It’s all coming down to the last few days before The Election now; and in all the (understandable! sympathetic! important!) rush and clamor it’s important to remember that we live in a wide, old world and that there has been a lot more before this November and there will be a lot more after every last one of these men and their works on the earth has crumbled into dust and ashes. So it’s hard to say just how glad I read a beautiful, moving article by Alina Stefanescu on living in history–on history, and living memory, and making our way in the midst of horror and hope.

History inspires, as it legitimizes and shames. The Bush administration has attempted to legitimize the Afghan and Iraqi transition to a democracy by involving historical institutions assumed to resonate with the local public. The extent of Russian and Chinese liberalization is constantly conveyed as a grappling with history– scholars resort to descriptions of strong-man rule and reverence for authory as stumbling-blocks in the path to free societies. Dale Richmond even goes so far as to define “South Eastern European values” entirely with reference to historical political institutions in the area.

While government-oriented institutional theories prove effective in short-term comparisons, their comparisons are often limited to explaining the political behavior of elites. Truly effective institutional paradigms would encompass social and non-governmental institutions, for it is these institutions which act as incubators of social change, creating classrooms of oral history and legendry, encouraging the laboratories of revolution. You don’t have to be a radical deconstructionist to acknowledge that the tale told by history textbooks is often a politically-motivated one, which sustains and reinforces current political arrangements. And you don’t have to worship Howard Zinn to acknowledge that the most crucial history for transition states is “the people’s history”– the one that legitimates and supports regime change.

Clausen’s includes a moving quote from one of my favorite authors, William Faulker. In “The Jail” (1951), Faulkner channeled the memory of a Alabama Civil war soldier’s widow to unveil the vividness and poignancy of historial memory:

“so vast, so limitless in capacity is man’s imagination to disperse and burn away the rubble-dross of fact and probability, leaving only truth and dream…there is the clear, undistanced voice as though out of the delicate antenna-skeins of radio, futher than the empress’s throne, than the splendid instantiation, even than matriarch’s peacful rocking chair, across the vast instantaneous intervention, from the long long time ago: Listen, stranger, this was myself: this was I.”

Who am I? Who were “we”? Must the “we” be delegitimized to make room for the repentant “I”? Every time I return to Romania, I silently observe the reckonings of individuals seeking to reconcile their present conceptions of morality with their past communist complicity (or lack). The older generation brushes off such difficult reflection with statements like, “It was better then..” or “Who cares? Politicians are all the same– I just did what I had to do to put food on the table”.

How we justify past horrors is the cornerstone of future political arrangements. How governments obscure past and present horrors can be exhumed through an analysis of propaganda. The stories we tell to hold our worldviews and self-images together cannot be discounted, especially when the stories don’t quite match the official explanation.

You should read it all. I’ve talked a lot, especially over the past year or so, about history and its importance, but I couldn’t hope to say why I do it better than Alina already has. All I can add is how much her post reminded me of another remarkable talk about history, from Utah Phillips, recorded on Fellow Workers (one of his collaborative albums with Ani DiFranco). The album–you really ought to get a copy of it, now, if you don’t already have it–is a passionate, moving, and often very funny collection of stories and songs from the anarchist workers’ movement of the early 20th century. And along the way, Utah Phillips muses on history, memory, and coming to terms. I couldn’t hope to duplicate in print that achingly earnest passion or that long, steady rumble of his voice. But here it is; listen to it some day, as soon as you have the chance:

The old songs, these old stories… why tell them? What do they mean?

When I went to high school–that’s about as far as I got–reading my U.S. history textbook, well I got the history of the ruling class; I got the history of the generals and the industrialists and the Presidents who didn’t get caught. How about you?

I got the history of the people who owned the wealth of the country, but none of the history of the people who created it… you know? So when I went out to get my first job, I went out armed with someone else’s class background. They never gave me any tools to understand, or to begin to control the condition of my labor.

And that was deliberate, wasn’t it? Huh? They didn’t want me to know this. That’s why this stuff isn’t taught in the history books. We’re not supposed to know it, to understand that. No. If I wanted the true history of where I came from, as a member of the working class, I had to go to my elders. Many of them, their best working years before pensions or Social Security, gave their whole lives to the mines, to the wheat harvests, to the logging camps, to the railroad. Got nothing for it–just fetched up on the skids, living on short money, mostly drunk all the time. But they lived those extraordinary lives that can never be lived again. And in the living of them, they gave me a history that is more profound, more beautiful, more powerful, more passionate, and ultimately more useful, than the best damn history book I ever read.

