One More Time, With Feeling; or, Who’s Afraid of Democratic Socialism?

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I’ve recently heard some conversation trying to sully or tarnish the idea of openness by associating it with socialism. (Of course, if there’s anything you don’t like in the US today the standard response is to label it “socialist,” despite the fact that many labelers can neither define nor spell the term properly.) However, from my perspective some of the most important forms of openness are simply about obeying one of the standard laws of capitalism: if I pay for a good or service, I am entitled to the good or service. Could the market (or society) survive if we didn’t obey this rule?

David WielyThe Twice-Paid Paradox

Mr. Wiley is one of the good guys whose ideas we can only hope prevail. But I have to say this recent post drove me a little batty. After the election of Obama last year, you would think that we would all be rushing to create a new, more challenging rhetoric that would push the ideals of democracy forward rather than simply reacting to the wing-nut tea beggars whose masters only wish to create a false sense of outrage behind which they can hide obstructionist policies. The longer they wait, they think, the most tarnished the liberal majority in Congress and the more successfully they can promote their reactionary policies.

Mr. Wiley’s argument is an old one with a certain veracity. This looks like radicalism, but if you look closely, it’s not. Open culture and software is simply capitalism repeated, with a difference. I don’t think that argument has ever worked with anyone other than true believers (and some of the believers are probably being cynical). I think he should just keep working on articulating the positive effects, economically, socially, and politically, of not allowing private property to dominate technological development. It took a generation to make capitalism a good word again. It’ll take another to clean up democratic socialism.

Posted in: Writing

Made Not Born: The Power of the Humanities in Capitalism

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Not to get all technical, but most of the time the capitalist market is almost shockingly reified, even by academics who you think would know better. The market, at best a rough description of a myriad of social and economic forces, seems to be constantly doing things that we just can’t do much about. Sometimes it’s explicit and almost religious in tone– the market is omnipotent and infallible– and sometimes its implicit.

There’s rarely any larger agency behind the decimation of the U.S. automobile industry, for example; it’s simply the unions and foreign competition. (More recently, however, poor management is sometimes blamed.) It didn’t just happen, though, by magic; the industry was destroyed by short term thinking and by a long term drive to weaken unions in the United States. The specifics of the history will be debated for a long time, but it was people, and greed, not the market, that made it happen.

I had the same same sort of reaction to a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education (“We Need to Acknowledge the Realities of Employment in the Humanities“). It’s not so much that the author has his facts wrong, he’s done his research. No, what bothers me is his implicit assumption that our only real choice is to adapt to the current conditions of “the market.” History, it seems, has moved on, and all the humanities can do is try to live as well as possible in this brave new world.

Don’t get me wrong, that aggregate of social forces we call the market is no limp biscuit and creating a new set of conditions for the humanities won’t be easy. It’s been done before, though, under much worse conditions. In fact, the “humanities” system now lamented by so many, and dominated among other things by full time tenured faculty, was established during the middle decades of the last century, a time dominated by world war and depression.

What was different? We were coming out of a period of progressive reform, for one thing, and for another, the working class was much better organized and much more actively fighting for it’s own interests. Even if academics never fully joined the unionization movement, the power of labor in this period led to all sorts of generous concessions, including a liberal higher education system. The place of the humanities wasn’t born, it was made in struggle. It won’t return without more of the same sort of fighting.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing

Library to World: The Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated

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Nearly one-third of Americans age 14 or older – roughly 77 million people – used a public library computer or wireless network to access the Internet in the past year, according to a national report released today. In 2009, as the nation struggled through a recession, people relied on library technology to find work, apply for college, secure government benefits, learn about critical medical treatments, and connect with their communities.

“Study: A Third of Americans Use Library Computers”

This is one of those ironic bits of good news. On the one hand, it suggests the enormous importance of the library in a democratic society; on the other, it suggests something about the enormous scale of U.S. poverty in general and in the recession. It’s also a rebuff to those radical conservatives that see all government services as nefarious and to those technology Utopians (or Dystopians) who have long predicted the demise of the public library. Class trumps both.

I think the librarians, and their professional organizations, should get the credit for making sure that the library keeps up with technology in the service of making information freely available. That’s an important element in the ongoing attempts to ameliorate the impact of capital (aka the class struggle). It also shows that the computer, unlike the television (or the radio elsewhere) has yet to reach true ubiquity. The machines may be cheaper, but the machines alone don’t get you access. Broadband remains expensive.

The struggle never ends, of course, and the hope is that these sorts of studies will revitalize funding for public libraries. (Would the wacky Tea Beggars (sorry, Baggers) complain about money for library technology? No doubt they would find a way.) I can’t help but wonder, too, if the library has become a new sort of public square for many, particularly in poor urban neighborhoods and isolated small towns. Thanks to 30 years of conservative reactionary politics, it may well be the last and perhaps the only place you can go just to get the tools you need to survive.

Posted in: Economics, Online Places, Professional