SFO to Continue Mozart Trilogy This Month

In exactly two weeks the San Francisco Opera (SFO) will continue its cycle of the three operas that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart composed in partnership with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. In the order in which the cycle was planned, those operas are The Marriage of Figaro (K. 492), Così fan tutte (thus do all women, K. 588), and Don Giovanni (K. 527). The plan also involved introducing the operas on a season-by-season basis; and the cycle began with performances of K. 492 in the fall of 2019.

As we all know, the original schedule was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in the cancelation of the 2020–21 season. With the reopening of the War Memorial Opera House, SFO will not only resume but also complete the cycle as it had originally been planned. This month will see the production of K. 588, and K. 527 will be performed in June of next year.

The “Great American House” as a country club setting for Così fan tutte (rendering by Set Designer Erhard Rom, courtesy of SFO)

Director Michael Cavanagh planned this cycle around staging all three operas in a common setting, which he calls “the Great American House of Mozart and Da Ponte.” Each opera would take place in a different historical era, which would be reflected by the overall design of the setting. Thus the cycle began in the early years of the newly-constituted United States of America, suggesting that the house itself may have been designed by and for Thomas Jefferson. K. 588 will be set in the Thirties, when the building has become the primary structure of a country club.

If I may be allowed a bit of personal editorializing, I have to say that I find it interesting that Cavanagh decided that the action would take place during the Great Depression. I am reminded of that “Spanish peasant’s proverb” that Philip Barry worked into his script for The Philadelphia Story:

With the Rich and Mighty always a little Patience.

The play by Pierre Beaumarchais that Da Ponte adapted for Mozart’s K. 492 libretto basically involved the servant class “getting even” with their “Rich and Mighty” master; and, in many respects, Figaro’s character is anything but patient with Count Almaviva’s designs on Susanna (soon to be Figaro’s bride).

These days our take on history has become similarly critical of Jefferson and his relations with at least one of his servants. As Cavanagh’s trilogy advances, we now find ourselves again in a setting for the “Rich and Mighty” while most of the country is reeling from the Great Depression. Thus, we have a diversion of “girlfriend-swapping” taking place among a pair of sisters and a pair of young men who seem to have nothing but leisure time on their hands.

In this coming production, those sisters will be performed by soprano Nicole Cabell (Fiordiligi) and mezzo Irene Roberts (Dorabella). The roles of the young men will be taken by tenor Ben Bliss (Ferrando), making his SFO debut, and baritone John Brancy (Guglielmo). The girlfriend-swapping is conceived in order to settle a bet proposed by the aging cynic Don Alfonso (sung by Italian bass Ferruccio Furlanetto), abetted by the sisters’ maid Despina (soprano Nicole Heaston). The conductor will be Henrik Nánási, who had previously conducted K. 492.

Così fan tutte will be given five performances, the first at 2 p.m. on November 21, and the remaining four at 7:30 p.m. on November 23 and 27 and December 1 and 3. The approximate running time will be three hours and ten minutes, including one intermission. To provide a touchless experience, tickets will be electronic for either printing at home or display on a mobile device. Similarly, there will be no printed program books; and patrons will be provided with a hyperlink to a digital version that, again, may be printed or displayed on a mobile device.

Ticket prices range from $26 to $398. They may be purchased by calling (but not, as of this writing, visiting) the SFO Box Office at 415-864-3330. There is also a Web page with hyperlinks for purchasing tickets for all six of the performances. To ensure flexibility for patrons during this transitional season, no-fee exchanges and refunds will be provided up to two hours before performances. In particular, refunds will be available to patrons that must miss a performance due to COVID. In addition, the three performances in November will be live-streamed. Virtual tickets are available for $25. SFO has created a Web page for these tickets. Information about viewing the performance will then be provided after the ticket purchase has been finalized.

SFB’s Take on the “star-cross’d lovers”

Yesterday evening San Francisco Ballet (SFB) launched the penultimate stream of its 2021 Digital Season. The program consisted of a full-length performance of Romeo & Juliet choreographed by Artistic Director Helgi Tomasson and first performed at the War Memorial Opera House on March 8, 1994. The video was a film production that inaugurated Lincoln Center at the Movies: Great American Dance in 2015. As a result, this offer differs from the other Digital Season videos by presenting “intermission features” that included a “making of” segment and a profile of the SFB School. More critically, I came away with the impression that the production teams for the previous SFB videos had a much better understanding of how to “capture” ballet than the Lincoln Center crew did.

The first encounter of Romeo (Davit Karapetyan) with Juliet (Maria Kochetkova) at the Capulet ball (photograph by Erik Tomasson, © Erik Tomasson, courtesy of San Francisco Ballet)

That said, there was much to admire, beginning with Maria Kochetkova’s interpretation of Juliet, which managed to nail the full diversity of dispositions that this character experiences over the course of the entire narrative. Davit Karapetyan’s Romeo captured every annoying detail of his obsession with Rosaline (WanTing Zhao), which turns on a dime into a focus on Juliet, whom he first sees when he has crashed the Capulet ball. Indeed, that ball scene provides more insight into the nature of Paris (Myles Thatcher) than one usually encounters; and one has to wonder if an allegiance with the Capulets is more important to him than whether or not he marries Juliet. Indeed, Luke Ingham’s portrayal of Tybalt came so close to excess that one almost wants to warn Paris to quit while he is ahead (and, as we know from the final act, still alive).

