The Antisocial Society: Rhetorical Strategies for Casualizing Humanity

Angeline Irene Olliff

Dr. Wexler      

English 654

11 December 2012

The Antisocial Society: Rhetorical Strategies for Casualizing Humanity

Ten years ago, Marc Bousquet sought to expose the increasing casualization of labor in the United States university system.  In “The Waste Product of Graduate Education: Toward a Dictatorship of the Flexible,” he argues against the idealized neo-liberal position “that assumes the academic labor system operates as a ‘market’ that, by unwarranted analogy to other markets in the business cycle, has a ‘natural’ boom-bust pattern” (82). Such a position, he says, necessarily “exclude(s) the labor of students, full-time lecturers, and part-time faculty,” the growing army of casual academic laborers upon which the university system is entirely dependent, and which it is most interested in reproducing.  As part-time and graduate student positions proliferate, full-time positions are disappearing, or dying out.  Graduate students who attain degrees become waste-products that must be deposited somewhere in the service of maintaining a casual labor system (Bousquet 89-90).  In my view, this exposes another dimension to the term casualization that contributes to its rhetorical instrumentality.  Casualization, more than referring to the hiring strategy that encourages “casual,” or contingent, labor, implicitly carries within it the word “casualty.” Advanced degree holders with no place to go can be aptly termed casualties: they are “dead” graduate students, casualties of a system that claims one objective while diligently serving another. 

At first glance, the distinction between the two bases of casualization seems stark: where “casual” generally refers to “something occurring by chance,” “casualty,” is most often used to describe military deaths and political and social losses—occurrences which generally happen for a reason as the consequence of someone else’s efforts rather than by chance, fortune, or accident.  However, “casualty” has an archaic connection to “chance” and “fortune” which links it to “casual” and describes something unfortunate and unintended.  The example sentence provided by Merriam-Webster conflates this original definition with the newer one: “the ex-senator was a casualty of the last election.” Here, the rhetorical use of casualty takes some of the sting out of the loss; as casualty denotes both loss and chance, the result must have been due to a mere turn of the wheel or happenstance, not fierce competition or fine-tuned political strategizing. Such language provides a benign connotation to the consequences of not-so-benign intentions and actions. 

More than describing labor relations, then, casualization describes the strategic rhetorical omission, smoothing over or euphemizing which serves to dissemble the consequences of deleterious social or economic policies or business practices.  Just as the capitalist economic system continues to produce temporary and flexible workers while killing off full-time, secure ones, and does so under the ironically benign term, “casualizing,” as if it is all an unfortunate accident, so, too, does the capitalist (anti)social rhetoric encourage a superficial and tenuous humanity. Indeed, through the strategic rhetorical manipulation and deadening of mass sentiment, American political and business figures foster an antisocial mentality that stops individuals from relating to each other and uniting in their common interest.  By espousing temporarily gratifying, yet impotent solutions aimed at particular swaths of the population (i.e. “let’s create more coal jobs”), by turning the “middle class” against everyone else by demonizing either the rich or the poor (take your pick), and by avoiding the overall trajectory of a cannibalistic and self-destructive economic system, politicians and business “leaders” aim to divide and conquer.  As the public willingly imbibes the rhetoric of division and strategic omission, they shore themselves up against prescribed foes, scrambling for an edge, a way to beat “them,” those other people; what results is a society that is anti-social, a society in which the very thing that connects us all, our humanness—our weaknesses, our strengths, our need for connection—is devalued, minimized, even destroyed.  In every sense of the word, what is being “casualized” is humanity.  

Over the past year alone, this de-humanizing through the rhetoric of disconnection, division, and difference has permeated nearly every aspect of American culture.  It inundates popular media from multiple angles.  For instance, in a recent Op-Ed piece for the Wall Street Journal, “The Business Plan for American Revival,” Mr. Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs attempts to propose a broad solution to today’s economic crisis.  He suggests that “the Obama administration and large segments of the business community [must] forge a more productive relationship,” and that this will “do wonders for the economy.” He goes on to say, “We in the business community have a responsibility to contribute to a better understanding of the urgency of averting a crippling and self-inflicted recession [and] we also need to talk about the significant opportunities that result from forward-looking change” (A17).  On first read, it is difficult to argue with his seemingly benevolent position of looking out for the general interest.  The economy is important; forward-looking change sounds great; we all need to work together; but, as seems to be the norm in political-economic rhetoric, there is a wealth of information waiting to be mined from the implications of the information he leaves out.

Here, it is necessary to read between the lines, to look at what is said and what is not said, and to reflect on why this might be.  Any effective rhetorical appeal entails “three elements that every author must consider: audience (the people who are being addressed), constraints (the limits upon what the speaker can say), and exigence” (26-7).  Even a cursory inspection of these three elements for Blankfein exposes his effective casualization of empathy, understanding, and brotherhood.   In terms of audience, as he writes for the Wall Street Journal, his audience is mostly educated, middle- to upper-class conservative men, but this is not evident in his rhetoric.  Rather, he uses broad and inclusive terms, such as “we in the business community,” “American[s],” and the “public.”  Nowhere in Blankfein’s solicitation of “sensible immigration reform,” “spending cuts, [and] entitlement reform,” or “restor[ing] confidence in public finance,” does he mention what that would look like for the millions of people it is supposedly intended to help, and that is because he is not writing to or for them.   Immigration reform is limited to “mak[ing] it easier for talented people to live and work in the U.S.,” and like much of his position, this sounds inarguable, but it is only inarguable because it says so little.  He does not address the real-life circumstances of the millions of people who live here illegally without having attended college or developing advanced skills, and in this occlusion, he renders those who are absent insignificant.  This effectively separates his true audience from the unified American “public” he appears to address; at the same time, it gives his audience a sense that in acknowledging “the issue,” they must really be conscientious citizens.   The implicitly included have casualized the occluded, and in so doing, what is lost is any recognition of commonality and mutual concern. 