As I have said so often before, the long memory is the most radical idea in America….

–Utah Phillips, The Long Memory, Fellow Workers (with Ani DiFranco)

Today (or yesterday, depending on how you count these things) is the 6,000th birthday of the Universe, according to the calculations of Bishop James Ussher. I hope that Young Earth Creationists around the world are living it up over this sextamillenial weekend.

Well, not really: life, the Universe, and everything was calculated by Ussher to have been created around 6:00pm on Saturday, October 22, 4004 BC; and from 4004 BC to AD 2004 is actually not a round 6,000 years, but rather 6,007 (remembering that there is no year 0). The cosmos’s 6,000th actually passed us by at this time of the year in 1997. But if a preference for nice round numbers can make 2000 CE the time to mark the beginning of the second millennium, it can make 2,004 the time to mark 6,000 years from the Beginning.

In the meantime, you can celebrate the occasion with a delightful article about Pufferfish genomes from The Panda’s Thumb, or Roderick Long’s post on the shared premises of creationism and (state) socialism from earlier this year at Austro-Athenian Empire. (Let me just add that Long’s comments on socialism apply to state socialism but not to those of us whose flags are Black as well as Red. There is no place for central production boards or Five Year Plans here, and spontaneous unplanned harmony is no problem for us in nature or in politics–just ask Prince Kropotkin.)

For those who may be interested, here’s a bit more about my troubles with the public utilities, and a reply to my friend Sergio Méndez’s comments.

A new router was ordered and arrived some days ago (you may have guessed as much from the increased volume of posts), and thanks to Microsoft Corporation decision to exit the wireless market, I managed to get a faster, more secure, and much more reliable wireless LAN (802.11g secured with WPA, nosy) in my house for fire-sale prices.

The water is back on, for the time being at least, and the power surges have–as far as I can tell–stopped. On the other hand, they didn’t stop before they had also fried my cable modem–meaning that for a while I was not only without a router, but not even able to plug my laptop in directly for Internet access for even a limited part of the day. Thanks, tax-supported utilities!

We’re renting the equipment from Comcast, so I took it into their payment center; they swapped it out for a new one with no questions asked and at no charge.

Meanwhile, the road outside of my house is still torn up, a month and a half after they ripped the pavement up.

I say this by way of an entre into replying to Sergio’s comments on my post. He quite rightly prods me about what is said and what is left unsaid in my post:

Charles, with all due respect…Do you actually think it will have been different if the public roads and electricity company was privately owned?

Short answer: yes. Longer answer: it would be a little bit different no matter what, but a lot depends on what is being envisioned as the form of private ownership.

I think that what Sergio has in mind here is something like the wave of IMF-driven privatization schemes for government utilities in Latin American and sub-Saharan Africa, and the Republicans’ idea of a programme for privatization in America (those Republicans, at least, who still harbor faint dreams of being something other than shameless lackeys for the Bush Administration’s economic royalism). I can sympathize with having a lot of misgivings over the idea of privatization if that’s the only kind that’s on offer; and in the present political environment (where brazen Mussolinism passes for free marketeering) it may very well be the only kind that’s likely to happen in the near future. But it’s worth remembering that privatization just means the transfer of businesses and resources from government control to control by individual citizens or groups of them–which does not necessarily mean selling them off in sweetheart deals to large corporations. It could mean something quite different, and something very much more humane and empowering.

I’ll have more to say about that in a moment. But first I want to note an important aspect in which even traditional corporate-driven privatization of utilities would have made a difference to the sort of crap that government providers put us through. One of the arguments that people give all the time when they are arguing for nationalizing utility services is that utilities need to be provided by projects that are accountable to the people, and not to the bottom line; thus, they should be entrusted to the elected government in a liberal democratic polity, and not left to the hard-bitten world of corporate commerce. But this neglects an extremely important point: the degree to which being accountable to the bottom line makes them accountable to the public–at least if the public here is taken to mean you, the individual person having to deal with them, and not some Rousseauian mystification of the the general will. (Since I entirely lack a general will, I’ll leave any questions concerning it to other, more enlightened commentators.)

