Marx In America

If we wish to date the beginning of the end of the institutional church, a good argument could be made for Ghent, 1324, when, according to David Landes, “the abbot of St Pierre authorized the fullers ‘to install a bell in the workhouse newly founded by them near the Hoipoorte’” (D Landes 73). Originally installed to infallibly signal times of prayer, the workhouse clock, like all clocks in the fourteenth century would eventually serve double duty. For it would also allow savvy entrepreneurs to signal the beginning and the end of the work day and thereby infallibly measure the abstract time and, so, the abstract values, of the goods produced between these signals. For the entrepreneurs, the church bells were, quite literally, a godsend, since eventually they would relieve them of the nasty business of having to negotiate just wages, prices, and holidays with representatives of clergy, the guilds, and the nobility.

Herewith, too, nominalism, always a minority view among educated clergy, gained a fresh lease on life. For now practically it became increasingly difficult to mistake the material composition of things or people with their true, unseen, immaterial value or meaning. When, by the end of the fifteenth century, renegade priests were beginning to isolate faith from works, spirit from body, body from bread, blood from wine, and gospel from law, these nominalist distinctions suddenly found a ready audience among towns folk who, practically, already knew that this was the case. For the bells had already told them. (Note that M Luther’s distinctions would have made little sense to the diaspora-trained Jew Saint Paul by whom Luther believed his doctrinal reformation was originally coined.)

We can well imagine how the Holy Eucharist, not unlike the liturgical and visual ornamentation that Jean Calvin found so obnoxious, must have struck sixteenth century protestants with much the same embarrassment as the institutional church strikes twenty-first century Christians today: so fallible, so fraught, impure, defiled, and ugly. And perhaps we can understand then why these first Protestants fixed their gaze not only on the Word — which, after all, could still be confused with the Living Word, Christ Jesus, or His Body, which is to say, the Church — but on the words, the actual grammar and syntax, whose beauty lay in our capacity to isolate the written, material, script from its immaterial, transcendent meaning.

Over time this original embarrassment and discomfort has only grown. To be sure, in the heady Fordist days immediately following World War II, high modernism was permitted to prevail, at least until the economic downturn in the early 1970s. And perhaps we were led to believe that the spirit and the flesh might actually have truck with one another: big bloated institutions, expanding seminaries, new hires, expanding enrollments. And, yet, as David Harvey would remind us, for all of its expansionary bravado, the Fordist Church celebrated the ephemera of the spirit — sleek, crisp, empty architectural lines, Expressionist and post-Expressionist Christs, and a move liturgically away from fixed and frozen traditions — no less and perhaps even more than we are accustomed to today. Yet, as the saying goes, “I have been docetic with money and without money. And I prefer being docetic with money.” So that, when the downturn did hit in the 1970s and our institutions began to shed their bodies — liturgies, buildings, seminaries, students, hours, and, yes, their faculties (see #GTS8)— this pragmatic, neoliberal elimination of the Body of Christ could be framed as simply another step towards a higher, purer, truer form of Christianity.

Commuter priests, commuter parishioners, on-line liturgies, digital courses, digital faculties, electronic students, electronic libraries — what could be more spiritual, right?

To be sure, it would be equally, perhaps even more erroneous for us to flee to some kind of post-Modern Ebionitism. Bodies and spirits belong together. Institutions and histories are empty if not occupied by embodied practitioners walking in the Spirit. Liturgies must change as the Body is transformed. So too must architecture and aesthetics.

And, yet, it strikes me that we unnecessarily lacerate ourselves when with too broad brushstrokes we condemn the institutional church, the embodied church — with its all too evident limitations, missteps, weaknesses, and wounds — as such. Only when it forgets what it is, that it is flesh, does the institutional church overstep its bounds. That is to say, only when it comically masquerades as disembodied spirit — as the Spirit — does the institutional church deserve our rebuke. Seminaries without seminarians, without seminaries, without professors, without books, without chapels, without time for prayer and worship — all on-line, available with the click of a mouse. Now, that is comical! But it is also terribly tragic, precisely because it mistakes a regrettable vice for an unmitigated virtue: no body, no harm, spirituality by default.

Our institutions of higher learning need to recover their financial bearings. We need administrators who will tirelessly hit the road, bang on doors, shake the money tree, and make our seminaries work. We do not need administrators who roll over and celebrate their defeat as though it were a virtue. In short, we need the institutional church. We need bodies, buildings, chapels, libraries, professors, students, liturgies, histories, choirs, robes, and vestments. These are not immaterial to our faith for the simple reason that our faith is not immaterial. We need the institutional church. But we need an institutional church that fully recognizes its bodily character.

Amen veni Domine Iesu.

Yesterday citizens across Bosnia and Herzegovina went to the polls to elect regional and national representatives (see Bosnian Elections). No one, least of all Bosnians and Herzegovinians themselves, believe that the elections will solve any of the nation’s most intractable problems. Indeed, most feel that the elections are likely to make these problems worse.

Although I am by no means an expert on Bosnian and Herzegovinian politics, I do believe that my year traveling throughout the region, speaking, teaching, but mostly listening between August 2013 and August 2014, might shed some light on why today’s elections will likely exacerbate these problems.

