American Banality versus Norwegian Humanity: Musings on Twin Sisters

I just watched a fascinating documentary on PBS about two Chinese twins, Twin Sisters, one raised in the urban US the other in rural small town Norway. The documentary showed how the Norwegian twins life revolved around family, nature, hiking, biking, school, and natural beauty. The American twins life, on the other hand, revolved around shopping, dolls who wore the same dresses she did, and event after event be it violin practise or soccer practise. At the end of the documentary the male of the American couple that had adopted one of the Chinese twin sisters remarked about how homes in rural small town Norway were built so families could enjoy each other. I would add that they were also built so the family could enjoy the beauty of the fjord on which the town they lived in lay. For me the life of the Norwegian twin showed how hollow and banal the life of the American twin was compared to the life of her sister in Norway. It showed to me how much we in the US have lost since the 1980s thanks to the octopus that is American consumer capitalism.

The Man From the Radiant Dystopian Utopian Future Past

What would Honest Weight Food Corporation be without controversy? Recently, the Board of Honest Weight, which is down to five members after four members resigned earlier this year due to issues surrounding the previous Board’s attempt to end the membership worker programme that has long been at the heart of the coop part of Honest Weight, appointed one S.R., one Better Call, to one of the empty seats of the Board. The Board can do this according to the by-laws, the constitution of Honest Weight.

R, who finished behind two others who finished just beyond the threshold for being elected to the Board, was appointed because he was a lawyer and this meant that the Board didn’t have to fill out the forms that are required for the New York State Liquor Authority each time a new member joins the Board. The Board, by the way, is the legislative and executive body of Honest Weight while the GRC, the Governance Review Council, has become the corporation’s Supreme Court, if unofficially and with no real power to enforce its rulings, something Andrew Jackson would, I think, have admired. But back to our main story: The Board had just spent an undisclosed amount of time doing the forms that hadn’t been filed for three and one half years. Fortunately for Honest Weight this lack of bureaucratic efficiency didn’t result in the loss of Honest Weight’s liquor license, since beer sales make up a significant portion of the total sales at the grocery.

A few people raised questions about whether it is proper for an institution that proclaims democracy as one of its defining missions should appoint someone to the Board who finished below two others. Others, like G.T, argued that “[w]e've [Honest Weight] been out of compliance with our liquor license for 2 years in a row, thanks to the LT's [Leadership Team’s] oversight. But somehow that's not what you want to talk about. You'd rather criticize the board for appointing a lawyer to help resolve a problem that the board didn't make. They had to fight to get the license situation under control, and were able to do that more quickly since S.R. did not need to go through the same kinds of background checks and fingerprinting that N would have had to if he had been seated. The license could have been taken away, at which point it would have been much harder to get back. We sell quite a bit of beer, which I'm sure you know, since I've seen you with an entire cart full of Sam Smith before. Thank your lucky stars next time you're drunkenly trolling this forum looking to stir up some conspiracy bullshit.”

I want to analyze G.T.’s statement because I think it reflects several not particularly positive trends in contemporary “intellectual” thought and analysis in the era of Twitter, twitterese, the new digital communications media, and the decline of the liberal arts college and its devolution into a type of vocational school. Let me note quickly that the ad hominem slurs inherent in G.T.’s accusations of drunkenness were made about someone Mr. G.T. doesn’t really know and that they reflect an unfortunate tendency in many of today's youth, particularly the male "kid" of the species, who seem to be unable to outgrow the schoolyard bullying or the rather childish and arrogant anti-intellectualism of their youth. Second, G.T.’s accusations that someone is trolling Honest Weight forums stirring up controversy are leveled far too often at those trying to uphold intellectual standards of argumentation and discourse, two things that seem to be lost in a generation brought up on the media, including Twitter, and educated in institutions that no longer maintain critical intellectual standards, and he provides no empirical justification for this accusation.