What I found the most unique of Tomasson’s approaches to the scenario was his treatment of the Prince of Verona (Martino Pistone). The music that Serge Prokofiev provided for his first appearance, breaking up the street fight between the Capulets and the Montagues, practically seethes with authority. Pistone (under Tomasson’s direction?) never captured the intensity of that authority, reducing the Prince to an annoyed suburban parent scolding his unruly children.

Nevertheless, I subsequently toyed with the idea that Tomasson may have intended a subtext. It is clear from the ball scene that the Capulets are an opulently wealthy family with no qualms about conspicuous consumption. We do not see very much of Lord Montague, but I found it worth speculating that the rivalry between the two houses may have been rooted in fiercely competitive merchant businesses. (In that context Lord Capulet may have chosen Paris as better suited to take over the “family business” than hot-headed Tybalt would ever be.) As a result, the prosperity of Verona itself probably owed much to the finances of the houses of Capulet and Montague. In that context, the Prince might chide the two Lords; but he has no real clout to enforce his ban on street fighting. As Karl Marx might have put it, “civic authority” has to take a back seat to “capitalist authority!”

The more familiar the story, the more conducive it is to being viewed through a variety of lenses. Tomasson selected several imaginative lenses through which to view Shakespeare’s tragic tale of a “pair of star-cross’d lovers.” Some of those lenses were more focused than others; but, as a whole, the SFB approach to the play’s narrative triggers some imaginative thoughts to go along with its rich choreographic resources.

Discovering My Own Point of View

As I continue to work my way through the new Library of America collection of Herald Tribune articles by Virgil Thomson, I encountered a paragraph that really resonated with me:

The intellectual audience wants culture with its music, wants information, historical perspectives, enlarged horizons. It demands of program makers constant experiment and a huge variety. It is far more interested in repertory, as a matter of fact, than in execution. It tends to envisage the whole of music as a vast library in which everything is available, or should be. The strictly musical audience and the mass public are more easily satisfied. They think of the concert life as a sort of boarding house where you take what is offered and don’t reach. Their good nature is easily abused by managements and other organizing agencies. The intellectuals are more demanding and refuse to be spoon fed. That is why, as a musician, I value the intellectual element in audiences.

Every now and then I encounter some push-back over the fact that I do not spend enough time writing about execution because I tend to dwell heavily on the music itself, usually in terms of its relation to the overall repertoire. I suppose that makes me an intellectual in Thomson's book; but that means that I value his punch line. I also think that the distinction that Thomson draws is the one I have previously tried to make between examining and criticism.

If I am to read him correctly, Thomson seems to work from the point of view that critical judgement is, and should be, grounded in evidence of execution, which may explain why, as I have previously observed, his own judgment tends to take its departure from what is printed on the score pages and, whenever possible, nothing else. However, he also seems to suggest that, even without recourse to score pages, the mass public has a basic toolbox to facilitate exercising their own judgement. I might suggest that those who are skillful at using their own tools might constitute that particular class that I have previously called the "enthusiasts." The problem is that those managements about which Thomson writes tend to know both the assets and the limitations of those tools, which is why Thomson raises the problem of abuse.

Thomson wrote the above paragraph for publication on January 22, 1950. I state that date because the article itself deserves a bit of historical perspective. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was created in 1938; but it was originally created to root out uncover Nazis, rather than undercover Communists. After the Second World War, however, the target shifted.

One result was that many keen intellects, particularly those studying the history of the United States, were writing about the many ways in which our country did not live up to the ideals it had set for itself. These articles were not necessarily accusatory, since many of the writers made no secret that the real world never lives up to the ideal world. Unfortunately, the nature of this critical thinking tended to be associated with advocating Communism; and, to be fair, there certainly was a contingent of writers who had been Party members. However HUAC went after the whole body of those intellectuals with the four-legs-good-two-legs-bad logic of George Orwell's Animal Farm, leading to a rise in anti-intellectualism that would ultimately be studied by Richard Hofstadter.

That rise was already in progress when Thomson wrote the above paragraph. However, those thoughts were simply a continuation of precepts he had been writing about half a decade earlier. My guess is that in 1950 he could not foresee just how much damage HUAC would do; and, since we have never really recovered from that damage, I have to wonder how many of today's readers would prefer to bite Thomson's finger of such regards, rather than looking where he is pointing.

Is Worker Discontent on the Rise?

Readers of either this site or either my San Francisco or national Examiner.com sites cannot have avoided learning about the current strike of the musicians of the San Francisco Symphony. However, it would appear that worker discontent is breaking out in a variety of different countries. The very source that inspired this article, BBC News, has just run a story about their own workers voting for a strike action. Shortly before that one was filed, a report was released that Lufthansa was canceling 500 flights in advance of a planned five-hour walkout by 33,000 employees.

I have to wonder whether or not these are symptoms of a broader pandemic of worker discontent. The fact is that, however comfortable the financial sector may be about markets having recovered from the economic catastrophe of the last decade, that recovery has not really been felt beyond the limited domains of an elite class whose only expertise is the ability to turn fictions of convenience into exchangable value. The unemployment problem has not yet been resolved in any substantive way. Those who do have jobs tend to find them tenuous with inadequate compensation and basically no job satisfaction. Is this conjunction of articles about strikes a sign that the workers of the world may once again be entertaining thoughts of uniting?