Reports in the Guardian, the New York Times, and even Al Jazeera will focus on persistent ethnic divisions and upon the entrenched oligarchy. And all will dutifully report how it was the US-brokered Dayton Accords that brought peace to the warring factions in 1995. Yet none I suspect will mention either the true cause for these wars — not ethnic conflict — or the true, long-term solution to the ongoing hostilities in the region: abandoning the neoliberal economic policies in the 1970s, and undoing the destruction produced by the economic downturn in the 1980s.

The persistent focus on ethnic conflict in the region known as Bosnia and Herzegovina is a relic of the nineteenth century, when, as Benedict Anderson reminds us, the emerging bourgeoisie imagined the nation as a counterpoint to the multi-ethnic (and therefore illegitimate and unnatural) monarchies of Europe. National bourgoisies created the new fields of national linguistics to “recover” “lost” stories from the past “proving” that beneath the accretions of nobility and monarchs there rested true, natural, and legitimate popular sovereigns — the peoples — which, of course, naturally excluded multi-ethnic monstrosities such as the Balkans. The only question remaining then concerned the true character of that “natural” underlying community.

Although the majority of communities in Bosnia and Herzegovina were Muslim, for centuries there had also been strong Croat (Catholic) and Serb (Orthodox) minorities whose representatives always maintained that it was “unnatural” for a European nation to be ruled by non-Christians. Thus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, it was argued should “naturally” be ruled by either Croats (Catholics) or by Serbs (Orthodox). This changed in 1945 when a coalition of Serbs, Croat, and Bosnian Communists successfully defeated Germany’s occupying Nazi forces and forged the first truly secular constitutional republic under Jozip Broz Tito. The secular and independent character of Bosnia and Herzegovina was further reinforced in 1950 when, in defiance of Joseph Stalin, the ruling Yugoslav Communists set out on an independent path of what Yugoslavs called self-governing socialism, in effect creating democratically managed cooperatives that enjoyed the authority to manage their own production, set their own wages, set their own prices, and, eventually, even trade with non-communist states. This explains how Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians in Yugoslavia, particularly in industrialized regions, increasingly came to view themselves not as Catholics, Orthodox, and Muslims, but as Yugoslavs.

Yet, for much the same reasons that heavy industry in western Europe, Great Britain, North America, and Japan began to suffer from declining rates of profit in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so Yugoslavs also began to suffer the consequences of global competition. In some regions of the globe, most notably in northwestern Europe, the public elected to reduce its overall consumption, production, and demand and spread the shock of deindustrialization socially across the entire population. This contrasts with Great Britain and the United States where in order to maintain relatively high rates of return for investors, elected representatives were willing to subject voters to higher than average un- and underemployment, lower wages and benefits, while deregulating financial institutions and relieving wealth of its fair share of tax burdens. Collectively these policies, known as neoliberalism, had the effect of bunching wealth increasingly upward (as Thomas Piketty has documented in his runaway bestseller). However, the same policies, when applied to Yugoslavia, had even more damaging consequences.

In an attempt to maintain consumer expectations, the ruling Communists in the 1970s were compelled to borrow ever larger sums from western governments and financial institutions. (Such loans and consumption, it was felt, held out the promise of pulling Eastern Europeans into the western capitalist camp and isolating the communists.) But when the dollar was strengthened under Ronald Reagan, leading to unprecedented unemployment in the US, the consequences for the former Yugoslavia were ten times worse. In order to pay off their now inflated foreign debt, the government began selling off huge swaths of public assets, reducing worker wages and benefits, and laying off large segments of the population. Bosnia and Herzegovina, which, prior to 1945, had been largely an agricultural region, had always lagged considerably behind Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia. The region was now plunged into levels of economic turmoil unseen since the end of World War II.

Why did Yugoslavia’s leaders not adopt the northwestern European model and spread the effects of deindustrialization more broadly? Two answers. First, because the lion’s share of its debts were with nations that had now adopted neoliberal economic philosophies (the so-called Washington Consensus), their creditors would accept nothing short of privatization, deregulation, and austerity. Second, because of the unequal distribution of burdens in Yugoslavia, where Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina had always been compelled to endure far more hardship than Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, or Slovenia, any attempt to further redistribute the social product from these relatively more prosperous regions to Bosnia and Herzegovina would in all likelihood have provoked civil war much earlier than 1991, the year civil war in fact broke out.

Yet, it was actually not until 1995 and 1996 and the end of the conflict that neoliberal privatization, bolstered by the Dayton Peace Accords (and hastened by the chaos that reigned during and following the war), had the effect of creating a lasting Bosnian and Herzegovinian oligarchy in both of its entities and among all three of its ethnic communities; political and economic oligarchies ready to receive and bank on World Bank, IMF, EU, and US financial assistance. Western financial institutions, eager to promote the neoliberal dream in Bosnia and Herzegovina, channelled resources into the oligarch’s bank accounts, with or without assistance from state intermediaries. When assistance went to states, such assistance was sure to promote state corruption. When it went to “private” interests, here too the aid went directly into the accounts of the oligarchs.

For example, this Spring when the World Bank, the EU and the US organized meetings in Sarajevo to address Bosnia and Herzegovina’s financial woes, the organizers completely overlooked the civil sphere that had taken shape in February through the formation of Plenum throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, extending invitations exclusively to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s entrenched and corrupt oligarchy. But it was the neoliberal dream, first forced upon Yugoslavia in the 1980s and then again in the late 1990s as a virtual condition of Dayton, that all but ensured a quarter century of political and economic dysfunction.

