be desired, then take a look at the world’s poor countries: hundreds of thousands of young sex workers, camel jockeys, child factory laborers, adult sweatshop workers, and house servants. It is enough to say that in India, call center work is seen as a desirable job, and the call centers are filled with college graduates. There are more than 150 million persons openly unemployed in the world.
Although there have been strong movements determined to clean up the world, they have not been very successful, given how much we now know about the impact of modern capitalist production on the environment. Poisoned food, power plant smog even in remote places like Big Bend National Park, scores of “Superfund” sites still mired in waste and filth and with no money in sight to restore them, global warming, mass extinction of species, cities so polluted that people have to stay indoors or wear masks, forests clear-cut of trees, the list goes on. It may be true that mother earth has an amazing capacity to restore herself, but it is a fair bet to think we not have enough time left for her to do it before we are all of us dead or too sick to care.
The Future
If we don’t change our ways, the future looks bleak. I shudder to think what my great grandchildren will see if they make the voyage of national discovery we made. One gigantic urban-suburban-exurban mess of traffic jams, strip malls, and concrete, marked by a bunker mentality and reality of the few versus the many (gated and guarded enclaves for the rich and hideous mass housing and prisons for the rest of us), all of us fearful of ever more devastating “natural” disasters. Don’t laugh, these things are already here; we’re not that far away from apocalypse.
The good news is that human beings are a resourceful species. If the many organized against the few and took things into our own hands, we could reinvent the world. There is no compelling reason why there couldn’t be far greater equality, work worthy of human beings, and harmony between us and the natural world. I don’t have any grand plan for change, but, at a minimum, I offer the following:
— We have to bring capitalism to an end. The system has outlived whatever historical necessity it might have had. There is simply no way that capitalism can solve the problems we saw everywhere in the country, much less solve these problems around the world, where they are many times more severe. One critic of capitalism put it this way: socialism or barbarism. We are well down the road toward barbarism.
— If we reject capitalism, what should we replace it with. In the end, we will determine this in the context of our struggles to end a barbarous system and give birth to a new one. However, some things will be essential.
– First, we will have to end the growth for growth’s sake mentality dominating our own society. There is no need for output to grow willy-nilly without any sense of what production is appropriate and how the output is distributed. To limit growth, however, will require some national (and eventually international) planning. There is no reason why a national dialogue could not take place on priorities and needs and methods discovered for the implementation of what such dialogues conclude is required to be done. There is no reason why, especially given modern computer technology, that planning cannot be done democratically.
– Second, much planning and decision-making can and should be done on as local a level as possible. If the Mormons in the West could plan their towns and their agriculture to meet local human needs, there is no reason why all towns cannot do this. What purpose does urban-suburban-exurban sprawl serve? Shouldn’t it be eliminated as quickly as possible? Shouldn’t our living spaces encourage as much walking as possible? Shouldn’t we have reliable and fast public transportation? Shouldn’t we have good, efficient, and reasonably-sized housing for all? Why should homelessness and substandard housing coexist with 20,000 square feet mansions?
– Third, our agriculture will have to be radically revamped, to end the sharp split between town and country evident around the world. Smaller-scale, locally-oriented, environmentally-sound, gardens-everywhere agriculture needs to replace, as much as possible, the large-scale, corporate farming that now dominates world agriculture. Consider that Cuba, despite terrible economic hardship caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union upon which it depended, achieved food independence in less than a generation after this collapse, and did so without super- mechanized and chemically-dependent agriculture.
– Fourth, workers and communities must jointly manage as many of our workplaces as possible. Every worker should be trained to understand production and to manage complex modern technology. As much dangerous and menial work as possible should be mechanized out of existence, and that which remains should be shared out as much as possible. Alienating mass production assembly line-like work should be eliminated wherever possible, and production by coordinated work teams should be used instead. Swedish auto workers proved that this can be done.
– Fifth, our education system should be completely scrapped and replaced with one in which the problems of inequality, work, and environment are made the center of study and in which the arts, both in terms of art as traditionally conceived and the mechanical arts, are taught to every student, not just in special subjects but integrated into all studies.
To those who say that such ideas are utopian and incapable of realization, I say this. Look around you. Isn’t it truly utopian to believe that we can continue along the path we have been traveling for so long now and with such shameful and deadly results?
One of the themes of Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate is work. More specifically the theme is dead-end work, how there is so much of this in the United States. Work has always been something that has interested me; I taught about, and for years I scrutinized my own labor. Now for a few months, I once again have a regular job, teaching in the Labor Studies Department at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Teaching a large undergraduate class has brought back memories of my thirty-two years of doing this at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. Memories by no means mainly positive. I was asked by a colleague in the department to give a public lecture, which I will do next week. I decided to speak about work and the lack of it) in our economic system. I have titled it “The Injuries of Class.” It parallels and explores more deeply some of the material in the first two chapters of the book. Here it is:
The Injuries of Class
We live in a complex, multiply-divided society. We are divided by wealth, by income, by education, by housing, by race, gender, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation. These divisions are much discussed; in the last two years, there have been entire series in our major newspapers devoted to the growing income divide. Even the wealth-flaunting of today’s rich was the subject of a recent Sunday New York Times Magazine.
What isn’t much talked or written about is what to me is our most fundamental division, one at the center of our economic system, namely the division of our society into a very large class of working men, women, and children—the working class—and a much smaller class of owners—the capitalist class—that employs the former. These two great classes make the world go round, so to speak.
Workers and owners are fundamentally connected and fundamentally antagonistic:
—It is through the labor of the working class that the goods and services necessary for our survival are produced.
—It is through the ownership of society’s productive wealth (land, machines, factories, etc.) that the owning class is able to compel that this labor be done. Workers must sell their capacity to work in order to gain access to this productive wealth, since no one can live without access to it.
—From the perspective of society’s reproduction” then, the relationship between labor and capital is fundamental, essential. Even our ability to physically reproduce presupposes the successful sale of labor power. Without the money from such a sale, there is nothing.
—The essence of production in capitalism is the ceaseless accumulation of capital, the making of profits and the use of such profits to increase the capital at the owners’ disposal. Competition among capitals both drives accumulation and is driven by it, in a relentless dance.
—But to accumulate capital, employers must make sure that workers cannot usurp the entire output they produce. This means that employers must strive for maximum control of the entire apparatus of production and any and all social forces and institutions that might in any way interfere with this control (for example, the state, the schools, the media). At all costs, workers must be prevented from getting the idea that they have any rights to the output they produce.
Whatever employers do, at individual workplaces and in the society as a whole, can and does have negative effects on working people. I want to talk about some of these. However, before I do, I want to point out that the whole process of accumulation, the extraction of a surplus from the labor of the workers, is, especially in the United States, hidden from view, so that workers don’t know or are confused about what is happening to them. This is the result mainly of
–the public school system and the tireless promotion of individualism and nationalism at its core.
–endless war, which magnifies and deepens nationalism and promotes both racism and male chauvinism.
–imperialism, which does the same thing as war and is, fo course, the root cause of it.
–constant propaganda by the media, think tanks, politicians, and business leaders to deny the existence of the two classes and the antagonism between them. An important element of this misinformation campaign is the mythology surrounding the “free market” economy.
–When these fail, which is most likely to happen before they have become deeply entrenched in the social fabric, naked violence serves to both suppress class consciousness and sow seeds of doubt among workers that they are finally seeing things clearly.