Revisiting a Bad Decision

While reading Stephen Hinton’s new book, Weill’s Musical Theater, I came across a line by Bertolt Brecht the seemed to resonate strongly:

What’s breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank?

The line was from the original script for Happy End; and, when that production did not succeed, it migrated into a revised text for Threepenny Opera. The reason it resonated was that it reminded me of a book that attracted a lot of attention when our Congress was debating whether or not to bail out all of those banks in September of 2009. The book was by William K. Black, former Director of Litigation for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. The title of the book was The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One.

In tracking the impact of this book during the bailout debate, I discovered that one of Black’s champions was Representative Chip Shields, who used Black’s title as the title for one of his posts to the Daily Kos. It turned out that Brecht’s line showed up in a comment to this post submitted by “LNK” on behalf of Media Reform Action. As we now know (and as we knew almost as soon as the bailout was approved), Shields’ appeal to reason both before and after the vote on the bailout had no effect.

The problem was that Shields and his fellow Progressives could not appreciate the magnitude of the opposition that faced them. This was the opposition of those who own “the material conditions of labour” (in the words of Karl Marx) but are concerned with profit through the exchange of what they own, rather than in the efforts and results of the laborers. Brecht basically took the lessons that Marx was trying to teach through his study of political economy and dramatized those lessons by recognizing that, in terms of the very principles through which one succeeds at banking, the successful banker is neither better nor worse than the successful bank robber.

The problem, however, is that those who controlled those “material conditions of labour” also controlled the consciousness industry, otherwise known as the mass media. Through that control, one did not have to silence the Progressives, because it was sufficient to ignore them and make sure that mass media did the same. More drastic action was only necessary when one of those voices began to attract enough attention from the public that the media could no longer ignore him/her. At that point the strategy turned from benign neglect to character assassination, as we saw in the case of Eliot Spitzer. Meanwhile, the 1% go about their business turning exchange into profit as we become a country no longer capable of producing value and, as a result of consciousness industry propaganda, not particularly caring that we have let those skills slip away from us.

Straight Talk about Globalization from Tim Cook

When Steve Jobs used to appear at the D: All Things Digital conference, he could dazzle his audience with his blue-sky visions, just as he would any other audience. However, as Andrew Nusca observed in his report from the conference for Between the Lines on the ZDNet Web site, Tim Cook has never pretended to live in a world of visionaries. Rather, he deals with harsh realities; and one of the realities he has come to understand best is that of supply chain management.

He thus used his slot at the conference to address the “made in America” question, explaining why Apple, and just about every other major company with a product, bases production on a globalized supply chain and why, as a corollary, there really is no place for the United States in that chain. Nusca’s summary of his remarks is well worth reading. Most important is that it teases out all of the down-side consequences that Tom Friedman either could not or would not put on the table back when he first started riding his globalization hobby-horse.

For those who like to cut to the chase, here is the crux of the argument as to why American manufacturing cannot play in the world of the global supply chain:

The reason: there’s a very real tradeoff between what’s good for workers and what’s good for business. When push comes to shove, business wins — which is why Apple’s American employees enjoy comparatively nice perks while employees of its supply chain partners live in 8,000-strong dormitories, ready to be woken up at midnight to start a 12-hour shift making new parts for an iPhone that received last-minute design changes from California. 

Imagine trying to do the same with an American worker. Unions would never stand for it, obviously, and chances are the rest of the family unit wouldn’t, either. 

My point is not to illustrate the benefits and drawbacks of unions, or even what’s fair; rather, I’m trying to illustrate a landscape in which American companies can go overseas for greater flexibility, lower price and sheer speed. So long as there are nations in this world willing to do work others aren’t, outsourcing will exist. In the capitalist system, businesses can’t win in the free market unless they exploit every advantage.

We happy few who still have a sense of history will probably have trouble reading those paragraphs without hearing a chorus singing “The Internationale” in the back of our collective heads. Written in the aftermath of the Paris Commune, it was probably the first song to state explicitly that “exploit every advantage” always meant exploiting labor to the benefit of both management and shareholders. The basic idea was that workers around they world must group together (“Groupons-nous”) for the “final struggle” (“la lute finale”) between the humanity of those workers and the objective interests of capitalism.

“The Communist Manifesto” echoed the vision of “The Internationale.” All that ensued, however, were new governments, mostly totalitarian. The new boss was the same as the old boss, and the workers were still the “damned of the Earth” (“damnés de la terre”). Several generations of new bosses have now come and gone in both political and manufacturing sectors. The state of the workers has not changed; and the sad truth is that, if the Internet empowers anyone, it is the shareholders for whom return-on-investment matters more than quality-of-product, let alone anything as intangible as worker quality-of-life. Meanwhile, “The Internationale” echoes as a faint memory, even less memorable than “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

As an afterthought, it is worth noting that Nusca’s perspective extended beyond Friedman to one of the other great visionary hucksters, Richard Florida. This seemed appropriate since I noticed that Florida’s book, The Rise of the Creative Class, is about to be “revisited” in a revised tenth-anniversary edition (as if a new edition could possibly add value to the first one). Here is how Nusca took on Florida:

Manufacturing is a powerful driver of the American economy, but it’s just one part of it. Whatever happened to the concept of a creative economy? (Answer: we realized we can’t win on creativity alone. There needs to be some elbow grease, too.)