Blankfein’s references to “spending cuts” and “entitlement reform” function in much the same way.  Rather than delineate exactly what these would look like for the people who will be most affected, he simply encourages a “comprehensive and balanced solution.”  Such vague language allows his audience to identify themselves as solution-oriented (very humane), while patently and conveniently avoiding the ineluctable human suffering such “solutions” entail (not so humane).  This, then, sheds some light on Blankfein’s exigence.  As a businessman, he is no doubt interested in his own interests—namely, to encourage governmental policy decisions that will benefit his business.  As such, he must appeal to his audience’s sense of self-interest so they will identify with his position.  However, it is socially and politically inexpedient to blatantly promote one’s own interests, and his audience would likely reject any proposition that did so in fear of potential social repercussions.  Instead, Blankfein must appeal to his audience’s self-interest circuitously by first appealing to their humanity, and then, by casualizing it.  He achieves this by purporting that his plan will “revive” the American economy.  Such a trope implicates him as an emergency room doctor valiantly saving lives.  For the audience, it is far easier and more gratifying to identify with a life-saving doctor than a pragmatic businessman.  His position’s implicit divisiveness and abandonment of large swaths of the American population becomes acceptable under the guise of uniting in a common (read his) economic interest.  Whatever suffering ensues can then be viewed as an unfortunate casualty of a worthy effort by concerned citizens, rather than the consequence of human targeting.

In Rebel Cities, David Harvey gives voice to what’s between the lines of Blankfein’s position: that “the economy of wealth-accumulation piggy-backs violently on the economy of dispossession” (25).  Here, he gives the lie to the “trickle-down effect” upon which Blankfein’s economic model rests.  In a 2009 radio interview for WNYC, New York Public Radio, Harvey explains that there is a difference between the “trickle-down” effect in terms of wealth versus quality of life, the latter of which Blankfein patently ignores.  Harvey explains that some wealth does indeed trickle down with increases in capitalist accumulation; but this does not ensure that improvements in quality of life trickle down as well.  He explains that “it is not as though well-being trickl[es] down,” but rather, that capitalists aim to accumulate more and more while doing nothing or very little to improve anyone’s life but their own.

This is all markedly absent from Blankfein’s “plan.”  Yes, Mr. Blankfein is a businessman first and foremost, so it makes sense for him to stick to an assessment of how government can get out of the way of business in order to facilitate economic growth.  But Mr. Blankfein does not outright say that this is the best thing for business, for his business; instead, he says that business leaders “want to see progress and contribute to it” and that “we are all ready to roll up our sleeves and work with the Obama administration and Congress to help fulfill America’s enduring promise.” There is no mention of social and economic inequality, and therefore, there is no invitation for discussion.   Rather, he obliquely links a very particular and limited kind of economic growth to the fulfillment of an American “promise.”  Silenced, devalued, effectively dehumanized through the rhetoric of casualization, are the millions of people to whom that promise will never be kept.

From a business perspective, Blankfein’s rhetoric of casualization relies on implicit division at the same time that it purports to unify his audience in a singular “American” ambition.  Central to his position is the difference between the implied and actual identity of his audience.  By avoiding specific reference to the diverse economic and social situations of the actual American public, Blankfein implicitly directs his argument at a very specific population.  His language, being vaguely inclusive, fosters a sense of unity in them while further separating them from the ignored.  But implicit division is not the only strategy for rhetorical casualization.  Some positions rely on far more overtly divisive tactics, while still, through convenient omissions, avoid the pervasive and deep-rooted causes of social discontent.

Such is the case with the political rhetoric overtly directed at “the middle class” during Barack Obama and Mitt Romney’s second Presidential debate.  The dominant theme during both campaigns was “jobs”—who can “create” them, who destroys them—with little or no attention paid to what kind of jobs and no acknowledgement that unemployment has become structural rather than cyclical.[1] Further, nearly the entire debate was directed at the homogenized entity of the “middle class” and the need to “create jobs” for them.  First, by focusing on the middle class, both men effectively divide their audience.  In his tax proposal, for instance, Mr. Obama makes no effort hide the division he seeks: “In addition to some tough spending cuts, we’ve also got to ask the wealthy to do a little bit more.”  He goes on to explain, “The only reason it’s not happening is because Governor Romney’s allies in congress have held the 98 percent hostage because they want tax breaks for the top two percent.”  Unlike Blankfein’s strategy of feigning American unity at the expense of the majority of the population, Mr. Obama’s strategy explicitly (and statistically) divides the population in order to unite his audience against a common enemy.  It is methodical divisions such as this which allow both men to casualize human relations by reducing common suffering to either “the policies of [the Obama] administration” (Romney) or the “top-down economics” of cutting taxes for “the top one percent” (Obama). 

The rhetoric does not stop there, though.  Indeed, by first overtly dividing the population, both politicians can target individual segments while avoiding the entrenched systemic causes of the current acute economic and social crises.  Thomas A. Hirschl discusses one such cause that affects the entire American population: the “qualitative transformation” of capitalism due to rapid technological innovation (162).  Despite the growing social unrest due to structural unemployment, Hirschl explains, “there has been little consideration of whether bourgeois property relations may or may not be disrupted by technological progress” (158).  Instead of looking at the indelible social and economic consequences of these changes, Obama and Romney establish the middle class and joblessness as the primary issue.  With this, Romney and Obama are free pursue stop-gap measures aimed solely at the middle class to the effect of abandoning any idea of remedying the consequences of the qualitative transformation Hirschl describes.