This helps to explain why democracy cannot succeed under present conditions in Bosnia and Herzegovina. No matter who runs, under whatever colors, it is the oligarchy and not the people who win.

What is the solution? First, just as they imposed neoliberalism and an utterly dysfunctional Dayton Agreement (because it establishes an ethnically defined political system in BiH, Dayton automatically excludes BiH from membership in the EU) on Bosnia and Herzegovina, so now the international community needs to step in to undo both. This will not be easy. The Republik Srpska will accept nothing short of complete independence from BiH as a precondition. And many Croats feel the same way about Croatian areas of BiH. Which is why, second, the international community needs to identify and freeze the assets of members of BiH’s oligarchy. Of course, the international community has already identified the members of the BiH oligarchy. (These are the individuals they invited and continue to invite to the table whenever they claim they are meeting with BiH “leaders.”) Third, the international community needs to redirect its attention, energy and resources to the extensive network composing civil society in BiH, in particular to representatives and spokespeople of Plenum and of the independent (non-SDP) labour movement. Finally, the international community needs to strengthen and support public institutions, such as BiH’s public schools, that represent the future of multi-ethnic BiH. (We were baffled during our visit to find the US Embassy lavishing support on private, ethnically defined schools in BiH while completely neglecting public, multi-ethnic schools.)

Of course, the international community is likely to turn a blind eye to these concerns. After all, BiH is a small nation (3.4M people), with virtually no economy. Let the Bosnians work out their own problems. Just give it some time. However, members of the international community must know that its periphery is fraying, that the tinder is dry, and that the fuel of nationalism is quite potent. Letting these sores fester on Europe’s “shatter zone” is unwise and untenable. Better to intervene now than to let this wildfire go unattended.

(At latest report, the nationalist candidates are all winning in the polls.)

As a former seminarian, practicing Episcopalian, and sometime theologian, I am occasionally asked why or how I continue to use tools and insights I have learned from the mature social and historical theory of Karl Marx. And, obviously, I also am asked by social theorists and historians how or why I continue to practice Christianity.

There is plenty here and in my other writings (see Max Weber and the Persistence of Religion: Capitalism, Social Theory, and the Sublime London: Routledge, 2006) to answer these questions. Yet, in a preliminary way, I can say that from my vantage point since there is only a shade of difference from the Tanakh to Mark or Paul to the Church mothers and fathers to Saint Thomas, etc., there is also only a shade from these worldly writers to other worldly writers, including Karl Marx, all of whom are trying to grasp something important about us in the world.

More specifically, however, a half dozen or so methodological distinctions recommend Mr Marx. First, if I am correct and if capitalism as a social, not an economic, form is responsible for practically isolating abstract value from its material form of appearance in the fourteenth century, then this indicates the point where we can also begin to address the multiple bifurcations and splittings that differentiate modern theology and its unique problems from classical theology and its problems (e.g., Jesus’ wounds, Mary’s breasts, the Real Presence, Faith and Works, the status of the Body, the status of the institutional Church, etc.). Second, this also marks the point, obliquely referenced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but openly in the eighteenth, where the hiatus irrationalis becomes an overwhelming problem for commentators. Much theology, tragically, from that point forward becomes mired in the subject-object dilemma and therefore reduces itself to epistemology, which, in my view, is unfortunate, since the community of faith ought, it strikes me, to be focused principally upon the body, which, in any concrete way, is lost to the Church from this point forward. Even where it is not fully elaborated, as, for example, in I Kant’s first critique, or when, as in GFW Hegel’s Phaenomenologie, thought on its own attempts to heal the temporal breach, the practical isolation of abstract value from its material form of appearance is all too painfully evident. I do not agree with, e.g., J Moltmann, that this problem can be collapsed into the similar problem of God’s death or God’s Body. But I do believe that each of these related problems sheds light on the other. K Marx, principally in the Grundrisse, but also in his Thesen über Feuerbach, does not heal this breach, but instead exposes its historical and social production, therein inviting readers to reflect critically on its practical supercession. Third, and related, by illuminating the social and historical production of the sublime value form of the commodity, K Marx also casts light on the real, historical, and social being of the Weltgeist, which GFW Hegel mistook for divine being unfolding in time, but which we can now recognize as Capital, which all too often also forms the heart and soul and mind of the community of faith, not only or even primarily in its beliefs and theology, but far more tragically in its practice and experience of God and the World. Fourth, by identifying the social and historical character of the breach between abstract value and its material form of appearance, K Marx also sheds light retrospectively upon the wonderful confluence and delightful mutual shaping of spirit and flesh evident in so much liturgy and iconography, as well as practice, prior to the fourteenth century. Since he stands at the crossroads of this transition, wrestling to preserve what is about to be lost, Saint Thomas, in TPQ73, “Of the Sacrament of the Eucharist,” perhaps best epitomizes what is at stake. Fifth, it strikes me that there is an implicit invitation in First Corinthians 1-2, to grasp the mystery of divine being and intention immanently, an invitation first and most visibly extended in Creation itself, but also therefore throughout the entire liturgical calendar, concluding with Triduum and Easter. But sixth, this could suggest that the hermeneutical error we are trying to expose should be ascribed less to K Marx than to the community of faith that appears eager, again and again, to isolate the body and the Body from its spirit and from its Spirit.

19 Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20 you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies (I Co 6:19-20).

In a discussion surrounding the financial challenges facing seminaries, one participant asks whether I “can you explain your premise of how church buildings and institutions are bodies?” Sure.

