Herbert Marcuse gets the better of the historical argument in Eros and Civilization (1955), when contemplating the immediate future from the standpoint of the 1950s; he did so by maintaining some faith in the possibilities of sublimation, on the one hand, and automation (the end of alienated labor) on the other.  But Norman O. Brown wins the theoretical stakes—he’s the more thorough and responsible reader of Freud, even though, in the end, he treated sublimation and repression as the same set of urges.  If nothing else, you can say that he revised Lacan avant la lettre, anticipating Foucault, as it were, and meanwhile grounded Weber and Tawney after the fact by psychoanalyzing the Protestant Era.  You can say, in other words, that like Marcuse, or Raymond Williams at precisely the same postwar moment, Brown tried to grasp capitalism as a cultural and social-psychological reality, and succeeded—he broke beyond the grip of a moribund Marxism by supplementing, correcting, and rehabilitating it.

To be more specific.

Life Against Death insists that psychoanalysis can and must become a theory of culture rather than a psychotherapeutic device that explains character structure by reference to changes in toilet training or child-rearing, that is, by the character of the parent(s).  The trans-historical infantile experiences of omnipotence and erasure, of instinctual defusion, and of polymorphous perversity—sexuality at its most extreme—are the raw clinical materials of the historical analysis, not the specific trauma of this or that childhood.  The theoretical set-up of Parts I through IV stands as a long introduction, in other words, to the empirical study of the Protestant ethic and the reality of capitalism in Part V (“Studies in Anality”), in much the same way that Parts 1 through VI of Capital, Volume 1, stand as a theoretical introduction to the empirical study of enclosure, expropriation, and colonization which follows.

Psychoanalysis is throughout treated as a symptom of the return of the repressed—that is, as an insight into the origin of culture in the displacement of bodily experience, and the evolution of culture required by the sub/consequent translation of bodily experience into intelligible signs.  Freud’s insight wasn’t new, in short, because all of religion and every work of art had already come up with it.  In this sense, psychoanalysis was a philosophy of history that couldn’t dismiss religion as false consciousness, or ignore art as mere ornament on the tree of life.  To put it more plainly, psychoanalysis was a theory of culture, and thus a philosophy of history, precisely because it was a way of acknowledging—and incorporating—the perverse truths of religion (and/or art) rather than dismissing or ignoring them as deviations from the truth afforded by reason and science (“modernity”).

“A reinterpretation of human history is not an appendage to psychoanalysis but an integral part of it.  The empirical fact which compelled Freud to comprehend the whole of human history in the area [sic] of psychoanalysis is the appearance in dreams and in neurotic symptoms of themes substantially identical with major themes—both ritualistic and mythical—in the religious history of mankind.  The link between the theory of neurosis and the theory of history is the theory of religion.” (12)

Every symptom is an attempted cure.  “Psychoanalysis must view religion both as neurosis and as that attempt to become conscious and to cure, inside the neurosis itself, on which Freud came at the end of his life to pin his hopes for therapy.  Psychoanalysis is vulgarly interpreted as dismissing religion as an erroneous system of wishful thinking.  In The Future of an Illusion, Freud does speak of religion as a ‘substitute-gratification’—the Freudian analogue of to the Marxian formula, ‘opiate of the people.’  But according to the whole doctrine of repression, ‘substitute-gratification’—a term which applies not only to poetry and religion but also to dreams and neurotic symptoms—contain truth; they are expressions, distorted by repression, of the immortal desires of the human heart. . . .  Psychoanalysis can go beyond religion [and Marxism, another symptom] only if it sees itself as completing what religion tries to do, namely make the unconscious conscious; then psychoanalysis would be the science of original sin.  Psychoanalysis is in a position to define the error in religion only after it has recognized [that] truth.” (13-14)

Again, the first 176 pages of dense theoretical exegesis are prolegomenon to an empirical inquiry into the Reformation—that is, into the character structure created by Protestantism and its relation to the emergence of capitalism.

Life Against Death is designed, then, as an exit strategy from the constraints of Marxism, which located the “compulsion to work” in a prior, external circumstance—primitive accumulation, class hierarchy, the superior power of the bourgeoisie, and so forth.  The book’s strategy works by demonstrating that this compulsion is internally generated and reproduced in the deep structure of what we call character: it’s the central symptom of the “general neurosis of mankind,” which might be characterized as the irrepressible urge toward freedom, that is, the urge to reinstate the experience of infantile omnipotence, to reunite the desire and the capacity to make the world move in accordance with our words.  Science, in these terms, is a rationalized version of the magical thinking that derives from our infantile glimpse of freedom.  In the same terms, the “compulsion to work” is a trans-historical component of human nature, or rather the essential element in the development of this human nature (which of course takes different historical forms in the course of human civilization).  Not incidentally, Marx said as much in Volume 1 of Capital: “The labour-process resolved  . . . into its simple elementary factors, is human action with a view to the production of use-values, appropriation of natural substances to human requirements; . . .it is the everlasting Nature-imposed condition of human existence, and therefore is independent of every social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to every such phase.”  (International ed., 1967, pp. 183-84)

Still, Brown has a point, and a purpose.  “The necessity of a psychoanalytical approach to history is pressed upon the historian by one question: Why does man, alone of all animals, have a history?  For man is distinguished from animals not simply by the possession and transmission from generation to generation of that suprabiological apparatus which is culture [cf. Geertz], but also, if history and changes in time are essential characteristics of human culture and therefore of man, by a desire to change his culture and so to change himself. . . . [The] historical process is sustained by man’s desire to become other than what he is.  And man’s desire to become something different is essentially an unconscious desire.  The actual changes in history neither result from nor correspond to the conscious desires of the human agents who bring them about.  Every historian knows this, and the philosopher of history, Hegel, in his doctrine of the ‘cunning or reason,’ made it a fundamental point in his structural analysis of history.” (15-16)

Life Against Death is also designed as a radical departure from Weber’s (thus Tawney’s) correlation of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism; in this sense, it’s a way of forcing us back to Marx and Hegel, or placing us alongside Tillich, in either case edging us toward a more fundamental critique of capitalism than we can derive from the “decadent Protestantism” of the 20^th century, which won’t, or can’t, acknowledge the actuality of evil—and thus can’t map out the Kingdom of God on this earth.

Brown wants us to take Luther’s fear and hatred of the Devil as seriously as we take, say, Marx’s theory of alienation.  For the Devil is the middle term that connects the privy—where Luther discovered the doctrine of justification by faith alone—to capitalism on the one hand and Protestantism on the other.  “The Devil’s word is money,” and he rules the world, according to strict Lutheran usage.  And this Devil himself is a monstrous, “materialized anality”—the incarnation of shit—who deploys the symbolic residue of feces we call money to seduce  and control his victims.  So by acknowledging the Devil’s sovereignty on earth, early Protestantism acknowledges the excremental rule of money—that is, the existence and the evil of capitalism as such.  (pp. 202-30)

From this standpoint, Protestantism is a powerful constraint on the development of capitalism, not its enabling condition, as Weber would have it in explaining the “spirit of capitalism” (e.g., at pp. 40-46, 73-75, 104-14, 120-21, 161-63 of The Protestant Ethic, Scribner ed, trans. Parsons)—or rather it is a powerful constraint until it becomes an enabling condition in the very late 17^th century, as the millennial hopes of the English Revolution recede, and, accordingly, as the gospel telling of the Kingdom of God on this earth begins to sound like news from nowhere.

But the centrality of anal compulsion in Part V of Life Against Death must sound either disgusting or hilarious—probably both—in the absence of Freud’s general theory of sublimation as recounted and enlarged by Brown.  So herewith my summary of this theory.

Sublimation happens, Freud argued, insofar as particular bodily experiences are repressed and translated into the more accessible symbolic resources made available by the culture at large.  Words and less complicated visual icons are the crucial symbolic resources in this sense, for we situate ourselves in the world beyond our bodies by talking or writing (or drawing), by depicting and changing the world with words and icons that others can understand.  We feel and communicate our original bodily states or desires as sounds and gestures, because as infants we have no other way of making them—ourselves—known to others.  At this stage of development, however, the world does move, occasionally at least, in accordance with the intention of these sounds and gestures: pain is relieved, food is delivered.  Thus the imagined bliss of infantile omnipotence and the enduring belief in the greater magic of mere words. [on infantile omnipotence, Sandor Ferenzci, “Stages in the Development of a Sense of Reality” (1916), in First Contributions (1921)]

We grow up, then, as we grow out of our bodies by means of linguistic abstractions—we sublimate and sanitize those originally polymorphous experiences as we rise above our bodies by replacing sounds and gestures with words and icons.  But of course the body’s urges always remain as ingredients in the mind’s eye.

Money is the only symbolic resource that is comparable in scope to language.  It is the universal commodity that works like a primal metaphor, thus allowing us to recognize and negotiate difference by equating unlike things (reducing a whole person, for example, to a bodily orifice, as in “he’s a real asshole,” or acknowledging the equivalent value of an expensive car and a cheap house).  Psychoanalysis follows the lead of anthropology, however, in treating money not as the epitome of economic utility but as the extremity of irrationality.  In Freud’s terms, money is the sanitized, sublimated equivalent of shit.  In other words, our desire for money—wealth in the abstract—is the enduring residue of the emotional attachment to excrement that comes with the anal-sadistic phase of infantile development, before the bodily sources of the child’s sexual pleasure are “elevated” and confined to the genitals by the rigors of the Oedipus complex.

The child’s feces are originally experienced and perceived as a detachable part of his body, as the first thing he can control with muscular effort and the first object he can give away as a gift—by the same token, it’s the first approximation of his property, a separable, tangible, and fungible asset he owns outright, as his own end product.  No wonder “anal erotism” organizes his infantile being: these feces are the material evidence of his differentiation from himself—his product—and from the external world, but they also measure his mastery over his body, which is all the identity he knows.  As he inevitably learns to rise above the bodily pleasures of playing with the fecal masses he produces, that is, as he sanitizes the urge to accumulate and allocate more of his own shit, he gradually transfers his emotional attachment to other separate, tangible, and fungible objects or assets, like collectibles, coins, and, eventually, less solid forms of money.

By this psychoanalytical accounting, the anal-sadistic urges are trans-historical dimensions of human nature and human being, but they remain as recessive symptoms of infantile development—as signs of deviance or childishness—until the advent of a money economy, a market society, validates them as necessary, rational, even admirable character traits of adults.  At that stage of human development, the anal-compulsive personality becomes normal; for where money mediates all social relations outside the family, no one can avoid the urge to accumulate—to abstain is to suffer poverty, social disgrace, perhaps even to starve to death.

Luther understood this stage, his own time, as a “rain of filth,” a perfect storm of shit: “money is the word of the Devil, through which he creates all things, the way God created through the true word.”  Money ruled the world: “Usury lives securely and rages, as if he were God and lord in all lands.”  In sum: “the world is the gaping anus” of the Devil himself.  Luther experienced the demonic more directly than most 16^th century individuals, and articulated it more immediately; but his correlation of the Trickster, the Devil, and the universalization of exchange value was by then a commonplace.

Here is how Brown summarizes his empirical findings.