In other words the workers figure in creativity, too. Read the stories about the Manhattan Project or the building of the first programmable digital computers. (Yes, I am beating the drum about history again.) You will find plenty of warrants for that claim in those accounts. Our would-be “visionaries” have forgotten about the workers; and, from that point of view, they are no better than heartless shareholders and may even be significantly worse.

The Shock Doctrine in Israel

In the latest issue of The New York Review, David Shulman, in his article “Israel in Peril,” seems to have hit on a turn of phrase to describe Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approach to government that may well be as accurate as it is disconcerting:

Like many Israelis, he inhabits a world where evil forces are always just about to annihilate the Jews, who must strike back in daring and heroic ways in order to snatch life from the jaws of death. I think that, like many other Israelis, he is in love with such a world and would reinvent it even if there were no serious threat from outside.

This statement triggered two key associative memories.

The first is that it stands as a characterization of just about any religious fundamentalism, regardless of the faith providing the foundation, and thus reflects the extent to which the strong religious convictions of those determined to build settlements in occupied territory factor in Netanyahu holding any sort of political office at all.

More generally, it reflects beyond prevailing opinions in Israel to Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine” thesis, formulated to explain the irrationalities of the policies of the Bush Administration, whether they involved foreign affairs (including military adventurism), the economy, and the environment. At the risk to being a bit too reductive, the basic thesis that that shouting loud enough that the sky is falling tends to be an excellent method for establishing and holding political power. I then realized that the arrow of influence actually points the other way. The very concept of government-by-shock-doctrine may have come about by members of the Bush Administrating examining conditions in Israeli and liking so much that they figured they could appropriate the playbook!

From this point of view, we may to well to face the coming Presidential election armed with the combined wisdom of Slavoj Žižek’s book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce and Karl Marx' thought about how history repeats itself (which inspired Žižek’s title). Barack Obama believed that the American people were smart enough to overcome the shock doctrine once they saw it for what it was. However, the way things are shaping up, there is a good chance that the shock doctrine will find its way into the Republican Party platform for the November election. From this point of view, that election may amount to a test of whether or not the electorate can, indeed, be fooled a second time.

From High Technology to Low Skill

The real story behind L. V. Anderson’s post to browbeat, the culture blog maintained on the Slate Web site, has to do with the relationship between technology and work. On the surface the story was about a press screening of The Avengers in which the entire digital file of the film was deleted by the projectionist and needed to be downloaded, requiring a wait of a couple of hours. Anderson used this as an opportunity to revisit an older blog post by Roger Ebert on “the visual pitfalls of digital projection.” At the risk oversimplifying, the basic idea is that using a digital projector is not that different from using an iPod; and Ebert’s point is that projectionists are no longer as skilled as they were in the good old days when you had to worry about things like a smooth transition from one projector to another when the film required more than one reel or monitoring the equipment to make sure that nothing catches fire.

This should not be surprising in a world in which technology has managed to reduce “knowledge work” to just another form of slave labor. The bottom line is that “the owners of the material conditions of labour” (to borrow a phrase from Karl Marx) are not interested in skilled workers; they are only interested in how increased productivity leads to increased revenue, whether it is the productivity of some drone at a call center or a projectionist in a movie house. In the latter case all that seems to matter to those owners is that one projectionist can now easily manage multiple theaters (the metric of productivity); and the risk factors of mistakes do not seem to enter into the equation. Presumably, one could design better interfaces to minimize those errors, but that would involve investing in both the designers and the evaluators. Why go to all that trouble when running a projection room is the same as using an iPod? Last week we saw a vivid demonstration of the answer to that question.

Decoding Zuckerberg

By now just about anyone following the story of Facebook preparing to go public knows that Mark Zuckerberg included a letter as part of the IPO filing that reads more like a personal philosophy of life than a mission statement.  I was therefore interested this morning to read how Rory Cellan-Jones, Technology Correspondent for BBC News, chose to undertake a micro-level text analysis of what he calls an “extraordinary document.”  I definitely agree with Cellan-Jones’ choice of words.  This is definitely a radical departure from what potential investors expect to read before a stock is floated.

Because Cellan-Jones has done such an admirable job, I want to come at this from the other end.  First of all I would have to say that someone (I have to wonder whether or not it was Zuckerberg) has done an excellent job of taking what is basically a defiant defense of a personal creed and rendering it in prose that coaxes the reader, rather than taking to him/her with a sledge hammer.  Whoever wrote this could have given some excellent lessons in style to Karl Marx.  Nevertheless, the top-level message is still a defiant one.  If I had to write a headline it might go something like:

Zuckerberg to investors, do it my way or go away!

Regardless of whether or not I accept “Mark’s way,” however, I think he may have overlooked one particular ugly reality about why Wall Street is so different from Main Street.  This amounts to a variation on the punch line of The American Ruling Class, both Lewis Lapham’s book and John Kirby’s documentary:

Why change City Hall when you can buy it?

When we shift Lapham’s perspective on power from political office to the broader question of who calls the shots for what, it is important to recognize that, unless Zuckerberg is extremely vigilant in making sure that he always holds a controlling percentage of Facebook stock (far from an easy matter), he may unhappily discover that, rather than walk away, those who wish to undermine his “way” may well find ways to buy that controlling interest.  If Zuckerberg does not recognize this possibility, then he may well find himself caught up in what I like to call a “comedy of distress,” if not on the scale of Alexander Pushkin’s A Dramatic Tale, The Comedy of the Distress of the Muscovite State, of Tsar Boris, and of Grishka Otrepyev, then perhaps long the lines of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross.

