Essayists From The United States

""Do you see my granddaughter?...Isn't it a miracle that we can visit with all our kin, simply by looking into this face?" (chapter 14, p103)"

"This day, more than any other, should remind us that everyone seeking asylum deserves to be treated humanely."

"On this anniversary, while remembering the dead and celebrating those still living, I also want to recognize more than ever the marginalized members of Haitian society—people like my grandparents and their grandparents, poor, urban and rural, self-reliant and proud men and women who are the backbone of Haiti. Without their full inclusion and participation in the reconstruction of their country, Haiti will never fully succeed."

"First novels are a lot like first children. You lavish all your love and attention on them, but you also make all your rookie mistakes on them. First novels teach you how to write. They are your initial opportunity to put into practice everything you’ve heard about long-haul narrative. They’re your primary attempt at trying to walk in the footsteps of the giant (and not so giant) writers you revere and adore."

""Only good deeds demand respect." (chapter 15, p110)"

"I am from a place, Haiti, that constantly evokes nostalgia in the people who have seen it, lived in it, and loved it “before”...The blessings of our islands are also our curse. Our geography gives us year-round sun and beautiful beaches, but more and more in the age of climate change, we are on the front line of destruction. “We are a people” seems to be what we have been saying for generations to all our colonizers and invaders who seemed intent on destroying us. And now more than ever, Mother Nature, too. We are a people, the Arawaks and Taínos might have said, even as they died trying to prove it."

"There is a Haitian saying that might upset the aesthetic sensibilities of some women. "Nou lèd, nou la," it says. "We are ugly, but we are here." Like the modesty that is common in rural Haitian culture, this saying makes a deeper claim for poor Haitian women than maintaining beauty, be it skin-deep or otherwise. For women like my grandmother, what is worth celebrating is the fact that we are here, that against all the odds, we exist. To women like my grandmother, who greeted each other with this saying when they met along a trail in the countryside, the very essence of life lies in survival. It is always worth reminding our sisters that we have lived yet another day to answer the roll call of an often painful and very difficult life."

"At the heart of these protests is also the obligation of a country that needs, yet despises, those who comprise a large percentage of its fundamental workforce. Should we desire in our midst a group of people only when they’re willing to do for less pay the work that our own citizens find too grueling, too demeaning, or too hazardous? The moral question aside, what does it say about our own societal structure that we cannot within our own borders make these jobs more appealing and more humane for our own citizens?"

"Watching the news reports, it is often hard to tell whether there are real living and breathing women in conflict-stricken places like Haiti. The evening news broadcasts only allow us brief glimpses of presidential coups, rejected boat people, and sabotaged elections The women's stories never manage to make the front page. But they do exist."

"That night, I slept hugging my secret. (p112)"

"...she was like a starfish, that she constantly needed to have a piece of her break off and walk away in order for her to become something new. (p143)"

"We are ill-favored, but still we endure. Every once in a while, we must scream this as far as the wind can carry our voices. "Nou lèd, nou la!" We are ugly, but we are here! And here to stay."

"Most of the constantly rising burden of paperwork exists to give an illusion of transparency and control to a bureaucracy that is out of touch with the actual production process. Every new layer of paperwork is added to address the perceived problem that stuff still isn’t getting done the way management wants, despite the proliferation of paperwork saying everything has being done exactly according to orders. In a hierarchy, managers are forced to regulate a process which is necessarily opaque to them because they are not directly engaged in it. They’re forced to carry out the impossible task of developing accurate metrics to evaluate the behavior of subordinates, based on the self-reporting of people with whom they have a fundamental conflict of interest. The paperwork burden that management imposes on workers reflects an attempt to render legible a set of social relationships that by its nature must be opaque and closed to them, because they are outside of it. Each new form is intended to remedy the heretofore imperfect self-reporting of subordinates. The need for new paperwork is predicated on the assumption that compliance must be verified because those being monitored have a fundamental conflict of interest with those making the policy, and hence cannot be trusted; but at the same time, the paperwork itself relies on their self-reporting as the main source of information. Every time new evidence is presented that this or that task isn’t being performed to management’s satisfaction, or this or that policy isn’t being followed, despite the existing reams of paperwork, management’s response is to design yet another—and equally useless—form."

"Ideological hegemony is the process by which the exploited come to view the world through a conceptual framework provided to them by their exploiters. It acts first of all to conceal class conflict and exploitation behind a smokescreen of "national unity" or "general welfare." Those who point to the role of the state as guarantor of class privilege are denounced, in theatrical tones of moral outrage, for "class warfare.""

"The manufacture of foreign crisis and war hysteria has been used since the beginning of history to suppress threats to class rule."