With all of what I have said so far in mind, let me now talk about the “injuries of class.” Consider first unemployment. The separation of workers from productive wealth creates the possibility that workers will be unemployed, that is, unable to find a buyer for his or her labor power. In addition, we know from studying the history of capitalist economies that it is not uncommon for them to periodically sink into recession or depression. Such crises are part of the nature of the system. In such circumstances, unemployment rises dramatically. Furthermore, capital is always searching the heavens for sunny skies (higher profits), and if it finds them somewhere else than where it is currently situated, it shuts down one operation and opens another. Plant contractions and closings will therefore be regular occurrences. What these things mean for working people is a pervasive sense of fear and insecurity that even what seems to be the most stable employment will “melt into air.” Fear and insecurity not uncommonly produce two responses: a kind of joyless penury (use example of my mother) or a present-orientation that is often self-destructive (debt, drinking, etc.). Here is something I wrote in a recent essay, referring to the workers in the mining town in which I was born:
What values did I assimilate from the mining town? This is a complicated question. The working- class solidarity always shown by underground miners seeped into my consciousness as did the ethnic clannishness of the Italian immigrants. This meant a certain distrust of anyone with money and authority and anyone outside the community. But these incipient seeds of class consciousness were counteracted by other more troubling feelings. Mining towns in the United States were typically owned by the mining companies, and the companies exerted a near totalitarian control over the residents. They owned the houses, the only store (the infamous “company store”), all utilities, the schools, the library, everything. They had their own private police—the Coal and Iron Police in Pennsylvania—, sanctioned by state law. The climate in such a town is one of perpetual insecurity and fear, emotions compounded by the danger of the work in the mines. While such authoritarian rule generates anger and hate, it also gives rise to feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness. Misery is one’s lot in life. There must be something wrong with us. Those in power must have special abilities and powers we don’t have. We deserve our fate. Organized religion contributes to this sense of helplessness and shifts attention away from material conditions and toward God and the afterlife.
Poverty and social isolation added fuel to the fire of fear. People lacked self-confidence and had deep-seated feelings of inferiority. When kids from the village went to the high school in the factory town three miles upriver, they faced a mocking condescension. They had the wrong clothes. They were greasy “dagos.” They were “dumb coal miners.” Some, like one of my cousins, reacted with anger; he hung a teacher from a third- floor window for calling him a dumb coal miner. But others took it to heart and were scarred forever.
It is difficult to overstate the power of fear and poverty in shaping how working men and women think and act. Fear of losing a job. Fear of not finding a job. Fear of being late with bill payments. Fear of the boss’s wrath. Fear your house might burn down. Fear your kids will get hurt. I inherited these emotions. I have a Ph.D. and have always had a job that brings forth instant respect from others. Yet I have a deep-seated lack of confidence and anxiety in the face of authority. I can confront the powerful in a group, even if I am a leader of it, but as an individual, I hate any kind of confrontation with authority and always wonder if I have the right to confront. I prefer to remain in the background, to be invisible.
Should a person face an extended bout of unemployment or a plant closing, the potential injuries of class are many, as research by Harvey Brenner and others has demonstrated: suicide, homicide, heart attack, hypertension, cirrhosis of the liver, arrest, imprisonment, mental illness. [The owning class are almost always better situated to withstand the storms of economic crisis or even unemployment, so these are injuries that the system does not inflict on them. Recently Michael Gates Gill, a wealthy former advertising executive who lost his job, was featured in the New York Times in connection with his book, How Starbucks Saved My Life: a Son of Privilege Learns to Live Like Everyone Else. Gates gets a job in a Starbucks, and in it he learns about ordinary people. By most accounts the book is not very good. But Gates had connections, and not only managed to get it published by a trade press (Gotham/Penguin) but reviewed in our premier newspaper. The chances of this happening “everyone else” is as close to zero as you can get. The stories of their job losses are written in the litany of woes just enumerated.]
Workers comprise the subordinate class. They are normally in the position of having to react to decisions made by others. They are dependent upon employers, and they are at same time fearful of them since employers hold the power to deny to workers the life-sustaining connection to the means of production. Dependence, fear, and insecurity—in a system where workers are bombarded with the message that they and they alone make the decisions that determine their circumstances—make for a toxic brew, which when drunk often enough, creates
a personality lacking in self-confidence, afraid to take chances, easily manipulated and shamed. [of course, on the bright side, these injuries have given rise to a massive “self-help” industry.]
The very subordination of workers, combined with the market mechanism that ratifies and reinforces it, means that capitalist societies will display ineradicable inequalities in variables of great importance: wealth, income, schooling, healthcare, housing, childcare, and so forth. What is more, the market will, absent powerful countervailing forces, not only reproduce inequalities but deepen them as well, as we have seen so clearly in the United States over the past thirty years. This inequality itself generates its own class injuries: In my book, Naming the System, I cite a study of the impact of inequality, other things equal:
In a study done comparing states within the United States, it was discovered that, all else equal, the greater the inequality of income in a state (as measured by the share of income going to the poorest 50 percent of households in each state), the higher the mortality rate. In a summary of this research, Peter Montague writes,
This measure of inequality was also tested against other social conditions besides health. States with greater inequality in the distribution of income also had higher rates of unemployment, higher rates of incarceration, a higher percentage of people receiving income assistance and food stamps, and a greater percentage of people without medical insurance. Again, the gap between rich and poor was the best predictor, not the average income in the state.
Interestingly, states with greater inequality of income distribution also spent less per person on education, had fewer books per person in the schools, and had poorer educational performance, including worse reading skills, worse math skills and lower rates of completion of high school.
States with greater inequality of income also had a greater proportion of babies born with low birth weight; higher rates of homicide; higher rates of violent crime; a greater proportion of the population unable to work because of disabilities; a higher proportion of the population using tobacco; and a higher proportion of the population being sedentary (inactive).
It appears that the psychological damage done to poor people as the contemplate the gap between themselves and those at the top of the income distribution has an independent effect on a wide variety of individual and social health outcomes.
Everything we know about the correlation between health and other social indicators and income (a decent though not perfect proxy for class) tells us that working people will suffer most of these injuries.
You may have heard it said that “the only thing worse than having a job is not having one.” This is true, but what does it say about work? Work in capitalism is a traumatic affair. We all have the capacity to conceptualize what we do before we do it. This capability, when applied to work, has allowed human beings to transform the world round them in profound ways: to invent tools and machines and to socially divide our labor so that the riches of the earth can be unlocked and a cornucopia of output be produced. As we have done these things, we have also transformed ourselves, becoming ever more conscious of causes and effects and better able to understand the world. Put another way, our capacity to think and to do makes us human. It is integral to our being.
In capitalism, which because it divorces the masses of people from direct connection to the means of production and therefore allows owners to claim no responsibility for workers can be considered the perfection of class society, this human mastery of the physical world is reserved for only a few. The capacity to think and to do implies control, and control by workers cannot be contemplated by capitalists. In fact, the essence of management in capitalism is the monopolization of control by the owners, control especially of the labor process—the work—and its denial to the workers.
We don’t have time today to discuss all the various “control tactics” used by employers: the herding of workers into factories, the detailed division of labor, mechanization, Taylorism, personnel management, lean production—all of which deny to workers their humanity, their capacity to conceptualize and carry out their plans, to actually “own’ what they make. However, let us look at a sampling of jobs in modern America:
Auto workers
: There are about 1.1 million of these. Not only are they facing rapidly rising insecurity, they are also faced every day with a work regimen so Taylorized that they must work fifty-seven of every sixty seconds. What must this be like? What does it do to mind and body? In this connection, it is instructive to read Ben Hamper’s Rivethead, a startling account of working in auto plants. Hamper worked in an old plant. He eventually got a job in a new, “lean production” facility. He called it a “gulag.” In her book, On the Line at Subaru-Isuzu, sociologist Laurie Graham, tells us about here work routine in one of these gulags. I have skipped a lot of the steps, because I just want to give readers an idea of the work. Remember as you read it that the line is relentlessly moving while she is working:1. Go to the car and take the token card off a wire on the front of the car.
