The Culling of the Books has begun again. It’s the process in which old friends and acquaintances (and a few new ones) are (1) put up for sale on eBay, (2) offered to used bookstores, (3) left at the city’s book exchange shed, (4) recycled or (5) even consigned to the trash. It happens as regularly as an atomic clock ticks, but not quite so often.
Some will survive the process, only to be assessed at the next CotB. No one will be safe forever!
This is why I picked up my 1975 paperback edition of Fields, Factories and Workshops this afternoon. First published in 1898, it’s a classic statement of anarchist principles written by Peter Kropotkin, more formally known as Prince Pyotor Alexeyevich Kropotkin.
Kropotkin was a Russian aristocrat who favored the overthrow of both capitalism and the state. He envisioned a future in which small communities, linked together by modern technology, would grow much of their own food and do much of their own manufacturing. He championed cooperation over competition and rejected the authoritarian socialism of the Bolsheviks.
This is the kind of book I was reading in the 1970’s when I started wondering why our economic system leaves so many people idle when there is so much work to be done.
But now, before deciding on this old book’s future, I’m going to share two paragraphs I highlighted back then. First, here’s Kropotkin predicting a future that now seems unlikely:
Each nation – her own agriculturist and manufacturer; each individual working in the field and in some industrial art; each individual combining scientific knowledge with the knowledge of a handicraft – such is, we affirm, the present tendency of civilized nations.
And here’s Kropotkin on the purpose of education:
Be it handicraft, science or art, the chief aim of the school is not to make a specialist from a beginner, but to teach him the elements of knowledge and the good methods of work, and, above all, to give him that general inspiration that will induce him, later on, to put in whatever he does a sincere longing for truth, to like what is beautiful, both as to form and contents, to feel the necessity of being a useful unit amidst other human units, and thus to feel his heart at unison with the rest of humanity.
Finally, to quote from the editor’s introduction:
Fields, Factories and Workshops is one of those great prophetic works of the nineteenth century whose hour is yet to come…His book is really a thesis … on the economic consequences of the humanization of work.
Pope Francis is upsetting a lot of people, including the fools and knaves seeking the Republican nomination (you know, the make-believe Christians who won’t admit nine people were murdered by a racist in Charleston because that would imply racism is still a problem in America).
The Pope issued a message to the world this week. From The Guardian:
Pope Francisâs encyclical on climate change, Laudato Si’, is the most astonishing and perhaps the most ambitious papal document of the past 100 years, since it is addressed not just to Catholics, or Christians, but to everyone on earth….
We need nature, he says, and we need each other….The care of nature and the care of the poor are aspects of the same ethical commandment, and if we neglect either one we cannot find peace….
Starting from that premise, he launches a ferocious attack on what he sees as the false and treacherous appetites of capitalism and on the consumerist view of human nature. For Francis, there is a vital distinction between human needs, which are limited but non-negotiable, and appetites, which are potentially unlimited, and which can always be traded for other satisfactions without ever quite giving us what we most deeply want. The poor, he says, have their needs denied, while the rich have their appetites indulged. The environmental crisis links these two aspects of the problem.
… The document is absolutely unequivocal in backing the overwhelming scientific consensus that anthropogenic global warming is a clear and present danger. It blasts the use of fossil fuels and demands that these be phased out in favour of renewable energy. But it is also explicitly opposed to the idea that we can rely on purely technological solutions to ecological problems….There will never be a technological fix for the problem of unrestrained appetite, the pope claims, because this is a moral problem, which demands a moral solution, a turn towards sobriety and self-restraint and away from the intoxications of consumerism.
The New York Times offers this summary (followed by selected paragraphs from the encyclical with explanatory comments):
Pope Francis has written the first papal encyclical focused solely on the environment, attempting to reframe care of the earth as a moral and spiritual concern, and not just a matter of politics, science and economics. In the document, âLaudato Si: On Care for Our Common Home,â he argues that the environment is in crisis … He emphasizes that the poor are most affected by damage from what he describes as economic systems that favor the wealthy, and political systems that lack the courage to look beyond short-term rewards….Its 184 pages are an urgent, accessible call to action, making a case that all is interconnected, including the solutions to the grave environmental crisis.
Perhaps we will do nothing about climate change until it’s too late. Last year was the warmest since records have been kept. This year is on track to be even warmer. But the climate isn’t changing fast enough to generate concerted global action. Short of a message from on high (from much higher than the sky), there may be nothing that will act as a sufficient catalyst. For now, however, Pope Francis has done his part.
Here are the first paragraphs of Laudato Si’:
1. âLAUDATO SIâ, miâ Signoreâ â âPraise be to you, my Lordâ. In the words of this beautiful canticle, Saint Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. âPraise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbsâ.
2. This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she âgroans in travailâ (Rom 8:22). We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.
Going through old bookmarks, I found Eric Foner’s review of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward Baptist. Professor Foner is a leading historian of the 19th century. From the review:
Where Baptist breaks new ground is in his emphasis on the centrality of the interstate trade in slaves to the regional and national economies and his treatment of the role of extreme violence in the workings of the slave system….