I want to explore Mr. G.T.’s level of intellectual discourse in the rest of this blog by focusing on his argument that Better Call had to be appointed to save Honest Weight’s Liquor license. There is a fundamental problem with G.T.’s argument. It is ambiguous. What does G.T. mean when he argues that R had to be appointed? Does he mean that only lawyers should be appointed to the Board now that Honest Weight has a liquor license and since it requires a Herculean effort on the part of the Board to make sure that the paperwork for the New York State Liquor Authority is kept up to snuff? Is he asserting that only lawyers should run for the Board since the paperwork to maintain the liquor license has become a labour of Hercules that only a lawyer could do this? Doesn’t that ignore the fact that only two of the members of the Board before S.R. was called were lawyers and that they managed to do what was required of them to get Honest Weight in compliance with the regulations of the State Liquor Authority? Is he arguing that this is a special situation and requires the labours of one Better Call. Isn’t this argument precluded by G.T.’s absolute statement about the need to have lawyers on the Board to protect the sale of liquor at Honest Weight? It is hard to tell what G.T. means since his assertions are not backed up with anything more than empty generalisations. At the very least he seems to be arguing that only lawyers should be appointed to the Board because only they can allow the Board and Honest Weight to avoid the slings and arrows of bureaucratic desire. He also may be implying that only lawyers should be elected to the Board since only they allow the Board to escape the herculean labours that have to be taken in order to meet the requirements of the New York State Liquor Authority, requirements that demand that each time a new member joins the Board the SLA must be informed and that the new member be vetted for possible violations of laws associated with selling liquor in retail stores. Whatever G.T. is trying to say one thing can be said about his “arguments”, they lack intellectual rigour, they are intellectually lazy, and they are intellectually sloppy. They are also all too human.

One more point before I go. I think the evidence strongly suggests that G.T. is arguing for the appointment of Better Call to the Board because he likes him and likes what he thinks Better Call stands for. G.T. likes Better Call because Better Call is, according to G.T., favourably disposed to labour and labour unions. G.T., you see, is one of the proponents of unionisation and is a member of a minority IWW union at Honest Weight. His goal seems to be to get the Board to recognise his minority union and he presumably thinks that the Rutgers educated S.R., a point G.T. makes a big deal of, is a means to this end. This, of course, is patented ideological construction of reality stuff and shows that the Wobbly commitment to what they call “direct democracy”, at least in the case of Honest Weight's direct Board elections, is secondary to their means, getting a lawyer sympathetic to unions on the Board, to their radiant ends, achieving Wobbly recognition at Honest Weight. It also shows that G.T. is a typical human who, like others, including members of the Westboro Baptist Church, construct a “reality” that fits their ideological needs.

And oh, as for Better Call he was elected to the Board last week. His comments prior to the election suggest that he may have a messianic complex which would seem to mesh well with G.T.'s uncritical defence of his appointment to the Board. Charismatic leaders, as Max Weber recognised, do have their acolytes. The appointment of R. to the Board, which was, in my opinion, a violation of the spirit of democracy at Honest Weight, doesn't seem to have raised much in the way of batted eyebrow amongst many of the voting members of the "coop". Oh well, I guess now would be a good time to note the conclusions of the Asch and Milgram studies.

No Voting For Me...

It is voting for the Board time again at Honest Weight. I definitely won't be voting for one person who is running for the Board, Better Call R. Saul. I know he is Honest Weight's Wobblies' Miss Honest Weight of 2016 because he wears the union label. I know he is the Miss Congeniality of 2016 of Honest Weight Board member Ned Depew because he found it expedient to appoint yet another lawyer to one of the Board's four empty seats because it meant the Board didn't have to send a form to the New York State Liquor Authority. I don't know why the other four members of the Board supported appointing Better Call Saul despite the fact that he finished below two others who had garnered more votes in the Special Membership Meeting election of last year. Was it because the Orange Brigade that controls the Board wanted to appoint one of their own? Was it because the Orange Brigade wanted to give Better Call Saul an advantage in the upcoming election? Was it because the Board was advised by lawyers that it was simply easier to appoint a lawyer rather than to follow the messier democratic process? Regardless of the reason this Board's action shows to me that the recent Board is as little committed to the direct democracy Honest Weight loudly proclaims that it is on its wall as the previous Board was when it appointed John Serio, who also finished behind another candidate, ironically the same one, who had more votes than Serio did.