“The Devil is a middle term connecting Protestantism and anality.  As against the neo-Freudians, anality means real bodily anality . . As against the orthodox Freudians, the pathogenic factor in anality is not real bodily toilet training, but peculiar fantasies (the Devil) connected with the anal zone.  Furthermore, these fantasies are not private or individual products, but exist as social projections into the world of culture.  It follows that the precipitating facto in a psychological upheaval such as the Protestant Reformation is not any change in toilet-training patterns, but an irruption of fresh material from deeper strata of the unconscious made possible by a large-scale transformation in the structure of the projective system (the culture).  The dynamic of history is the slow return of the repressed.” (230)

There’s more: it gets better.  “Luther’s vision of the dominion of death in life is correlative to his eschatological hope in the transformation of life on earth, and the transformation of the human body—the resurrection of the body, in a form, as Luther says, free from death and filth.  Luther’s eschatology challenges psychoanalysis to formulate the conditions under which the dominion of death and anality could be abolished.  In thus challenging psychoanalysis, Christianity would perform the function, proper to all religion, of voicing the substance of things hoped for, the [conviction] of things unseen [this is Hebrews 11].” (232-33)

I assigned Part V of Life Against Death to a graduate class I’m teaching on the development of capitalism, and we discussed it today, alongside Weber’s Protestant Ethic and C.B. Macpherson’s Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (1962).  We agreed, I think, that Marx and Weber converge on a definition, and thus a periodization, of capitalism.  On all else, we remain confused, and that is a good thing.  I thought Brown would shake up our thinking about the character structure specific to early modern capitalism—certainly he fleshes out what Weber politely calls the ascetic personality enfranchised by Protestantism.  I also thought that our ideas about modern individualism would take some concrete shape in the terms proposed by Marx in the Introduction to the Grundrisse, where we started with all this, and by Brown in Chapter XIV.  Specifically, I thought we’d see that the individualism—the character structure—solicited by the development of capitalism was a brand new creature that, in its turn, enabled the further development of this mode of production.

No such luck, and that, too, is a good thing.

But the politics of that commercial reside in its rendering of historical time, and I deploy that last verb for all it’s worth.  Cars and workers and Detroit are approached obliquely, glancingly, even abstractly, as figures rather than real things: they actually get in our way, and so we want to look through them, we want to see the real thing, and that is Clint again in that dark underground passageway.  Cars and workers and Detroit are occasions—props, almost—for a meditation on how we might think of America in middle age, at mid-passage.

The three big moments of the Super Bowl—these happened off the field, most of us aren’t tuning in just for the game—were the Chevy apocalypse commercial, Madonna’s menopausal halftime show, and Clint’s retro ad.  Budweiser went for the long view, to be sure, reminding us that it’s been almost eighty years since the repeal of the 18^th Amendment.  “What’s with all the history?” my girlfriend asked during one of Anheuser-Busch’s staged sepia shots of men, women, and minorities in bars recently liberated from Prohibition: 1933, the date matters, we know the New Deal is on trial.  GM and Chrysler did too, they were desperate to insinuate their products into an even longer view of America, as if these national brands still matter, as if the indispensable nation were still open for business.

But the Bud commercials were just boring, for all their knowing references to iconic photographs from the 1930s and 40s—nothing like the “Whassup?” breakthrough of 1999, which featured an all black cast.  No, here you get just tinted photos and funny blue bottles, to give you the impression that there’s something deep-seated, dignified, maybe even upscale about Budweiser.  Not just sleeveless hairy guys in baseball caps yelling at the TV in a sports bar—or in the stadium, where the pathos of masculinity is less excruciating, more exhilarating—no, this beer-drinking demographic includes you.

GM went for broke, and pulled it off.  “Chevy Runs Deep,” the ads concluded.  Deeper, that is, longer, than any lifetime.  Unlike you, and unlike America itself, these machines last forever.  Or is it the corporation that lasts?  If so, we’re still a country created by corporations, always wondering how the Massachusetts Bay Co. and the Virginia Co. created such different versions of the American Dream on the very same European frontier.

There are just four sources of audio after the apocalypse, as the Original Driver’s Chevy truck busts out of a huge pile of debris: Barry Manilow’s “Looks Like We Made it,” the dog in the backseat of the pickup barking, the dialogue when OD meets his three Chevy buddies—“Twinkie?” the black guy asks—and the concluding voice-over by Tim Allen, he of “Home Improvement” and “Toy Story” (whether a building trades purveyor or an astronaut, a man’s man): “From the beginning of your workday until the end of the world, Chevy runs deep.”

“Where’s Dave?” OD asks when he gets to what must be a previously determined rendezvous point.  The grizzled elder explains that Dave didn’t make it because he drove a Ford.  The reverse shot shows OD shrugging, saying “of course” without words, and then he notices the Twinkies.  In the last three shots (there are only 25 total), frogs are falling from the heavens, in keeping with the eschatological vision of Revelations.

So Chevy trucks and Twinkies last forever.  Hamburgers don’t count—we’ve already seen the toppled Big Boy statue in an alley—and neither do cars, they’re just wreckage; two emblems of postwar American prosperity (and masculinity) are thus dispatched without captions.  Martians don’t count either, you know this because a lot of flying saucers litter this beautifully ravaged landscape.  There goes another reliable reference to those “Happy Days,” when GM was good for America, food got fast, and science fiction came of atomic age.  The War of the Worlds is over, and so are the good old days.

And yet love abides, at least among truck-driving men and their dogs.  The remains of this very last day are, then, man’s best friend, brotherly love, battered pickup trucks, and Twinkies.

So GM scripted the perfect set-up for both Madonna and Clint Eastwood at halftime.  Perhaps they colluded.  It’s more likely that the writers tried to tap into a near-universal feeling of dread—a fear of the future that cuts across every ideological divide.  This truck commercial captures and caricatures the sense of an ending that all of us feel at a time of global economic crisis, political paralysis, and emotional exhaustion.  It asks a serious question in a comic frame: What if the worst happens, and the American Dream is over, what then?  Madonna and Clint answered that question, and they, too, engaged the politics of time.

Madonna said, discover, anoint, and nurture successors, younger people who can keep the beat.  During her strangely quiet set, which got us from Cleopatra to Gospel and hip-hop dance grooves in about five minutes, she kept deferring to other performers, letting them take center stage and sing a lot more than harmony.  She seemed to deflect attention from her past personae, portraying herself as a middle-aged woman with pretty good skills, neither an unpredictable babe nor a material girl: the convener of a tradition rather than its culmination.  So this show—still her show—demonstrated the possible continuity of musical generations, or rather the continuity of historical time as it can be gathered and performed in these American musics.

Clint Eastwood went her one better, without trying to situate his pep talk—yeah, he sounded like a coach toward the end there—in the whole stretch of time we call recorded history, from the Pharoahs of antiquity to the court poets of plutocracy who preside over the present.  “It’s halftime in America” he rasps, and we can see as he approaches that it’s dark down there in the depths of an unprecedented economic crisis—we know we’re underground.  Eastwood himself appears as a shadow, almost an apparition, as he moves deliberately toward a camera that’s retreating: he looks and sounds like a querulous ghost out of Elizabethan tragedy, an “old mole” like Hamlet’s dead father, there to remind us of that our patrimony indentures us to a future, and obliges us to put right a time that is out of joint—to restore a lost continuity.

We’re “hurting,” he says, “we’re all scared, because this isn’t a game.”  These are “tough times.”  But we know what to do: pull together, “act as one,” knowing “all that matters is what lies ahead.”  A bankrupt automobile industry (Detroit) did it, so the rest of us can too.  Still, he asks questions: How do we “come from behind,” come together, “how do we win?”

Wait a minute, is there a scoreboard, so we can tell how far down we are?  Win at what, manufacturing?  Automobile production?  Manhood?  The American Dream is a game after all?  These are academic rhetorical questions, because the answer is yes, of course.

It’s Halftime in America.  Because the last 15 seconds of the commercial revert to the opening metaphor of the football game, we’re confused by all the poignant pictures that have come before.  But the “old mole,” the 81-year old auteur, knows what he’s doing.  This is a suture of the American past, present, and future: “coming together” means refitting these pieces of historical time, and by doing so, affirming the continuity of the American experience.

The Super Bowl’s commercial armature proves the most basic proposition about that experience: because Americans don’t share a national origin or linguistic affinity or racial stock, they live by what’s left, the songs and the stories that bind them to a usable past and open onto a plausible future.  It’s all metaphor, all the way down: to be an American is to argue about what it means to be an American.

To get into that conversation, though, you have to think historically, where the politics of time matter, where conflict or consensus isn’t just the silly either/or proposition of the new social historians.  GM, Chrysler, Madonna, and Clint Eastwood, aging icons all, did that thinking at least as well as any living historian, by persuading their viewers without argument that making it new has always been the American way.

Last time out I ended on a skeptical note—I had begun to doubt my own deployment of James Madison’s formative distinction between the rights of persons and the rights of property.  I concluded that the Santa Clara decision of 1886 conflated these “two cardinal objects of Government,” as Madison called them, and thus had adjourned the debate he had designed to trouble congressional decision-making—the debate he thought would prolong the process of majority formation and prevent the propertied oligarchies that had destroyed the ancient republics by ignoring the rights of persons.  After Santa Clara, I suggested, the rights of persons and the rights of property couldn’t be distinguished because the Supreme Court had designated corporations persons whose property was protected by the substantive due process of the 14^th Amendment.

And yet, and yet.  The notion—the very idea—of a person was enlarged and enriched in the age of the giant corporations, the 20^th century, and this is not mere coincidence: the contemplation of corporate or collective identities, whether as business firms or trade unions, enabled the concept of a  “social self,” an artificial yet real and durable personality constructed through association with others.  The pragmatists and feminists of the early 20^th century led the way.  They kept claiming that individuality was an achievement, not a given—it was more cumulative effect than prior cause of particular situations and actions.

To characterize an individual, they showed, was to assess what that individual had actually done, because any reasonable assessment could make sense only after the fact of some action (the exception to the rule was physical beauty—not even grace or wit or intelligence could be assessed apart from particular situations and actions—but beauty as such was itself a historical variable that presupposed cultural consensus).  No one could know that another person was brave or kind or homosexual, for example, prior to brave or kind or homosexual acts by that person (or absent criteria of bravery, kindness, and homosexuality, which are themselves cultural artifacts that presuppose one’s immersion in and familiarity with socially determined protocols).  No one could come to know herself prior to engagement with and association with others.

John Dewey’s 1926 essay for the Yale Law Journal, and the essays he then wrote for The New Republic which were collected as Individualism Old and New in 1929, suggest how much the corporate legal form informed new, adventurous thinking about persons and personality in the early 20^th century.  Morton Horwitz calls Dewey’s law review essay the “last great analysis” of corporate personhood, and remember, it was Horwitz who insisted, in his  “Santa Clara Revisited,” West Virginia Law Review 88 (1986): 173-224, here 175, 181, that “theories of corporate personality were associated with a crisis of legitimacy in liberal individualism arising from the recent emergence of powerful collective institutions [pools, trusts, cartels, corporations, and trade unions] .”

Take a merely cursory look at what Dewey is writing in the late-1920s and you can see that he thinks an acceptance of “corporateness”—he prefers the term to socialism or collectivism—is the path beyond the dessicated bourgeois individualism of the pioneer past.  I’ve written this up before, though, so if you’re interested, see Chapter 3 of my Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy (2001).