The Dramatic Category of a Margaret Thatcher Biography

There is a telling sentence near the beginning of Martin Filler’s NYRblog post about Meryl Streep’s performance of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady that is likely to frame the attitude of those of us who still enjoy the study of history.  After having put forth the proposition that Streep’s best roles have always been comic ones, Filler says the following about her latest effort:

But when I watched this strange tour de force of Important Acting, I was uncertain whether I was witnessing a tragedy or a farce.

This left me wondering if Filler was familiar with either Slavoj Žižek’s book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce or the Karl Marx text about how history repeats itself that inspired the title.

Those of us bold enough to voice openly a preference for social democracy would know how to consider that last quarter-century of British politics in these terms.  Thatcher was so rabidly opposed to social democracy that it is hard to perceive her as anything other that the key villain in a major tragedy of what one might archly call “the developed world.”  The problem is that every one of her successors, regardless of party affiliation, seems to have managed to turn this tragedy into farce.  This makes for a grim contrast with American politics, in which, ever since the election of Ronald Reagan, we have had to endure one farce after another until we found ourselves staring tragedy square in the face under the Administration of George W. Bush.

It may be that fiction has provided a better platform for examining the Thatcher phenomenon.  From that point of view, John Mortimer wrote the book.  It was called Paradise Postponed;  and ultimately it is about the evolution of a Prime Minister (who happened to be male in Mortimer’s account) who became a scourge of social democratic values will all the gusto of William Shakespeare’s account of King Richard III.  In such a framework one could appreciate the virtues of an actor particularly skilled in comic talents.

How is the Economy Healing?

The BBC News Web site just put up a report whose lead sentence is optimistic, at least on the surface:

The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) said its services index rose to 52.6 last month from 52 in November. A reading above 50 indicates expansion.

Needless to say, this (along with an increase of 325,000 new jobs in December according to the ADP National Employment Report) has been picked up by many, particularly in the financial sector, who are desperate for good news.  Here is the quote given by Wayne Kaufman, Chief Market Analyst at John Thomas Financial:

This is another data point that shows our economy is healing.

It fits in well with improvements we've seen in consumer sentiment, and obviously that's because there are more people getting paychecks, which is making everyone happier.

We should bear in mind, however, that this is an interpretation of the financial sector, by the financial sector, and for the financial sector.  How does it signify (if at all) for the rest of us?

As the BBC report puts it, the service sector “covers industries ranging from utilities and retailing, to healthcare and finance.”  In other words it has considerable breadth;  so, at the very least, any optimism should be withheld pending a more specific industry-by-industry account, which would give us some idea of what new jobs are going to whom.  (It is also grimly amusing to note that the photograph attached to this story on the BBC Web page shows an automobile assembly line, which has no direct connection to the service sector.)  At the very least one would assume some kind of bump in retail having more to do with the holiday season than with any overall trends in the economy.

Beyond that, however, is the question of the work itself.  We should not dismiss Kaufman’s assertion that “there are more people getting paychecks;”  but it begs two questions:

1. What are they doing to earn them?
2. How much are they actually earning?

For the majority of the unemployed, any paycheck is better than none at all.  However, it is probably the case that, more than any other sector of the economy, service work has become less skilled by virtue of “advances” (yes, those are scare quotes) in technology (as in the case that, much of what is now called “knowledge work” requires little, if any, knowledge).  Furthermore, again because of the impact of support technology, such work is no longer regarded as warranting a full-time salary.  Rather, compensation is provided on the basis of “piece work,” following the economic model of a sweatshop in the garment industry.

As a result both of the above questions give rise to hypothesis that need to be seriously considered: 

1. A strong majority of the new jobs tallied by ADP involve people working at skill levels significantly below those for which they have been trained and/or educated.
2. A strong majority of those jobs offer little, if any, security of extended employment and provide compensation that, while better than nothing, may not match the skills of the worker.  In other words this is compensation based on (to use the vocabulary from Karl Marx’ “Critique of the Gotha Program”) neither abilities nor needs.  As I have previously suggested, this is a world of work that is not particularly representative of what might be called a “real economy.”

Thus Kaufman may be celebrating a recent rise in gilded cages for the future workers of this country (if not the world).  Consequently, any claim that this amounts of a “healing” of economic conditions is, at best, questionable for those in the 99%.  Furthermore, the conditions resulting from such “healing” bear so little resemblance to any traditional model of a “real economy” that they are suspect at best of socially pernicious at worst.

The Gilded Cage of Slavery

One of my favorite themes has been the extent to which the world the Internet has made has become a world that is steadily reducing workers to a new generation of slaves.  The general concept is not a new one.  Last April I had quoted Karl Marx on the concept of the worker who had become “the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labour.”  For Marx this involved the need for complex and expensive machines required for manufacturing and agriculture.  He could not have conceived of the concept of a “knowledge worker;”  nor could he have imagined that such workers would also be enslaved by the need for similar complex and expensive machines.

Yet that is what knowledge work has become, and today’s Dilbert provided a painfully funny reminder that, while many of the major employers of Silicon Valley have figured out how to gild the bars, a cage is still a cage.  The dialog says it all:

Visitor:  At Google, we’re encouraged to spend 20% of our time developing our own ideas.