2. Pick up the 2 VIN (vehicle identification number) plates from the embosser and check the plates to see that they have the same number.
3. Insert the token card into the token card reader.
4. While waiting for the computer output, break down the key kit for the car by pulling the 3 lock cylinders and the lock code from the bag.
5. Copy the vehicle control number and color number onto the appearance check sheet.
8. Lift the hood and put the hod jig in place so it will hold the hood open while installing the hood stay.
22. Rivet the large VIN plate to the left-hand center pillar.
23. Begin with step one on the next car.
This work is so intense that it is not possible to steal a break much less learn your work mate’s job so that you can double-up and rest while she does both jobs.
What is true for auto workers is true for all who do this type of labor—whether it be in beef processing plants or chicken disassembly lines.
Clerks:
There are about 15,000,000 clerks in the United States. Many years ago I was on a television show with former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich. In response to my claim that a lot of the jobs being created were not all that desirable, he said that there were a lot of good jobs available, ones in which workers had a real say about their jobs (no doubt referring to the “quality circles” so popular then). One such job was that of “clerk.” I blurted out in a loud and incredulous voice, CLERKS! I suggested that perhaps Mr. Reich had never noticed the splints on the writs of many clerks, signs of epidemic carpal tunnel syndrome. Since that time, I have actually worked as a clerk, at the Lake Hotel in Yellowstone National Park. I describe the experience and what I learned in my book Cheap Motels and Hot Plate: an Economist’s Travelogue. Clerks work long hours; they are on their feet all day; they take regular abuse from customers; they are exposed in full view of supervisors with no place to hide; they are accorded no respect (cell phones in grocery lines); their pay is low; their benefits negligible. After a hard day at the front desk, I only wanted a few drinks and a warm bed. The stress level was extraordinary.Restaurant workers
: There are 11,000,000 of these, growing in number every year. Next to personal care and service workers, those that prepare and serve our food are most likely to experience “a major depressive episode.” Restaurant workers in Manhattan’s Chinatown log as many as 100 hours a week, for less than minimum wage. The pace of the work, the pressure of it are unbelievable. Check out the arms and legs of a kitchen worker. They are full of cuts and burns. Alcohol and drug abuse are rampant.Secretaries, Administrative Assistants, and Office Support:
These are 23,000,000 strong. Poorly paid, many in sick buildings, stuck in poorly designed chairs, staring at computer screens for hours, taking orders all day long, (usually women from men), often heavily Taylorized, these workers, satirized so skillfully on the television series The Office, have to contend with daily degradations, including all too prevalent sexual harassment.Security workers
: Three million men and women watching over others, in prisons, in malls, in gated communities, in Iraq, on our city streets. This is a type of work guaranteed to be stressful and to generate an extremely jaundiced and pejorative view of the rest of society. Not to mention an extreme, macho personality, prone to violence.Custodial workers:
There are 4,000,000 building and grounds workers, many of them immigrants, keeping our buildings clean and the grounds swept and manicured. Often they are hired by contractors who are themselves employed by the buildings’ owners. It has taken monumental efforts by the SEIU to organize some of these exploited workers, who must often labor in close proximity to dangerous cleaning fluids, solvents, and chemical fertilizers.Medical workers:
There are more than 13,000,000 people laboring in our hospitals, urgi-care centers, and nursing homes, as well as in individual residences. With the exception of those at the top, including healthcare administrators and most of the physicians, this is a minefield of poor working conditions. Even nursing has been degraded and deskilled so much that the nursing shortage could be nearly filled simply by the return of disaffected nurses to their profession. At the request of the California Nurses Association, I spoke this summer to nurses in four Texas cities. I heard many tales of woe: sixteen hour days, two weeks straight of twelve-hour days, insane patient loads, constant cost-cutting that damages patient health, demeaning treatment by administrators, etc. Conditions only worsen as we go down the healthcare occupation ladder.Work takes its toll on mind and body. It saps our creativity, bores us to death, makes us anxious, encourages us to be manipulative, alienates us in multiple ways (from coworkers, from products, from ourselves), makes us party to the production of debased and dangerous products, subjects us to arbitrary authority, makes us sick, injures us. I remember my dad saying, when emphysema (the result of too many cigarettes, too much asbestos, and too much silica dust) had sapped his health that he hadn’t expected retirement to be like this. He and how many hundreds of million others? It is not the CEO who suffers depression, hypertension, and heart attacks from being too long on the job; it is instead the assembly line worker, the secretary, the kitchen laborer. Those who can’t control their work hurt the most. And with all of these injuries of class, I haven’t even touched upon the compound misery endured by black workers, by Hispanic workers, by women workers, by gay workers, by workers without the proper national documents. It is no wonder that people don’t need much convincing to believe that happiness lies not in the workplace but in the shopping mall.
The daily debasement heaped upon working men and women breeds anger and rage. Often rage is turned inward and shows itself as depression, addiction, or suicide. Frequently it is directed against children, spouses, lovers, or against some great mass of “others,” like immigrants, women, radical minorities, or gay persons. But sometimes it is correctly aimed at the class enemy and takes the form of riots, sabotage, strikes, demonstrations, even revolution. And then the creativity bound and gagged for so long bursts forth as people try to take control of their labor and their lives. This is what I think of as the “miracle of class struggle.”
I am not going to end by talking at length about how important it is to keep the struggles of the past fresh in the present, how it is necessary to educate the working class, of how it is essential to build a working class movement and not jsut to organize workers into unions, about how there are any number of hopeful signs that such a movement can be built, of why we must always fan the flames of dissent and revolution. You’ve heard all this before.
Instead I am going to say something different. The injuries of class are deep and long lasting. The poor education that is the lot of most working class children leaves lasting scars that won’t be healed by a picket line. The love lost when the factory-working father spent too much time in bars doesn’t come back after a demonstration. I have been a radical, highly educated and articulate, but the fears and anxieties of my working class parents are like indelible tattoos on my psyche. The dullness of mind and weariness of body produced by assembly line, store, and office don’t go away after the union comes to town. The prisoner might be freed but the horror of the prison cell lives on.
Wilhelm Reich, the German psychoanalyst, was kicked out of the psychoanalytic society because he was a communist. Fair enough. But he was also expelled from the communist party because he was a therapist who believed that the minds of working people, ravaged by the injuries of class, would have to be healed. It would take real effort to help workers regain their humanity. I think Reich was right. We ignore the injuries of class at our peril.
{Note: This first appeared in Counterpunch at http://www.counterpunch.org/yates10102007.html. It is based upon a story in the book.]
Alan Greenspan’s new memoir has put his tenure as Federal Reserve chairman on the hot seat, as critics ask whether he bears responsibility for the housing bubble and for his failure to vocally reject the Bush tax cuts. Missing from this criticism is an understanding of what the Federal Reserve System is about. The real job of Mr. Greenspan and his predecessors and successors is to protect the country’s creditors and in the process extend and solidify the ownership and control a tiny minority of extremely rich persons have over profit-generating property. By extension this means that the monetary authorities aim to diminish and weaken the political strength of working people, who through their collective actions have provided the only real counterweight to the power of the wealthy.