The first question posed to the candidates in this particular debate does not specifically refer to technology, so it is seems justifiable that it goes unmentioned.  But neither does it mention the word “jobs” (what the college student actually asks is how he will be able to sufficiently support himself after he graduates).  Whether explicitly asked or not, though, in addressing this quality of life question, both candidates avoid what Guglielmo Carchedi so succinctly describes as a crisis of capitalist social relations: namely that, with technological innovation, comes an “increase in productivity [that] goes hand in hand with unemployment,” and thus, “the development of productive forces is the ultimate cause of crises” (Carchedi 83).  Rather than delve into this unattractive reality, both candidates immediately respond to the question with effusive references to jobs—four for Mr. Romney and seven for Mr. Obama.  The moderator encourages this direction by following up with, “What about those long-term unemployed who need a job right now?”  Here, the candidates continue to sidestep a social and economic discussion of quality of life and reasonable self-sufficiency, of the purpose of education and the direction of the country, and become immersed in the realm of stop-gap measures and band-aids.  Mr. Obama speaks of “good-paying jobs” in the “private sector” and manufacturing jobs in the automobile industry, and Mr. Romney says, “I want you to be able to get a job.”  This rhetoric of avoidance does not explore the systemic expansion of labor-saving technologies and their consequences in a capitalist society—specifically, that technologies initially increase capitalist accumulation at the expense of laborers’ decreased purchasing power, which then results in less profits and an increased drive toward labor-saving technology.  This, in turn, results in fewer jobs, and the spiral continues (Carchedi 75).  Without identifying this pervasive and accelerating cycle of capitalist (self)destruction, both candidates effectively avoid proposing the radical economic and social changes necessary to interrupt this cycle, and thus, neither candidate can propose an adequate approach.

Further, only when pressed on foreign outsourcing and competition with China does either candidate finally broach the topic of information and technology.  Mr. Romney asserts, “China’s been cheating over the years … by stealing our intellectual property; our designs, our patents, our technology,” and Mr. Obama explains, “There are some jobs that are not going to come back.  Because they are low wage, low skill jobs.  I want high wage, high skill jobs … That’s why we have to invest in advanced manufacturing.”  Both candidates imply that technology plays a serious role in economic health (something markedly absent from their initial discussion of “jobs”), and they suggest that they would protect and develop technology to protect and develop jobs.  Neither addresses that these very advances in information and manufacturing technology only heighten socioeconomic polarization by delimiting the types of employment available.  The few positions available in advanced manufacturing work put a scarce amount of knowledge workers “in a position to share in their nation’s privileged position” (Hirschl 164), while the reduction of alternative job options for everyone else is framed as the casualty of necessary “progress.”

This is where the rhetoric of casualization really soars.  By framing joblessness as an unfortunate consequence of not investing in the right kind jobs (Obama) or as the result of foreign attacks upon our technologies (Romney), both men divert their audience’s attention away from their entrapment in a system doomed to fail them all.  Worse yet, this sort of language obstructs empathy in the same breath that it increases competition and antipathy.  In “Automation and Alienation,” Ramin Ramtin how this occurs: “The insecurity of capitalist conditions of labor has always acted as a powerful means of social control—but only because and as long as there is at least some hope of future employment” (247).  In emphasizing the creation of jobs without addressing the long-term and systemic reasons for unemployment, these politicians encourage that increasingly unfounded hope for future employment, further pitting people against one another.  Rather than offering system-wide, socially-conscious solutions, this rhetoric perpetuates the very social and economic polarization so complicit in the populace’s increasing malaise.

More than exposing the underpinnings of a spiraling and self-destructive “advanced” capitalism, it is imperative to expose the language used to keep the majority of the population in the dark, to placate rather than inform; it is imperative to critique the rhetoric of casualization.  Without identifying potential and likely reasons behind the political and economic information that is disseminated through popular media, its larger impact cannot be adequately assessed.  This is not to say that all words are intended to be disingenuous or manipulative, but rather, that all language is meant to mean something, and some meaning extends beyond the simple logic of the words which convey it.  In accepting strategic omissions without question, in halting at catchy talking points, and in buying into the rhetoric of “me” or “us” versus “them,” our diverse and dynamic population is being handled into submission and wrought by division.  This casualized humanity—characterized by disconnection, competition, lack of empathy, and open hostility—is entirely necessary to sustain the current capitalist economic system in the face of rapid technological and cultural changes. By uncovering how this rhetorical strategy shapes identities and relationships, distorting public sentiment, it might then be possible to reclaim language in encouraging humanity rather than suppressing it. 

Works Cited

Blankfein, Lloyd.  “The Business Plan for American Revival.” Opinion-Editorial.  Wall Street

Journal 14 November 2012: A17.  Print.

Carchedi, Guglielmo.  “High-Tech Hype: Promises and Realities of Technology in the Twenty-

First Century.” Davis, et al.  73-86.

---“Casual.” Merriam-Webster.com.

---“Casualty.” Merriam-Webster.com.

Davis J., T. Hirschl, and M. Stack, eds.  Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism                and Social Revolution.  London: Verso, 1997.  Print.

Harvey, David.  Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution.  London:

Verso, 2012.  Print.

---.  “David Harvey Interviewed on New York Public Radio.” NYPR.  WNYC: New York, 26

March 2009.  http://davidharvey.org/2009/03/david-harvey-interviewed-on-new-york-public-radio/ Web. 5 December 2012.

Hirschl, Thomas.  “Structural Unemployment and the Qualitative Transformation of Capitalism.”

Davis, et al.  157-174.