Dilbert:  How many hours per week do you work?

Visitor:  About sixty.

Wally:  It sounds better when you don’t do the math.

Yes, Virginia, what Marx has to say today applies as much to Silicon Valley today as it did to the Detroit of Henry Ford in the last century!

Freedom to Consume?

I have been reading Tim Parks’ New York Review account of Ingo Schulze’s novel Adam and Evelyn.  This is basically a comic novel, much of whose plot depends on the division of Germany into East and West,  The “Adam” is a skilled Taylor in East Germany, who has, by Eastern standards, made a comfortable life for himself.  Nevertheless, he follows his girlfriend into the West after Hungary opens its border with Austria.  Adam’s life changes, but not for the better.  A tailor cannot make a living in a culture where people have no end of choices of clothes they can buy off the rack, even if those clothes do not fit very well.  What struck me was how Schultze (at least in the English translation by John E. Woods) was able to encapsulate Adam’s plight in a single sentence:

Too much, too many, an inflation of stuff that buries everything else, the essential things, the real things.

I do not take this as nostalgia for either the ideals of Marxism or the reality of Communism.  However, in the wake of Woodrow Wilson’s ideal vision of an America that would make the world safe for democracy, it seems as if our country has succumbed to a distorting conflation of democracy with consumerism.  Freedom of choice has less to do with selecting those who govern and more to do with choosing Coke over Pepsi (or, in the case of a recent Harry’s Law episode, choosing to ban the presence of foreign cars within the limits of one’s city).

In the past I have written about losing touch with the real as it pertains to people so absorbed in their personal mobile devices that they are oblivious to the real world around them (such as traffic).  However, reality has also been buried (to use Schulze’s metaphor) under mounds of ideology that have, once again, crippled our government to the point of failure (or so it seems in the wake of the deadlocked “super-committee” on spending cuts).  This is the sort of thing that makes the 138 members of “Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength" look pretty good in their petition to have their taxes increased;  but here, too, we need a reality check.  These millionaires may appreciate the value of a “public good;”  but that does not mean that they recognize the differences between corporate management and governance.  Perhaps the more dire consequence of Max Weber’s “loss of meaning” is that, through our addiction to consumerism, we have become a culture that can no longer accommodate reality in our shared life-world (let alone the proposition that the life-world must, out of the necessities of social theory, be shared).  From a Darwinian perspective, I would think that this will make our chances for survival pretty low.  Then again, most fundamentalists, regardless of their specific faith, always seem to have a pretty low opinion of Darwin!

Freeman Dyson's Perspective on Marx

Freeman Dyson’s piece in the latest New York Review makes at least a moderately acceptable case against C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” thesis, demonstrating that not only can a physicist read the text of a contemporary philosopher but also he can give it a fair shake.  The text in question is The Beginning of Infinity:  Explanations that Transform the World by David Deutsch.  What is particularly interesting, however, is the way in which Dyson uses this text to examine other schools of philosophical thought, particularly that of Karl Marx.

The result is a critique of Marx that not only transcends the usual ideological stances that do little to advance understanding but also says something useful about the process of advancing understanding itself.  We may see this by considering two paragraphs from Dyson’s review.  The first amounts to an evaluation and a warrant for the conclusion:

Looking back on Marx’s visions today, we can see that much of what he wrote about capitalism was true and almost everything he wrote about communism was false. So long as he was examining the evidence that he saw around him, he was on firm ground. As soon as he moved from evidence to dogma, his imagination led him wildly astray.

From this position Dyson can then broaden his scope to philosophy in general, while drawing upon what he learned from reading Deutsch’s book:

The gospel according to Karl Marx is a classic example of bad philosophy as defined by Deutsch. Bad philosophers try to improve the human condition by telling the world how to behave. They deceive themselves, imagining that the world will dance to their tune. Good philosophers continue to observe how the world is behaving and try to explain what they observe. Good philosophers improve the human condition by asking questions and correcting errors. The method of good philosophy is to explain and understand how the world behaves, not to prescribe.

There is nothing particularly new about this.  There has always been a tension between description and prescription.  The intellectuals about whom Mark Lilla wrote in his book The Reckless Mind were all victims of the fallacy that the insights of descriptions could be readily converted to prescriptions.  They were tempted to turn away from observation and towards action, and that temptation led them astray.  Ironically, Lilla’s book never really takes on Marx;  but that may be because his own historical scope only begins with Martin Heidegger.  Thus, while I would not say that Dyson reduced all of Lilla’s book to a single paragraph, I have to credit the physicist for formulating such a critique so cogent that it can be readily applied to many other philosophers.

Misunderstanding Poverty

With all the recent focus on poverty, I found myself revisiting a quotation from Karl Marx that caught my attention back in 2008:

The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.

This comes from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy;  and, when I last cited it, I was taken by the extent to which the second sentence could be taken as an anticipation of George Herbert Mead’s concept of "social behaviorism."

However, my fixation the second sentence distracted me from the first, which basically states that the nature of that “social being” that “determines” consciousness is, itself, determined strictly by the “mode of production of material life.”  This emphasis of on the influence of material production became the basis for a school of thought called “historical materialism;”  and Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” was written as an attack on that school of thought.  Indeed, there is a good chance that Benjamin intended his title to be a parody of Marx’ Theses on Feuerbach.