Consider the housing bubble and the very low interest rates that brought it about. In our travels my wife Karen and I met a wealthy and prominent man in a Midwestern city. He was a successful professional, and he has used his considerable earnings to buy real estate. During the past few years, his holdings have risen dramatically. Today he is perhaps the largest real estate owner in town.
It occurred to me that a key to this man’s ability to accumulate property was the very low interest rates generated by the easy money policy of the Federal Reserve System that marked the first half decade of the twenty-first century. In 2000, the stock market began a precipitous decline, first in the “dot-com” sector and then, in 2001, the rest of the market. In the late 1990s, there was a sharp run-up in prices, which, as often happens in capitalist economies, had become a bubble, with investors buying stock simply because everyone else was. The stocks of companies that had consistently lost money and had limited prospects for future profits were trading at remarkably inflated prices. When the big traders started to sell, the floodgates opened and prices plummeted. The events of September 11 compounded the bear market, and share prices fell further. As those whose wealth had diminished and whose debts had risen were forced to cut their consumer spending and investment, what economists call aggregate demand for the economy’s output began to fall and threatened a recession.
Presumably to forestall a downturn, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, chaired by Mr. Greenspan, began to implement monetary policies that pressured interest rates sharply downward. According to standard economic wisdom, falling interest rates will stimulate both consumer and capital spending, increasing both output and employment. While these things happened to some extent, the main outcome was that low interest rates (lower than at any time in forty years) encouraged borrowing, not to finance the building of productive capital, but to buy real estate. New home construction boomed (with, by the way, many socially negative but seldom discussed consequences— deforestation, traffic congestion, continuous road construction, air pollution, and erosion of communities by second, third, and fourth home owners.) Sales of existing homes skyrocketed too, as did the refinancing of mortgages, with the latter fueling a burst of home repairing and remodeling.
Because of low interest rates, the businessman we met was able to leverage his existing properties into much larger holdings without incurring high-interest mortgages. As his wealth increased, so too did his political and social influence in the town. And his ability to purchase still more property rose in tandem with the greater wealth the low interest rates made possible. All across the United States there are businessmen like this one; and in cities large and small, they have gained what we might call “class power.” They are not the economic elite, which owns the “commanding heights” of the economy, but they are closely allied with and take direction from them. And of course, those who do control the “commanding heights” acquired property on a scale that makes our businessman look like a piker.
For working people, low interest rates meant something different. Some were able to refinance mortgages and reduce their monthly payments, but for most the money saved was simply spent on consumer goods. If money was borrowed against houses that had appreciated in value, the result was still more debt. If new homes were bought, there was a good chance, especially for minority borrowers, that the interest rate was not the low one given to richer borrowers. Instead banks gave so-called subprime loans, with higher rates and thousands of dollars of hidden charges. As real estate growth degenerated into a “bubble,” financial institutions engaged in an orgy of dishonest advertising, urging everyone to become a home owner. Thousands of poorer, working-class people were sucked into a bevy of mortgage schemes that promise years of debt dependency, bankruptcy, and foreclosure.
Alan Greenspan’s low-interest-rate-fueled real estate boom was in essence a form of class warfare, strengthening the power of large property holders while reducing that of working persons. Recent Fed actions confirm this. The interest rate cuts will not help homeowners now in trouble. The banks will not cut deals with them, and prospective buyers will not get lower rate mortgages. The banks and other creditors, however, now have the liquidity necessary to help them ride out the crisis. And should the economy slip into recession, so what? Those on top will buy up those without enough ready cash to withstand a downturn, concentrating economic power still further. Workers will lose their jobs, and there will be more foreclosures. But they are too disorganized and demoralized to do anything about it.
Low interest rates used to be a rallying cry of American populists like William Jennings Bryan. Farmers and small business owners needed low rates, they said, to compete with their larger rivals. Workers joined them in great political upheavals. But in a society marked by large income and wealth inequalities and a moribund labor movement, low interest rates only served to make such disparities wider. They made the rich richer and the poor poorer. It is difficult to believe that at least some of this wasn’t intentional. During the Greenspan years, we have witnessed a rush of money flowing from the bottom to the top of the income distribution, now more unequal than at any time since the 1920s. Economic—and political—power are firmly entrenched at the top too. Alan Greenspan did his job well.
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Eric Asimov is the New York Time’s wine critic and a restaurant reviewer. Yesterday he wrote a glowing tribute to Portland, Oregon restaurants and some Portland chefs. Karen and I wrote him a letter, posted below, and followed by a restaurant review I wrote and included in my book. Asomov said the cheap real estate drew chefs from NYC and elswhere. The Ken in our letter owns Ken’s Artisan Bakery in Portland. Mr. Paley’s restaurant, Paley’s, is featued in the article, as is chef Pascal’s bistro. Claudia Pepin is famed chef Jacque Pepin’s daughter.
Dear Eric Asimov,
We read your column on Portland dining with interest. Portland is the subject of chapter four in Michael’s book, Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate: an Economist’s Travelogue. It might interest you to know that Chef Pascal was let go from the job he held prior to opening his bistro. He had so little money that other chefs (including Mr. Paley) held a benefit for him, perhaps due to the scandaloulsy low pay restaurant workers get in Portland no matter their skills. Ken Forkish was paying talented workers $7 an hour in 2004 (Claudia Pepin worked for him but shortly left). It wasn’t uncommon for restaurants to replace sous chefs when their pay got into the upper $20,000s. And restaurant managers were known to steal workers’ hours
(employees had to keep a pay period’s worth of their twice daily time clock statements to avoid such theft). Consider this: Real estate might be cheap in Portland, but low wages make the restaurants profitable.
Michael Yates and Karen Korenoski Amherst, MA
Here is a section from Michael’s book you might enjoy.
“For Christmas, our twins gave us a gift certificate of $120 for a restaurant that had opened recently to great fanfare. The boys were irreverently critical of Portland’s eateries. Caprial’s Bistro and Wine Bar is in the southeast section of town. Caprial has her own television show and is the author of popular cookbooks. I drove one of the twins there to apply for a job. He took one look at the menu and dismissed the fare as “diner food.” My son’s views were confirmed when I ate with a visitor from Germany at a Vietnamese bistro, well regarded and reviewed. I charitably described the food as slop. In any event, the boys were excited, sure they had found a winner. The new place, Hurley’s, was owned by the chef, a former New York City firefighter. It had received rave reviews for its uniquely composed dishes. We didn’t get to use our present until the day before we were to leave Portland, in late April 2004. Tired from emptying our apartment, selling more furniture, and planning a long road trip, we were excited about a night out. We seldom eat in restaurants. The food isn’t usually healthy, and the prices are high. We know too much about how their kitchens function. We prefer to cook for ourselves. But this one looked good; the menu in the window promised the kind of food even our chef son might approve. We missed the boys, and this would remind us of them.
We have never had an eating experience like the one we had that evening. We were led by the host to a small table with sharply angular and uncomfortable chairs. Karen had injured her left foot in a bizarre accident and by night’s end, the seat had made her entire leg numb. An overly attentiveffected waiter soon appeared and began to advise us about the menu. I had already looked at it, and my heart was set on the lobster paella. It was $30, but we were feeling extravagant with our gift certificate. However, the waiter soon disabused me of my choice. This was a restaurant that served “small plates,” a culinary euphemism for high-priced small portions. It was necessary, he said, to order at least three, and better yet four, courses. He showed us with his hand that the dish I wanted would never satisfy my appetite. Later as we watched with amusement—the only enjoyment we had that night—customers at other tables did double-takes when their tiny servings arrived, we marveled at the calm way the waiters led us down the garden path with a patter of gibberish about the dishes. When a woman insisted on having but a single course, her waiter gave her a look of disgust as if to say, “You’ll see.”