Merriam-Webster.com. Encyclopedia Britannica. 2012.  Web.  24 November 2012.

Ramtin, Ramin.  “A Note on Automation and Alienation.” Davis, et al.  243-251.

“Second Presidential Debate Full Transcript.”  ABC News.  WABC, Los Angeles, 16 Oct.      

            2012.  Television. Transcript.  abcnews.go.com.  Web.           

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[1] Hirschl’s discussion of structural unemployment, pg. 160-1, provided background for this independent assessment.

Prison University

            I was immersed in Stanley Aronowitz’s The Knowledge Factory when I encountered David Schalkwyk’s OP-ED piece in the LA Times, “Reading Hamlet Behind Bars.”  My undergraduate education as an English major, maybe surprisingly, did not require that I read a single Shakespearean play.  The only knowledge I have of Hamlet was from watching the excellent filmic version starring Kenneth Brannagh when I was studying for the English Subject GRE.  What drew me to the article was my curiosity about prisoners reading Shakespeare.  Further, after being inundated with Aronowitz’s scathing analysis of the demise of the broad, liberal education curriculum in American universities, what I read in Schalkwyk’s piece became all the more poignant.

            Aronowitz describes the modern university: “Like a roach motel, the university will let students in, only to release them as intellectual corpses” (63).  He criticizes the specialization resulting from certain areas being more financially lucrative than others at the great cost of producing less well-rounded citizens.  Specifically, he  poses the goal of finding out how can we “inspire skeptical, not to say cynical, students who, having been encouraged to turn away from knowledge for its own sake in favor of the most practical conception of the role of education, may believe that general education is ‘useless’” (192).  After reading about the prisoners of Robben Island, a South African political prison, I was struck with a different perspective.  One man had convinced his fellows to sign “their names beside their favorite passages” (A32) in a copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare that he surreptitiously circulated throughout the prison.  Schalkwyk explains, “When they signed their names against Shakespeare’s text, each prisoner recognized something of himself and his relation to others in the words of a stranger” (A32).  What I gathered from this was not that Shakespeare’s texts are universal or representative of mankind, as Schalkwyk implies, but rather, that when people are motivated by the desire to understand and express themselves, they will find a vehicle with which to do so. 

            What this might mean for education is that there is no perfect or ideal curriculum that will produce an ideal citizen. Instead, what needs to be developed is the attitude toward and awareness of the purpose of education.  In encouraging knowledge for its own sake, Aronowitz idealistically abstracts the pursuit of knowledge from the everyday lives of the people who might pursue it.  The prisoners of Robben Island demonstrate, conversely, exactly why one might be inspired to pursue knowledge.  They received no degrees from their “Prison University”—in fact, they would have suffered grave consequences if their book had been discovered—and it is doubtful the passages themselves taught them any practical lesson.  What they did receive was an opportunity, which they took, to treat something outside themselves as a part of themselves, to internalize someone else’s words and insight and thereby connect more deeply to their humanity.  This, I move, is the purpose of education, and a university degree is just one avenue for this process.  Yes, practical skills and specialized knowledge must also be disseminated in order to produce capable individuals, but that is only one facet of humanity’s ongoing pursuit of understanding, expression, and connection

Works Cited

Aronowitz, Stanley. The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and

Creating True Higher Learning. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.  Print.

Schalkwyk, David.  “Reading Hamlet Behind Bars.”  Los Angeles Times.  Op-Ed.  25 November

2012.  A32.  Print.

The Rhetoric of Omission

          In a 2009 radio interview for WNYC, New York Public Radio, David Harvey differentiates between the “trickle-down” effect in terms of wealth versus quality of life.  Yes, he says, some wealth does indeed trickle down with increases in capitalist accumulation; but this does not ensure that improvements in quality of life trickle down as well.  He explains that capitalists do not actually invest in production as much as in assets and that this enables them to accumulate more and more while doing nothing or very little to improve anyone's life but their own.  Sure, some jobs are created through construction, “but the wage rates were very low, extremely low, and of course, as we know, the social protections were negligible.  So it is not as though well-being trickled down.  A certain sort of job structure was created which was very low wage, very badly protected, which actually then produced goods which allowed the rich to get even richer.”1

          Mr. Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs would disagree.  In fact, in a recent Op-Ed piece for the Wall Street Journal, Blankfein adeptly implies quite the opposite.  In “The Business Plan for American Revival,” he suggests that “the Obama administration and large segments of the business community [must] forge a more productive relationship,” and that this will “do wonders for the economy.” He goes on to say, “We in the business community have a responsibility to contribute to a better understanding of the urgency of averting a crippling and self-inflicted recession [and] we also need to talk about the significant opportunities that result from forward-looking change” (A17).  On first read, it is difficult to argue with his seemingly benevolent and disinterested position of looking out for the general interest.  The economy is important; forward-looking change sounds great; but, as seems to be norm in political-economic rhetoric, there is a wealth of information waiting to be mined from the implications of what has been omitted.

            Without explicitly saying it, Blankfein assumes the position that Harvey so lucidly denigrates.  Nowhere in Blankfein’s solicitation of “sensible immigration reform,” “spending cuts, [and] entitlement reform,” or “restor[ing] confidence in public finance,” does he mention what that would look like for the millions of people it is supposedly intended to help.  For instance, immigration reform, to him, is limited to “mak[ing] it easier for talented people to live and work in the U.S.”  Like much of his position, this sounds inarguable, but it is only inarguable because it says so little.  If he were to address the real-life circumstances of the millions of people who live here illegally without having attended college or developing advanced skills, there might be plenty of room to argue.  What might he propose we do with or for them?  Indeed, “spending cuts” and “entitlement reform” function much the same way.  Rather than delineate exactly what these would look like for the people who will be most affected, he simply encourages a “comprehensive and balanced solution.”  Even if such a solution could be achieved, what has gone unaddressed is exactly what the problem is, who it plagues, and how their lives can and should change. 