"The single biggest subsidy to modern corporate capitalism is the subsidy of history, by which capital was originally accumulated in a few hands, and labor was deprived of access to the means of production and forced to sell itself on the buyer's terms. The current system of concentrated capital ownership and large-scale corporate organization is the direct beneficiary of that original structure of power and property ownership, which has perpetuated itself over the centuries."

"War crimes are only committed by defeated powers. (But as the Nazis learned in 1945, unemployed war criminals can usually find work with the new hegemonic power.)"

"From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called "laissez-faire" was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline."

"Capitalism was founded on an act of robbery as massive as feudalism. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege, without which its survival is unimaginable."

"But the point, as I argued with Caplan, is not that managers are inherently less intelligent or capable as individuals. Rather, it’s that hierarchical organizations are—to borrow that wonderful phrase from Feldman and March—systematically stupid. For all the same Hayekian reasons that make a planned economy unsustainable, no individual is “smart” enough to manage a large, hierarchical organization. Nobody–not Einstein, not John Galt–possesses the qualities to make a bureaucratic hierarchy function rationally. Nobody’s that smart, any more than anybody’s smart enough to run Gosplan efficiently–that’s the whole point. No matter how insightful and resourceful they are, no matter how prudent, as human beings in dealing with actual reality, nevertheless by their very nature hierarchies insulate those at the top from the reality of what’s going on below, and force them to operate in imaginary worlds where all their intelligence becomes useless. No matter how intelligent managers are as individuals, a bureaucratic hierarchy makes their intelligence less usable."

"Localized, small‐scale economies are the rats in the dinosaurs’ nests. The informal and household economy operates more efficiently than the capitalist economy, and can function on the waste byproducts of capitalism. It is resilient and replicates virally. In an environment in which resources for technological development have been almost entirely diverted toward corporate capitalism, it takes technologies that were developed to serve corporate capitalism, adapts them to small‐scale production, and uses them to destroy corporate capitalism. In fact, it’s almost as though the dinosaurs themselves had funded a genetic research lab to breed mammals: “Let’s reconfigure the teeth so they’re better for sucking eggs, and ramp up the metabolism to survive a major catastrophe—like, say, an asteroid collision. Nah, I don’t really know what it would be good for—but what the fuck, the Pangean Ministry of Defense is paying for it!”"

"Foreign war is a very useful tool for manipulating the popular mind and keeping the domestic population under control. War is the easiest way to shift vast, unaccountable new powers to the State. People are most uncritically obedient at the very time they need to be most vigilant."

"Capitalism could not have survived at any point in its history without state intervention. Coercive state measures at every step have denied workers access to capital, forced them to sell their labor in a buyer's market, and protected the centers of economic power from the dangers of the free market."

"When that happens, and the “World’s Sole Remaining Superpower” loses its early-adopter advantage, drone technology will work to the advantage of the side with the most decentralized, distributed organizational infrastructure, and the most widely dispersed and hardened end-points. And it will disproportionately hurt the side with the most centralized, hierarchical form of organization and the most concentrated target profile. Anyone want to venture a guess as to which respective sides fit those descriptions? Imagine, if you will, a world in which drones are cheap and widely available. Then stop and think about the target profile of the Empire and the corporate interests it serves. Imagine how easy it would be to get targeting information on the homes, churches and country clubs of the senior management and directors of the aerospace companies that make American drones. The Boardrooms and C-Suites themselves. The factories. The whole South Asian chain of command, from CINC CENTCOM down to battalion and flight headquarters. The logistical tail of the drones, including the control centers at every airbase from which drones are staged. Begin to get the picture?"

". The central theme of contemporary autonomist Marxism is a shift from giant organizations and insurrectional seizure to gradualism and Exodus. The rapid transformation of the working class, the blurring of the lines between work and the rest of life, and the shift in meeting a growing share of our needs into the informal and social economy, mean that the Old Left’s workerism (and like Harry Cleaver, I include syndicalism and council communism in the Old Left), its focus on the production process as the center of society, and its treatment of the industrial proletariat as the subject of history, have become obsolete. In this regard, read Toni Negri’s contrast of the Multitude to previous Old Left ideas of the proletariat. Mostly, I call it a heroic fantasy because any model that envisions a post-capitalist transition based on the universal adoption of any monolithic, schematized social model is as ridiculous as Socrates and Glaucon discussing what musical instruments and poetic metres will be permitted in the perfect state. The real world version of the post-capitalist transition — just as with the transition to capitalism five centuries earlier — isn’t a matter of any single cohesive social class, as the subject of history, systematically remaking the world guided by some single, comprehensive ideology, and organized around a uniform institutional model. It’s a matter of a wide variety of prefigurative institutions and technological building blocks that already exist in the present society, continuing to grow and coalesce together until they reach sufficient critical mass for a phase transition — a phase transition whose outlines can only be guessed at in the most general terms. This is the model advocated by Michel Bauwens, by Paul Mason, by John Holloway, by Peter Frase, and by a lot of other people who can hardly be fitted into any American individualist ghetto."