We took the waiter at his word and ordered three plates each. He thought we should have a soup too, but at $8 for six ounces, we decided to pass. We thought that surely we would get enough to eat and even be able to share each other’s dishes. I ordered a Caesar salad, an elaborate sea scallop dish, and a chicken entree. It is difficult to describe our shock and that of other patrons when the food arrived. There was a television commercial a few years ago for Wendy’s that featured the company’s owner, Dave Thomas. A haughty waiter brings a dish to Dave’s table and removes the silver cover. Dave looks at the plate and can barely see the entree because it is so tiny. The waiter says, “Enjoy.” An amusing commercial matched exactly by our dinner at Hurley’s.
The Caesar salad came on a small plate and consisted of lettuce chopped into a slaw-like mess in a Caesar dressing. I liked its taste, but I had to take elaborately slow bites and chews to make it last more than a couple of minutes. I nostalgically remembered the large, traditional Caesar salad I used to eat at Putanesca’s on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan—lots of real anchovies and beautiful romaine lettuce leaves. Good Italian bread. None of this was present at Hurley’s, not even bread. I guess I was supposed to appreciate the composition of the dish on the plate and not notice the price or the skimpiness of the portion. Despite my best effort, it disappeared all too soon but just in time for the sea scallops. These were priced at $20. There were two of them, about three bites and thirty seconds worth of eating. When I told a friend of mine about our dining experience, he asked what would have happened if I had dropped one of the scallops on the floor. Ten dollars down the drain.
We finished the third “course,” feeling like we hadn’t eaten more than a snack, but entertained by the astonishment of the woman at the next table when she got her single course, the paella I had originally lusted for. Our calculating waiter brazenly told us that dessert for the two of us would take the bill to exactly $120, the amount of our certificate. We had thought about asking for cash back but decided to play out the game and have dessert. These were good but the most expensive we had ever eaten.
The total bill, including tip, came to $140; we didn’t give our usual 20 percent gratuity, a feeble protest I admit but at least something. We should have stormed into the kitchen and told the chef that he was perpetrating one of the most remarkable frauds we had witnessed, that our sons had had to work for more than twelve hours in hot and dangerous kitchens to pay for our dinner, that none of Hurley’s kitchen laborers could afford to eat in his restaurant. But had we done so, Chef Hurley could have put us in our place by asking if we had noticed that the restaurant was packed with patrons, each spending a small fortune for his food and drink, and on a Thursday evening.
Our dinner at Hurley’s told us something important about Portland, and about the United States itself. An abiding inequality haunts this city and every city in the country. It strikes you like a hammer. In a city with one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates, with homeless children on every street corner, with adult beggars at every highway entrance ramp, diners were packed cheek by jowl in a restaurant whose prices were surely among the highest in the nation.” ______________________________________________________________________________
Western Massachusetts reminds us a lot of Pennsylvania. Lots of countryside. This is probably the most rural place we have lived. The streets of Amherst lead in a mile or two into farmland, and the same is true for most of the other towns as well. The main difference between here and Pennsylvania is that the towns are much older. We took a hike through the woods near Pelham to see a large reservoir. The hike starts at the intersection of the Amherst-Pelham Road and US-202, and on the west side of 202 there is an old cemetery. We found a headstone that identified the person buried there as having been born in 1687. There is a house near us that was built in the mid-1700s; it still has its asymmetrical roof, steeply pitched and much longer on one side than the other.
It is interesting to drive around and see the towns and countryside, and it will be fun to extend our trips into Vermont and the rest of New England. We have visited the “five colleges”I put his in quotes because the schools call themselves this and have many cooperative programs (see http://www.fivecolleges.edu/): The University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Amherst College, Smith College, Mt. Holyoke College, and Hampshire College. The last four are first-rate and expensive private schools; the first is the state’s flagship university. Amherst, Mt. Holyoke, and Smith were founded in the early and mid-nineteenth century, the latter two as colleges for women (both still are women only). The grounds and buildings of these schools are expansive and inviting. Amherst has a more puritan feel than Mt. Holyoke or Smith, especially in the old chapel with its austere design and paintings of former presidents and distinguished alumni adorning the walls. A professor at the University of Massachusetts told me that the dorms were very modern and comfortable; the old ones had been torn down and replaces with buildings that looked like the old ones on the outside but were filled with modern conveniences. He also told me that the college has an endowment of $1.6 billion. Smith College, in the nearby town of Northampton (which as over 30,000 residents and many fine buildings, shops, and restaurants, sits impressively on a hill in the middle of the village. There is an outstanding greenhouse on campus and beautiful grounds. Karen and I admired a gigantic gingko tree planted in the early 1900s. We both imagined being students in such a rich (in more ways than one!) environment. Probably the most beautiful campus is Mt. Holyoke. Outside the remarkable library there is an ancient and magnificent copper beech tree. It is worth a trip to the college just to see it. The library building itself, the building across the lawn from it, and the chapel are extraordinary and like the tree, worth a visit to admire. The landscaping of both Smith and Mt. Holyoke was originally done by the firm of Frederick Law Olmstead, he of Central Park fame. Not too shabby!
The two least appealing campuses are those of Hampshire and the University of Massachusetts. Hampshire has the excuse of having just begun around 1970, and then what could you expect in terms of architecture? The college was actually formed by the other four, as a kind of experimental school in which there would be no grades, the students would choose their own idiosyncratic fields of study ending with a major senior project, and public service of some sort would be a requirement. I met a teacher from Hampshire while on a walk along the great 8 1/2 “rails to trails” bike and walking path that connects Amherst and Northampton. I asked her if the school made heavy demands on professors, and she said yes. A grade is easy to give, but it is hard to examine all the writings of each student and make a very personal evaluation. At various points in time, student portfolios have to be evaluated in their entirety, and this makes for an awful lot of work. She said that what was good is that you could really mentor students and help bring out their best, especially those who might escape a teacher’s attention in a traditional college setting. I admired her but I wasn’t sure I’d like to have to do all that work!
The University of Massachusetts, where I am teaching, is a good school with many excellent faculty, but the campus is not very eye-appealing, which is a shame given the amount of land controlled by the school. A mishmash of building styles, some so awful that they are painful to look at, makes a visitor feel that he or she is in a place that was put together without much thought.
I think that you have to take this area for what it is and find your pleasures in small doses. The “mountains” are really hills, and nothing you see makes your jaw drop as happens every day in the west. We’re hoping that excursions to Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine plus other parts of Western Massachusetts will make us say “wow” at least a few times.
I am going to try to make more frequent blog entries, and I will continue my verbal sojourn through Wyoming next post.
I taught my first class this past Tuesday. It is a large lecture section of seventy students, in a course titled “Globalization and Labor.” It was the first time I was in a classroom like this since 2001. I’m was nervous about it. Lectures to prepare, exams to grade, hassles to deal with. The paperwork I have to do just to get paid is remarkable. Do this, fill this out, go here, get this. Then I am told it might take awhile for me to “get into the system.” I’m only here for five months, so I hope that first check comes before I leave. The University of Massachusetts seems to be a particularly bureaucratic organization, but maybe I’m not remembering how bad the University of Pittsburgh was. The class went fine, though. About seventy students, but I have two graduate assistants, the first time in my life I have ever had help for a class.