            Yes, Mr. Blankfein is a businessman first and foremost, so it makes sense for him to stick to an assessment of how government can get out of the way of business in order to facilitate economic growth.  Up to this point, it sounds as though the “trickle-down effect” of wealth is in order and realistic.  But Mr. Blankfein does not outright say that this is the best thing for business, for his business; instead, he says that business leaders “want to see progress and contribute to it” and that “we are all ready to roll up our sleeves and work with the Obama administration and Congress to help fulfill America’s enduring promise.”  Here, he obliquely links a very particular and limited kind of economic growth to the fulfillment of an American “promise.”  What he doesn’t say is what this fulfillment entails. 

            Harvey would have some feedback.  In Rebel Cities, he gives voice to exactly what’s between the lines of Blankfein’s position: that “the economy of wealth-accumulation piggy-backs violently on the economy of dispossession” (25).  What Blankfein does not say is that whatever little wealth trickles down only serves to reproduce the very conditions which sustain the increasing wealth of a few while ensuring the ever-decreasing wealth of the many.  What he does not mention is how reforming the system and spurring growth will directly affect people’s lives.  Will a few be granted crumbs under the pretense of democratic access to the capitalist pursuit while the rest stay mired in state dependence and financial debt cycles?  Or is there another way, a way to look past simply giving the same old system a kick-start to create the same results?  These are tough questions because they require radical changes to a system Mr. Blankfein seeks to preserve.  These are tough problems because any massive solution proposed will undoubtedly be subject to vehement critique.  So it is much easier to say a whole lot of nothing, and that is just what he does. 

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1.  See the above YouTube clip, beginning at 2:48 min.

Works Cited

Blankfein, Lloyd.  “The Business Plan for American Revival.” Opinion-Editorial.  Wall Street

Journal 14 November 2012: A17.  Print.

Harvey, David.  Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution.  London:

Verso, 2012.  Print.

No Terrorists Here

            Randy Martin, author of Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management, addresses the cause of the lingering conflicts in Afghanistan by linking the United States’ military strategies with its economic strategies.  Specifically, financial risk is broken down, parceled out, and capitalized on by being sold as a commodity, or derivative, in itself (rather than being resolved between the two original parties).  The wars on terror of late are intended to function in much the same way.  American forces break down and strategically engage potential threats under the pretense of spreading freedom and democracy, and by increasing social and political chaos, risk and effects can be calculated and capitalized on.  Martin explains, “The decomposed nation would leave a colonial substrate that would spin off endless conflicts and opportunities.  The old imperial ambition was to consume the colonial whole; the new aspiration attaches to less, while making more if its partial attentions” (123).  The U.S. effectively starts and spreads conflicts without actually achieving any of the “goals” it purports to pursue.  Not only do wars not end, they offer more and more opportunities to achieve desired effects through future conflicts.  So, just as debt is broken down according to calculated risk, parceled out, and re-sold, so, too, are wars now sustained indefinitely while they constantly spawn new conflicts which can then be capitalized on for political and economic purposes.

            One of the U.S. military’s strategies, according to Martin, is in dubbing its actions in Iraq and Afghanistan responses to terror.  Martin explains, “the war on terror allows nations and populations to be marked with the occult motives and shadowy intention that have long characterized racial loathing,” and in doing so “racialize(s) [the terrorist] as the bad other or object of risk—risks to freedom, liberty, ways of life, and identity” (165).   These risks must be objectified and managed, and in order to do this, there “is a splitting of a single race into a superrace and a subrace” where the subrace embodies all the darkness and ugliness of the larger race (Martin 135). 

There is ample evidence of this strategy throughout American mass media.  As Martin mentions, the descriptions of Saddam Hussein, bin Laden, and “the hooded torture victims of Abu Ghraib,” all render these men animalistic, vicious, and inhuman.  This is no surprise after years of being inundated with the rhetoric of terror and terrorists in an effort to build and sustain support for a disingenuous war.  What was slightly surprising was that, even after so many years and one of the wars supposedly being over, this strategy has evolved to a whole new level of manipulation. 

As I read the recent Los Angeles Times article, “Afghan Massacre a Hard Case for Army,” I was flooded with mixed feelings.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-kandahar-massacre-20121105,0,4945123.story

Murphy and Parker present two distinct threads in their coverage of Staff Sgt. Robert Bales’ alleged murdering of sixteen Afghani villagers.  The first is “whether there is sufficient evidence to hold [Bales] for a court-martial on charges of premeditated murder” (A4); the second thread draws from witness interviews to make explicit the victims’ and survivors’ suffering, incredulity, and anger.  This is undoubtedly a horrific experience for all involved, and the intensity of the witness accounts, at first, seems to highlight the atrociousness of the antagonist’s actions.  But there is a subtext which overrides the poignant depiction of these villagers’ suffering. 

Although there is no explicit mention of “terror,” Bales’ alleged actions, had they been undertaken by a member of al-Qaeda, would no doubt be attributed to terrorism: according to witness accounts, “he shot and stabbed people as they rose sleepily from their beds, dragged one woman by her hair and leveled his weapon at a shrieking baby’s mouth” (A1).  All signs seem to point to an excellent opportunity to divest the term “terrorist” of its racializing and “othering” effects; to show that anyone can terrorize and anyone can be a victim of terror; and, thus, to show the injustice of basing an entire occupation and war on an invented subrace of “terrorists.” 