II

Having considered my own ambiguities, I read the Bellotti decision of 1978 as carefully as I’ve ever read anything—except maybe Sandor Ferenczi’s  “Ontogenesis of the Interest in Money” (1914) or Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death (1958), don’t get me started—and found that in this strange linguistic space Madison’s distinction is alive and well, and usable.  But here’s the thing.  The most eloquent and effective defenders of the distinction, at least in this decision, are the most conservative members of the Burger Court—the outspoken dissenters from the 5-4 majority opinion are Byron White and William Rehnquist (Justices Brennan and Marshall signed onto White’s dissent), and Rehnquist cites John Marshall Harlan’s decision in Northwestern National Insurance Co. v. Riggs 203 U.S. 243 (1906) as his principal precedent!  Beyond that, the Bellotti majority itself treats corporate personhood with almost hilarious irony, and refuses to base its decision on Santa Clara, saying, repeatedly, that whether corporations are persons or not has nothing to do with its decision.

I’ll work backward from the majority’s irony.  The Court overruled the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, which had upheld a state law restricting the free speech of corporations to “general political issues” that materially affected their business, property or assets, on the grounds that a corporation has more limited First Amendment rights than a natural person.   The question the lower court had asked in upholding that law was “whether business corporations, such as [appellants], have First Amendment rights coextensive with those of natural persons.”   The Supreme Court of the U.S. summarized the lower court’s logic as follows: “The [Massachusetts] court found its answer in the contours of a corporation’s constitutional right, as a ‘person’ under the Fourteenth Amendment, not to be deprived of property without due process of law.  Distinguishing the First Amendment rights of a natural person from the more limited rights of a corporation, the [Massachusetts] court concluded that ‘whether its rights are designated “liberty” rights or “property” rights, a corporation’s property and business interests are entitled to Fourteenth Amendment protection.’” [771]

Notice the scare quotes around person—those were supplied by the Supreme Court’s majority, not the lower court.  And notice the distinction that the lower court makes between a natural person and a corporation, limiting the latter’s First Amendment rights, in effect, to the protection of its property, not the protection of its capacity or agency as an individual entitled to free speech.

The Supreme Court’s majority gets more ironic about the personhood of corporations when it displaces what it calls the “principal question” adduced and addressed by the lower court.  “The court below framed the principal question in this case as whether and to what extent corporations have First Amendment rights.  We believe that the court posed the wrong question.  The Constitution often protects interests broader than those of the party seeking their indication.  The First Amendment, in particular, serves significant societal interests.  The proper question therefore is not whether corporations ‘have’ First Amendment rights and if so, whether they are coextensive with those of natural persons.  Instead the question must be whether ~8 [the section of the statute limiting corporate speech to “general political issues” affecting the business, property, or assets of corporations] abridges expressions that the First Amendment was meant to protect.  We hold that it does.” [775-76]

Notice again the scare quotes.  The Supreme Court majority is suggesting that the identifiable origin of political expression is irrelevant to deciding whether or not the expression itself deserves protection under the First Amendment.  In this sense, the majority is using a strictly pragmatic logic that gets us to the place Nietzsche first mapped in the Genealogy of Morals: “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming: ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.”

Here is how the Supreme Court majority puts it: “The inherent worth of the speech in terms of its capacity for informing the public does not depend upon the identity of its source, whether corporation, association, union, or individual.” [777]  Now all beautiful souls can appreciate this self-evident proposition, and probably agree with it as well.  But the “inherent” worth of speech as such is not the vital issue being decided in Bellotti.  As the lower court and the dissents make clear—and as the majority itself acknowledges—that issue is whether the resources of corporations, which are always larger than those of natural persons, will disproportionately affect “the discussion of governmental affairs,” that is, the speech that informs electoral politics.  So the real question here is whether the inherent worth of speech is a price.  To frame the question as Madison might have, can the rights of persons balance the rights of property if the courts no longer observe the difference between these “two cardinal objects of Government”?  To frame the question as Marx might have, what follows when the use values of free speech are reduced to exchange values?

The majority goes on to say that “we need not survey the outer boundaries of the [First] Amendment’s protection of corporate speech, or address the abstract question whether corporations have the full measure of rights that individuals enjoy under the First Amendment.”  It then does exactly that in the footnotes, happily contradicting itself throughout.  On the one hand, it notes that “certain ‘purely personal’ guarantees, such as the privilege against compulsory self-incrimination, are unavailable to corporations and other organizations because the ‘historic function’ of the particular guarantee has been limited to the protection of individuals.  United States v. White 322 U.S. 694, 698-701 (1944).”  [779 n. 14]  On the other hand, it insists, contra the lower court, that liberty as well as property is protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause, and from this premise it concludes that corporations are persons, after all: “It has been settled for almost a century that corporations are persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.  Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Ry. Co., 118 U.S. 394 (1886); see Covington & Lexington Turnpike R. Co. v. Sandford, 164 U.S. 578 (1896).”  [780 n. 15]

III

Byron White’s dissent draws very clear lines: “Indeed, what some have considered to be the principal function of the First Amendment, the use of communication as a means of self-expression, self-realization, and self-fulfillment, is not at all furthered by corporate speech.”  White here cites Thomas Emerson’s seminal, Aristotelian work on freedom of speech; but then so did the majority. [804-5, 777 n. 11]

White offers three reasons to believe that corporate speech is detrimental to the expression required by democratic political discourse.  First, its purpose is profit, which in principle stands apart from what Emerson called the system of freedom of expression, and in practice often stands athwart that system (after all, the most fantastic private fortunes in history have been generated under the most corrupt and closed political regimes).  Second, the diversity of shareholder’s views is erased when managers use corporate rather than personal funds to further a political cause; thus political and ideological diversity is flattened out by corporate speech of the kind outlawed by the Massachusetts statute and upheld by the lower court.  Third, corporations “are artificial entities created by law” which have impersonal attributes—limited liability, perpetual life, etc.—that confer upon them a “special status.”  And this status “has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only the economy but also the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process.” [804-09]

White actually runs the numbers in contemplating the potential effects of “unrestrained corporate expenditures in connection with ballot questions,” in Massachusetts, California, and, of all places, Montana.  In Massachusetts, the referendum of 1972 proposed to amend the state constitution to allow a graduated income tax on both individuals and corporations.  In California and Montana, the referenda of 1976 proposed legislative approval of nuclear plant sites.  In Massachusetts and Montana, the ratio of corporate vs. personal spending was approximately 100 to 1; in California it was 2 to 1.  All three measures were defeated. [810-11 and 811 n. 11]

White then goes on to invoke the Corrupt Practices Act of 1907, which “has consistently barred corporate contributions in connection with federal elections,” but has never been adjudicated by the Supreme Court as to its constitutionality, noting meanwhile that the common law itself has been “generally interpreted as prohibiting corporate political participation.” [811-12, 819]  And he concludes by predicting Citizens United: “If the corporate identity of the speaker makes no difference, all the Court has done is to reserve the formal interment of the Corrupt Practices Act and similar [state-level] statutes for another day.” [821]

IV

William Rehnquist’s dissent is even more interesting.  Here’s how it begins:

“This Court decided at an early date, with neither argument nor discussion, that a business corporation is a ‘person’ entitled to the protection of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. [Santa Clara citation omitted]  Likewise, it soon became accepted that the property of a corporation was protected under the Due Process Clause of that same Amendment.  See, e.g., Smyth v. Ames 169 U.S. 466, 522 (1898).  Nevertheless, we concluded soon thereafter that the liberty protected by that Amendment ‘is the liberty of natural, not artificial persons.’  Northwestern Nat. Life Ins. Co. v. Riggs 203 U.S. 243, 255 (1906).” [822]  (This decision was written, not incidentally, by Chief Justice John Marshall Harlan, the lone dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson 163 U.S. 537 [1896], and the presiding spirit of the Harlan majority that, from 1897 to 1911, refused to observe the common law distinction between reasonable and unreasonable restraints of trade, thus placing vertically integrated industrial corporations at legal risk.)

So a corporation can be a person at the law, but as a special case—only to the extent that its property is protected by the due process imperative of the Fourteenth Amendment.  Its liberty, or rather it rights as an artificial person, are derived from, and limited to, the scope of it effective claims on property.

Rehnquist makes another, more subtle distinction between natural persons and corporations in view of White’s citation of Emerson.  “Since it cannot be disputed that the mere creation of a corporation does not invest it with all the liberties enjoyed by natural persons, United States v. White, 322 U.S. 694, 698-701 (1944) . . .our inquiry must seek to determine which constitutional protections are ‘incidental to its very existence.’ Dartmouth College, supra, at 636.”  [824]  The reference here is to John Marshall’s famous 1819 dictum, whereby a corporation becomes “an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law,” and, as such, “possesses only those properties which the charter of creation confers upon it, either expressly, or as incidental to its very existence.” [cit. 823]  With or without Marshall’s severe judgment, which was superseded by “natural entity” theories of the corporation in the 1890s and after, Rehnquist can go on to ask whether political as against commercial speech is, in fact, “incidental to the business of a commercial corporation” [825]—to ask, in other words, whether the protection of its property requires more than the narrow freedoms of commercial speech.  Unlike an individual, who requires access to political speech to fulfill her functions as citizen and to realize her capacities as a human being—to achieve liberty—a corporation does not.

V

In short, Rehnquist elaborates on White’s dissent in ways that open up the question of corporate personhood.  Both of course insist on the distinction between the rights of (natural) persons and the rights of (corporate) property—that’s where they begin and end.  For me, though, what is most interesting about these dissents is their illumination of the profound ambiguities in the law of corporations since 1886, and in the majority opinion of Bellotti itself.

Let me summarize what we can learn from this case in thinking about corporate personhood.  First, Bellotti is too ambiguous and too evasive on this question to serve as an unproblematic precedent for Citizens United, or for any unqualified statement about corporations and their legal standing.  Second, Madison’s distinction between the rights of persons and the rights of property is alive and well in the case law, particularly in Riggs, but also in Bellotti itself, in the majority opinion as well as the dissents.  Third, the issue of the broadly political as against the strictly commercial speech of corporations is unresolved.  Fourth, and finally, the very idea of a person at the law—the doer behind the deed—remains unsettled, and thus open to rethinking with the precedents at hand.

Here’s the link to the interview.

http://www.againstthegrain.org/program/526/id/051229/mon-1-30-12-celebrating-consumption

Today I’ll post some more  thoughts on corporate personhood, having read the key precedents of Citizens United and realized that the debates over the legal standing of corporations are far from over.  You might even say that we’re just now catching up with William J. Rehnquist and Byron White, the dissenters in Bellotti (1978), who denounced their colleagues for ignoring the distinction between “natural persons” and corporations.  Uh oh.  We’re catching up with the arch conservatives of the Burger Court?

The extreme Right has hammered the thing as communist propaganda, of course, but the business press has been more or less respectful, notwithstanding the twit who reviewed my book alongside James Roberts in the Wall Street Journal.  Did I tell you he and I “debated” the issues on Minnesota Public Radio?  Never mind.  It was like arguing with a clergyman about the Bible–surely you know money is the root of all evil, and, oh my god, you ought not spend more money than you got?–so that, when the radio host asked if there were some “middle ground” where me and Mr. Roberts could meet and make nice, I said No.