When we have committed to be in a place for awhile, it isn’t long before we start talking about places we have been. It was just a year ago that we left our cottage in Estes Park. Before settling in Tucson for a few months, we were on the road for 157 days, from August 30, 2006 until February 3, 2007. We spent the first ten days in Wyoming: Laramie, Cheyenne, Sundance, Sheridan, and Thermopolis. Despite the fact that the state is the home of Dick Cheyney, Wyoming is worth spending some time exploring. It is our least populated state, and the barren, harsh, almost spectral landscape tells you why. If you visit, here are some things worth seeing:
Laramie:
Laramie is the home of the University of Wyoming, a pleasant mid-sized town with a couple of bookstores (I liked 2nd Story Books on East Ivinson St.), some healthy restaurants (try Sweet Melissa, a vegetarian restaurant along the railroad tracks downtown), a decent farmers’ market in summer and fall, and, of course the university, not the prettiest campus I’ve ever seen but attractive enough. The art museum at the University is excellent. We saw an exhibit about Chinese immigrants in the west. In all sorts of places where you won’t find them now (often they were forcibly evicted in waves of anti-Chinese hysteria), there were Chinese people building roads and railroads, working in mines, operating small shops, and living as best they could in a hostile environment. The television show Deadwood, on HBO, gives a good depiction of how whites treated Chinese on the frontier (see Iris Chang’s book, The Chinese in America, for details). Another unsavory and hidden part of our history. Let us struggle to see that it is not repeated with recent immigrants from Mexico. In Laramie we stayed at the nicest Days Inn we have ever seen, with a spacious and clean room and a moderate price.Cheyenne:
Laramie is at an elevation of more than 7,000 feet, and there are mountains around it. To the west is the Snowy Range; there is a scenic drive through it. Cheyenne, the state capitol is about fifty miles east, but it is in an entirely different world. The drive from Laramie drops you in elevation considerably; by the time you get to Cheyenne, you are pretty much on the plains. [Between Laramie and Cheyenne, there is an area of beautiful rock formations called Vedauwoo (http://www.vedauwoo.org), popular with climbers. Definitely worth a stop.] Cheyenne doesn’t offer a whole lot to visitors. Maybe we were there at the wrong time; it was the Labor Day weekend and everything was closed, including the capitol complex and some museums. The Days Inn here was close to the railroad tracks and not attractive at all. There is a good visitors’ center/museum, again by the tracks but in the center of the city next to a park that hosts a good farmers’ market on summer Saturdays. Get a walking tour map and see what sights there are, what is left of Cheyenne’s past as a railroad center and cowboy town. The biggest event here is the annual rodeo, part of the “Frontier Days” celebration held in mid July (http://www.cfdrodeo.com/index.aspx). Maybe if I had been born in the west, I’d appreciate rodeo, but I went to one in Estes Park and it didn’t do much for me. There is a lot of skill involved in staying on a crazed and jumping bull for even thirty seconds. But the whole thing seemed cruel to the animals. I was amused seeing young women riding around the track waving advertising banners. And the rodeo clown kept up a banter of silly jokes while he avoided getting trampled by bulls and horses. Then during a break in the action, a group of kids about six years old were paraded out to ride sheep in the “mutton-busting” event. A sad spectacle indeed, made all the sadder when a friend told me that his father had made him do this when he was five and the whole thing frightened him to death. Throughout the rodeo, patriotic themes abounded, but this wasn’t much different than other sporting events. What bothered me the most I suppose is that these rodeos act as if there are still plenty of cowpokes roaming the range, dodging the tumble weeds. We’ve seen a few of them, but the entire heyday of the cowboy on the range didn’t last very long. Still the myth, tied as it is to the romance of the west (which helps erase the truth of extermination of Indians, rapacious capitalist development, and racism—plenty of cowboys were black, exploited like all wage workers but facing racism as well), lives on for the generally uninformed and gullible tourists.
Sundance:
Sundance is in the northeast corner of Wyoming. We drove there from Cheyenne, stopping to see the pioneer wagon wheel ruts and “Register Cliff” near Guernsey. As people moved west along the Oregon trail, the Mormon Trail, and others, the wheels of their heavily loaded wagons dug ruts into the rocky ground, and you can see them here (go to http://www.trailsandgrasslands.org/register.html for directions). Close to the North Platte River here there are sandstone cliffs bearing the carved names of some of the trailblazers. Look for the name of Alva H. Unthank (what a great last name!). The aforementioned website says this about him:Perhaps one of the sadder stories is that of Alva H. Unthank, a boy of 19 who passed by here in 1850. You’ll note the date, just one year after the ‘49-ers had created a sensation. Alva intended to make his fortune in the gold fields of California. When passing Register Cliff, he dutifully carved his name, as did so many others.
Several days later he felt a little queasy in the morning, somewhat ill by afternoon and was being buried the following day. For Alva had fallen prey to cholera, a fairly common happenstance on the Oregon and California Trails. He made it as far as Casper before succumbing to the virulent disease, and his grave site can supposedly still be found there.
We drove into the town of Gillette to look for a room for the night, figuring that we’d drive to Sundance the next day. But motels were expensive and full there. Gillette is a coal boomtown, and workers who can’t find housing live in motels, as do workers spending short periods of time there. Along the highway near Gillette there is an overlook from which you can see one of the giant strip mines with their gigantic machines (there is a tire from one of these at the overlook about twelve feet tall). A more ruinous site it is hard to imagine—the earth just gouged away and the coal mercilessly stripped out, leaving behind an enormous pit that the mining company will “reclaim” for us. In less than a minute a truck is loaded with coal. Soon train cars will be full of coal and waiting in line in a train traffic jam until the tracks are clear for it to move. A few years of high wages, enough taxes to make the state think it is rich, another decade of energy waste, more polluted air, another environmental disaster. Between coal strips and gas wells, Wyoming is well on its way to looking like the western version of parts of Appalachia. But as one official put it:
“There’s still coal underneath the land and sometime in the future, that coal has the right to be mined,” said Commissioner Alan Weakly, a former mining engineer. “What I am saying is there are areas where people will build and in the future they will have to un-build.”
We left Gillette depressed and drove east to Sundance, in Wyoming’s part of the Black Hills, named for the famous bandit The Sundance Kid, who apparently got his nickname here. Throughout the west there are names you here over and over again. With his partner Butch Cassidy, Sundance seem to have hit every place east of the Mississippi. There is an arch named for Butch in Capitol Reef National Park in southern Utah, near a place where his gang hid from the law. Another name you see everywhere is Laura Ingalls Wilder (of Little House on the Prairie fame). Every state out west seems to have a Wilders family homestead!
We went to Sundance to see Devils Tower, which is less than an hour’s drive from town.
To be continued. . .
We drove the long and dismal trip from Washington DC to Amherst, Massachusetts on Monday, August 20. It was overcast and rainy, matching our moods. It had been a long and difficult ninety days on the road promoting my book. I wondered if it had been worth it. True, the book has done well in terms of new books published by a small and left-wing press like Monthly Review. There has been a second printing, just five months after publication. And the book is in stores no Monthly Review book has ever been and noted in sections of newspapers probably very few books by a radical have ever been noticed. But still, a book like this should have a much wider audience. Unfortunately, it is really not possible to reach such an audience absent the greatest good luck. So, you have to ask yourself–what was the point of it all? Ego gratification? Yes, there was a lot of that. But that doesn’t last long or make you happy either. The hope that you will get a few people to think more critically about their country and the environment? Maybe, but more than a few are needed to bring about any kind of meaningful change.