The problem with the materialism perspective is that it does not allow for those excluded from any role in that “production of material life.”  However, that exclusion lies at the heart of poverty.  It is why the poor are condemned to become social outcasts.  As we see from our current unemployment statistics, the assumption that the poor can end their plight simply by getting jobs is unrealistic, particularly when the very concept of “work” is ready to join the ranks of other concepts suffering from loss of meaning.  Is it any wonder that those planning our “recovery” do not understand poverty?

Disunited Workers of the World?

The most memorable passage from “Manifesto of the Communist Party” is the injunction for workers of the world to unite. Today’s account (based on wire service reports) by Al Jazeera English of worker gatherings described quite a few rallies, all around common themes of discontent;  but there was little evidence of any kind of world-wide union.  Indeed, those who were united by the ideology of globalization turned out to be the capitalists and the managers they financed.  The workers remain out of the equation, separated from those beneficiaries by the largest separation of distribution of wealth in economic history.  If that is not an appropriate reflection for May Day, I don’t know what is!

From Benjamin to Marx

One nice thing about returning to the writings of Walter Benjamin for their polemic value is that Benjamin was also good for reviving my interest in the writings of Karl Marx;  and, as I have observed frequently (if not tediously), Marx provides good source material for considering the nature of work in the world the Internet has made.  This is particularly the case in his “Marginal Notes to the Programme of the German Workers’ Party,” better known as the “Critique of the Gotha Programme.”  This text is best known for its “From each according to his abilities” slogan;  but there is far more to the entire document.

Most important is that the title itself is a good piece of truth-in-advertising.  Marx works his way through the text of the Programme, taking it apart, often at the phrase-by-phrase level, and pointing out its inconsistencies (if not delusions).  The first “victim” of this process is a premise that we have heard early and often from many Internet evangelists:

Labour is the source of all wealth and all culture …

Marx’ response, written at the end of the nineteenth century, could just as easily have been written today:

The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labour;  since precisely from the fact that labour depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labour must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labour.  He can work only with their permission, hence live only with their permission.

Using this as a point of departure, Anthony Giddens would subsequently develop a model of a social system as an organization of rules and resources in which domination is exercised primarily through the control of resources.  From this point of view, Marx’ invocation of the concept of slavery is not a mere rhetorical turn to attract attention but a recognition that enslavement is an optimal agency for ensuring domination.  Thus, while the Bush Administration may have propagated the myth of war in the interest of spreading democracy, the real war is being waged against the poor;  and it is being waged on a global scale.  Ironically, the power of the Internet to enable such domination is also the power to bring education to the poor;  and, as Fareed Zakaria observed about conditions in Egypt, the power of knowledge can be the power to rebel.  Thus, the only thing we can say with certainty about the War Against the Poor is that it is far from over with no sign of either side prevailing.

Taxation with Representation Should be Representative

Once again, Michael Moore may have hit upon the right diagnosis,  As BBC News reported yesterday, he addressed a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, both opposing the efforts of the state government to undermine the collective bargaining rights of state employees and providing moral support to the AWOL Democrats whose absence has blocked a quorum for a State Senate vote on a measure already approved by the other house of the State Legislature.  Moore’s bon mot for the occasion was:

The rich have overplayed their hand.

Whether or not this is strictly true, it should serve to remind us about what is really at stake in all the budget battles taking place at both state and federal levels.

Let us begin by recalling that the “Tea” in “Tea Party” is actually an acronym for “Taxed Enough Already.”  There is nothing new about populist uprisings over taxation.  Were is not for such uprisings, we might now be part of the British Commonwealth.  However, it is one thing for people struggling to make ends meet to complain about being overtaxed.  It is quite another for the rich to make similar complaints, particularly that sector of the financial elite whose “nimbleness of mind” led to extraordinary levels of personal gain while fomenting an economic crisis that came close to crippling the entire industrialized world.  (That quote comes from Plato, by the way, when he makes the case that those who make our laws should be selected for the quality of their values, rather than their “nimbleness of mind.”  Unfortunately, such texts have been readily embraced by neoconservatives, whose own “quality of values” do not necessarily align with those of either Plato or their contemporary compatriots.)

“Taxed Enough Already” is not the formula that will lead to economic recovery or restore jobs to those who have given up looking for them.  Rather, we need a formula under which individuals are taxed according to the resources they have to pay them, otherwise known as a fairly graduated income tax.  (This happens to be that part of Karl Marx' "Critique of the Gotha Program" that is most consistent with the motives behind the American Revolution, the part about “From each according to his abilities.”)  The irony, of course, is that the rich will throw all sorts of lobbying money to prevent such a formula ever progressing to the point of legislation, when that money might have been better spent (for the rich, as well as for the rest of us) paying the taxes they are so desperate to avoid.  However, since this formula does not have a snappy acronym, it is unlikely to receive much attention from the media, which means that, for the American public at large, it will be kept safely “out of sight, out of mind.”

The Degradation of the Knowledge Worker

Back when I was working on the research turf of knowledge management, the name most associated with the concept of “knowledge work” was that of Peter Drucker.  However, I was surprised to discover, by poking around in the Wikipedia Discussion page for “Knowledge worker,” that the term was basically as old as I was.  Drucker apparently introduced the term in his book Concept of the Corporation, which first appeared in 1946!