I’ll inquire into the Left’s silence in another post.  Meanwhile, here’s what I said in Miami last Friday.  I was invited to a gathering of businessmen and women–mostly investment bankers and hedge fund managers, in keeping with the “financialized” nature of contemporary capitalism–by the former CEO of Eastern and Continental Airlines, a man who led the deregulation fight of the late 1970s and, not coincidentally, managed Teddy Kennedy’s insurgent campaign against Jimmy Carter in 1980.

How come?  Why him and his constituency?  Especially when the Left seems so totally uninterested in my arguments that I’ll have to review my own book somewhere with a suitable pseudonym, something like “Don Whitman”?

But who’s complaining?  I stayed in a beautiful South Beach hotel overlooking a narrow park that opened onto the ocean. I learned to drive In Miami, where some demon has designed the stoplights to stall traffic at every hour, in every direction, unless you want to go south on Washington Street in Miami Beach at 7:30 am.  I drank just enough beer and wine to stay sober.  And I met some really smart and funny people who, unlike my academic colleagues, never donned contempt as the only proper attitude to my argument.

Here’s what I said on Friday, January 20th, between 8:15 and 9:30 am, to a gathering of the 1%–a larger gathering, I should note, than heard my pep talk beneath Brown Brothers Harriman, across from Zuccotti Park, to the Occupy Wall Street march on December 13th, 2011.

_________________

We’re here to take the long view.  We want to know how we got here, to a place where economic crisis has been compounded by political impasse, on the one hand, and intellectual exhaustion on the other—except from the fringes, where energy seems abundant and renewable, but ugly all the same.  Once we know how we got here, we can see where we we’re headed, and why we might want to choose another destination.

In interesting times like these, though, when novel facts collide with previous truths, prudence based on custom could be useless: the past can tell us where we’ve been, but not necessarily where we’re headed.  I’m sure this dictum sounds odd coming from a history professor, especially one who reveres Lincoln, the conservative Republican who led the Second American Revolution.  But we’ve now reached the limits of what our history can teach us.

So let’s begin by addressing the economic dimension of the crisis.  I’ll put all my cards on the table.  In my view, capitalism as we know it can’t survive this moment, and that’s a very good thing for everybody—for the 1% as well as the rest of us.  I believe, on historical grounds, that a necessary condition of political democracy is the economic pluralism that comes with markets, prices, arms-length bargaining, contracts, property rights, and so forth.  But I also believe, on the very same historical grounds, that if they are to work properly, as agents of growth and social mobility, markets require vigilant management, increasing socialization, and political pluralism.  The causative sequence runs both ways: liberty and equality, or market freedom and social justice, are not mutually exclusive imperatives: after the American Revolution, they go together.  Indeed I would insist that these two imperatives are the basic and indispensable ingredients of the American Dream.

What caused the Great Recession?  There are four explanations out there.  Mistakes were made, especially by the Fed; monopoly choked off market forces that would have averted such a huge crisis; the money supply was too great or unwieldy because the financial sector had metastasized after deregulation in 1999; or moral standards eroded to the point of utter decay, so that consumer credit was available to the least deserving of buyers.

These explanations, the Four M’s as I like to call them, aren’t “false”—there’s enough truth in each to satisfy a substantial constituency among influential observers and accredited policy-makers, on Main Street, Wall Street, and inside the Beltway.  But each is insufficient.  Sure, Alan Greenspan kept interest rates low, but he did so to avoid the deflationary trap Japan entered by pricking a housing bubble in 1990, not because he was ignorant of the alternatives and the downsides.  Yes, the too-big-to-fail banks crossed the line once drawn by Glass-Steagall, but that move was perfectly legal, and they were already riding a tidal wave of corporate profits with no place to go except into speculative channels; breaking them up will neither restore market forces nor stem the tide of surplus capital.  Of course consumer credit became more plentiful after 1995, but that, and a drop in household savings rates, merely compensated for the long-term stagnation of wages (thus consumer demand) which became measurable in the 1980s.  And yes, moral standards have changed since then—for the better.

My explanation of the current crisis improves on the Four M’s by acknowledging rather than dismissing their partial truths, and by grounding the discussion in historical evidence rather than theoretical axioms, and moral certainties.  I show that the real problem we face in rethinking the sources of growth—it’s a real promise as well—is that private investment for profit is not the engine of growth we think it is.  Investment out of profits by the so-called job creators in the private sector is just not that important; you might even say that it’s unimportant.  I certainly say so in my recent book.  Here’s why.

For a hundred years, growth of output and productivity has happened as net investment in non-consumable goods like plant and equipment has steadily declined.  So if our purpose is growth, higher corporate profits begin to look like dangerously flooded streams of income that are unnecessarily withheld from consumer demand, and that are necessarily bound for speculative channels.  If our purpose is growth, we need to divert these streams toward higher consumption—from the 1% to the 99%.

Notice how my explanation of the crisis has already become an argument for income redistribution.

Both my explanation and my argument run counter to mainstream economic theory, and counter to the bipartisan political consensus that tells us we can’t redistribute income in the name of anything, whether equity or growth.  I depart from this mainstream and this consensus by comparing the Great Depression and the Great Recession—by explaining both in the same terms.  Let me alert you to the possibilities of the comparison, the explanation, and the argument by citing some startling facts.

Between 1910 and 1920, something brand new in the history of the human species took place.  For the first time ever, an increasing output of goods required no increase of inputs, whether of capital or labor.  Where for two hundred years previously, capital inputs per unit of output had steadily risen—we call this the industrial revolution—around 1919, capital-output ratios began a measurable decline that continues into the present.  Net private investment fell 20% between 1900 and 1930, and yet non-farm labor productivity and industrial output grew spectacularly, especially in the Roaring Twenties.  Between 1929 and 1939, the capital stock withered as almost all private investment ceased—net investment was less than zero for the decade—and yet growth rates between 1933 and 1937 were the fastest of the 20^th century.

Mechanization took command: labor-saving technology had finally become capital-saving as well.  In the past new plant and equipment bought with business profits might have displaced workers in this or that factory; but it would have meanwhile increased the labor force that was making new equipment and building new plant: more workers would be required to produce these capital goods, so more jobs appeared in this sector even though workers had been displaced elsewhere.  After 1919, that is no longer the case.  Thereafter, barring war, all labor force growth derives from the consumer goods and services sector.  But in the 1920s, hundreds of thousands of jobs were lost here, too, even as consumer demand became the engine of economic growth, making up for the atrophy of net private investment.

Well so what, you might say, what’s wrong with labor-saving innovation and cheaper capital goods?  Nothing, I’d answer, as along as the distribution of income doesn’t change so that wages stagnate and profits explode; because in that case, what will happen is a catastrophic end to growth—massive crisis—caused by lack of consumer demand, on the one hand, and market bubbles on the other.  For if new investment is not needed to improve productivity and increase output, profits become superfluous—just restless sums of surplus capital that will seek any remunerative outlet, including the most risky outlets available.

Look at what happened in the 1920s.  Corporate profits increased 62% and dividends doubled, but wages stagnated, and this at the very moment that broad-based consumer spending on new durables had become the critical engine of economic growth—spending on automobiles, to be sure, but also on vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, radios, and washing machines, not to mention housing.  In the absence of better wages—93% of taxpayers had less disposable income in 1929 than in 1921—consumers went into debt to buy these goods: 80% of their spending on these durables was financed by the new credit available through companies like GMAC.

At the same moment, net investment was declining because the mere replacement and maintenance of the capital stock was more than enough to improve labor productivity and increase output.  So CEOs of industrial corporations went looking for new places to put the profits that were piling up: they opened time savings deposits at banks, just parking the money, but they also got creative and loaned on call in the stock market—between the deposits and the loans, they wagered about $15 billion in superfluous profits—as Fed member banks helped them to inflate the bubble by doubling their investments in stock market collateral.  Meanwhile, as the stock market became bubbly, roughly 1924 to 1929, the proportion of proceeds from new stock issues that were spent “productively” declined precipitously: according to Moody’s Investors Service, it fell off a cliff.

Sound familiar?  Pretty much the same sequence has unfolded, but more slowly, over the last 25 years, since the Reagan Revolution.  Corporate profits have metastasized, CEO salaries and bonuses have, too.  Wages and median family income have stagnated, even though labor productivity has steadily risen, as Alan Greenspan reminds us, in keeping with the cybernation of work.  This massive redistribution of national income was not the stealthy project of right-wing conspirators—Democrats and Republicans have collaborated to cut taxes on profits and high-end incomes in the hope of getting more investment out of the private sector, thus more jobs and more growth.

And the results?  Mergers and acquisitions, greater concentrations of wealth, just like in the 20s.  A much slower rate of job creation—a net loss of manufacturing jobs—just like in the 20s.  A decline of personal savings, and an explosion of consumer debt that closed the shortfall between household incomes and expenditures, and compensated for the decline of net private investment, just like in the 20s.  A boom-bust cycle fed by surplus capital, just like in the 20s, which ended very badly, with a financial crisis that couldn’t be fixed except by ignoring the banks, as the Reconstruction Finance Corporation did in the 1930s and as the Fed is doing now.

In short, the catastrophes we call the Great Depression and the Great Recession were both caused by a redistribution of income that cut marginal rates on corporate and high-end incomes, on the assumption that higher profits and capital gains would provide obvious incentives to more private investment—thus more jobs, more growth.

If we can’t rid ourselves of that assumption, we’ll never get anywhere in thinking about what happened back then or what we can do about the economic crisis that still plagues us.  We’ll just fall back on the common sense of our time, and we’ll get all bewildered once again, when, come April, Occupy Wall Street again dominates the airwaves and demonstrators fill the streets.  What do they want, we’ll ask, as if we don’t already know.

But what follows when we do rid ourselves of the assumption that higher profits mean more private investment, and thus more jobs, more growth?  And beyond this, what happens when we stop assuming that private investment drives growth?

To begin with, we give John Maynard Keynes and his adversary Friedrich Hayek credit for teaching us that investors want a yield, not a productive asset, and that money in the bank is always an alternative to buying an asset.  Say’s Law is over, they both insisted: demand automatically equals supply only under primitive conditions of production, as when Robinson Crusoe roamed his fictional island.  Both Keynes and Hayek argued that more saving, more profits, didn’t naturally or easily translate into more investment.  Alan Greenspan, Martin Wolf, and the OECD have recently verified their argument by measuring the growing discrepancy between corporate retained earnings and business investment: by their accounting, idle money in the hands of bankers now amounts to about 8% of GDP, about $2 trillion.

But neither Keynes nor Hayek went far enough because neither could see that more private investment wasn’t the key to renewed growth; both understood that savings weren’t being invested, but both thought that if coaxed from the private sector by government policy—increased spending for Keynes, resolute stability for Hayek—these savings would of course become increased private investment, and would therefore solve the economic problem.

We can go beyond Keynes and Hayek because we can acknowledge the novel fact of economic growth without “capital formation”—without more personal saving and private investment.  We can see, in other words, that we don’t need more investment to increase output and improve productivity, which is longhand for economic growth.  We can do both by replacing and maintaining the existing stock of capital goods, without making any net additions.  So we suffer from surplus capital, too much saving—and too little consumption.  How to explain this predicament?