After nine hours, we reached the apartment complex where we would live for the next five months. It was a nice enough looking compound, lots of trees and greenery, very close to town and the university where I would teach. (I was also thinking about why I had decided to teach again. I couldn’t come up with an answer except that I would accumulate some money and maybe we could put this to good use later. I certainly had no feelings of joy that I would be in front of lots of students again. Just like my book will make a few people think, so too will my teaching. But so what? As Marx said, this entire society bears down upon our breasts like an incubus. Most of us are crushed and will be into the foreseeable future). We parked the car; I found the key in a storage shed under some pots; and we opened the door.
Words cannot adequately describe our dashed expectations. The place was a mess: dirty, cluttered with junk, not an eye-pleasing thing in sight. The living room couch and love seat were ancient, badly worn, and could not be sat on. There was a board under the dirty cushions of each, making them as hard a church pew. When I removed the boards and sat down, I sank to the floor. And things got worse after that. I won’t bore you with the details except to say that we called the landlord and managed to get a few things done. Hopefully we’ll get more done this next week, and the place will be barely liveable. I almost walked away from the whole mess and would have had I been alone. It is going to be very difficult to teach and live here. At least we are conveniently located, near school and town and grocery stores and the like. We’ll have to make do and vent our anger by planning our future.
Landlords are, for the most part, a particularly vicious lot. They act like they are doing you the favor by renting a place to you and they demand all sorts of information about you. However, when all is said and done, caveat emptor. But then what can you expect in a society where private property is king, and the mere ownership of it conveys all sorts of rights and marks the owner as a specially placed person. Those without property, on the other hand, get what they deserve, a thorough thrashing! Righteous historians and social commentators ask why Chinese peasants injured and killed so many landlords after the 1949 revolution. Such violence! I think to myself, why didn’t they kill more. Of course, we are not propertyless. And we won’t ever kill anyone. But if I were king, landlords would have to go before a special renters’ court and prove themselves worthy of staying out of prison. To make matters worse, the treatment of renters helps fuel the pipedream of home ownership, where you trade one set of predators for another.
The last stops on the book tour were in Milwaukee, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Washington DC, with a stop in Johnstown to visit friends. Much of this was familiar territory.
Milwaukee is an industrial city hard hit by factory closings, outsourcing, and off-shoring. The bookstore hosting my talk and signing was the venerable Harry W. Schwartz bookshop. This independent bookseller has been in Milwaukee for nearly eighty years and is still owned by the same family. There are several Schwartz stores, and this one is in South Milwaukee, in the Bay View neighborhood. The address was the wonderfully named Kinnickinnic Avenue; the word is derived from Algonquin and means a mixture used as a tobacco substitute. Locals just call it KK Avenue. As we entered and drove through the avenue, we thought that the area looked too poor to have a good bookstore. But appearances can be deceiving. We found a cooperative food store with lots or organic items. After the talk we had dinner with a friend from Canada who had stayed in town for an extra day just to see me. The food at the restaurant was excellent and moderately priced. The bookstore, itself, provided the greatest surprise. It was well-stocked, the person who introduced me had done some homework, and the crowd was large and enthusiastic. I was given a black tee-shirt with an image of the original Harry W. Schwartz store’s facade on the front. A woman came up afterward and told me an amusing story. She was looking for a hot plate on amazon.com, and when she typed “hot plate” into the search line, my book appeared! She didn’t know anything about it, so she went to the Harry Schwartz store and asked. She was told that they not only carried it but I was coming that week to speak. A strange set of coincidences!
Our motel in Milwaukee was outside town, on Interstate 94, the highway that connects the city with our previous stop in Chicago. It was a Super Eight, usually fairly cheap but expensive the week we were in town because the state fair was in progress. The clerk did graciously give us a room upgrade, and we were grateful for that.
The man with whom we had dinner after the talk was Sam Gindin, who for many years was chief economist for the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union. Sam is a major character in what I think is the best documentary film about union-company labor contract negotiations I have ever seen. It is titled “Final Offer,” and it documents the bargaining that led the Canadian workers to break from the UAW and form a separate and much more militant and member-oriented union than the UAW. Sam is now teaching part-time as a chaired professor at York University in Toronto and writing about the economy, usually with his comrade Leo Panitch. Sam is interested in building organizations that struggle for radical social change. Like Jerry Tucker, with whom he has long been associated (after Milwaukee he was heading for Detroit to teach in the solidarity school Jerry helped organize and which I mentioned in a previous post), Sam is an organizer, a person who understands that radicals can talk and analyze all they want but the world won’t change until we organize to force the issue. In Toronto, Sam said, there are many grassroots organizations fighting for many progressive things. But these organizations rarely have a larger social focus, one aimed at transforming society as a whole. Sam has begun, with some others, to try to bring these groups together, to find out what they have in common. He gave a good example of the difficulties involved. There is an organization in Toronto that tries to secure rights for Southeast Asian women. It would seem that it would be a natural ally in living wage campaigns. However, the women in it often work for parents and relatives, employers none too keen on paying a living wage.
It took us about eight hours to get to Cleveland. We anticipated the usual traffic nightmare in Chicago, but this didn’t materialize. There was bad weather all around, but we missed it. There was flash flooding in Cleveland that morning and a road we were on later had been closed a few hours earlier. Karen’s sister in Joplin says that bad wether always follows one of our visits, but this time the storm preceded us. Later, in Pittsburgh, we experienced torrential rains but luckily avoided serious flooding in some of the nearby boroughs (caused in part, as it is throughout the country, by relentless suburban developments that remove trees from hillsides) and a tornado that struck the downtown destroying homes in a poor neighborhood and damaging the Science Center.
The Cleveland event was in the suburb of Lyndhurst, a few miles east of the city. I have fond memories of Cleveland. Today it is one more manufacturing center ravaged by de-industrialization, but when I was a boy, it represented the big city, even more so than Pittsburgh. This was because my Uncle Bob, my father’s brother (he often went by “Mike,” so we had the same name), lived there with my Aunt Ann. My uncle was a glass artist. He sandblasted intricate designs with devices of his own invention that shot a thin stream of sand into the glass. The technique was called glass carving. My dad used to take me there to visit in summer, and I have happy memories of playing stickball with city kids in the ally near my uncle and aunt’s apartment, of walking the city streets with dad and Uncle Bob, stopping at White Castle for a hamburger, listening to Bob talk to the cops and derelicts who frequented the neighborhood. My dad went to Cleveland to work for his brother during a long strike at the glass factory in my hometown in 1958. He enjoyed the company of his brother and sister-in-law. I also remember going to Ann’s family home when she was dating my uncle. The family was Italian, and I reported back incredulously to my mother that they ate spaghetti with every meal, even Thanksgiving. My mother was Italian too, but her family came from far in the north of Italy, close to the Austrian border. There pasta was not as important a staple food as was polenta, which I have always loved.