Disturbingly, though, even here, those who have been terrorized are the ones indirectly turned into terrorists, and the alleged harbinger of terror, Staff Sgt. Bales, is all but exculpated.  This reversal functions subtly and smoothly.  For each mention of Afghani suffering, the writers hedge against developing too much sympathy for them by playing into American consciousness and values.  For instance, immediately after detailing the body count, Murphy and Parker not so discreetly imply that if prosecutors have any trouble convicting Bales, it will be the Afghanis’ fault.  It will be their fault that they buried the bodies too soon, and that mostly women and children survived and their husbands and fathers are reluctant to have them testify (A4).  In so many words, the writers describe the American justice system as being obstructed by this foreign culture—if only they were more like us, we would be able to do our jobs.

There are two other means by which the authors, as presenting the American military’s perspective, deflect the status of terrorist back to the Afghanis.  Bales’ lawyer, John Henry Browne, explains, “It is not possible to pass judgment on what Bales did or didn’t do in time of war without also looking at what the war did to Bales.” He goes on to say, “I believe we all have a responsibility to Sgt. Bales, and to all these soldiers” (A4).  Here, Sgt. Bales’ alleged actions are not only naturalized and possibly even justified, but, further, the implication is that he is a victim.  If he is the victim, then who is the terrorist?  Conveniently, the blame for this single-handed act is now shifted back to the third party of al-Qaeda and subsumed as a tragedy of the war on terror.  There are no terrorists here, then, and if, by chance, one of “us” undertakes a terrible deed, it is only because he has been terrorized himself.  Has anyone asked whether we can pass judgment on bin Laden for what he did or didn’t do without looking at what his environment and circumstances did to him?  I doubt it.  Nor do I think anyone should.  His actions, just like Bales’ alleged actions, speak for themselves.  Enough said, but the double standard is striking.

Toward the end of the article, the writers bolster the vision of Bales as a victim by quoting one of the victims’ threatening declarations.  In response to the U.S. government’s provision of “$50,000 for each death and $10,000 for each of those injured,” a childless father and widower explains, “If your child dies, what would you expect? Money? No.  Will you expect prison? We don’t want prison… If the court doesn’t go the way we want, we will not accept the decision of the court” (A4).  With this, the inversion of blame and victimhood is made complete; this widower must be a terrorist for not respecting the American justice system, and Bales, in being threatened obliquely, is now even more of a victim. 

Martin, Randy.  Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk

Management.  Durham: Duke UP, 2007.  Print.

Murphy, Kim, and Ned Parker.  “Afghan Massacre a Hard Case for Army.”  Los Angeles Times. 

5 Nov. 2012: A1+.  Print.

Analysis Two: "Jobs," a Rhetorical Red Herring

      
          In discussing the “qualitative transformation” of capitalism and its social consequences, Thomas A. Hirschl cites Marx’s theory that “an era of social revolution begins when the technological capacity of society supersedes or becomes too productive for the existing property relations” (158).  Technological innovation fervently continues, though, so in the interest of separating social and economic crises from their roots in information and technological capitalism, leaders strategically employ political rhetoric.  This is hardly more apparent elsewhere than in political debates, particularly the second Presidential Debate of 2012.  Nearly the entire debate was directed at the homogenized entity of the “middle class” and the need to “create jobs.”  Both candidates briefly reference technological innovation, but their overall avoidance of the role of information and technology in their supposed quest for jobs is like a pink elephant in the room—they talk all around it, obliquely alluding to it, without acknowledging the massive amount of space it occupies and its undeniable impact.  By limiting the depth of their discussion to expansive, vague references to "jobs," they avoid addressing the relationship between capitalism, technology, and structural unemployment.  This, in turn, shapes public discourse so that the recent economic crisis is seen in isolation, not as evidence of an accelerating trend with dire social consequences, and, in turn, neither candidate’s role and stake in serving this trend is exposed.

In their respective essays in the 1997 collection, Cutting Edge, Hirschl, Guglielmo Carchedi, and Ramin Ramtin address the economic and social malady of their time, a prescient description that anticipates the very situation addressed by Messrs. Obama and Romney fifteen years later.  The first question posed to the candidates does not specifically refer to technology, but neither does it mention the word “jobs” (what the college student actually asks is how he will be able to sufficiently support himself after he graduates).  Neither candidate addresses what Carchedi identifies as a crisis of capitalist social relations, “the relations between the owners and the nonowners of the means of production,” due to technological innovation (74).  Rather than delve into this unattractive reality, both candidates immediately respond to the question with effusive references to jobs—four for Mr. Romney and seven for Mr. Obama.  The moderator encourages this direction by following up with, “What about those long-term unemployed who need a job right now?”  Here, the candidates continue to sidestep a social and economic discussion of quality of life and reasonable self-sufficiency, of the purpose of education and the direction of the country, and become immersed in the realm of stop-gap measures and band-aids.  Mr. Obama speaks of “good-paying jobs” in the “private sector” and manufacturing jobs in the automobile industry, and Mr. Romney says, “I want you to be able to get a job.”  This rhetoric of avoidance does not explore the systemic expansion of labor-saving technologies and their consequences in a capitalist society—specifically, that technologies initially increase capitalist accumulation at the expense of laborers’ decreased purchasing power, which then results in less profits and an increased drive toward labor-saving technology.  This, in turn, results in less jobs, and the spiral continues (Carchedi 75).  Without identifying this pervasive and accelerating cycle of capitalist (self)destruction, both candidates effectively avoid proposing the radical economic and social changes necessary to interrupt this cycle, and thus, neither candidate can propose an adequate approach.