Of course it is far from self evident that under the Stoic metaphysics that governed popular discourse in the first century, built structures and institutions were deemed to enjoy there very existence due to their relative proximity to or distance from the divine (Ro. 13:1-2). Nor is it self evident that even within apocalyptic discourse the divine held the authority to declare the nullify of things that exist or the existence of things formerly deemed null (1 Co. 1-2); herein annulling the dominant discourse, but not the substance metaphysics around which this discourse was organized.

With the emergence of capitalism in the fourteenth century, however, it became increasingly difficult to imagine sacred bodies or embodied spirits. This is because value in the new practical regime was isolated from its material form of appearance. The familiar notion of “disenchantment” (M Weber) seeks to grasp this development sociologically. But clearly it also achieves theological expression in the transformation and overturning of a wide range of previously settled theological understandings and experiences. Suffice it to say that prior to this point one could speak quite intelligibly of the sacred character of bodies — icons, relics, ground, textiles, buildings, etc. — whereas after this point it became increasingly difficult to do so without invoking the cloak of “mystery” and “inscrutability.” Disembodiment of divinity in the modern era owes itself to the rise of capitalism.

It is in this context that it makes sense not only to speak of buildings and institutions as bodies, but also to speak of sacred groves, mountains, rivers, and gardens. The degradation of bodies is a feature of capitalism, which can only grasp the utility of bodies, but not their divine character. No surprise here that we are more than ready to sacrifice the earth itself to the abstract value form of the commodity.

Yes, we must take care not to make an idol whether of bodies or of spirits. But I think it is a mistake to view either as strictly means to ends. They are also ends, though not the ultimate end. Because if viewed as mere means, this could imply that they can be sacrificed to achieve a higher end, which pits bodies against spirits, instead of challenging us to wonder why the two are found together — e.g., this cup and this loaf, etc.

Churches are places for people and are the people who make these places; the place needs to reflect the people who are also bodies and the Body, not in opposition or by contast, but also alongside. And not simply the Body for the past four hours or years or decades or centuries. Our places are occupied by words and the Word, by the dead, by ghosts and by their words and prayers. Which is why places are sacred (W Benjamin).

I hope that this is helpful.

Yesterday two energetic, well-dressed teens showed up my door campaigning against Measure D. Measure D is a local initiative, duplicated across the US, motivated by health care officials and parents worried by sky-rocketing diabetes among youth, and city officials concerned about the sky-rocketing costs of providing health care to citizens with diabetes. The Measure aims to increase the marginal costs stores have to pay on “oversized” high-fructose beverages under the sound economic theory that at a certain cost customers will prefer smaller and therefore lower fructose beverages, especially if those beverages per volume are less expensive than their super sized neighbors. The revenues generated by the added tax on oversized beverages will be placed in the general fund to be allocated according to the concerns of Berkeley’s elected city council members.

The key to good propaganda is not to get you to change your mind, but to use the mind you have to get you to DO something you might not otherwise do.

In the propaganda distributed at my house, sponsored by the American Beverage Association, an African American woman (a mom?) who evidently is not a victim of diabetes herself is contemplating the merits of Measure D. She knows that diabetes has sky-rocketed, particularly among African American youth. So she is concerned.

The American Beverage Association is not interested in getting her to abandon her concern. To the contrary, the American Beverage Association shares her concern. The health of beverage consumers is at the top of their agenda. But, what if the ordinance taxed Berkeley citizens, but did nothing to limit the consumption of high fructose beverages?

So, that’s the angle. Got it? What if I were to tell you, then, that Milkshakes and coffee drinks like Caramel Frappuccino and White Chocolate Mocha are not included? What if I were to tell you that small retailers like the ones who sell drinks to your kids will be exempted?

The American Beverage Association is committed to the proposition that no public institution, on whatever grounds, should interfere in the private marketplace decisions of sellers and buyers. They would be opposed to Proposition D even if it included Caramel Frappuccino and White Chocolate Mocha. And if the ordinance penalized small mom and pop outfits, instead of exempting them, the ABA would then place that provision in its cross-hairs. Good propaganda does not try to get you to change your mind. It aims to get you to use the mind you have to do something against your best interests.

Proposition D is a political product. It balances various interests, for example, the interests of small business owners, against the interests of parents of obese children, health officials, and city officials. Its not perfect. No proposition is.

But don’t be fooled by the “No on D” campaign. Its pure propaganda. Its sponsors are leading opponents of public institutions and public oversight of private wealth. Unrestricted free markets is their sole criteria.

Vote Yes on D. And enjoy that Frappuccino.

Wage inequality in the United States is at an all-time high. According to a frequently cited Congressional Budget Office Study, between 1979 and 2007, the top 1% of wage earners increased their income by about 275%. And in 2012, while incomes of the wealthiest 1% rose 20%, those of the remaining 99% rose only 1%.

The most common and probably the most broadly accepted theory for why these wages rose so precipitously revolves around marginal productivity. In any market — free or otherwise — wage earners will always bargain up to, but cannot bargain beyond, their last marginal dollar, the dollar beyond which an employer will say “you are this productive, but not a dollar more productive.” Should the employer then pay the employee one dollar more, the cost of hiring that employee would be greater than the earnings she or he brings in, and that employee would fall outside or beyond his or her marginal productivity.

