The Social History of Bread

So after exploring frightening color advertisements here, I was subsequently forwarded this rather hilariously foppish renarrated history of bread, brought to us from the 1940s by Sunbeam.

Black Swans, Hedge Funds

One other thing I learned at MLG this year (see post below) is that the way Hedge Funds make their money is through betting against events that are extremely unlikely. Dubbed "black swans" these type of events include things like when oil prices rise so will all other prices (at least this was the example I was given).



The problem with this form of institutionalized gambling is that disastrous events do happen.

Marxist Literary Group & PDX

I haven't been blogging in a bit and that has partially to do with an effort to "get serious" this summer and get some reading done for my exams, but also because last month I spent a week in Portland, Oregon attending the Marxist Literary Group (MLG) annual summer institute. I also used this conference as a opportunity to visit with friends I hadn't seen in awhile and see old haunts from when I lived in PDX.

MLG seems to be divided into two "guards" of an older generation of people working to recuperate questions such as Stalin's "real" legacy, or resolving the real implications of various volumes of capital and a new guard largely focused on the question of immaterial labor, neoliberalism, and the bio-political. By far the more interesting work for me came from this "new" guard. There were some fascinating work of left political economy coming from people in literature departments like Berkeley and UC Davis. I saw an excellent paper on "centrist reason" by a graduate student at McMaster, which deliberated on the meaning of people from the Economist, Obama, and those neophytes of the techboom who imagine that the internet has reinvented politics completely. Another paper denied the use or meaning of "ideology" as false-consciousness for Marx.

Also, of note were some of the reading groups particularly one on the Wertkritik ("value critique") school in Germany. Although the discussion thanks to the UC students devolved into a deliberation of a figure I have not yet read, Moishe Postone, the readings themselves were rather interesting. Wertkritik asserts that capitalism has increasingly failed to integrate masses of unemployed laborers into the labor force, particularly in the "developing world." They also suggest that the conflict at the heart is not between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie but the forces of capitalism and those who desire the persistence of life. Capitalism in this reading is oriented against the persistence of life. There work was pretty engaging and scholars have just started translating their work, check out some links here (I particularly recommend Marx 2000).

As for Portland, I was able to visit with several friends, have several brunches which is precisely my favorite meal, and have Stumptown coffee fresh brewed every day despite my moratorium on daily coffee consumption. The Red Bicycle, an amazing breakfast place in St. Johns was probably my favorite brunch whilst in PDX featuring a tempeh-bacon avocado breakfast sandwich. I was able to see several people with whom I organized in a queer collective that occupied some time and a lot of head space for me whilst in Portland. Some of them have moved on to social work (or continued in it), or to having babies, attending graduate school. And a few have continued in political organizing around other issues not related to queer politics at all.

At the end of the institute following the BBQ I met a former co-worker from the group home at a lesbian bar for drinks, but my sleeplessness throughout the conference followed by my inability to sleep in without five in my bed, made me a sloppy/sleepy drunk. I definitely recall half-falling asleep while talking to her, and waking up quickly with the phrase "Hegelian madness..." something she would probably not know about or care to discover its true meaning. Anyway, a little embarrassing.

But Portland has changed a great deal (economically) and several good friends have moved away, so I feel settled in my narrow house in Pittsburgh with my boyfriend, and dog, even though we miss some of our friends there. Also, it is kind of a bubble in terms of the limitations people face in their daily lives be they queer, unemployed, etc. It is almost more important to be in a place where the conflicts at the heart of American society are a little more out in the open.

Death to the Franchise

As much as I sometimes enjoy Michael Jackson's music (earlier better than later), I have to agree with what my friend Luis said,"Come on guys, it's not like it was Prince."

Anyway, Germaine Greer writes something excellent in the Guardian, on the issue, arguing that in death he forestalls aging and irrelevance.

Update: Hitler reacts to MJ's death.

Working Class Studies Conference

So I attended a few sessions of the Working Class Studies Conference in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago, and I wanted to jot down a few observations.