Because of the current Board's lack of respect for direct democracy I am going to abstain from the upcoming Board elections. I am glad that this Board has finally brought into the light what went on under the previous Board and under the reign of the Leadership Team. I am glad that we now know that $75,000 dollars in bonuses (some claim the amount was higher, others lower) were paid over three years to the LT (which three years they don't note), that $200,000 dollars was spent on rent on the old store location that members were told we would not be paying after January of 2013 (though it was known that we were still renting the old store), and that $500,000 dollars was spent enriching advisers pushing corporatisation in order to eliminate the member labour programme, one of the few things that continues to make Honest Weight a kind of "coop". The old Board and the LT did all of this despite the fact that the store was, according to the same Board and LT, having financial problems and was not meeting managements sales goals. Shades of vampire corporate capitalism. I am, in other words, glad that the current Board is apparently trying to clean up the mess the previous Board and the LT left them. Despite this, however, I cannot in good conscience vote for a group of people who fail to live up to the direct democracy claims displayed prominently in the store.

I have to say that not voting also has other perks. I won't miss going to a membership meeting in which questions asked of the candidates make the questions asked of American presidential candidates seem intellectually impressive and challenging by comparison. I won't miss the fact that questions taken from the audience on pieces of paper are not only dumbed down but, the difficult ones in particular, are censored. I won't miss voting in elections where incumbents have an unfair advantage and are generally re-elected. Shades of American oligarchy. I will be happy that I won't, to paraphrase George Carlin, be in any way responsible for what comes bureaucratically after at Honest Weight.

The Man Who Knew Too Little About Bureaucracies

I don't remember precisely when it happened, probably in the 1960s and after, but bureaucracy has become, like cult, a dirty word for many in the United States. I am not sure those who use bureaucracy as a dirty word really know what a bureaucracy is, however. According to one introductory textbook on sociology “[b]ureaucracy is a type of organisation marked by a clear hierarchy of authority and the existence of written rules or procedures and staffed by full-time salaries officials.” Another introductory sociology text defines bureaucracy similarly as a “formal organisation in which power is allocated through a hierarchy of offices and goal statues. In a bureaucracy people engage in specialised tasks, there is a division of labour, and abide by rules and expectations that are clearly defined”.

Let’s apply these similar definitions to a case study, a case study of the Honest Weight Food "Coop". Does Honest Weight have a clear hierarchy? Yes, there is the Board of Directors, Honest Weight’s ruling legislative and executive body. Below them is the Leadership Team. Below these managers are a host of workers with specialised tasks such as benefits, payroll, and advertising. Below these mid level managers are the heads of departments including grocery, the deli, and the front end. Then there are the staff. As one goes up the hierarchy pay increases just as in any other bureaucracy. As one goes up the hierarchical pyramid does power and authority increase? It does just as it does in the American government and in the American military. Does Honest Weight have written rules? It does. Honest Weight has a book full of ever increasing by-laws and it has an employees manual full of ever increasing rules that employees are supposed to abide by. Needless, to say other bureaucracies from IBM to the federal government have similar written rules. Do Honest Weight’s employees engage in specialised tasks? They do. Honest Weight has cashiers, deli personnel, mid management personnel, and upper management personnel to name just a few. Management personnel, as is the case in GE, are subdivided by specialised tasks. Is Honest Weight a bureaucracy in the way that term has been defined for one hundred years or so? The answer to that question is a resounding well duh, yes it is.

Despite all of this, despite, in other words, of the clear fact that Honest Weight is a bureaucracy, there are still those who deny the obvious, namely, that Honest Weight is a bureaucracy. One can only wonder why an intelligent and thinking person fails to recognise that Honest Weight, given the weight of the evidence, is a typical bureaucracy. Is he or she unfamiliar with the scientific literature on bureaucracies? Does he or she not know that comparative history shows that as societies were transformed from hunter-gatherer societies to small scale agricultural societies to large agricultural societies and to modern industrial societies, populations grew and bureaucracies grew to deal with increasing numbers of people, the increasingly complex tasks that demographic growth and civilisational complexity brought, and to maximise economic and political efficiency? Does he or she not want to believe that Honest Weight is a bureaucracy because he or she can't face the truth? Is he or she trapped in an ideological iron cage and unable to admit the obvious because that would mean giving up a cherished ideological fiction? You do the ideological math.