In his study of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty argues that the dramatic increase in wage disparity since 1970 cannot be explained by any theory of marginal productivity (1) because the differences in skill levels of the top centile and the remaining top decile of managers is inconsequential; (2) because comparably skilled and equipped managers of equally productive companies in France and Germany earned incomparably less than their US counterparts; and (3) there is no demonstrable relationship between performance and earnings such that the increase in earnings could have been justified on the basis of increased performance or productivity (Piketty, Capital, chapters 9-10).

Piketty therefore credits the wage disparity to cultural factors, not to actual shifts in marginal productivity.

And, yet, if we follow Piketty’s argument, it could lead us to conclude that prior to 1970 or roughly from 1914 through 1970, when the capital-income ratios in all the world’s leading industrial nations declined to all-time lows, wages were based on marginal productivity. And it is this claim that deserves closer scrutiny.

As early as 1870, I would argue, when the “marginalists” shifted economic modeling away from the classical land-labor-rent-money-interest paradigm and toward a new paradigm that treated all factors as simply so many margins seeking aggregate equilibrium, economists recognized that the value composition of any of these factors was relative to each and all of the other factors within markets where the short-term values of all factors were recognized to be in constant flux. The value of any commodity, therefore, let’s say corn, at any market, on any given day, would bear a stronger relationship to long-term changes in transportation costs, climactic changes, migratory patterns, changes in international taxation, and so on, than it would, say, to the amount of labour time at any given wage devoted to each unit of corn on sale at the market. As the father of neoclassical theory, Alfred Marshall, noted in 1890: “The value of a thing, though it tends to equal its normal (money) cost of production, does not coincide with it at any particular time, save by accident” (Principles, Book V, Chapter 7, page 401).

This is because the relationship that any good bears to its value is a social relationship, however, which, although also cultural, is much more general than its cultural value. To appreciate this distinction, we might consider the wage difference between a migrant laborer in the central valley of California and a skilled line worker at Toyota. Let us say that the wage differential between the two is 50 to 1. And let us say further that this differential can be accounted for, as above, on the basis of marginal productivity. But what does this mean?

Let us assume that the bunch of grapes that I purchase at Andronico’s for $3.00 returns $2.95 for transportation, distribution, rent, and profits for the employer of the migrant laborer, leaving $0.05 for the laborer; which, I think, is a very generous estimate. Now, let us suppose that for an equivalent unit of the finished Toyota, a worker at the Toyota plant could claim $25. Presumably, the worker in the central valley field enjoys just as much or greater intelligence, skill, manual dexterity, and so on, as the Toyota worker. And, yet, presumably the market for Toyotas differs somewhat from the market for grapes. Would anyone pay $25 for a bunch of grapes? Almost certainly not. And, yet, if you did, the migrant laborer would then be pulling in a salary and benefits, caeteris paribus, comparable to the Toyota line worker. Fair enough.

But, someone will doubtless note, the grape worker needs a basket, a truck, plenty of water, latrines, health facilities, and so on, while the Toyota line worker is laboring on a line worth billions of dollars whose cost must, like the migrant laborer, be covered by his or her marginal productivity. To which someone else should reply: but the grape picker is working just as hard or harder; to which someone else should reply: but there is a large gap in the cost of training, etc., etc.

Certainly one way to capture the different variables contributing to these different wage structures is to look at the factors themselves and their costs. But, except at the margins, this is not at all the way that neoclassical modeling works. The way that neoclassical modeling works invites us to consider the marginal returns on the $3.50 bunch of grapes, the $4.00 bunch of grapes, the $7.00 bunch of grapes, and so on. Could employers of migrant laborers charge $7.00 for a bunch of grapes they surely would. But at some price — presumably close to $3.00 per bunch — the employer begins to see declining marginal returns. So that the actual wage, $0.05 per bunch, is determined by the socially agreed upon demand price of the bunch of grapes, plus the socially agreed upon supply price of the employer; that is to say, the amount per bunch below which the employer says the she or he is seeking a new line of business, minus the marginal wage of the employee.

But, in each of these cases, the margins are socially determined. That is to say, they have very little to do with the actual costs of production, except at the margins. We agree upon them together, socially, collectively, through our sales and purchases.

Returning then briefly to our question of wage inequality, why do super-managers earn 500-1000% more than their employees? They earn that much, first, because these sums still fall under or within the marginal costs of their product. Second, they earn these sums because shareholders have concluded, perhaps rightly, that a sum less than these amounts will bring super-managers to market themselves elsewhere. And, third, they earn these sums because, socially and politically, they can. For we can clearly imagine social and political circumstances under which those who earn these sums would be accused, as Piketty puts it, of being caught with their hands in the tills, especially given the difference between their wages and the low end of the wage scale in their firms. Yes, this is cultural. But it is more than cultural. It is social.

Moreover, it has always been social. Even when top wages were not so out of line with average wages.

Power differentials are always social. And they are always political and cultural as well. But this means that our economic modeling, which tends to overlook the social, the cultural, and the political, must itself be taken as a social and cultural artifact, reinforcing or contesting norms and practices whose “objectivity” is constituted in practice.

http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/

A letter from the Dean and President of General Theological Seminary was posted on EpiscopalCafe.com and then circulated on FB. Those interested in its contents are encouraged to find it there. For those who do not follow the news at religious institutions of higher learning, it should be enough to know that these institutions are experiencing the same traumas as publicly supported institutions of learning outside of the Church. Faculty in particular are in a bind. Shrinking revenues have led to layoffs, early retirement, broken contracts and the transition, everywhere, to the implementation of post-Fordist regimes of cultural production. And it is to these latter regimes, in large measure, that the faculty at General were responding when they went on strike. Many now have been let go. And that is tragic.