Don’t get me wrong: corporations can be huge assholes. In this vale of tears, there are people who are foolish, short-sighted, irresponsible, avaricious, or cruel, and no small number of them seem to be in the world of business. I realize all this, and I want a radically different world; the red in my flag means socialism. But the black in my flag means anarchism, and I don’t see any reason to think that people in government bureaucracies would be somehow more angelic than those in corporate bureaucracies, so I think the important question to ask is one of incentives. And if you look at the incentives, the facts are that you, personally, can make a difference on the margin when you are dealing with a private company, whereas you can’t with the government. Think of it this way: who is going to be more accountable to you and more ready to help you with your problems–someone who could lose $60/month right now if you’re unsatisfied, or who has the power to take your money for the service whether you like it or not, who was appointed by some other person, who in turn might lose your one vote amongst the thousands or millions that determine whether or not they will keep their job–if you’re so pissed off that one or two or four years from now the crappy service from your public utilities happens to be the deciding factor for your vote? (And who, by the way, will suffer no marginal loss whatsoever of power or responsibility or income for having lost one vote that they had before….)

Let alone if you happen to live in a Black neighborhood (or a working-class white neighborhood), or if you are a woman, or a member of any number of other groups who are drastically underrepresented in the government and who are often dismissed or marginalized in the political process.

Of course, you might object that these are all reasons for democratic political reform: if it’s so hard for individual citizens (especially those without established political connections) to make any difference to how government-run utilities do business, then why not make politicians more accountable to the citizens, by instituting reforms like public comment periods, shorter election cycles, term limits, citizen recalls, voter initiatives, and so on? Well, fine–and I think these would all be laudable reforms. But if you get to change around the constitution of the government for hypothetical purposes, then I should certainly be able to put forward ideas based on a radically environment in terms of the coordination of businesses, private ownership, and privatization of government resources. If we’re talking about instituting fundamental reforms, then why not also talk about what privatization would be like with fundamental reforms to how services are privatized and who gets chances to buy up the resources?

Imagine what it would be like if privatization meant that you and your neighbors (organized into a neighborhood co-operative) owned the street in front of your house? If privatized parks meant selling land to the Trust for Public Land rather than corporate developers, or simply donating park land as public property (instead of government property: for the difference, see Roderick Long‘s essay, In Defense of Public Space)? If privatized water meant that the local government would sell different parts and aspects its water works to a half-dozen local groups, including worker-owned union shops and not-for-profit co-operatives? If privatized electricity meant no more subsidies for huge, centralized fossil fuel plants and selling power wires to local neighborhood associations that work towards putting up small-scale solar energy production from panels on their roofs? That you and your neighbors were the ones who made the decisions about when your road needs to be fixed and who should be hired to fix it? That you can switch power companies if their service causes power surges and they refuse to compensate you for equipment destroyed, or switch water companies if they start turning the water off without warning for hours at a time? If it meant that utilities would be in the control of a vast, bottom-up network of individual people, voluntary associations, and local co-operatives making the decisions about what they want and need?

I can tell you one thing for sure: nobody on Olive St. would be paying for a bunch of assholes who leave our road torn up for a month and a half while they go work on other stuff.

If you want the services that matter to your life to be provided cheaply and reliably, with high quality and under your own control rather than the control of unaccountable bureaucrats, then the answer to Behemoth corporations is not a Leviathan state! The answer is a society based on local autonomy, co-operative production, and mutual aid–that’s cooperative, not coerced, and mutual aid, not the crumbs of tax monies that the sovereign deigns to drop from the table. Freedom makes your life better. And if it is done in a spirit of giving the people back their own, rather than in the spirit of cutting sweetheart deals with big corporate contributors, then it will especially make life better for people who have historically been oppressed and disenfranchised. That’s not actually the primary reason you should support it (your primary reason should be that other people are not your property). But some things are valued both for themselves and for their consequences; and as consequences go, this is as good a reason as any.

Today is May Day, or International Worker’s Day: an international day for celebrating the achievements of workers and the struggle for organized labor.