Here’s what W. Arthur Lewis, the Nobel Laureate, had to say about it in his Theory of Growth (1955): “At any level of income, people can consumer only the quantity of consumer goods which exists.  Since their incomes derive from producing consumer goods and [capital] goods, and since they can buy only the consumer goods, it follows that they must save a part of their income equal to the value of the [capital] goods which have been produced. . . .What they are thus forced to save may not, however, correspond to what they would like to save at that level of income.”

Translation: we are now being forced to save too much, in amounts equal to the value of the retained earnings being hoarded by non-financial corporations, on their own balance sheets or on deposit with Federal Reserve banks.  These superfluous profits can serve no productive purpose as expenditure on new plant and equipment—again, such investment is unnecessary to cause growth—and yet they are being withheld from the purpose of consumer expenditure.  So far, they’re merely pointless, but they could become destructive if diverted, once again, into speculative channels.   Why not, then, return them to the stream of national income that is available for consumption, a proven means to the end of growth?

Why not acknowledge, once and for all, that private investment doesn’t drive growth, and redistribute income accordingly, toward wages, toward consumer spending?  Why not acknowledge that the profit motive as we now act on it no longer promotes growth because all it does is encourage more saving—more withholding from consumption, more delay of gratification, more unnecessary “investment”—and find some better alternatives?  Why not acknowledge that Keynes was right, that the profit motive is a “somewhat disgusting morbidity”?

Mainly because we don’t know how to live without it.  We don’t know how to live unguarded, without protecting ourselves against the future by accumulating something, anything, in the present—by storing up emotional as well as economic assets, withholding from the present one way or another.  The psychoanalysts call it repression, the economists call it saving, the rest of us call it common sense.

As a matter of historical fact, our character structures are built on a profound fear of the future that makes spending seem both irrational and immoral.  That’s why we still haven’t figured out how to recognize an economy of abundance: like the hunters and gatherers from the archaic past, we still know, down deep, that famine waits for us on the other side of the feast, and we behave accordingly.  We don’t know what to do about the plenitude of consumer culture except to denounce it as the cause of the current crisis and the solvent of our souls, because the structure of our character is still determined, and disfigured, by the scarcity we’ve only recently conquered.  An archaic urge to accumulate—that old profit motive, call it saving for a rainy day—overrules the evidence of economic abundance and enforces austerity of every kind, fiscal, familial, and psychological.  The same archaic urge also lets us believe that “entitlements” are a moral problem because they provide income without effort, something for nothing.

But how can I claim that more spending is good for the economy, the environment, and your soul?  How can I suggest that the alternative—more saving, more austerity—means both material and psychological disaster?  Make it a practical question: How does an embrace of consumer culture address the manifold crises of our time?

I’ll answer in the first person.  We promote economic recovery and we smooth out the boom-bust cycle of the last quarter century—we create the conditions of more balanced growth—by redistributing income away from corporate profits, toward wages and thus consumer spending.  We work on three assumptions here.  First, increased private investment doesn’t drive growth, and indeed can’t do so, because net additions to the capital stock are unnecessary to improve productivity and increase output, or—put it another way—because the capital stock in question is composed of human capital nurtured, for the most part, by public spending, mainly on education.

Consumer spending drives growth, let’s face this basic fact and get on with planning an economic future in compliance with it.  Let’s also face another basic fact: public spending doesn’t crowd out private investment, not any more than so-called residential investment—consumer spending on homes—is a drain on private enterprise.  And here’s another basic fact: there is nothing new about poverty; what is new is that we have the techniques and the resources to get rid of it.  I’m quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., who understood that economic abundance meant we could afford to be our brother’s keeper.

Our second assumption, and this follows from the first, is that we can’t leave superfluous profits—surplus capital—in the hands of traders, analysts, and CEOs who define the purpose of investment as merely monetary gain, and who will therefore pursue it in whatever market it’s available, no matter how risky, exploitative, or bizarre.  We can’t do so any longer because we know from hard experience that if we do leave it to them—the proverbial 1%—catastrophe follows.  Let’s not continue to reward them for destroying rather than creating value.  The time has come for our very own perestroika.

Our third assumption in advocating redistribution is that we have socialized financial capital by insuring deposits through the FDIC and bailing out the big banks; meanwhile we have socialized investment, more generally, by using tax codes, incentives, interest rates, state-funded worker training—also regulation by government agencies as well as NGOs—to make the market a means to the end of publicly-debated social goals, not an economic end in itself.  So it’s time that we, the people, the 99%, take responsibility for what is, practically speaking, already in our grasp.  The private sector has tried to socialize the risk of investment, and not always at the expense of the public good.  It’s time that we socialized the return on private investment, in keeping with broader purposes than the bottom line.

From this angle, a more equitable distribution of income looks eminently practical and immediately necessary.  Put it this way.  To do the right thing—to seek social justice through a more perfect union, to de-center and democratize decisions about our future—is to do the best we can for economic recovery and for long-term growth.  We’re not distracting ourselves from the real economic issues by contemplating redistribution.  We speak as realists, not idealists, not optimists, and not do-gooders, when we claim that an increasingly unequal distribution of national income is bad for business—bad for the future of market freedoms—or when we insist that liberty and equality go together in the American Dream.

That’s the thing about this dream, it keeps telling us that our ethical principles, which remind us of what we ought to be doing, aren’t necessarily at odds with our historical circumstances, which remind us of what we’ve actually been doing.  As Americans, we seldom notice this contradiction between “ought” and “is” because we’re so used to remaking ourselves in the name of an ideal we barely understand: that’s why we call it a dream, because it describes what we want to be, not what we are.  In times of crisis, though, we do notice, we wake as if from this dream and we start asking how to resolve the contradiction.  Sometimes we come up with remarkable answers.

Often enough, not always by any means, those answers lead us toward a more democratic society—usually by de-centering and democratizing decisions about the future.  It happened in the 1740s and 50s with the Great Awakening, when itinerant preachers robbed invested ministers of their doctrinal authority, then again in the American Revolution when rag-tag militias and committees of privates taught George Washington how to fight a war of liberation.  And then again during a great Civil War, when mere slaves taught free men and women the price of freedom, and then—once again—a hundred years later when black people stood up for human rights, civil rights, the rights of everyone.

There’s no predictable outcome from this kind of grass-roots radicalism, whether of the Left or the Right.  But as Americans we’re accustomed to it because we believe in the sovereignty of the people, not the state or the cabinet or the Parliament or the party.  We’re used to periodic uprisings of the unruly, the unlettered, and the unwashed among us.  We look to them for harbingers of the future because, unlike most of the intellectuals in our midst, they don’t long to live in the past.

So now, when we face an economic crisis of extraordinary proportions, and when we ask ourselves what we can do about it, we can look in their direction and say that what we need is more democracy—more people who are more involved in more decisions about what we want to be as a nation and a people, and as individuals, in the future.  Economic recovery comes by way of consumer spending, and long-term, balanced growth comes by way of more such consumer spending, not more saving and investment.

So let’s admit that we don’t need the traders, analysts, and CEOs to lead the way toward renewed prosperity.  This 1% is as superfluous and superannuated as the landed nobility had become by the end of the 17^th century.  Let’s empower consumers and de-center decisions about the future: let’s give the 99% a vote when it comes to the allocation of economic resources as well as political office.

Let’s realize that the price of liberty is equality.  But don’t think that this price is a cost to be subtracted from the benefit of freedom, as if these two imperatives are incompatible.  In the American scheme of things—we all have this dream—liberty thrives only where equality becomes possible, only when social mobility becomes normal and social justice enlarges market freedoms.

Because we want the consolation that comes not just after but from the fright itself.  Sure, we’re Ego, they’re Id.  Look around, though.  We’re all locked in the same theater, eagerly experiencing the same spectacle.

Here’s George Packer at the New Yorker blog, on January 3^rd, wondering why we keep suffering from a self-imposed Intellectual Deficit Disorder: “The great puzzle of the Republican campaign is that, in an era of unprecedented ideological fervor, the party will almost certainly nominate the candidate who is the blandest, least ideological, and least trusted by conservatives of them all.”

“Great puzzle”?  C’mon, people, there’s no mystery here.  It’s the extremities that tell us most about the rest of us.  Those insane Republicans in Iowa aren’t a different species, they’re just like us—but they’re less repressed.  And yet at the end of election day they gave Ego the edge.

Ask yourself, why does Rick Santorum mention his grandfather’s huge coal-miner’s hands when he pays homage to his working-class origins?  More specifically, why are these the hands of the deceased, folded in a coffin, where only heads and hands, only extremities, protrude from the decorations of the undertaker?  Because they’re severed, dead and gone, because they can be mourned as such, as something detachable that will never return—as absent, aberrant causes, in every sense, of those who live to die and to kill, those who embody the death instinct.

Senator Santorum walks the castrated walk, and he talks the castrated talk.  He scares the shit out us, and so we keep buying tickets to the  horror movie he or Newt or Ron stars in—the actors don’t matter in this genre—because it’s so gratifying.  For the record, this man, this Santorum, is almost certainly not a zombie.  Newt Gingrich, I can’t say—his face does seem to be dissolving these days—and Ron Paul is beyond categorization because he’s not from my planet.

But what, exactly, is gratifying about watching the horror movie that is the Republican primaries?  Ah c’mon, people.  Ask yourself, what is pleasurable about watching, say, Mel Gibson being eviscerated at the end of a year’s Best Picture?  Never mind, I get that.  But what about the violent spectacles on display in any movie that matters from the last twenty-five years, say “Goodfellas” or “Robocop,” or, to bring this right up to date, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”?  What makes you want to watch, not turn away?

Unless you’re the unusually stupid and cloistered kind of human being who says “I won’t see movies with a lot of violence”—that means you don’t get out much—you’re accustomed to the routine cinematic violation of your expectations when it comes to the borders or limits of the human body.  In fact, you go to the movies in the hope of this violation.

And that goes for filmic sex (not porn) as well as the physical encounters that qualify as violence.  Not to worry, this urge doesn’t make you a masochist.  You go to the movies precisely because you know the experience you will have there is not yours: like all good fiction, it’s (mostly) preparation for the future, not (merely) confirmation of the past.  “And as, in real life, the proprieties will not allow people to act out themselves with that unreserve permitted to the stage; so, in books of fiction, they look not only for more entertainment, but at bottom, for even more reality than real life can show.”  That’s Herman Melville talking, in The Confidence-Man, his 1857 farewell to readers.

We watch horror movies because we know that for all the cruelty and violence and gore and ignorance—why did she go back into that dark place?—we, the spectators, will escape, and we know our egos will be fortified, not diminished, by engagement with the angry, ugly, overpowering, and yet fictional forces on screen. 

That’s why we stay up late and watch the Iowa caucuses.  That’s why we pay attention to the roughly 29,000 people who voted for Rick Santorum, a guy that belongs in an asylum where Mass is said every morning—we used to call these places churches or Catholic seminaries.

These horrific Republicans are the American Id, so of course we’re not just fascinated by them, we’re obsessed with them.  We want to experience the cruelty and violence and gore and ignorance they would inflict on us, just as we want to experience the untoward gifts of our own unconscious—but it’s the release from the experience, and it moves both ways, giving into the guilty pleasure and meanwhile announcing abstention from it, that is so gratifying.  We can’t help ourselves, we’re addicted.