The cotton kingdom that arose in the Deep South was incredibly brutal….Violence, Baptist contends, explains the remarkable increase of labor productivity on cotton plantations. Without any technological innovations in cotton picking, output per hand rose dramatically between 1800 and 1860. Some economic historians have attributed this to incentives like money payments for good work and the opportunity to rise to skilled positions. Baptist rejects this explanation.
Planters called their method of labor control the âpushing system.â Each slave was assigned a daily picking quota, which increased steadily over time. Baptist, who feels that historians too often employ circumlocutions that obscure the horrors of slavery, prefers to call it âthe âwhipping-machineâ system.â In fact, the word we should really use, he insists, is âtorture.â To make slaves work harder and harder, planters utilized not only incessant beating but forms of discipline familiar in our own time â sexual humiliation, bodily mutilation, even waterboarding. In the cotton kingdom, âwhite people inflicted torture far more often than in almost any human society that ever existed.â When Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans in his Second Inaugural Address of the 250 years of âblood drawn with the lashâ that preceded the Civil War, he was making a similar point: Violence did not begin in the United States with the firing on Fort Sumter.
Foner concludes:
It is hardly a secret that slavery is deeply embedded in our nationâs history. But many Americans still see it as essentially a footnote, an exception to a dominant narrative of the expansion of liberty on this continent. If the various elements of âThe Half Has Never Been Toldâ are not entirely pulled together, its underlying argument is persuasive: Slavery was essential to American development and, indeed, to the violent construction of the capitalist world in which we live.
Reading this review again reminded me of another book review. It was easy to find, although it was published eight years ago. Janet Maslin wrote the review. The book was Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II. Maslin says it’s a corrective for those who think slavery ended with the Civil War:
[The author]Â is not simply referring to the virtual bondage of black sharecroppers unable to extricate themselves economically from farming. He describes free men and women forced into industrial servitude, bound by chains, faced with subhuman living conditions and subject to physical torture. That plight was horrific. But until 1951, it was not outside the law.
All it took was anything remotely resembling a crime. Bastardy, gambling, changing employers without permission, false pretense, âselling cotton after sunsetâ: these were all grounds for arrest in rural Alabama by 1890. And as Mr. Blackmon explains in describing incident after incident, an arrest could mean a steep fine. If the accused could not pay this debt, he or she might be imprisoned.
Alabama was among the Southern states that profitably leased convicts to private businesses. As the book illustrates, arrest rates and the labor needs of local businesses could conveniently be made to dovetail. For the coal, lumber, turpentine, brick, steel and other interests described here, a steady stream of workers amounted to a cheap source of fuel.
It’s hard not to think of contemporary practices that mimic the “pushing system” or the cruel exploitation of prison labor. Today, we read about corporations like Amazon that set ever-increasing production quotas. If you don’t meet your quota, you’re fired. If you do meet your quota, you’re quota goes up. Then there’s the way towns and cities like Ferguson rely on fines for their funding. If you can’t pay your fine or miss your court date, you’re hit with a bigger fine or thrown in jail. And, of course, we now have a huge prison-industrial complex that’s devoted to mass incarceration as a way to lower the unemployment rate while increasing corporate income.
After writing the above, I looked at another bookmark. It was to a New York Times interview with someone who isn’t quoted very often in newspapers like the Times or on television: Noam Chomsky. I’d forgotten that he cites both The Half Has Never Been Told and Slavery By Another Name. His subject is “the roots of American racism”:
There is …Â a common variant of what has sometimes been called âintentional ignoranceâ of what it is inconvenient to know: âYes, bad things happened in the past, but let us put all of that behind us and march on to a glorious future, all sharing equally in the rights and opportunities of citizenry.â The appalling statistics of todayâs circumstances of African-American life can be confronted by other bitter residues of a shameful past, laments about black cultural inferiority, or worse, forgetting how our wealth and privilege was created in no small part by the centuries of torture and degradation of which we are the beneficiaries and they remain the victims….
Jefferson, to his credit, at least recognized that the slavery in which he participated was âthe most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.â And the Jefferson Memorial in Washington displays his words that âIndeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever.â Words that should stand in our consciousness alongside of John Quincy Adamsâs reflections on the parallel founding crime over centuries, the fate of âthat hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious crueltyâŠamong the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgment.â
If Franklin Roosevelt had lived longer, the United States might have a Second Bill of Rights. We might have had more amendments to the Constitution, or simply a collection of new laws, but in either form we would have established a set of economic rights to go along with the political rights already stated in the Constitution.
This was news to me until recently. Here’s what President Roosevelt said in his State of the Union address on January 11, 1944, as the war continued in Europe and the Pacific:
It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our peopleâwhether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth- is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill housed, and insecure.
This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rightsâamong them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
As our Nation has grown in size and stature, howeverâas our industrial economy expandedâthese political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the Nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being….