One interlocutor in the FB discussion, which is quite extensive, asks: “Why now?”

And it is to that question that, as an economist, I would like to respond. Briefly, like most institutions, the US Church also experienced its heyday in the immediate post-war period — that is World War II. The US economy was booming, had been booming since 1938, when, prior to entering the war, it began gearing up for full-scale war-time production. After the war, flush with capital and consumer goods, the US poured both into the recovering economies of Europe and Asia. Returning GI’s bought homes, went to college and got productive. Tuitions were at an all-time low. Registered students were at an all-time high. (It was in this climate that the Vatican promoted ecumenical dialogue and that the Graduate Theological Union, the most ambitious ecumenical and interreligious institution of higher learning, brought nine seminaries and, eventually, twenty-one independent research units together to offer its common core curriculum in collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley.) What could go wrong?

What went wrong is that eventually, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Germany’s and Japan’s economies began to compete against the US economy globally; and this placed downward pressures on rates of profit. In order to maintain rates of return, investors initiated a full-court press to completely overhaul the fiscal, monetary, and regulatory climate globally. We call this regulatory dimension of the new economy “neoliberalism.” It is a term with which most of us are familiar. Far fewer are familiar with the term “post-Fordism,” which refers to the changed institutional and employment arrangements that accompanied neoliberalism. And, yet, we are probably familiar with many of its stock phrases: on-time delivery, flexible production, contingent workforce, off-shoring, down-sizing, sleek and efficient, “robust,” and so on. This new institutional regime is confusing. It replaces the large-scale, impersonal, inflexible bureaucratic model forged at the height of war, with a nimble, personal, flexible approach to production.

Some scholars with a less than adequate grasp of economic and social history may be inclined to mistake this transition for a new stage in ecclesiastical development, a new age of the spirit, free from buildings, institutions, churches, dogmas, liturgies and hierarchies. Since these scholars take their bearings from the seventeenth century, during which western Christian churches first became drunk on the extraordinary vitality, flexibility, and exuberance generated by nascent capitalism, they see the current post-Fordist Church as simply another natural progression in the same direction without ever reflecting critically about how this new spirit of capitalism infiltrated and transformed the Christian church. Such scholars are therefore inclined to celebrate the flexibility, openness, extra-institutional character of the post-Fordist Church. From an economic vantage-point, however, there is little to celebrate here. The highest rates of inequality in the modern epoch; little or no job security; and, as Thomas Piketty has reminded us in his best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century, a global economic system that is fundamentally unsustainable.

Theologically, however, the new institutional arrangements should also give us pause. Rather than celebrating our transition to distance learning, evening school, and weekend classes, we might instead call into question a social formation that has pushed all learning to the periphery compelling mom and dad to spend hours in front of their computers when they get home rather than spending time with their kids; that has transformed theological learning and in-residency training a luxury available to a small, hyper-wealthy, and hyper-young or retired elite; that has degraded and downgraded theological and religious vocations to the equivalent of the minimum-wage, non-benefited fast food clerk; and that celebrates the absence of an historical or institutional memory as evidence of God’s spirit among us.

Yet, following a by now familiar model, our seminaries packed their board rooms with men and women trained in business, law, and technology, cheerleaders all for the new post-Fordist economy. Why would they not transform our institutions to fit this new economy?

Why now? Now, because this is the direction that the entire global economy is moving, including our institutions of higher learning, including our seminaries and churches. Only if the Church were truly grounded in and guided by a different spirit would it have been in the forefront of the opposition to this movement. Instead, tragically, it is among its leadership; evidence, I fear, not of the spirit’s guidance, but of the spirit’s absence.

Of all sections in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, I think my favorite for the moment is Book I, Chapter 8.
When I shared this passage with Tuzla’s workers last night, they were astonished. For it is here that A Smith openly admits what all workers suspected all along; namely, that their penury arose from an original appropriation of property and capital in which they played no role but whose consequences they must endure with the full cooperation of their representatives in Sarajevo.
The passage begins as follows:
In that original state of things, which precedes both the appropriation of land and the accumulation of stock, the whole produce of labour belongs to the labourer. He has neither landlord nor master to share with him (I.8.2).
Neither landlord nor master. Unbelievable.