"The natural effect of unfettered market competition is socialism. For a short time the innovator receives a large profit, as a reward for being first to the market. Then, as competitors adopt the innovation, competition drives these profits down to zero and the price gravitates toward the new, lower cost of production made possible by this innovation (that price including, of course, the cost of the producer’s maintenance and the amortization of her capital outlays). So in a free market, the cost savings in labor required to produce any given commodity would quickly be socialized in the form of reduced labor cost to purchase it."

"The key to efficiency, for the New Class, was to remove as much of life as possible from the domain of "politics" (that is, interference by non-professionals) and to place it under the control of competent authorities. "Democracy" was recast as a periodic legitimation ritual, with the individual returning between elections to his proper role of sitting down and shutting up. In virtually every area of life, the average citizen was to be transformed from Jefferson's self-sufficient and resourceful yeoman into a client of some bureaucracy or other. The educational system was designed to render him a passive and easily managed recipient of the "services" of one institution after another."

"In a very real sense, every subsidy and privilege ... is a form of slavery. Slavery, simply put, is the use of coercion to live off of someone else's labor. For example, consider the worker who pays $300 a month for a drug under patent, that would cost $30 in a free market. If he is paid $15 an hour, the eighteen hours he works every month to pay the difference are slavery. Every hour worked to pay usury on a credit card or mortgage is slavery. The hours worked to pay unnecessary distribution and marketing costs (comprising half of retail prices), because of subsidies to economic centralization, is slavery. Every additional hour someone works to meet his basic needs, because the state tilts the field in favor of the bosses and forces him to sell his labor for less than it is worth, is slavery. All these forms of slavery together probably amount to half our working hours. If we kept the full value of our labor, we could probably maintain current levels of consumption with a work week of twenty hours. As Bill Haywood said, for every man who gets a dollar he didn't sweat for, someone else sweated to produce a dollar he never received."

"Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term "free market" in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles. ... When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations."

"The great investors are almost entirely clueless as to what their supposed “employees,” the corporation managers are doing. The CEOs are almost entirely clueless as to what the branch and facility managers are doing. And the management of each facility are almost entirely clueless as to what is going on within the black box of the actual production process. In the light of this reality, Mises’ “entrepreneur”—so carefully and closely involved in the minutiae of choosing between technical possibilities of production, a brooding omnipresence guiding the efforts of every employee—is largely a construction of fantasy. It’s quite ironic, in fact, considering that Mises starts out the block quote above with the announcement that the entrepreneur is not omnipresent."

"We have probably already passed a “singularity,” a point of no return, in the use of networked information warfare. It took some time for employers to reach a consensus that the old corporate liberal labor regime no longer served their interests, and to take note of and fully exploit the union-busting potential of Taft-Hartley. But once they began to do so, the implosion of Wagner-style unionism was preordained. Likewise, it will take time for the realization to dawn on workers that things are only getting worse, that there’s no hope in traditional unionism, and that in a networked world they have the power to bring the employer to his knees by their own direct action. But when they do, the outcome is also probably preordained. The twentieth century was the era of the giant organization. By the end of the twenty-first, there probably won’t be enough of them left to bury."

"The shift to the pre‐job pattern of self‐employment in the informal sector promises to eliminate this pathological culture in which one secures his livelihood by winning the approval of an authority figure. In my opinion, therefore, we should take advantage of the opportunity to eliminate this pattern of livelihood, instead of—as Ford proposes—replacing the boss with a bureaucrat as the authority figure on whose whims our livelihood depends. The sooner we destroy the idea of the “job” as a primary source of livelihood, and replace the idea of work as something we’re given with the idea of work as something we do, the better. And then we should sow the ground with salt."

"... how works that posit the end of history can offer any usable historical impulses, how works which aim to resolve all political differences can continue to be in any sense political, how texts designed to overcome the needs of the body can remain materialistic, and how visions of the "epoch of rest" (Morris) can energize and compel us to action. There are good reasons for thinking that all these questions are undecidable: which is not necessarily a bad thing provided we continue to try to decide them."

"The last few years have been marked by an inverted millenarianism in which premonition of the future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the end of ideology, art, or social class; the "crisis" of Leninism, social democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.,); taken together, all of these perhaps constitute what is increasing called postmodernism."