Further, only when pressed on foreign outsourcing and competition with China does either candidate finally broach the topic of information and technology.  Mr. Romney asserts, “China’s been cheating over the years … by stealing our intellectual property; our designs, our patents, our technology,” and Mr. Obama explains, “There are some jobs that are not going to come back.  Because they are low wage, low skill jobs.  I want high wage, high skill jobs … That’s why we have to invest in advanced manufacturing.”  Both candidates imply that technology plays a serious role in economic health (something markedly absent from their initial discussion of “jobs”), and they suggest that they would protect and develop technology to protect and develop jobs.  Neither addresses that these very advances in information and manufacturing technology only heighten socioeconomic polarization by delimiting the types of employment available.  The few laborers who are incorporated in advanced manufacturing work or as knowledge workers “are often in a position to share in their nation’s privileged position” (Hirschl 164), while the rest, in increasing numbers, become casualties.

Contrary to either politician’s stance, the source of these material and social consequences cannot be denied, nor can it be reduced to an inexplicable lack of jobs.  Joblessness is a symptom of a malady, but the palliative measure of treating a symptom without treating the problem does nothing to heal the person.  Ramin Ramtin explains, “The insecurity of capitalist conditions of labor has always acted as a powerful means of social control—but only because and as long as there is at least some hope of future employment” (247).  In emphasizing the creation of jobs without addressing the long-term and systemic reasons for unemployment, these politicians perpetuate that increasingly unfounded hope for future employment.  Consequently, they manage, if only temporarily, to hold on to their positions of power in a spiraling capitalist system. 

Works Cited
Carchedi, Guglielmo.  “High-Tech Hype: Promises and Realities of Technology in the Twenty-

First Century.” Davis, et al.  73-86.

Davis J., T. Hirschl, and M. Stack, eds.  Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism                and Social Revolution.  London: Verso, 1997.  Print.
Hirschl, Thomas.  “Structural Unemployment and the Qualitative Transformation of Capitalism.”

Davis, et al.  157-174.

Ramtin, Ramin.  “A Note on Automation and Alienation.” Davis, et al.  243-251.
“Second Presidential Debate Full Transcript.”  ABC News.  WABC, Los Angeles, 16 Oct.      
            2012.  Television. Transcript.  abcnews.go.com.  Web.

Oligopolizing Freedom: the Social Reality of “Free” Trade and the “Free” Flow of Information

     Arguing against “freedom” now is like arguing against cuddly puppies, sunsets, and unique, beautiful snowflakes.  It is anathema to a progressive perspective.  But that is because freedom has been co-opted by political rhetoric.  Rather than express autonomy and lack of constraints, freedom has come to include particular social, economic, and political implications which are not readily apparent, but which ineluctably detract from the instantiation of the very term which houses them.  So I do not take issue with freedom; what I do take issue with is the couching of oligopolistic capitalism, the stifling of cultures, and the suppression of individual liberty through the selective dissemination of information within the fallacious claim that it is all in the service of freedom.   Two inextricably-related instances of this arise in the rhetoric of agricultural “free” trade and of “supporters of the ‘free’ flow of information” (Schiller 71).

From the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, May 2005:

Farmers in the United States, Canada, and Mexico all benefit from NAFTA.

• Two-way agricultural trade between the United States and Mexico increased 149 percent since 1993.  Two-way agricultural trade between the United States and Canada increased 112 percent since 1993.

Although U.S. imports have grown under NAFTA, so have U.S. exports.  Without NAFTA, the United States would have lost these expanded export opportunities.

In 2004, exports of numerous key U.S. commodities set records to both countries:

• Canada:  fresh vegetables, fresh fruits, snack foods, poultry meat, pet foods, vegetable oils, planting seeds, breakfast cereals, tree nuts, nursery products, rice, soybean meal, processed fruits and vegetables, juices and eggs.

• Mexico:  red meats, processed fruits and vegetables, poultry meat, fresh vegetables, tree nuts, wheat, soybean meal, animal fats, dairy products and rice.  This broad cross section of commodities suggests the benefits of NAFTA are widely distributed across U.S. agriculture.

Import competition has increased under NAFTA for some commodities, a not unexpected development, as trade barriers begin to come down and trade is subject to open marketing conditions.  As the largest of the NAFTA countries and with a booming economy, it is not surprising that U.S. imports from Canada have grown strongly, providing American consumers with a broader array of competitively priced, high-quality products.[1]

     

Although the above is only an excerpt, the FAS maintains an implicit theme in its explication of the benefits of the North American Free Trade Agreement: that if the United States benefits from the agreement, so too, must everyone else.  The U.S.'s supposed benefits, however, are predicated on a few particular economic occurrences and are not in any way attached to commensurate benefits for either Canada or Mexico.  Is it enough that Americans are provided with "a broader array of competitively priced, high-quality products" (FAS)?  Should we stop there, or should we read  between the lines just a little more? 

Otero, Scott, and Gilbreth do indeed read between the lines in their essay on neoliberalized global trade.  In particular, they explain the social consequences for the actual people of Mexico, something the FAS, in its emphasis on U.S. economic benefits, neglects to address.  For Mexican peasants and rural farmers, “free” trade means trading according to the dictates of the country with the most money, and this in turn, means shifting their own agricultural system to suit such trade.  One such consequence is “unemployment in cities that are unable to provide enough jobs for those expelled from the modernizing agricultural sector” (Otero, et al. 255).  Further, what the FAS claims as a benefit (at least for the United States, but presumably for Mexico as well) is the massive increase in U.S. exports of certain foodstuffs, the details of which are cited above. 