But then Smith describes what all of them believe to have been the state of affairs in the former Yugoslavia:
Had this state continued, the wages of labour would have augmented with all those improvements in its productive powers, to which the division of labour gives occasion. All things would gradually have become cheaper. They would have been produced by a smaller quantity of labour; and as the commodities produced by equal quantities of labour would naturally in this state of things be exchanged for one another, they would have been purchased likewise with the produce of a smaller quantity (I.8.3).
Ever greater efficiency leading to ever less work and ever lower costs of goods.
But then Smith throws cold water in our faces. For what if workers in one sector, detergent for example, were able to produce ten times more efficiently than, let’s say, automobile tires, whose efficiency only increased two-fold. Smith describes this possibility as follows:
But though all things would have become cheaper in reality, in appearance many things might have become dearer than before, or have been exchanged for a greater quantity of other goods. Let us suppose, for example, that in the greater part of employments the productive powers of labour had been improved to tenfold, or that a day’s labour could produce ten times the quantity of work which it had done originally; but that in a particular employment they had been improved only to double, or that a day’s labour could produce only twice the quantity of work which it had done before. In exchanging the produce of a day’s labour in the greater part of employments, for that of a day’s labour in this particular one, ten times the original quantity of work in them would purchase only twice the original quantity in it. Any particular quantity in it, therefore, a pound weight, for example, would appear to be five times dearer than before. In reality, however, it would be twice as cheap. Though it required five times the quantity of other goods to purchase it, it would require only half the quantity of labour either to purchase or to produce it. The acquisition, therefore, would be twice as easy as before (I.8.4).
No landlords. No masters. And, yet, because Smith is describing a relationship of commodities to commodities, and labor to labor, the relative “costs” continue to mediate social relations even in the absence of private property or capital markets.
And so we have the 1970s, which every worker in the former Yugoslavia remembers wistfully as the good old days. In fact, the good old days were already heavily leveraging the Yugoslavian future. So efficient were workers in the former Yugoslavia that they had to work less and less for more and more (I.8.3). But because their society was still mediated by abstract labor, dropping prices and a flood of cheap goods threatened to lead to the forced closures of enterprises all across the state. Which is why, when the US pulled the dollar off the gold standard in 1972 and flooded world markets with cheap US dollars, Marshal Tito eagerly snapped up the opportunity. No landlords. No masters. But here the Yugoslavians were leveraging their futures not in order to produce more leisure time, but in order to produce its opposite. The factors remained running full-bore throughout the 1970s in thanks largely to cheap US dollars. But then in the early 1980s, when the US reined in its supply of dollars, the party ended.
What this means for more than fifty per cent of Bosnians and Herzegovinians who are out of work is that their efficiency in the 1960s ended up costing them big time. For, landlords or no landlords, in societies whose social relations are mediated by abstract labor, there is no choice. For although your efficiencies will produce leisure time in the short run, in the long run the compulsion, the necessity, for ever greater efficiency will never permit you to actually claim that leisure. The only solution is full factories — work — even when, owing to your very efficiencies, there is no work to be had.
But Smith does not stop there. A little further on, Smith will describe the very oligarchic strangle-hold that has forced those few Bosnians and Herzegovinians who do enjoy employment to work for only a fraction of the wages on offer elsewhere in Europe:
A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long-run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him, but the necessity is not so immediate. We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and every where in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is every where a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things which nobody ever hears of (I.8.12-13).
Tuzla’s workers are intimately familiar with these combinations of masters and employers and with the distortions they introduce throughout the Bosnian and Herzegovinian economy. They know — as Smith too knew — that this combination of capitalists is “the natural state of things.”
So, is Smith a Marxist? No. Of course not. Unlike von Hayek, or Menger, or Mises, however, who clearly had “drunk the Kool-Aid” as we say, Smith could look capitalism in the eye and call it by its name. For he knew, as these mystics or snake-oil salesmen did not know, that capitalism was a comprehensive, integrated, total system that left no room for what they mistakenly took for “freedom.” Where they strut about proclaiming the freedom of the working man, Adam Smith was perfectly comfortable calling the working man “a commodity,” which, like every other commodity, obeyed the dictates of supply and demand (I.8.39).
Where Adam Smith differed from Marx was not in the facts, which are plain for all to see; but in his interpretive categories. For, unlike Marx, Smith mistook the historically and socially specific relationships of domination and submission peculiar to capitalism for transhistorical, inalterable, realities fixed by the nature of human being as such. And in this respect he differed little from von Hayek, or Menger, or Mises, none of whom were particularly interested or observant students of history.
Marx, by contrast, saw this historical moment as contained and limited, constrained by its own unique circumstances. In some as yet unspecified future, he felt certain that workers would face up to this peculiar form of self-domination, a society structured completely around labour, labour value, and work. He felt certain that at some point human beings would elect to organize their social relations in such a manner as to respect the many, many different ways to judge value.
The workers of Tuzla are still stunned. Men and women who have built their entire lives around labour, stunned at Adam Smith’s honesty. But stunned as well that maybe their future, the future of emancipation, need not center upon labour.

Aristotle said it best over 2300  years ago; work is not a virtue, whether it is a necessity or, even worse, a choice.

Today I drove to Belgrade over the highway M-18 where three weeks ago we witnessed a whole hillside collapse onto a rescue vehicle and under which our own vehicle was very nearly crushed. The highway is still far from whole and the homes and fields on either side will not be whole for years to come; homes with watermarks four, five, or even six feet from the ground, and heaps of belongings piled up smoldering on their front lawns. Nevertheless, I tried as best I could to explain what had happened here to our visitors from London.

Upon my return to Tuzla, nine hours later I rushed off to my weekly meeting with Tuzla’s workers. As I explained to my visitors, this was not a meeting I was looking forward to. Last weeks meeting had been a huge disappointment. Our text had been Karl Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach. But instead of taking up their historically determinate position, the workers in my meeting had taken up the position of the bourgeoisie. And why shouldn’t they have? There is nothing in work or in working that makes workers particularly adept at social critique. And in a nation where 50 per cent of the workforce is unemployed, there is every reason for workers who remember the 1970s to identify the security of work and a steady flow of consumer goods with socialism. Marshal Tito gave the workers job security and a steady flow of consumer goods. What we need is Tito.

