The Economist as Hipster

...and so if in the midst of civilization -- founded upon the Faustian urge to dominate nature by mastering time, mastering the links of social cause and effect -— in the middle of an economic civilization founded upon the confidence that time could indeed he subjected to our will, our psyche was subjected itself to the intolerable anxiety that death being causeless, life was causeless as well, and time deprived of cause and effect had come to a stop.

It is time to tell the truth. Those are the first words of an astonishing 31-page diatribe, The Fake Revolt, published in 1967 by one Gershon Legman.

Ostensibly, the pamphlet berates "the people behind" the hippies and beatniks of the 1960s counterculture. But Legman lingers just a tad too long and with too much relish on salacious anecdote and intemperate hyperbole to take his screed entirely at face value.

Almost in passing, Legman indicts a slew of no-so-innocent bystanders whose minds had long ago "been reduced to malleable pap" by the media, "all of which are totally hitched to saleable products, and are themselves for sale..." In short, the counterculture is no better (but no worse) than "the usual condescending flatulencies... the same old crap... the whole stinking old-peoples' mess" that passes for modern so-called culture.

So what does a rabidly homophobic and downright paranoid polemic against hippie merchants of perversion and hallucination have to do with macro-economic analysis? Only this: any attempt to "tell the truth" about the depravity of what passes for economics these days is bound to come across as a spittle-flecked rant rather than as a "reasoned critique."

Why? Because the economists are not serious. Legman fronts his discourse with epigrammatic quotes from Robert Lindner's 1944 Rebel Without a Cause (not to be confused with the movie of the same name) and Norman Mailer's "The White Negro" (1957). Both authors address the phenomenon of the psychopath but there is a subtle difference that becomes evident from consulting to the source texts themselves. Lindner was referring to the clinically diagnosed criminal psychopath, while Mailer was employing a metaphor of generalized psychopathology to define "the hipster" as a "philosophical psychopath" -- a psychopath "and yet not a psychopath but the negation of the psychopath for he possesses the narcissistic detachment of the philosopher."

The economist of today is a hipster... and yet not a hipster, but the negation of the hipster.

"A totalitarian society makes enormous demands on the courage of men, and a partially totalitarian society makes even greater demands for the general anxiety is greater."

If we grant a certain naïvety to the 1950s technocratic "confidence that time could indeed he subjected to our will," what could be said about the insidious restoration of that obsolete posture, long after C. Wright Mills, Robert McNamara and even the maestro himself, Alan Greenspan, have come and gone? Is it mere cynicism that compels a macro-economist to not only assume but to belligerently insist upon a hypothetical production process that encompasses no actual human relationship between the workers and the work that they perform? Is it some technocratic tic that induces a "progressive" economist to confuse the static, retrospective nature of statistics -- and models based on them -- with the dynamic process of production? These examples are not anomalies: they are canonical. To object is to reveal oneself as some kind of crank.

Or is there a more sinister explanation? Are we witnessing, once again, the "stench of fear," the "collective failure of nerve" that pervades an age when intellectuals know full well that dissent constitutes a note, "which could be called in any year of overt crisis." Not that the economist is going to be marched off to a concentration camp, insane asylum or shot. It is just that the economist's analysis -- and therefore the economist, too -- is a salable product and the market for "time-less," "labor-less" macro-economic analysis is so much more lucrative.

Afterthought: Mailer's essay was 9,000 words, Legman's pamphlet 32-pages. My blog post is 600 words. There is an economy of condensation and of transience at work in what can be said today. In other words, very little. "tl;dr."

The Productivity of Unemployment

Peter Frase:

If you believe, as I do, that it’s a good idea to reduce the amount of time people spend in paid employment, it would also be nice to increase the productivity of whatever they do in the time thus freed up.

Work Sharing is the Answer

Dean Baker:

The basic point is simple. If we encourage employers to deal with reduced demand by shortening work hours rather than laying people off, we can get back to full employment relatively quickly. Every month, firms lay off or fire roughly 2 million people. If this figure can be reduced by 10 percent through work sharing, it would be equivalent to creating 200,000 additional jobs a month.

Intellectual Progress?

Nick Rowe (2011): "because my policy increases output, because there's 1% more person-hours of *government* employment."

Lionel Robbins (1929): "The days are gone when it was necessary to combat the naïve assumption that the connection between hours and output is one of direct variation, that it is necessarily true that a lengthening of the working day increases output and a curtailment diminishes it."  

Nick Rowe (2011): "Sandwichman: This post is not about work-sharing. I am holding hours per worker constant. You are off-topic. Do not hijack this post. Stop now. Not everybody shares your interests."