You might have thought that the proper day was Labor Day, as traditionally celebrated on the first Monday in September. Not so; the federal holiday known as Labor Day is actually a Gilded Age bait-and-switch from 1894. It was crafted and promoted in an effort to throw a bone to labor while erasing the radicalism implicit in May Day (a holiday declared by workers, in honor of the campaign for the eight hour day and in memory of the Haymarket martyrs). As a low-calorie substitute for workers’ struggle to come into their own, we get a celebration of labor … so long as it rigidly adheres to the AFL-line orthodoxy of collective bargaining, appeasement, and power to the union bosses and government bureaucrats. That this holiday emerged and solidified at exactly the same historical moment as the unholy alliance of conservative (statist, nativist, racist, and misogynist) unionism with corporate barons and the Progressive regulation movement is no coincidence. That AFL-line unions continue to use Labor Day as a chance to co-opt the historic successes of radical, libertarian unions in campaigns such as the fight for the eight-hour day or the five-day week is no coincidence, either.

Too many of my comrades on the Left fall into the trap of taking the Labor Day version of history for granted: modern unions are trumpeted as the main channel for the voice of workers; the institutionalization of the system through the Wagner Act and the National Labor Relations Board in 1935, and the ensuing spike in union membership during the New Deal period, are regarded as one of the great triumphs for workers of the past century.

You may not be surprised to find out that I don’t find this picture of history entirely persuasive. The Wagner Act was the capstone of years of government promotion of conservative, AFL-line unions in order to subvert the organizing efforts of decentralized, uncompromising, radical unions such as the IWW and to avoid the previous year’s tumultuous general strikes in San Francisco, Toledo, and Minneapolis. The labor movement as we know it today was created by government bureaucrats who effectively created a massive subsidy program for conservative unions which followed the AFL and CIO models of organizing–which emphatically did not include general strikes or demands for worker ownership of firms. Once the NRLB-recognized unions had swept over the workforce and co-opted most of the movement for organized labor, the second blow of the one-two punch fell: government benefits always mean government strings attached, and in this case it was the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which pulled the activities of the recognized unions firmly into the regulatory grip of the federal government. Both the internal culture of post-Wagner mainstream unions, and the external controls of the federal labor regulatory apparatus, have dramatically hamstrung the labor movement for the past half-century. Union methods are legally restricted to collective bargaining and limited strikes (which cannot legally be expanded to secondary strikes, and which can be, and have been, broken by arbitrary fiat of the President). Union hiring halls are banned. Union resources have been systematically sapped by banning closed shop contracts, and encouraging states to ban union shop contracts–thus forcing unions to represent free-riding employees who do not join them and do not contribute dues. Union demands are effectively constrained to modest (and easily revoked) improvements in wages and conditions. And, since modern unions can do so little to achieve their professed goals, and since their professed goals have been substantially lowered anyway, unionization of the workforce continues its decades-long slide.

May Day is a celebration of the original conception of the labor movement, as expressed by anarchist organizers such as Albert Parsons, Lucy Parsons, Benjamin Tucker, and others: a movement for workers to come into their own, by banding together, supporting one another, and taking direct action in the form of boycotts, work stoppages, general strikes, and the creation of workers’ spaces such as local co-operatives and union hiring halls. The spirit was best expressed by John Brill’s famous exhortation to Dump the bosses off your back–by which he did not mean to go to a government mediator and get them to make the boss sit down with you and work out a slightly more beneficial arrangement. Dump the bosses off your back! meant: organize and create local institutions that let you bypass the bosses. Negotiate with them if it’ll do some good; ignore them if it won’t. The signal achievements of the labor movement in the late 19^th and early 20^th century were achievements in this spirit: the campaigns that won the 8 hour day and the weekend off in many workplaces, for example, emerged from a unilateral work stoppage by rank-and-file workers, declared by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, and organized especially by the explicitly anarchist International Working People’s Association, after legislative efforts by the National Labor Union and the Knights of Labor failed. The stagnant, or even backsliding, state of organized labor over the past half century is the direct result of government colonization and the ascendency of government-subsidized unions.