At the very least this makes for an interesting lesson in academic silos.  When knowledge management was on the rise, I had several colleagues who were fond of recalling Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, which was first published in 1973.  Given the vintage of Drucker’s work, I figured that he would figure in Bell’s study (which was concerned with the more general idea of a “knowledge society”);  but there appears to be no mention of Drucker in the book.  (He is certainly absent from the Name Index.)  One gets the impression that Bell and his colleagues felt too “elevated” to give much thought to anything Drucker may have written.

These days the very word “knowledge” seems to reside in two worlds.  On the one hand we have the academics, who are still wrestling with the concept as Socrates had done (as least as he was depicted by Plato in Theaetetus).  On the other we have the stark reality of how the words “knowledge worker” are actually used (following the semantic criteria pursued by Ludwig Wittgenstein).  I recently suggested that the “real-world usage” of the phrase now denotes “a mindless drone,” sitting in a call center behind a computer terminal concerned with little more than reading scripts and filling out forms.  In this context the following words, delivered at a conference in 1994 before knowledge management really hit its stride, offer a quaint nostalgia for academic thinking:

Knowledge workers solve problems and generate outputs largely by resort to structures internal to themselves rather than by resort to external rules or procedures.

I was amused to see that one of the contentious topics of discussion on Wikipedia involved whether or not a blacksmith was a knowledge worker;  but, according to the above criteria, any blacksmith (past or present) probably brings more knowledge to his/her tasks then one is likely to find behind that voice at the other end of the phone telling you what to do when your broadband connection is malfunctioning.  Nicholas Carr would probably argue that it is the technology itself that has degraded workers who could be drawing upon such internalized knowledge, turning them into those “mindless drones;”  but I think the issue is a broader one.  Basically, the knowledge worker is a victim of a social trend, identified by Max Weber and discussed at length by Jürgen Habermas, that involved loss of meaning.  It is basically a reflection of semantic manipulation that George Orwell had recognized, according to which the meaning of a word reverts to its own antonym:  The most “productive knowledge worker” is the one who operates out of ignorance, delegating all authority to support technology.  As I have previously suggested, the consciousness industry is the chief beneficiary of such loss of meaning;  and it has been frighteningly successful in turning Bell’s social forecasting of a knowledge society into the more harrowing present of a society of wage slavery.

Values and Priorities

President Barack Obama will visit India at the end of this coming week.  What will he see there (or, perhaps more accurately, what will his hosts allow him top see)?  What conversations will he hold and with whom?  What is the significance of a relationship with India in his own vision of what he wants our own country to be, assuming that any trace of the inspiring visions of Obama-the-candidate remains?

Ravi Nessman has written a valuable background piece for The Associated Press, which has been included as a Yahoo! News selection.  He writes from the perspective of “political economy;”  and, while that phrase is too frequently associated with the writings of Karl Marx (even if it can be traced back to Adam Smith), it is appropriate for a variety of reasons.  For his American readers it is a recognition that our country has still not recovered from its economic crisis;  and, whatever the promising signs may be, the hard numbers indicate that more, rather than fewer people, are suffering from that lack of recovery.  Ironically, the current Prime Minister of India, Manmohan Singh, is himself an economist;  so it is hard to imagine that any discussion of economics will be absent from the meetings that Obama holds and the visits that have been arranged for him.

This seems appropriate enough in the context of India estimating an annual economic growth rate of 8.5 percent.  Among the rich and mighty of the World Economic Forum, this would probably amount to a Holy Grail;  and it is hard to imagine that the White House would not share this opinion.  However, what Wall Street prefers to ignore (and what Main Street has to live with, whether it wants to or not) is that everything comes with a price;  and the value of Nessman’s piece comes from his desire to seek out what that price has been for India.

One approach to that price comes from the usual rhetorical flourishes like “a bloated, corrupt government that has failed to deliver the barest of services.”  With more sober language he summarizes Singh’s approach to economic policy as follows:

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, an economist credited with unleashing India's private sector by loosening government regulation, talks about growth that benefits the masses of poor people as well as a burgeoning middle class of about 300 million. He describes a roaring Maoist insurgency in the east — which feeds in large part on the poor's discontent — as the country's biggest internal security threat.

However, the critical question is whether or not the poor really do benefit from this growth.  Nessman legitimizes this question through a variety of arguments;  but the most striking may be one of those “sign of the times” statistics:

There were more than 670 million cell phone connections in India by the end of August, a number that has been growing by close to 20 million a month, according to government figures.

Yet U.N. figures show that only 366 million Indians have access to a private toilet or latrine, leaving 665 million to defecate in the open.

The point is that economic growth is measured in terms of financial transactions (“buying and selling stuff”).  Within that value system any statistics concerned with the well-being of the population never even enter the equations;  so no one has to worry about sweeping them under the carpet.

We must therefore seriously consider the hypothesis that one price of economic growth may be the growth of poverty.  We experienced such conditions in our own history during a period known as the Gilded Age.  Economic growth was prodigious enough to attract global attention;  but those who benefitted from that growth constituted a thin veneer (or “gilding”) of the overall population.  It took the Great Depression to shake our Government into recognizing that not all social values are economic values.  Now we see India experiencing that same confusion of values, and we see our President heading to India.  The thought that he may be heading there to learn from India (if not to try to grab a ride on their gravy train) is about as disconcerting as his recent aspiration to create “more Googles.”