As one worker at the meeting explained, “A nation is like a household. Every household needs a strong father.”

Workers are not the only ones confused by the last century of political economy. Theorists too are baffled. The temptation to identify emancipation with steady work and consumer goods is understandable. And, yet, if Marx is correct, then we need to learn how to differentiate between an older materialism — a materialism that, according to Marx, focuses on individuals and on civil society — and a more rigorous theoretical framework that focuses on social humanity and social relations. For just as the former Yugoslavia will not be saved by finding another Tito, so it will not be saved by throwing the bums (meaning the oligarchs) out. Individuals are neither the problem nor the solution. So just as a BBQ-of-one misses the point, so a social analysis of one misses the point. Workers themselves need to redirect their attention away from individuals and civil society and toward a new socialized humanity.

This new socialized humanity already possesses the means to realize its ends, not individually or by passing new laws to govern the production and exchange of commodities, but collectively by retraining the focus of socialized humanity upon the things that make our lives most meaningful. We mistake work and commodities for these things. But the workers, at least, know that this is not so. They know that what makes our lives meaningful is spending time with our friends and families, creating new things to share, enjoying good food and song, dance, art, stories together.

Which is why when Marx came to theorize the most radical action workers could take to seize their socialized future, he wrote about shortening the work day. We are all dominated by work. We are dominated by work even when, as in today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina, most of us are unemployed. Because even our ability to enjoy leisure time is (as Hannah Arendt pointed out a half century ago) pegged to work. And this is because we consume the efficiencies of labor not by producing leisure but by producing ever more labor.

When in the 1970s, Marshal Tito found himself caught between low-interest US loans and deindustrialization, he knew that Yugoslavians would not accept the latter. They had grown accustomed to steady work and a steady stream of consumer goods, which they mistook for the good life. And so he opted for the former. When President Reagan strengthened the dollar by restricting the monetary supply in the 1980s, Tito’s successors were caught flat-footed. All of a sudden, the cheap loans Marshal Tito had snapped up in the 1970s ballooned into huge debts. To pay them off, Tito’s successors were compelled by international law to eat into already socialized labor — the labor that had already been translated into public goods and services.

But the real question is: why wouldn’t the workers have accepted deindustrialization? And the difficult answer I think is that by the 1970s workers had come to identify work and consumption with the socialist dream.

At last night’s meeting we therefore revisited Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, trying to draw a distinction between the old materialism and the new, between a materialism that focuses on individuals and civil society and a materialism that focuses on our social life together and upon the ends implicit in this shared life together. The problem then is also social. We cannot aim at these socialized ends by making a better, more humane and just capitalism. That is because capitalism, by its very nature, focuses on the individual and on civil society. Which means that we can only serve socialized humanity so by making these ends paramount and developing laws that serve these social ends.

Last night I met again with workers from Canton Tuzla. We decided last week to look at Karl Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach. My reasons for choosing this text seemed sound. For weeks I have been hearing from workers who complain about the prominent role of intellectuals and party members at meetings of Plenum. And there is no doubt. The organizers of Plenum — those who put together the Agenda and run the meetings — are for the most part university trained academics, some of whom are also SDP party members. So that, even though the Agenda is composed of items proposed from the floor, from workers and citizens whatever their academic history, it is not entirely implausible that the academics run the show.
Which is why Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach seemed to me such a perfect text. Since it focuses on practice, it helps us to see how and why abstract “scholastic” (Marx uses this term) debates over who runs the show are just that. The questions we should be asking are what are the practices that brought us to the place where we are? And what are the practices we currently are engaged in? In the end, however materialist they may sound, those who accept or exclude on the basis of ideology and not practice are, says Marx, idealists and not materialists. So, what a great text!
Wrong. Marx calls our attention to the fact that revolutionary and reactionary practices might arise from any number of places socially and historically. And so there is no reason to believe that workers will occupy the “practical” side of his critique while intellectuals will occupy the “idealistic” side of his critique. It might well be the reverse. Workers might embrace an ideological metric to differentiate who is and who is not revolutionary; while intellectuals might adopt a practical metric. And, in fact, that is precisely what happened at last night’s meeting. So Marx turned out to be right. But what this meant was that the workers were eager to exclude those who embraced the wrong ideas, even when they were engaging in the right practices.
Two observations: (1) Marx was not a member of the working class. I don’t know how his investments worked for him; and, yes, I doubt that he actually lived on his investments. But in the way that the workers in Bosnia and Herzegovina think of it, Marx was an intellectual. Even the leftists, the socialists, the communists view Marx as a class enemy. Go figure. (2) What workers want is their jobs, security, and security for the future. A labor leader at last night’s meeting said without any duplicity that she would happily deny the benefits of labor to the children of the workers who did not join in their struggle. When I asked her, simply on strategic grounds, whether it might not be more promising to tell the non-militant worker’s children that we were working on their behalf, she said, unequivocally, No.
Leading me to wonder about the pathologies — the regimes of pain — that lead even the most dedicated of workers to wish harm upon the children of workers who are too tired, too depressed, too scared to fight on their children’s behalf.
This is not an argument against theories of practice, but is instead an argument to think about such theories more clearly. What care do workers need before they open up and forgive one another? What care do we need to take before the regimes of practice by which they feel surrounded are such that they are willing to join our common struggle?
Because, in the end it really is a question of practice and not ideology.