So the great puzzle of the Republican campaign is not that the party will almost certainly nominate “the blandest, least ideological” candidate—that it will nominate Ego instead of Id.  No, the great puzzle here is the extreme pleasure we take from the struggle and the spectacle.  If I were the people’s shrink, I’d say, you’re clearly rooting for Id over Ego, but why?

A rhetorical question, of course.  As a good shrink, I already have the answer.  You’re not just bored.  You’re eager to overthrow everything.  But if not now, when?

Last year at New Year’s Eve my girlfriend and I hosted a party at my old place on 163^rd Street—outer space as far as most New Yorkers are concerned, but only a block from 555 Edgecombe, where Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Joe Louis lived in the 1930s, and no more than three blocks from where W.E.B. Du Bois and Thurgood Marshall lived in that same tumultuous decade.

To begin with we drank good champagne and better wine, ate strange little French pickles (cornichons), and smeared strong mustard on salami-like substances from Italy, mostly courtesy of the guests.  I don’t even remember what we served for dinner.  What I remember is feeling at home in the world for the first time in many years, and there I was on the far edge of this city of immigrants, perched on a sharp precipice of Manhattan overlooking the Harlem River, in view of the Bronx, to be sure, but, more immediately, in view of a future I couldn’t predict because I knew I’d have a hand in its making.

That’s what home feels like to most Americans, for better and worse: satisfied with unsettlement.  It’s a frontier mentality, this feeling, but it’s not rootless; in time it creates an urge to discover, or to invent, roots enough to become sunk in tradition.  When people say “you can’t go home again,” they mean you’ll never find that origin because there never was one, except as a primal scene—a mere fantasy—that nevertheless became the proximate cause of the reality that is your life.  Most fiction, it seems to me, is a way of resetting this scene, retelling the origin story, letting us see that its results are either as malleable as words on a page (Junot Diaz) or as irrevocable as the judgments of an angry god (William Faulkner).  After the epic poem, either comedy or tragedy.

II

We spent this New Year’s Eve with the same small crowd on 79^th Street and 1^st Ave, way over on the East Side.  The hostess is a writer—she teaches it, and she does it with great skill, having published award-winning articles in magazines and quirky biographies of famous men.  The other principals, apart from my girlfriend the notorious writer of books that make you reexamine every assumption you bring to everyday life, but still lets you laugh while you’re at it, are a psychiatrist who knows everything about food and drink—he’s the chef who prepared the picnic on the Hudson I recount in Against Thrift—and who tends, being a polymathic shrink, toward global explanations of all phenomena, and an editor who came to New York out of college, camped out at Ms. Magazine determined to break into the feminist scene of writing, and finally got a job photocopying, then worked her way into periodical publishing, where by now, as a senior editor at a hugely successful women’s magazine, she surveys the future with some serious misgivings about the very possibility of writing seriously.

The main course was a beef tenderloin wrapped in bacon—I couldn’t make this up—and it was delicious: each of us got two thick slabs that didn’t look or feel cooked, being very red and very soft, but they tasted the part.  The side dishes were squash and spinach, as befit the mid-winter moment of the feast, and they were equally delicious, although I must confess that my new carnivorous habits seem to crowd my sensorium in favor of whatever meat appears on the plate: I pay more attention to the dead animal because I feel like I’m making up for lost time—those difficult vegetables preoccupied me for a lot of years—and besides, the taste of meat is new.  Two weeks ago, for example, I ordered venison in a nice Tribeca restaurant, hoping to compare the effect of its eating to my pre-pubescent experience with wild game, when my father and I used shotguns on artificial wastelands in Wisconsin to kill every colorful animal we could startle into flight by stomping through their dead brown habitat (pheasants, mainly, you can’t shoot the females, whose drab feathers keep them better camoflauged).  There was no comparison because my remembrance was itself the most exquisite artifice.

III

The dinner conversation was all about the Internet.  The complaint on the table was that in cyberspace there are no standards—everybody’s opinion is valuable, or is equal to any other—so the “crapification” of American culture, as my girlfriend puts it, proceeds at an accelerating rate.  We’re all worried that the books we write can’t be read properly or even intelligently because they open questions that, in the most literal sense, can’t be addressed by readers equipped only with the conventional wisdom the Internet allows—because they challenge prevailing assumptions about the way the world works.

Right now I’m even more worried than these writerly friends because I know that a tiresome, middlebrow mind from a marketing department at Baylor University—his name is James A. Roberts, and he’s able without a trace of irony to juxtapose Abraham Maslow, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ben Franklin in a book called Shiny Objects: Why We Spend Money We Don’t Have in Search of Happiness We Can’t Buy—is selling many more books than I am, and in direct competition with mine.  Yes, he blames consumer excess for the troubles of our time, including the Great Recession.

My counter-argument at dinner, and I offered it with some hesitation, goes like this.  The lack of standards in cyberspace is a function of something the Left might have welcomed in its Frankfurt phase—and that is the decommodification of information, opinion, argument, and analysis, whether offered as fiction or non-fiction.  These things used to bear a price and have a very specific cost; they can now be appropriated without the intermediation of market devices, except that, once upon a time, you had to buy the machine that gives you access to the Internet.  (The same goes for the production, distribution, and consumption of music, but that’s a slightly different story.)

As the market has come to organize less of our attention and energies in appropriating these things, so have the standards of the past come to mean less to readers.  In other words, our intellectual standards have dispersed, eroded, changed, or disappeared as the market itself has become less regulative, and less determinative—or at any rate less ubiquitous—in the production and distribution of information, opinion, argument, and analysis.

What follows, however, is this: the intellectual standards whose passing we lament are, by and large, the standards of an information age that was thoroughly organized, indeed saturated, by the commodity form.  Put it another way.  Intellectual or artistic attainment of the most profound order is perfectly consistent with success in the market.  You might say, well, duh, that’s what the post-modern condition has taught us, or rather that’s what its heralds, from Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein to Stephen King, have tried to teach us.

But my point is different: the complaints I hear from my friends on the Left about the corrupting force of cyberspace on standards of intellectual or artistic attainment would suggest that they long for a moment in which the market was more visible and consequential in producing and distributing information, opinion, argument, and analysis.  They long, in this sense, for the standards set by the commodity form.  That’s not a criticism, because, as some of you may know, I’m a great believer in markets as the historical groundwork and the enduring bulwark of political democracy.  But there’s some interesting irony in their complaints.

And that irony comes at my expense, not theirs.  They’re right, there are real downsides to the decommodification of information (and music), which I tend to overlook or discount in my zeal to discover subversive possibilities or epochal significance in recent economic changes.  This “primitive disaccumulation” I have celebrated—this Internet-enforced movement toward the decommodification of basic cultural necessities like information and music—is no less destructive and terrifying than the primitive accumulation of resources that forced everyone to buy the right not to die.  For me, that’s useful new knowledge for the new year.

IV

When dinner was over, about 11:15, we all pretended to carry some plates somewhere, knowing that our real destination was six long blocks west and then some, we were headed for the midnight fireworks in Central Park.  We got all the way down to 72^nd on the west side of the park before 12:00, and by the time the sky lit up and the windows of apartment buildings on 5^th Avenue responded with second-hand explosions of magnified color, the runners were pounding past us, heading uptown and uphill, contestants in a midnight run sponsored by the New York Road Runners Club.  The stream of them widened quickly as the professionals disappeared  to the accompaniment of trucks and motorcycles and loudspeakers.  We were almost crowded off the road—of course we were on the wrong side of the race—by this thickening mass of amateur runners, their backs to the fireworks on this New Year’s Eve: the size of a small town went past, and many of this town’s wayward residents were in costume, on their way to a party.

I smiled madly at all of them, thinking, “You gotta love this town.”  High fives for a couple of happy runners, but my favorite moment came when a spangled young woman stopped when I nodded at her costume, a T-shirted gesture toward Wonder Woman.  Not right then, she stopped somewhere upstream and came back, touched my shoulder and asked me to take a picture of her against the light of those fireworks.  “It’s for my parents,” she said.  I was disappointed—what, it’s not about me?—and grateful all at once.  I took the picture, backlit perfectly by another rocket’s white glare, and thanked her for asking.

When the fireworks ended, we walked west, toward the C train, past exhausted runners and befuddled tourists who probably mistook this ultra-foliated place for Times Square.  Then we walked up to the 81^st Street stop by the Natural History Museum, on Central Park West.  As we walked, looking over that low brick wall into the sunken park at almost 1:00 in the morning on the first day of 2012, we could see hundreds of runners facing downtown, nearing the finish line, all headed for home.

I

I’ve been claiming that if you want to understand Occupy Wall Street, you need to think with Vaclav Havel, particularly his 1978 manifesto, “The Power of the Powerless.”  I’ve meanwhile been suggesting that the Velvet Revolution he galvanized—I hesitate to say that he led it—was the blueprint for the rebellions of our time, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, on toward the great upheavals of 2012.

Here I’m going to continue reading “The Power of the Powerless” against the grain, insisting that, Havel notwithstanding, the Eastern European revolutions of the late-20^th century rediscovered what he called the “sources of humanity” on the site of what he loathed—consumer culture—and that they did so by practicing the “politics of ‘more’.”  Then I’ll suggest that Occupy Wall Street is recapitulating this very itinerary.

So I’ll be concluding that if you don’t want to be disillusioned by the impending revolutions of our time, rethink everything you know about consumer culture.  To begin with, rethink the credo of Kalle Lasn, founder and editor of Adbusters, who serves, not incidentally, as a crucial source of inspiration to Occupy Wall Street.

II

A great deal of nonsense has been produced by close study of the revolutions that rocked Eastern Europe between 1975 and 1992—perhaps because they seemed such spontaneous, almost accidental events.  They looked mysterious, inexplicable, mundane, and yet somehow glorious, too.   The Left in the advanced capitalist nations didn’t quite know what to make of it all.  On that side of the political divide, people typically said, “We love trade unions and we identify with ‘dissident’ intellectuals just like ourselves, but do we want ‘actually existing socialism’ to disappear?  Do we want a revolution in the name of the right to wear cool jeans?”  Meanwhile the Right congratulated itself on “winning the Cold War,” maybe even ending History, by reversing the search for the Missing Link and profiling the Last Man.

Neither side got it right because these revolutions were motivated by the “politics of ‘more’” in two related senses.  First, conventional, “oppositional” politics, as conducted by a party system organized around public events, electoral campaigns, and programmatic debates—or as organized by armed guerillas—were irrelevant to the outcome.   These weren’t “wars of maneuver,” in Gramscian terms, they were “wars of position.”

Second, the symbolic meanings of consumer goods—the significance of jeans, genres of music, even styles of hair, but also the prices of basic necessities—became central figures in the rhetoric and strategies of revolution.  The constituents of this unarmed revolution didn’t want to overthrow the state; they wanted more art, more music, more time away from work—just enough exemption from necessity—to do something unimportant, like read a novel or write a play or strum a guitar.  They wanted to inhabit a consumer culture, where the goal is more leisure, not significant work.  Their desires produced revolutionary political change.