The name of the bookstore is Joseph Beth Booksellers, and it was as large as a chain bookstore but much better laid out and more comfortable. I noticed that Stephen King and Hillary Clinton had been there to speak. At least King was good company to be in. I have always stuck to some advice he gave writers, especially his maxim that “the adverb is not your friend.” I was anxiously waiting to see if anyone would show up when I saw my Aunt Ann (my uncle died some years ago, of emphysema, like my dad) and her son Rob come through the door. What a wonderful surprise. We talked excitedly and later had dinner, with Rob’s wife Kim. The only thing that marred the evening was the argument I got into with an audience member. A person accused me (not too strong a word given her tone of voice) of being too negative. I tried to assure her that this wasn’t the case, but she remained aggressively adamant, even denying that it was a bad thing that as many as fifteen unrelated persons might live in a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan’s Chinatown. This was too much for me and the frustrations building from so many days on the road spilled over and I went on the attack. It got pretty ugly, but I eventually had the sense to end it, after telling her husband, who has not heard my talk but came by after and asked a stupid question, that I wasn’t going to repeat what I said. Oh well, one bad night in forty-five isn’t too bad.
The bookstore was located in Legacy Village, an outdoor mall built to look like Main Street, USA. Shops in attractive brick buildings line named streets, and there are even small parks with benches. It reminded us of the “New Urbanism” towns along the Florida Panhandle that I described in the last chapter of the book. The relentless move outward from cities has destroyed much of the urban landscape (and small towns have been gutted by the same phenomena), so smart developers recreate mythical street scenes in towns and shopping malls. Everything is antiseptically clean and neat, like in a theme park. The unpredictability that gives street life anywhere its excitement and interest is intentionally eliminated, since it would no doubt be bad for business. The gentrification of New York City may be leading to a similar outcome for our greatest city, as neighborhoods themselves, the lifeblood of the city’s pulsing uniqueness, become predictable theme parks for the edification of the sophisticated traveler and suburban refugee (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/the-suburbanization-of-new-york-editors-take-questions/index.html). Hopefully New York city will prove too large and lively to succumb to what we might call “urban cleansing.”
It was unnerving to think about visiting Pittsburgh and Johnstown. It is one thing to be in the spotlight in strange places but another to be in it at home. I needn’t have worried. The talk in Pittsburgh was at the Pump House, one of a small number of buildings activists have managed to save from the great Carnegie steel mill at Homestead, Pennsylvania. The entire space once occupied by one of the most famous mill in the world (see the book, The River Ran Red, by Paul Krause, and the film of the same name for details. See also William Serrins Homestead: the Glory and Tragedy of an American Steel Town) is now a huge shopping, condominium complex, an irony if ever there was one. Charles McCollester, professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and a Monthly Review contributor, organized the event. Charles was also instrumental in saving the Pump House. We had a great turnout, and I sold an entire box of books, every book we had left in the van. My mother, two sisters, a niece, and a friend of one sister came to hear me, so all in all it was perfect day. I joined some people at a nearby bar, Duke’s, for some food. We’d probably have gone to the famous mill bar, Chiodos, with its famous mystery sandwich, but alas it is no longer on the corner close to the old mill.
Before heading for Washington DC for the last stop on the tour, we detoured to Johnstown to stay with friends who were having a party for us. It was bittersweet to see so many old friends. When I look in the mirror each morning, I don’t notice the changes that time brings with it. The calculus of age notes only the smallest alterations. But tiny changes add up in the long run, and it is sometimes shocking to see the transformation in the faces of those you used to see every day and then realize that they are noticing the same things in you. Besides the party, a high point of the visit was a newspaper clipping framed for me by the wife of my old friend Bruce Williams, who died the month before I retired.. The clipping showed me at thirty and Bruce a couple of years older speaking to some group or other about the booklet we wrote in 1976 outlining the area’s labor history (It’s called Upward Struggle, but copies are rare!). I showed it to everyone at the party. Bruce was the heart and soul of the college, and when he died, the school lost something it won’t likely get back.
I was glad that the bookstore event in DC was on the day we arrived, August 15. After it was done, we’d have time to rest before heading to Amherst and five months of stability. The venue was an interesting space called Busboys and Poets, located at 14th and U Streets in an historic black neighborhood. Many bookstores have attached cafes or coffee shops, but this one was built around a large dining space, with a small bookstore and a large room where writers, musicians, and other artists perform. The concept seems to be working well; another store will open soon. When I first entered the reading room, music was playing and people were eating. I was nonplused to see a large stage set above one end of the room with bright stage lights. I imagined a comedy club and thought that I might have to tell some jokes. People were wandering around not knowing if they were in the right place, so I began to ask them if they were here for the reading. In the end, everything worked out. The music stopped and the diners listened politely when I was introduced. The store personnel were friendly and encouraging. As usual I answered many questions. And we sold a lot of books. My friend Chris Townsend, political director of the United Electrical (UE) workers union, who helped organize my engagement at Busboys and Poets, as did the local chapter of the National Writers Union, the Cultureworks Collective, and the American Federation of Teachers, bought a second copy of the book to give to Ralph Nader. I will be honored if he reads it. I recommend this bookstore/performance space highly to any visitor to the city.
As we drove back home with our daughter, I felt a deep sense of relief that the tour was over. It will no doubt be awhile before I can calm down, but for now the fact that I won’t have to give talks, find directions to new cities and bookstores, and sleep in cheap motels gives me pleaure.
The tour is done, but the blog will continue. Stay tuned!!
While we were resting and visiting family in Joplin, Missouri, we went to the town of Carthage, a few miles away. Carthage was the site of a battle early in the Civil War, in 1861. There was strong southern sentiment in this part of the state, unlike in St. Louis to the east. The town was also home to owners and supervisors of the region’s zinc and lead mines, and there are still some fine old houses on the streets surrounding the central square. The square is dominated by the county courthouse, a magisterial, towered building made of Carthage “marble,” locally quarried limestone so hard that it could be polished like marble. As we drove into town, we noticed a large number of tents set up in front of a group of buildings. There were signs all around in both English and Vietnamese. After the United States was forced by the North Vietnamese Army and the National Liberation Front to leave Vietnam in 1975, numerous Vietnamese Catholics, including many who had been in or were supporters of the US-backed regime in the south (a million Catholics had already fled south from the north when Ho Chi Minh took power after the defeat fo the French), left the country and came to the United States. Some Catholic priests were given an abandoned seminary in Carthage, and this is the site of the big annual festival, which centers around a Marian Days festival, honoring Mary (Mother of God to Catholics), the Co-Redemptrix (this was the name of an order of priests in Vietnam who formed the base for the seminary’s rebirth in Carthage). Tens of thousands of Vietnamese Catholics from around the country flock to Carthage for the celebration. At first locals were hostile and racist, but today the festival brings money to town, and Carthage has made its peace with the Vietnamese, even holing an annual Vietnam Day.
I don’t give many restaurant reviews in my travel writings because we almost always prepare our own meals. However, if you find yourself in Joplin and hungry, I recommend Crabby’s Seafood Bar and Grill (http://www.crabbysseafood.com/menu.htm). Both times we’ve eaten there, the fish was delicious, imaginatively prepared and cooked just right. Might be the best restaurant in town.
We were not anxious to begin the tour again; it is hard to have a long break and then get back into a routine of long drives, finding a motel, getting groceries, finding the bookstore or other venue, giving the talk, meeting new people, and then doing it all over next day. The five-hour drive to St. Louis was uneventful. We ended up at a much overpriced Red Roof Inn along Interstate 44, about fifteen minutes from Left Bank Books (http://www.left-bank.com/) in the lovely, urbane Central West End of St. Louis. The talk there went very well, and we met the brother of Jeff, the husband of Karen’s sister in Joplin. He came to the bookstore with his girlfriend, and we were able to chat for awhile before and after the reading. Both are physicists, and then enjoyed my joke about the good economist being reincarnated as a physicist and the bad econo