"Utopia is a spatial matter that might be thought to know potential change in fortunes in so spatialized a culture as the postmodern; but if this last is a dehistoricized and dehistorizing as I some times claim here, the synaptic chain that might lead the Utopian impulse to expression becomes harder to localize. Utopian representations knew an extraordinarily revival in the 1960's; if postmodernism is the substitute for the sixties and the compensation for their political failure, the question of Utopia would seem to be a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all."

"If the ideas of a ruling class were once the dominant (or hegemonic) ideology of bourgeois society, the advanced capitalist countries today are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without norm. Faceless masters continue to inflect the economic strategies which constrain our existence, but they no longer need to impose their speech (or are henceforth unable to); and the postliteracy of the late capitalist world reflects not only the absence of any great collective project but also the unavailability of the older national language itself."

"Theories of the postmodern - whether celebratory or couched in the language of moral revulsion and denunciation - bear a strong family resemblance to all those more ambitious sociological generalizations which, at much the same time, bring us the news of the arrival and inauguration of a whole new type of society, most famously baptized "postindustrial society"(Daniel Bell) but often also designated consumer society, media society, information society, electronic society, or high tech and the like. Such theories have the obvious ideological mission of demonstrating, to their own relief, that the new social formation in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism, namely, the primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of class struggle."

"The success story of the word postmodernism demands to be written, no doubt in best-seller format; such lexical neoevents, in which the coinage of a neologism has all the reality impact of a corporate merger, are among the novelties of media society which require not merely study but the establishment of a whole new media-lexicological subdiscipline."

"The moderns were interested in what was likely to come of such changes and their general tendency: they thought about the thing itself, substantively, in utopian or essential fashion."

"Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good. It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which "culture" has become a veritable "second nature.""

"Postmodernism theory is one of those attempts: the effort to take the temperature of the age without instruments and in a situation in which we are not even sure there is so coherent a thing as an "age,"or zeitgeist or "system" or "current situation"any longer. Postmodernism theory is then dialectical at least insofar as it has the wit to seize on that very uncertainty as its first clue and to hold to its Ariadne's thread on its way through what may not turn out to be a labyrinth at all, but a gulag or perhaps a shopping mall."

"Adorno retains the concept of the system and even makes it, as target and object of critique, the very center of his own anti-systematic thinking. ... His most powerful philosophical and aesthetic interventions are all implacable monitory reminders—sometimes in well-nigh Weberian or Foucauldian tones—of our imprisonment within system, the forgetfulness or repression of which binds us all the more strongly to it."

"This matter of periodization is not , however, altogether alien to the signals given off by the expression "late capitalism," which is by now clearly identified as a kind of leftist logo which is ideologically and politically booby-trapped, so that the very act of using it constitutes tacit agreement about a whole range of essentially Marxian social and economic propositions the other side may be far from wanting to endorse. Capitalist was itself always a funny word in this sense: just using the word - otherwise a neutral enough designation for an economic social system on whose properties all sides agree - seemed to position you in a vaguely critical suspicious, if not outright socialist stance: only committed right wing ideologues and full-throated apologists also use it with the same relish."

"If we are unable to unify the past, present, and future of the sentence, then we are similarly unable to unify the past, present, and future of our own biographical experience or psychic life."

"What "late" generally conveys is rather the sense that something has changed, that things are different, that we have gone through a transformation of the life world which is somehow decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of modernization and industrialization, less perceptible and dramatic, somehow, but more permanent precisely because more thoroughgoing and all-pervasive."

"Fruit trees in this world are ancient and exhausted sticks coming out of poor soil; the people of the village are worn down to their skulls, caricatures of some ultimate grotesque typology of basic human feature types. How is it, then, that in Van Gogh such things as apple trees explode into a hallucinatory surface of color, while his village stereotypes are suddenly and garishly overlaid with hues of red and green?"

"The problem of postmodernism - how its fundamental characteristics are to be described, whether it even exists in the first place, whether the very concept is of any use, or is, on the contrary, a mystification - this problem is a t one and the same time an aesthetic and political one."

"It would seem essential to distinguish the emergent forms of a new commercial culture - beginning with advertisements and spreading on to formal packaging of all kinds, from products to buildings, and not excluding artistic commodities such as television shows (the "logo") and best-sellers and films - from the older kinds of folk and genuinely "popular" culture which flourished when the older social classes of a peasantry and an urban artisanat still existed and which, from the mid-nineteenth century on, has gradually been colonized and extinguished by commodification and the market system."

"It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations."

"Grown men, otherwise daring, capable and virile men of accomplishment frequently find themselves terrorized and terrified by ridiculous accusations of bias or impropriety cast by spoon-fed students, indignant sluts, disabled lesbians, bipolar transsexuals, illegal immigrants and the morbidly obese. In the space of a few hundred years, the noble morality of the sovereign has been exchanged for the ignoble morality of the squeaky wheel."