Two of the keynote speakers were two high level union organizers who were discussing the possibilities for transnational work based organizing. Bill Fletcher, a former AFL-CIO organizer, made some really heartening comments particularly about how unions need to start rethinking themselves, i.e. organizational structures, but more importantly what are unions as political bodies, whom do/should they represent? This was his response to questions about sex workers and the increasing percentage of unemployed. He also indicated that unions need to have conversations that in the past one would be red-baited out of the room. For example, unions need to start talking about globalization beyond a kind of nationalist protectionism and in particular capitalism itself--its sustainability and worth. Both concluded that the union movement needs new blood, it needs young people to start infiltrating its ranks with new ideas and forcing older organizers to start retiring. For me these developments, if they are indicative of some larger change in the base of union opinion, were inspiring. Particularly because of my own lackluster short-lived attempts to organize a non-profit for developmentally disabled adults. I found that the organizing tactics that depended on a shared "shop floor" where woefully inept at organizing workers in scenarios where they are geographically contained but atomized into smaller cells.

I attended another panel in which a paper presented new forms of exploitation ("immaterial labor" as defined by Hardt & Negri?) by way of the internship, as essentially freeing business from having to pay workers for training.

Lastly, I attended two consecutive panels arranged around the same theme: Ontologies of Latin American Politics. These were by far the most engaging a difficult panels of the whole conference for me, partially because they would shift in an out of Spanish.

The one thing I found rather troubling was that several participants were overemphasizing the post-Fordist turn (a move away from centralized state planning in economic matters and assembly-line production) in the economies of Latin America. Whilst I think this was definitely clear in places like Argentine and Chile where the neo-liberal changes were imposed in the latter by an authoritarian government. One of the panelists persisted in getting into an argument with one of the older interlocutors both in discussing the political significance of the "death" of the political subject, i.e. the industrial worker. I have to say that any attempt to generalize the post-Fordist condition outside the West is highly suspect, particularly into places where the disaggregated Fordist manufacturing is dispersed into. Certainly, we also see mechanisms like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund training peoples of the "underdeveloped" world into neo-liberal mindsets instructing them to think of themselves like the subjects of game theory scenarios or performing "cost-benefit analysis" for all decisions, not to mention the Grameen Bank model of micro-capital. Despite these distributions the actual predominance of "immaterial labor" does not seem to fit economies still residing with neo-feudal arrangements, the fragments of the West's exported Fordism, and massive informal markets.

Overall though I was fascinated by panelists addressing different elements of this question of the ontology of politics in Latin America, in particular was a paper discussing the development of ideas of "human capital" in Chile, and the necessary rejection of humanism when new labor practices obliterate the difference between "meaning" and "action." Another paper attempted to reject the neo-Hegelian strain of some contemporary Marxisms, arguing against considering the present as "radical negativity" and instead in terms of "ontology," a theory of being in order to offer critiques of things like the bureaucratic classes. The connection between the reasoning here was not altogether clear to me , but it was a surprisingly cogent response to the persistent pull on Hegel as the sort of axiom by which Marx becomes a better philosopher.

MC Hammer Nostalgia

1st: a video much discussed by a friend on a recent visit to Portland of MC Hammer thrashing about his nether parts in a speedo for all to see, in his attempt to adapt to the predominance of gangsta rap: "Pumps in a Bump" (apparently banned on MTV). Actually, I think Hammer's mistake here with the speedo, the invitation to fixate on his endowment, indicates his incommensurability with gansta-rap as whole given its emphasis on a politicized economically motivated violence and deep urban alienation.

MC Hammer - Pumps in a Bump
by Discodandan

Also, "Can't Touch This" inspired dance in a LA shop vending "skinny jeans."

Google Phone

I just purchased this phone just as it was becoming obsolete,



but I don't care I fucking love it. It is definitively good to be able to access maps when you are lost (as I could have been last weekend in Chicago), access the internet when you have questions, and text with more efficiency and accuracy.

Also it is the closest I will get to Penny's computer book from Inspector Gadget.