These constituents of a world elsewhere were up against a system that couldn’t quite accommodate the strange, subversive values embodied in consumer culture because that system had displaced the market, and thus couldn’t accredit consumer demand.

But economists in the Soviet Bloc understood this dilemma long before it acquired a cultural presence and a political standing in the late 1970s.   In fact, throughout Eastern Europe in the early 1960s, influential economists were noticing a disturbing trend toward stagnation, and urging “marketization”—both political and economic reform—as the solution.  Among these economists were Wladczmier Brus of Poland, Istvan Friss of Hungary, and Radoslav Selucky of Czechoslovakia.

They showed that mere additions to the capital stock and the labor force had worked to increase per capital incomes, and thus consumer spending, in the age of industrialization—a 19^th century event in the West and a 20^th century event in the East.  They called this pattern “extensive growth,” and argued that it couldn’t work any longer, in the late 20^th century, in the aftermath of industrialization.  For net additions to either the capital stock or the labor force had somehow become unnecessary to fuel growth; a greater share of national income was therefore available for spending on things besides new plant and equipment—it was available for spending on things like consumer goods—but a larger volume of consumer goods was not available.  So economic stagnation was inevitable, these economists claimed, unless the Soviet Bloc countries could use “marketization” to make the transition to a different, consumer-led pattern of growth, which they called “intensive growth.”  In the West, they showed, this transition was already well under way; the East would fall behind if it didn’t follow suit.

The “Prague Spring” of 1968, when the Czech government introduced a reform program of “marketization,” was the first facsimile of the necessary transition.  But it was a “technocratic” fix according to the reformers themselves (including Selucky).  It addressed the economic problem of consumer demand in new, imaginative, market-oriented ways, but it didn’t, and probably couldn’t, address the key political question—how to limit state command of economic decision, which in practical terms meant, how to limit the power of the Communist Party?

So the great discoveries of the 1960s in Eastern Europe were that a consumer-driven pattern of “intensive growth” had become the obvious alternative to economic stagnation in the Soviet Bloc—and that the pursuit of this alternative would require massive political change.  In other words, the “marketization” of resource allocation required the democratization of the political order: “genuine economic pluralism is impossible without unlimited political pluralism,” as Havel himself put it in retrospect.  Translation: if democracy needs markets to work effectively, markets need democracy to work properly.

The question for the disillusioned reformers after 1968 was not whether but how to make this kind of political change.  They eventually decided on a “war of position”—they relinquished the idea of “opposition” or “dissent” and instead cultivated a cultural politics.  “The Power of the Powerless” is the summary statement of their new attitude toward the predicates of political change.  The seizure of state power by means of a Leninist “war of maneuver” was never the goal.  As Havel explained, Charter 77 operated on the assumption that “political reform was not the cause of society’s reawakening but rather the final outcome of that reawakening.”

III

Havel’s premise was that a “post-totalitarian society” had emerged in the aftermath of the 1960s, in both East and West—his own part of the world stood as a “warning” to the parliamentary democracies of the West.  Like many other theorists of the 1970s, he sometimes called this new order an “industrial society” or a “technological society,” as a way of suggesting that its suffocating routines cut across any differences between capitalism and socialism.

And like most recent theorists of “late capitalism,” Havel also equated industrial society and consumer culture.  He broadcast this indictment as follows: “The Soviet Bloc is an integral part of the larger world, and it shares and shapes the world’s destiny.  This means in concrete terms that the hierarchy of values existing in the developed countries of the West has, in essence, appeared in our society. . . .In other words, what we have here is simply another form of the consumer and industrial society.”

Indeed he claimed that industrial society—whether socialist or capitalist, East of West—was inert, passive, “sopoforic, submerged in a consumer rat race,” because its constituents had been seduced the “the consumer value system.”  Like Kalle Lasn, Chris Hedges, and the larger crew at Adbusters, Havel treated the most egregious clichés as self-evident truths; for example, the “general unwillingness of consumption-oriented people to sacrifice some material certainties for the sake of their own spiritual and moral integrity” was a mere fact, something beyond argument.

Poor Havel.  In 1978, he was already railing against the demands of his own people, who wanted, above all, to be able to choose for or against the consumer culture of the West—of course they wanted more of everything, but mainly time and money and goods enough to discover themselves in the here and now, where their moral integrity would be in play, at risk.

IV

Havel notwithstanding, the Velvet Revolution was fueled by the same “politics of ‘more” that ignited the workers’ revolts in Poland of the 1970s—food price increases were the spark every time—and fanned the flames of perestroika in the heart of the Soviet Union in the 1980s.  In the 1970s and 80s, more consumer goods were, in fact, more available in the Soviet Bloc because the authorities kept trying to meet consumer demand by borrowing from the West to import scarce items like children’s clothes (they could do so because Soviet oil revenues rocketed after 1973).  But they couldn’t keep up, because as Steven Kotkin puts it, “although people had more, they were demanding more on the basis of wider horizons.”  Those horizons were the distant, wavering lines they could see on TV series imported from the West (mostly BBC), which they watched for clues about material life, peering into the refrigerators with the actors as if they were on the set.  Those horizons were the confident bass lines they could hear on bootlegged music imported from the Americas, which they listened to for ways of being in a world elsewhere, wondering what way of life could make sense of this noise.  Those horizons were the sights and sounds of consumer culture.

The Velvet Revolution was no exception to this rule.  Even Havel admits as much in explaining the origins of Charter 77.  Here’s the narrative he offers in “The Power of the Powerless”:

“Undeniably, the most important political event in Czechoslovakia [after 1968] was the appearance of Charter 77.  The spiritual and intellectual climate surrounding its appearance, however, was not the product o any immediate political event.  That climate was created by the trial of some young musicians associated with a rock group called ‘The Plastic People of the Universe.’ . . .Everyone understood that an attack on the Czech musical underground was an attack on a most elementary and important thing, something that in fact bound everyone together: it was an attack on the very notion of living within the truth, on the real aims of life.  The freedom to play rock music was understood as a human freedom  and thus essentially the same as the freedom to engage in philosophical and political reflection, the freedom to write, the freedom to express and defend the various social and political interests of society.”

In short, Charter 77, the Czech equivalent of Poland’s Solidarity, the “parallel structure” whose members would dominate the post-Soviet government, was founded in response to the arrest and trial of four men who had formed a rock band called Plastic People of the Universe.

V

There was enough irony in the name of the band to alert knowledgeable listeners to the subversive possibilities of the music: not to worry, it said, we’re just pretending to be hapless consumers.  But its genealogy and Havel’s explanation of Charter 77 suggest that the detonating event in the Velvet Revolution was the reflexive defense of what had become both a common good and a consumer good—the black aesthetic embodied in and imported as rock ‘n’ roll.

The Plastics got their name and their aura from their affiliation with the obvious and the esoteric.  To begin with, the name recalled a song, “Plastic People,” recorded in 1967 by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.  It mixed bemused spoken dialogue with the already classic rock sound of “Louie, Louie,” changing tempo, timbre, melody, whatever, following the CIA through Laurel Canyon and telling listeners to “watch the Nazis run your town.”  The song’s paranoia was pointed, ironic, and hilarious—perfectly suited to the wary, weary temperament of the Prague Spring and its aftermath.

The name of the band also recalled Andy Warhol’s multimedia project of 1966-67, the “Exploding Plastic Inevitable,” which featured the Velvet Underground as the house band.  The voices and the music on these occasions sounded like Bob Dylan had wandered into a disco—I know, this is impossible—at least until John Cale turned up the amp and sped up the sound before the end of a song; before then, it was all slide guitar verging on the plunky feel of a banjo, nasally vocals coming and going like strange weather over major chords as the strobe lit up the dancers in their cages.  If you listened closely enough, you could hear the entire history of North American music in these performances.  That was probably the point, and it wasn’t lost on the Plastics.

But their name came from yet another world elsewhere.  This was the world delivered to the band by its manager, Ivan Jirous, an art historian, cultural critic, and close reader of Roland Barthes, the French semiotician who treated plastic—the signature stuff of postwar capitalism—as a wondrous, lovely, and “disgraced material,” the cartoonish lack of substance that defined consumer culture: “So, more than a substance, plastic is the very idea if its infinite transformation, as its everyday name indicates, it is ubiquity made visible . . . it is less a thing than the trace of a movement . . .because the quick-change artistry of plastic is absolute: it can become buckets or jewels.”

The Plastics knew they were already disgraced, “imitation materials,” as Barthes put it, practicing the kind of artifice that “aims at something common, nor rare,” something reproducible, not unique.  At the outset, the band got its avant-garde standing from its imitative abilities—from it covers of in English of songs by the Velvets and the Fugs (the translations were by the Canadian Paul Wilson, who was recruited by Jirous, who promoted the band in much the same way that Warhol had promoted the Velvets).  The Plastics copied the Velvets’ early droning sound from bootleg tapes smuggled into Czechoslovakia, they copied the Fugs’ playful lyrics using the same illegal sources, and they copied the dress code and attitudes of rock ‘n’ roll as displayed in Greenwich Village, ca. 1968, from album covers and Wilson’s wardrobe.

VI

But they were licensed by the Czech government.  As in Russia proper, where every factory had its own house band by the late-1960s, the Czech authorities didn’t treat rock ‘n’ roll as decadent or subversive; they saw it as a weird consumer good imported from the West along with children’s clothes, in response to the insistent demands of people who wanted “more” of everything.  The authorities revoked the Plastics’ license in 1970 as part of a larger crackdown on participants in the Prague Spring—but the band played on into the 1970s without interference from the state, covering the Mothers and the Velvets and the Fugs until 1972 (when Wilson left the group), and then using the poetry of Egon Bondy, the banned Czech philosopher, as the lyrical content of its original music.

The three remaining band members and Jirous were arrested in 1976; all four were sentenced to prison terms of eight to eighteen months.  Their crime wasn’t rock ‘n’ roll.  The authorities weren’t singling out the music, surreal as it was, they were trying instead to silence Bondy once and for all by jailing the ventriloquists.

However you catalog the crime, the music came from farthest outpost of consumer culture, the USA.  The Mothers, the Velvets, and the Fugs were avant-garde bands, to be sure, but they had recording contracts, they played concerts, and they sold lots of mass-produced vinyl records made with advanced technology (I know, my sister bought them).  If the records hadn’t circulated worldwide as consumer goods, the Plastics would never have been able to copy the music, the attitudes, and the styles these industrial artifacts made both audible and reproducible—just like the white kids who wouldn’t have been able to copy the music, the attitudes, and the styles of African-American music produced in the southern United States if recording technology and mass distribution hadn’t let them cross a color line.

So when Havel invokes the “freedom to play rock music” as a basic human freedom and cites the Plastics, he’s actually invoking the freedom to listen to these new sounds imported from the headquarters of both capitalism and consumer culture; for without the audience, the consumers of the music, who appeared en masse and in public—and not just in Czechoslovakia—the band would never have drawn the attention of the authorities.  In 1976, this basic human freedom meant access to the consumer good that was the black aesthetic embodied in rock ‘n’ roll.

No less than the constituents of the Velvet Revolution, then, Havel was demanding that a consumer society of free time, leisure, and play be released from the deadening constraints of industrial society.  Despite his theoretical opposition to consumer culture, he was preaching and practicing the “politics of ‘more’.”