My Sojourn Among the Wobblies

Before I electronically entered the land of the Wobbly (Industrial Workers of the World) tribe I had been told by previous sojourners and observers who knew of my interest in the social and cultural construction of culture and ideology that the Wobblies had a very interesting ideological topography. According to these researchers the Wobblies, like most other humans before them and likely most other humans after them, divide up the world into two spheres: the sacred and the profane. In the category of the sacred is, for members of the contemporary Wobbly tribe, the man Wobblies seem to think of as kind of a prophet, Karl Marx, and the works of "the prophet", which the Wobblies regard as infallible sacred scripture. In the category of the profane is anyone who criticises, validly or not, the prophet, the sacred works of the prophet, and that key symbol of contemporary Wobbly culture, the utopian belief that "the working class"--ironically most contemporary Wobblies seem to be middle class intellectuals--is the essence of all that is good and pure in a profane world dominated and run by capitalist pigs and their running dog lackeys, a belief symbolised succinctly and pithily by the graphic art poster above with its radiant future brought to you by the Wobblies motif. Critics of Wobbly sacred culture are, researchers report, regarded by the Wobbly tribe as heretics and disbelievers and treated as such by the Wobblies.

Recently, a number of researchers have reported that a new category of profane has begun to emerge among current members of the Wobbly tribe, namely the belief that anyone who writes more than a few paragraphs and who uses words like fetishisation or social and cultural construction in their electronic posts is profaning the sacred culture of the Wobblies, a culture, of course, which Wobblies, have fetishised. What is fascinating about this conception of the profane among contemporary Wobblies is that it has become apparent among members of the tribe despite the fact that the works of their prophet run to several thousand pages and are littered with words like fetishisation, the labour theory of value and other technical philosophical and economic "jargon". Most researchers chalk the rise of this novel conception of the profane among recent Wobblies up to the rise of the new digital media and its negative impact on the attention spans of those who use electronic media, something that shows, contrary to Wobbly ideology, that culture is sometimes base.

What I can report at this point in my research is that my research thus far confirms the reports of previous observers. The Wobblies I encountered do have very definite notions of what is sacred and what is profane, do treat as heretics those who violate Wobbly sacred taboos, do inquisit those who violate Wobbly sacred taboos, and do react negatively to electronic posts they regard as too long and too full of multi-syllabic words. I can also report that I learned a few other things during my ethnographic sojourn among the Wobbly faithful. The posts they criticise for being too long and too verbose, in my experience, are only those posts they regard as profaning their holy of holies, their sacred prophet and his sacred works. This intellectual anti-intellectualism of the Wobblies I encountered may, in part, be a product of the comprehension, patience, and concentration problems wrought by the rise of new digital media with their cult of pithiness. It is also, if not more, the product of an ideological correctness grounded in the sense that they, the Wobblies, have a monopoly on truth. That's fetishisation. I learned that the official Wobby commitment to direct democracy is only skin deep. When the Board at the "coop" at which the Wobblies work and shop appointed someone to the Board who finished sixth in a direct membership election--three were elected--the Wobblies supported the Board action justifying the means by reference to the ends, the lawyer appointed was more union friendly and, as a result, more friendly to the Wobbly union they are trying to expand at the Coop. Ironically, a Board member who is opposed to unionisation in putatively cooperative settings also justified the means--appointing a lawyer who finished behind two others--by the end--it was expedient. Those Wobblies sure do wobble. All of this, by the way, makes the Wobblies I met online rather typical examples of the human species, particularly the bourgeois human species..

Author's note: There is a bit of the Nacirema tongue in cheek in this blog post. There are several serious points being made in it as well, I hope.

Mucking About in the Recesses of Theoretical Memory...

One of the most treasured moments in my life were those days when I frequented one of downtown Athens, Ohio's 20 plus pubs with my Socialist Worker Party friend Jake and a group of political science and sociology students from Ohio University in the 1980s to explore, discuss, and debate social theory, Marxist and beyond, to try to figure out the world we lived in. Another was the years I spent hiking the American and Canadian West with another one time friend but that is another story.