Otero, et al. give the lie to the social implications of this factoid, however, when they delineate the real-life consequences of such expansive and “free” trade. The United States must create a demand in Mexico for its products, and it does so by “promoting modern agriculture and a U.S.-style diet [which] has involved the displacement of subsistence crops like corn and beans, grown for human consumption” in favor of growing feed for livestock.  This conveniently creates a demand for foreign food products, and the United States can step right in and provide that.  Consequently, “Mexican consumption patterns are still moving in the direction of greater amounts of meat and dairy products, and fewer local grains and products” ),  while Americans are eating increasing amounts of whole grains and low-fat and –cholesterol products (Otero, et al. 256.  Here, “free” trade effectively constrains and shapes the direction of an entire group of people physically and culturally. 

Dan Schiller presents a striking parallel in his analysis of digital capitalism and the political and economic interests in the “free” flow of information.  The overt message is that if information flows freely (without government dictating what is available and how it can be accessed), the people will be able to democratically access information via advanced technology and decide for themselves how they will explore and with what they will engage.  Such a proposition is incontrovertible.  I certainly do not want my government, which purportedly serves me, to dictate my access to knowledge and information.  What is not made explicit, though, is that in place of the government, the “free” flow of information is actually the very strategic dissemination of very specific information via very constrained points of access.  Such limitations are enforced by corporate interests who are now “free” to use their expansive financial means and business alliances to package information in ways which sustain and increase their profits. 

Just as free trade in practice limits trade for those who must now play by one, highly unbalanced, set of rules, so too does the notion of freely flowing information mask the diminishing availability of democratically accessible information. Further, both of these “freedoms” serve each other: with the not-so-free flow of information, the few who benefit from free trade can bolster their dominance by manipulating how the system is viewed, and by capitalizing on an imbalanced trade system, they maintain the wherewithal to continue shaping the consumption of information.  Freedom in the service of the few at the expense of the many is not freedom.  Instead it is more closely aligned with “free reign” (as opposed to free rein), and if our grade-school history books have taught us anything, there are dangerous social consequences behind the exercise of free reign.

Works Cited

Otero, Gerardo, Steffanie Scott, and Chris Gilbreth.  “New Technologies, Neoliberalism, and

Social Polarization in Mexico’s Agriculture.” Cutting Edge: Technology, Information,

Capitalism and Social Revolution.  Ed. Jim Davis, et al.  London: Verso, 1997.  253-270.  Print.

Schiller, Dan.  Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System.  Cambridge: MIT

Press, 2000. Print.

---

[1] “FAS Backgrounder: Benefits of NAFTA.” USDA Foreign Agricultural service.  May 2005.  www.fas.usda.gov.  24 October 2012.  Web. 

Genetic Engineering and the Fate of the "Social Factory"

     In the following scene from Andrew Niccol’s 1997 Gattaca, Vincent Freeman’s parents are looking to conceive their second child with the aid of genetic engineering.  Having forewent this when conceiving Vincent, his life expectancy was determined at birth to be 30.2 years, and his blood alone told the doctors he was ninety-nine percent likely to develop a congenital heart condition among other deleterious mental and physical dispositions.

            I first viewed this film several years after it was released, and I was more incredulous at the technology itself than with the ethics of the technology.  When it first came out, I was eleven years old and busy trying to change my nature to suit society’s dictates all on my own. By the time I encountered Gattaca, I was struck by the futility of my own and Vincent’s efforts to circumvent nature.  I did not consider the possibility that both Vincent and I were already perfectly ourselves.  Now, a decade later, and with the help of other thinkers who encourage the challenging of these ossified beliefs, I can’t help but reconsider the social, economic, and political conditions behind this fictional account, and more importantly, behind my own experience.

            Nick Witheford’s “Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism” is an excellent foundation for reconsidering this film.  He begins by defining the Autonomist Marxian term, the “social factory,” as extending “class conflict [to] include not only waged labor but also all the unwaged workers, such as housewives, students, and the unemployed” (197).  With this premise, no one in society (either my own or the “futuristic” one Vincent inhabits) is free from participating in the capitalist system of oppression—we are capitalists, laborers, and/or reproducers of laborers.  Witheford goes on to explain that one way “capital” retains control of the people is through their physical bodies, and in particular, through “the biopolitics of reproducing labor power” (215).  Specifically, he writes, “Although genetic engineering is generally publicized a means of curing hereditary diseases, its main achievements are currently neither therapeutic nor even diagnostic but predictive … it offers a way, not of healing, but of targeting subjects with an alleged predisposition to costly disease” (Witheford  215). 

The film takes this hidden motive of capital’s development of technology and presents it as an overt and socially accepted means for ensuring individual greatness.  What this raises, and what Witheford so articulately exposes, is the question of what this technology really means in the lives of actual people.  For Vincent, his parents had the means and the choice to produce a genetically engineered child, and they chose not to for moral reasons.  They learned from that “mistake” and endeavored to have a more wholesome child the second time around.  So Vincent is portrayed almost as a tragedy, being born with social, physical, and mental “handicaps.”  But he is not alone, there is a whole segment of the population without the wherewithal to avail themselves of genetic engineering, so in being more and more likely to reproduce the physical and mental traits that relegate them to a lower class, they reproduce themselves as a class.  The economics of technology supports social and political oppression, and this is how the social factory works. 

Although contemporary capitalist society has not quite reached this degree of technological oppression, we are quite close, and the closer we come to believing that this is the path toward greatness and “freedom” from limitations, the farther we go from being whole people.  This, in turn, will only make it easier to further segment and separate us, pitting laborer against laborer, social being against social being, effectively precluding any unified retaliatory effort.

Witheford, Nick. “Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism.” Cutting

Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution.  Ed. Jim

Davis, et al.  London: Verso, 1997.  195-242.  Print.