Don’t get me wrong: the modern labor movement, for all its flaws and limitations, is the reflection (no matter how distorted) of an honorable effort; it deserves our support and does some good. Union bosses, corporate bosses, and government bureaucrats may work to co-opt organized labor to their own ends, but rank-and-file workers have perfectly good reasons to support AFL-style union organizing: modern unions may not be accountable enough to rank-and-file workers, but they are more accountable than corporate bureaucracy; modern unions bosses don’t care enough about giving workers direct control in their own workplace, but they care more than corporate bosses, who make most of their living by denying workers such control. The labor movement, like all too many other honorable movements for social justice in the 20^th century, has become a prisoner of politics: a political situation has been created in which the most rational thing for most workers to do is to muddle through with a co-opted and carefully regulated labor movement that helps them in some ways but undermines their long-term prospects. It doesn’t make sense to respond to a situation like that with blanket denunciations of organized labor; the best thing to do is to support our fellow workers within the labor movement as it is constrained today, but also to work to change the political situation that constrains it, and to set it free. That means loosening the ties that bind the union bosses to the corporate and government bureaucrats, by working to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, and abolish the apparatus of the NLRB, and working to build free, vibrant, militant unions once again.

Dump the bosses off your back. Free the unions, and all political prisoners!

I’d like to interrupt the recent stream of political posts for a moment to geek over the prospects of robotic automobiles. Well, not quite; there will be a bit of political grumbling before the end, and there are a few mixed feelings about the technology. But first–the robots!

DETROIT, April 3 — The modern car does not have to guess your weight. It already knows.

It watches how you drive and it can pull a Trump. Skid, and before you can blink, you’re fired — the car is driving for you, if only for a moment. Cars today can decide when to brake, steer and can park themselves. They can even see.

In short, the back-seat driver now lives under the hood. And it does more than just talk.

This is all technology on the road now, if not in a single country or car. But industry engineers and executives view it as the start of a trend that will play out over the next decade, in which automobiles become increasingly in touch with their surroundings and able to act autonomously.

…

Diminishing returns from air bags and other devices that help people survive crashes have led to a wave of new technology to help avoid accidents. Or, if an on-board microprocessor judges a collision to be inevitable, the car puts itself into a defensive crouch. Mercedes S-Class sedans will even start shutting the sunroof and lifting reclined seats if a collision is deemed likely.

This trend is made possible by the car’s evolution from a mechanical device to an increasingly computerized one, in which electronic impulses replace or augment moving parts. That means microprocessors can take control of the most basic driving functions, like steering and braking.

At the same time, there is a parallel evolution in sensory technology. Most advanced safety systems are equipped with sensors that look inside the car, tracking tire rotation, brake pressure and how rapidly a driver is turning the steering wheel.

…

Japanese automakers have pushed the boundaries of these technologies farthest in their home market, a society with an affinity for gadgetry. Toyota recently introduced a car that parks itself.

I love gadgets. And while I like having a car available, I hate the routine unpleasantness that goes along with driving most places you need to get. A self-parking car is just so tomorrow–and so nice a solution to one of the more routine frustrations of driving, that it will leave my geeky soul all a-glow for weeks.

I do have to confess, though, that the glow wears off a little when I think about it more. Sure, I’m all for intelligent machines–and robots, no less! And sure, I think that increased road safety is all for the best. But–as Thomas Landauer pointed out back in 1996 in The Trouble With Computers–all too often we end up wasting a lot of productive energy by investing it in sophisticated technological solutions to problems that were created by the inappropriate application of technology in the first place. Landauer discusses this in the context of uncritical transfer of tasks to the computer; but it’s no less true of transportation.

Think of it this way: the reason that people are working on sophisticated robo-cars is because when you have millions of people individually driving cars on crowded streets at high speeds, it makes it all too likely that a lot of people will crash into each other and get killed. One way to do this is to pour a lot of technological effort into making the cars more aware of their surroundings and able to automatically take actions that will reduce the likelihood of a crash, and reduce the damage if one occurs.

Another way to get cars to carry a lot of people without running into each other is to tie a bunch of them together, move them as a unit, and call it a train.

But trains have floundered over the past century while automobiles have flourished. Why? Well, not because stressful, dangerous, polluting, rage-inducing car commutes are really how the average person wants to get from place to place; it has a lot more to do with the fact that the various levels of government in the United States have effectively forced us to adopt automobiles as our method of mass transit through creating a cartelized financial disaster-area in the train industry, and by pouring billions of dollars every year into subsidies for creating and maintaining free highways.

Don’t get me wrong. I wish I had the resources to get myself one of those self-parking cars. I think a future filled with robo-mobiles is one I’d like to live in. But I also appreciate a simple solution to what ought to be a simple problem. So two cheers for robo-cars, and one boo held back for the Interstate Highway System.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled jeremiads against the Bush Administration.