Breivik and Lind, a Side-By-Side Comparison

The document below the jump compares the text of the manifesto of the Oslo mass murderer, Anders Breivik, in the first column with that of the Free Congress Foundation pamphlet, "'Political Correctness': A Short History of an Ideology" in the second column. Differences between the two texts are highlighted in red in the Breivik text and blue in the Lind text. A line by line comparison has only been completed for the first chapter. But chapter divisions have been completed for the whole document.

Rehman: "The Witch-Hunt for Liberal Traitors"

From Jalees Rehman: From Frankfurt to Utøya, Guernica, a magazine of art and politics:

One of the central themes in the texts of contemporary far right American and European writers that are compiled in Anders Breivik’s compendium “2083: A European Declaration of Independence” is the idea that cultural Marxists and multiculturalists are conspiring to destroy Western culture by promoting the immigration of Muslims. The persistent use of the expression “cultural Marxism” is a very effective tool employed by far right authors, because it evokes the deep-rooted historical fear of Marxism that still exists in the United States and in many parts of Europe. Following the collapse of communist states in Europe, far right thinkers may have found “cultural Marxism” to be a handy substitute adversary to mobilize popular support. The vagueness of the term “cultural Marxism” and by linking it to multiculturalism or feminism allows far right leaders to cast a wide net, potentially implying that all fellow citizens who support progressive-liberal values are somehow linked to a “Marxist” conspiracy. By further connecting such “cultural Marxists” to the idea of a Muslim enemy, far right thinkers tap into the historical European fear of Muslim or Ottoman invasions, and also accuse liberals of betraying their countries by colluding with the enemy.

These contemporary approaches of far right leaders in Europe and the United States remind us of two myths used by the Nazis to justify some of their horrific crimes. The Dolchstoßlegende (dagger thrust or stab-in-the-back myth) was propagated by German right wing extremists, nationalists, and the military during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich to blame the World War I defeat on left-of-center political parties in Germany, such as the social democrats or communists, who had metaphorically stabbed their country in the back. The myth of a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy was also used by the Nazis to tap into the deep-rooted European anti-semitism and accused Jews of working with Russian Bolsheviks.

Below is a collection of blog posts, including Ecological Headstand, that have discussed the Breivik/Lind/Buchanan/LaRouche political-correctness conspiracy doctrine.

• US Intellectual History: Fun With Primary Sources: The Free Congress Foundation's "History of Political Correctness"
• The Broker: Breivik and the Gramscian legacy
• Max Blumenthal: Anders Behring Breivik, a perfect product of the Axis of Islamophobia
• Three Way Fight: Anders Breivik, Mainstream Islamophobia, and the Far Right
• Old Hickory's Weblog: "Cultural Marxism": a far-right conspiracy theory involving the Frankfurt School
• Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist: What do Alexander Cockburn and the Norwegian mass murderer have in common?
• Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist: Alexander Cockburn responds on Lind/Bleivik

Ecological Headstand:

• Forensic Fun with Footnotes: Calumny, Plagiarism, Murder (Patrick J. Buchanan's The Death of the West)
• "Cultural Conservatives": Prophets of Deceit
• What is Cultural Conservatism
• Martin Jay Spills Some Beans
• Confessions of a Cultural Marxist

Chip Berlet at Talk to Action:

• Anders Behring Breivik: Soldier in the Christian Right Culture Wars
• Updated: Breivik's Core Thesis is White Christian Nationalism v. Multiculturalism]
• Breivik cited William S. Lind, Free Congress Foundation, & the LaRouchites
• Oslo terrorism roundup

Forensic Fun with Footnotes: Calumny, Plagiarism, Murder

Reading a book by Patrick J. Buchanan may be presumed to be anything but fun. The man is a lying thug from head to toe and his books are slick, slanderous forgeries. But some merriment can be recuperated from the experience if only one takes the time and effort to trace Buchanan's fraudulent "scholarly apparatus."

Chapter Four of Buchanan's The Death of the West, "Four Who Made a Revolution," shares with the Oslo mass murder, Anders Breivik's presumed "manifesto" the feature of being plagiarized from an unreliable source (the same source) who distorted his sources... and so on.

Listed second among the five friends who "were kind enough to read the text and to urge cuts, alterations and additions" was Bill Lind. Five of 49 footnotes are to authors subsequently included in the Free Congress Foundation pamphlet, "Political Correctness: A Short History of An Ideology," also plagiarized by Breivik -- William Lind (2), Raymond V. Raehn (2) and Gerald L. Atkinson. However, there are two additional footnotes to "Michael Löwy" that are clearly not from Löwy but again from Raehn. The true source is evident when one traces the footnote and compares Buchanan's text with Löwy's and Raehn's. The infidelities in Raehn's quotations are carried through, unmolested, into Buchanan's text.