I ask the Congress to explore the means for implementing this economic bill of rights… Many of these problems are already before committees of the Congress in the form of proposed legislation. I shall from time to time communicate with the Congress with respect to these and further proposals. In the event that no adequate program of progress is evolved, I am certain that the Nation will be conscious of the fact.
The President began his fourth term one year later, on January 20, 1945, but he didn’t live past April. President Truman took over and didn’t pursue the idea of an economic Bill of Rights.
There’s more about the speech, including the full text, here. Roosevelt would have delivered the State of the Union to Congress, but he didn’t feel well that night. Instead, he gave the speech over the radio from the White House (Congress received a printed copy). But he also had parts of the speech filmed by newsreel companies so it could be shown in movie theaters. Here’s some of that footage:
Roosevelt said a lot else that night. For example, he criticized what we now call “special interests”, calling attention to the millions of people with “few or no high pressure representatives at the Capitol”:
The overwhelming majority of our people have met the demands of this war with magnificent courage and understanding…. However, while the majority goes on about its great work without complaint, a noisy minority maintains an uproar of demands for special favors for special groups. There are pests who swarm through the lobbies of the Congress and the cocktail bars of Washington, representing these special groups as opposed to the basic interests of the Nation as a whole. They have come to look upon the war primarily as a chance to make profits for themselves at the expense of their neighbors – profits in money or in terms of political or social preferment.
Well, that situation has only gotten worse since 1944.
Roosevelt also warned against right-wing reactionaries trying to turn back the clock:
One of the great American industrialists of our day … recently emphasized the grave dangers of “rightist reaction” in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop â if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called “normalcy” of the 1920’s â then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.
Even if Roosevelt wasn’t feeling well that night, I bet he would have had a good laugh if someone had suggested that a certain 32-year old actor, then making Army Air Force training films in California, would one day lead just such a right-wing reaction.
ThinkProgress reports that the Supreme Court sensibly ruled, in a 5-4 decision, that a state can restrict lawyers’ campaign contributions to judges. Chief Justice Roberts explained why:
States may regulate judicial elections differently than they regulate political elections, because the role of judges differs from the role of politicians. Politicians are expected to be appropriately responsive to the preferences of their supporters. Indeed, such âresponsiveness is key to the very concept of self-governance through elected officials.â The same is not true of judges. In deciding cases, a judge is not to follow the preferences of his supporters, or provide any special consideration to his campaign donors. A judge instead must âobserve the utmost fairness,â striving to be âperfectly and completely independent, with nothing to influence or control him but God and his conscience.â As in White, therefore, our precedents applying the First Amendment to political elections have little bearing on the issues here.
So a majority of the Court agreed that it’s important for judges not to be influenced by campaign contributions, because judges are expected to serve the public good. Does that mean it’s acceptable for politicians to be influenced by campaign contributions, since they’re expected to serve the interests of whoever gives them money?
The obvious problem with Roberts’s explanation is that politicians should serve the public good as much as judges. A President is supposed to serve the national interest. Senators are supposed to serve the national interest and the interests of their particular states. Politicians are only supposed to do little favors for people who give them money. Otherwise, we’d say the politicians were for sale!
After all, we vote anonymously so that nobody, not even the candidates, know who we voted for. That makes sense, because how a particular person voted shouldn’t matter to a politician who represents “the people”.
But doesn’t that suggest that campaign contributions (assuming they’re legal at all) should be anonymous too? Politicians shouldn’t know who gave them money or spent money on their behalf, because they’re not supposed to be influenced by such things. They’re supposed to make their decisions on the merits, not reward the rich people or groups who paid for their campaigns. Nor should politicians be able to extort contributions by threatening anyone.
Anonymous campaign funding was the subject of a 2004 book called “Voting With Dollars” written by two law professors. They argued that all voters should be given government-financed “gift cards” that could only be used to finance presidential campaigns. Last year, two political scientists called for making all campaign contributions anonymous, even those made by major donors:
Indeed, if we think about all the ways transparency helps contributors and candidates put pressure upon each other, it is clear that reporting contributions can make matters worse. Suppose, then, that we turned out the lights? What if we let Adelson and Shaun McCutcheon spend their money on politics but not take credit for their âgenerosityâ? What if we made all campaign contributions and independent expenditures anonymous â and made sure they stayed anonymous?
I don’t know if it’s possible to design a system that would guarantee anonymity. If people contributed to a general fund from which payments were made to their candidates of choice, it would be difficult for the contributors to see that they’d made a specific contribution to a particular candidate without their having the ability to share that information with the candidate in question. Maybe it would be enough to make it illegal to communicate the source of donations or “independent” spending, as the political science professors suggest. Â
In addition to reducing the number of favors politicians did for their major contributors, anonymity would theoretically reduce the amount of money in politics too. Presumably, some of the wealthy would limit their spending if they couldn’t expect something in return. Of course, even anonymous contributions won’t solve the Big Money problem. Fixing that will require a majority on the Supreme Court that doesn’t equate unlimited political spending with free speech.
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