And speaking of more.  Merry Christmas.  More to come.

I claimed that to understand the effect and the promise of Occupy Wall Street, you have to think with Havel, especially with his 1978 manifesto, “The Power of the Powerless,” where he insisted on the political significance of those “hidden areas” and “parallel structures” embedded in everyday social life—where he insisted that “opposition” and “dissent,” or programs and platforms and policies, were simply irrelevant to the kind of revolution required to dismantle post-totalitarian society.

Now it’s time to think across the grain of Havel’s manifesto.  Unless we do, we won’t understand the revolution that’s happening under our feet, shifting the grounds of every political difference, and, more important, we won’t know how to change the terms of intellectual debate—we’ll end up as Havel himself did, estranged, exhausted, and even embittered by what he so desperately wanted, just another radical disillusioned by reality.

Toward the end of “The Power of the Powerless,” Havel turns to address the pragmatists and the Leninists who must be wondering what it all could mean in the real world: “And now I may properly be asked the question: What then is to be done?”  His answers are anything but reassuring.  At any rate they make me think he was too much the radical, the outsider, and the insurgent, never willing to compromise in a “parliamentary” manner, never able to bear the weight of the political past.

And why not, you might ask, he lived under a brutal totalitarian regime, the equivalent of Nazi Germany—how could he not want to repudiate the political past?  It’s a good question until you realize that, like Solzhenitsyn, his deepest scorn was reserved for the fragile, feckless democracies of the West.: “This static complex of rigid, conceptually sloppy, and politically pragmatic mass political parties run by professional apparatuses and releasing the citizen from all forms of concrete and personal responsibility; and those complex focuses of capital accumulation engaged in secret manipulation and expansion; the omnipresent dictatorship of consumption, production, advertising, commerce, consumer culture, and all that flood of information: all of it, so often analyzed and described, can only with great difficulty be imagined as the source of humanity’s rediscovery of itself.”

Of course there was no institutional or intellectual groundwork for the renewal of “democratic discussion” in the Soviet bloc—but this absence was even more characteristic of the hapless West.  The “existential revolution” required to get beyond post-totalitarian society would, then, have to escape the “everyday mechanisms of Western (or, if you like, bourgeois) democracy.”  But how?

Havel didn’t duck the question.  In fact he answered too honestly, revealing a fondness for charismatic leadership and extra-parliamentary power we might dismiss as soft-hearted silliness if it weren’t for the slaughter bench we remember as the 20^th century.  He tried to imagine the structures that would allow for “the rehabilitation of values like trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, love.”  They had to be “open, dynamic, and small.”

But these ad hoc organizations wouldn’t be leaderless.  They would be animated by what Max Weber called charismatic authority (and associated with pre-modern politics): “The leaders’ authority ought to derive from their personalities and be personally tested in their particular surroundings, and not from their position in any nomenklatura. They should enjoy great personal confidence and even great lawmaking powers based on that confidence.  This would appear to be the only way out of the classic impotence of traditional democratic organizations, which frequently seem founded more on mistrust than mutual confidence, and more on collective irresponsibility than on responsibility.”

No wonder Havel died a disillusioned man.  He wanted to replace bureaucracy with  the “human ties” created by “personal trust and personal responsibility” (the last phrase was the trope that Havel and Solzhenitsyn shared as a defiant testament against modernity as such).  Authority had, then, to derive from the personal charisma of leaders, who would, having gained the trust of the people, be endowed with “even great lawmaking powers.”

This is what must happen to your thinking if your ethical principles aren’t legible in the historical circumstances that surround you: it becomes utopian, romantic, and, at it outer edges, downright dangerous.  For it proclaims moral imperatives that are empty of any social content that strangers could recognize and make their own—these imperatives can apply only to those within the ambit of your personal trust and personal responsibility.  We typically call these people friends or family, but however we designate them, they cannot constitute a political community, because, whether ancient or modern, this kind of community is predicated on the recognition and articulation of the difference between personal interests—or responsibilities—and public goods.

What, then?  What could be “the source of humanity’s rediscovery of itself’?  Kant’s famous dictum from The Critique of Pure Reason was clearly the blueprint of Havel’s will to lawmaking powers: “For whereas, so far as nature is concerned, experience supplies the rule and is the source of truth, in respect to the moral law, it is, alas, the mother of illusion!  Nothing is more reprehensible than to derive the laws prescribing what ought to be done from what is done, or to impose upon them the limits by which the latter is circumscribed.”

Ethical principle (“ought”) and historical circumstance (“is”) are always at odds according to this dictum, as are mind and body, reason and desire, freedom and necessity, subject and object, thought and thing.  But if you can’t read your principles in the actually existing circumstances, the only honorable recourse is evacuation—you have to escape the weight of the past, head for the territory, look for new beginnings on that horizon where anything is possible.  And where anything is possible, we can conjure charismatic leaders with “great lawmaking powers” as the political solution to both post-totalitarian societies and parliamentary democracies.  Politics becomes science fiction, or a cult of personality.

It’s a pathetic place to be at this hour, but it’s in keeping with the sensibility of Adbusters, a crucial inspiration of Occupy Wall Street—it’s in keeping with the apocalyptic imagination fired there by the most extraordinary images and purple prose now available.  And yet Kalle Lasn, the figure behind the magazine and its culture-jamming project, is more interested in “rethinking” capitalism than in abandoning it: that’s why he gets quoted as favoring the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall rather than recommending the overthrow of the state.

Next time out, I’ll propose consumer culture as “the source of humanity’s rediscovery of itself.”  Yes, I’ll be revising Havel and Lasn in ways that neither would like (and neither would OWS), but the point is to grasp what is as the groundwork of what we ought to be doing—to understand our ethical principles as residing in and flowing from the historical circumstances that surround us.

To begin with, read “The Power of the Powerless,” his zamizdat manifesto of 1978.  He wrote it  to explain the invention of Charter 77, a small band of intellectuals, dissidents, musicians, artists, vagabonds, and ne’er-do-wells which became the headquarters and staff of the Velvet Revolution—but you can say that only in retrospect, because at the time it looked like a rag-tag bunch of misfits with no program, no plan, and absolutely no intention of overthrowing the state.  All its members had to start with was anger at Absurdistan, as Havel like to call the Czech regime.

Charter 77 was formed to protest the fact that the Czech authorities had thrown a rock band in jail.  Seriously.  To be sure, almost all of its signers remembered the Prague Spring of 1968 as participants or partisans—still, the occasion for the meeting and the manifesto was the arrest of “Plastic People of the Universe,” a band that, from 1968 to 1972 had covered songs by the Mothers of Invention, the Velvet Underground, and the Fugs.  It got itself into trouble after 1972 by setting the poetry of Egon Bondy, a banned Czech philosopher, to music—but notice that for four years, until 1976, it played without interference from the authorities.

“The Power of the Powerless” quickly circulated throughout Eastern Europe, becoming an inspiration for members of Solidarity in Poland and appearing as Exhibit A in the Czech state’s case against Havel.  It cost him four years in prison—all for explaining that the arrest of three musicians and their manager was unacceptable, and beyond that, for explaining why seemingly insignificant, anti-programmatic resistance to post-totalitarian society was itself a surreal retort to the absurdity of arbitrary power.

You could read this manifesto as the product of privilege, because Havel (the bourgeois scion of a wealthy Czech family) asks us to step outside the everyday obligations and believable lies that deflect our frustrations and anger from their actual origin—and that would be our own complicity in the reproduction of what he calls “post-totalitarian society” (a genus that includes the post-industrial species known as the USA).  Who can afford to do that?  Who would ask us to, except someone exempt from the demands of making a living, someone willing to camp out on the perimeter of real life?

That’s the way Occupy Wall Street has been read by the pundits from Day 1, unless of course they’re denouncing it for making radical demands or complaining that it has no demands to make.

You could read “The Power of the Powerless,” on the other hand, as the product of experience and investigation, as the modern-day equivalent of James Madison’s redefinition of revolution and the republics they create.  That’s the way I like to read it, as the harbinger of revolutionary social change that requires no vanguard, no party, no leadership, and maybe not even any armed struggle except the spastic violence doled out by the cops who are paid to do it, because this is a cultural revolution—this is a war of position, not a war of maneuver, as Gramsci put it—held in check by political counter-revolution, by the power of the state and the fear of emancipation from economic necessity.

This war of position begins and ends in a “pre-political” space.  Havel calls that space a “hidden sphere,” an “independent life of society,” a “parallel structure”—parallel, that is, to the state—or just “culture” as such.  It isn’t a retreat from society available only to the bohemian, the diffident, or the affluent (“an act of islation”), it’s where the real social life of the future can be glimpsed, and maybe even experienced.

So the revolution requires patience and humility, and skepticism of “politics” as convened by any party.  Havel keeps saying we’re not interested in overthrowing the state (the war of maneuver): we don’t want to own this thing.  We’re not an “opposition,” we’re not interested in “dissidence”—we don’t want to erase the modern-liberal relation between state and society, like the fascists and the communists did by seizing power—no, we think “politics,” especially the electoral kind, comes last, and the power that comes with “politics” so conceived, well, you can spare us that, too.

That’s the way I read Occupy Wall Street, as the realization of Vaclav Havel’s prescient insights into post-totalitarian societies like the one we inhabit, which are insights into both the vast inertia created by our own complicity and the possibilities of fundamental change in such societies.

Now I can  quote him—I thought you’d never ask—from “The Power of the Powerless,” and see where he points us.

“The real background to the movements that gradually assume political significance does not usually consist of overtly political events or confrontations between different forces or concepts that are openly political.  These movements for the most part originate elsewhere, in the far broader reaches of the ‘pre-political,’ where living within a lie confronts living within the truth, that is, where the demands of the post-totalitarian system, conflict with real aims of life. . . . Such a conflict acquires a political character, then, not because of the elementary political nature of the aims demanding to be heard but simply because, given the complex system of manipulation on which the post-totalitarian system is founded and on which it is dependent, every free act of expression, every attempt to live within the truth, must necessarily appear as a threat to the system, and, thus, as something which is political par excellence.”

Havel knew he was speaking across borders most intellectuals and activists couldn’t cross, not even in the twilight of the Cold War: he thought of Eastern Europe and its Western antagonist as different stages of development, not antithetical models of industrial society.  “And do we not in fact stand (although in the external measures of civilization, we are far behind) as a kind of warning to the West, revealing its own latent tendencies,” he asked, and answered this way: “The post-totalitarian political system, after all, is not the manifestation of a particular political line followed by a particular government.  It is something radically different: it is a complex, profound, and long-term violation of society, or rather the self-violation of society.  To oppose it merely by establishing a different political line and then striving for a change in government would not only be unrealistic, it would be utterly inadequate.”

The “fundamental revolution in politics” that would be adequate to the challenge of post-totalitarian society was underway in the form of the “pre-political” Charter 77, Havel surmised, and offered this prediction:  “In the democratic societies, where the violence done to human beings is not nearly so obvious and cruel, this fundamental revolution in politics has yet to happen, and some things will probably have to get worse there before the urgent need for that revolution is reflected in politics.”

Welcome to our times, courtesy of the Great Recession and the DJ of the Velvet Revolution.