What I enjoyed most about these experiences, apart from the intellectual stimulation, was that they were not dogmatic. While Jake was a Socialist Worker he was not a fundamentalist Marxist. Jake did not, or at least this was my impression, need to believe that every jot and tittle that Marx wrote was infallible and true. In these gatherings we were able to talk about and critique a variety of social theories civilly and respectfully and, of course, enjoy a beer or three at the same time.

I have been studying social theory, including Marxism, history, religion, and the social sciences for forty years. I have taken much from Marx particularly his emphasis on economics and his discussion of the fetishisation of the commodities if in its broadened social constructionist form. I have also borrowed from Weber, who I still find the most compelling of the great social theorists though I do not regard him as infallible. I have taken much from Lukacs (a student of Weber), Gramsci, the Frankfurt School (who were responding to Weber), Keith Thomas, Raymond Williams, Christopher Hill, EP Thompson, Foucault (who expanded on Weber), Baudrillard, Geertz, Victor Turner and a multitude of others. I have long sought to understand the world we live in and all of these theorists have helped me do just that. I have had the opportunity to learn not only from friends and theorists but from a handful of wonderful teachers.

Because of all this I think that I, because I recognise that social theory like life itself, is dynamic and must attempt to come to grips with a world in flux, have a better understanding of a world that has changed dramatically since the mid-19th century, the world Marx was writing about. Some of what Marx said, of course, is still instructive and helpful. Some of what he wrote has been proven wrong, the labour theory of value which he took from Ricardo, for instance. All of what I have taken from these host of theorists has helped me understand that we now live in a world, a postmodern and postindustrial world, where consumer capitalism and service sector capitalism, are dominant. They have helped me understand that we now live in a world where digital media bread and circuses anaesthetise much of the population and the old media anaesthetise most of the rest.

Historical changes require, in my opinion, a broader social theory, which, while it recognises the centrality of economics, requires and demands a more subtle and nuanced notion of base and superstructure. Marx. of course, hinted at a more subtle and nuanced view of base and superstructure on several occasions, something many of his more fundamentalist dogmatic disciples could learn from. Weber, who like Marx argues for the centrality of economics, offers a more nuanced view of culture, politics, and geography that have been very helpful to me in comprehending both the modern and postmodern worlds I have and continue to live in. I am so glad that social theory in the service of understanding has been a significant part of my intellectual life. I wouldn't have had it any other way.

Don't You Know That You Can Count Me Out: I Ain't With Her

I voted for a female for president in 2012. I was not about to vote for the moderately conservative corporatist Barack Obama. Hell, I hadn't voted for that self proclaimed New Democrat (read corporation friendly) Bill Clinton, the president who helped eliminate Glass-Steagall putting American taxpayers on the hook for the casino capitalism of investment banks, the president who, along with Newt Gingrich, helped transform welfare making it more difficult for those who really need it to get, in 1992 or 1998. If Bernie Sanders is not the Democratic (Socialist) nominee in 2016 and if he doesn't run as a Green or a Socialist for president I will be voting for a woman again, Jill Stein, the likely Green candidate for president, the person who I voted for in 2012. Unlike the moderately conservative corporatist Clinton, Stein, at least in my opinion, cares more about the men and women of the 99% than for those few who work for Wall Street in its broadest sense, the same Wall Street Clinton has received significant amounts of money from for her presidential campaigns, the same person who spoke to Wall Street reportedly receiving thousands of dollars for doing so. While I will not vote for Clinton, I would vote for another woman who really cares about the 99%, Elizabeth Warren, if she ran for president. Hey wouldn't a Sanders-Warren ticket be awesome in 2016? Anyway, though many of my friends disagree with me about my voting logic pointing out that in a two party systems sometimes you have to hold your nose and vote strategically sometimes, I urge all of you out there in cyberland, particularly those who supported Bernie Sanders, who was undone in large part by a Democratic Party primary process rigged in favour of the establishment candidate--Clinton, of course--and the front loading of Southern states with their populations who seem to care more about symbolic politics and name recognition rather than real political change that would benefit all of the 99%, to vote for Stein. If we really want real political change we need to start just saying no to establishment corporate friendly 1% candidates like Hillary Clinton.