| Number 104 | February 2, 2000 |
|
This Week:
|
|
Greetings, Welcome to the new readers this week. I appreciate all of you who forward the Notes to others or send along the names of new subscribers. I am terrible at self-promotion, so any help my readers give is much appreciated. Thanks for the support! The other kind of support that I really appreciate is the financial kind. Later this month will be the bi-annual Nygaard Notes Pledge drive, so get those checkbooks ready! I say "bi-annual" because the first one was six months ago. I don't know if they really will occur twice a year or not. A couple of months ago I mentioned that the editor of Access Press, Charlie Smith, had been diagnosed with cancer. Well, I just learned that his chemotherapy is having the desired effect and the preliminary report is that the cancer is retreating. Hooray! Hope you're back in the saddle soon, Charlie! I have been giving facts and figures for a few weeks in the Notes, so this week I get out of the fact business and delve into a little philosophy, focusing on class and how it affects our thinking. Let me know what you think. Happy Groundhog Day! Nygaard |
|
|
The Context Club is cruising along. So far we have had 20 people express interest in the Club, and 13 of them have actually attended one or more of the first 4 sessions. The group is meeting on alternating Saturday afternoons and Monday evenings, with the next two meetings being February 3rd and 12th. Come on down! On the 3rd we will be talking about Customer Service (believe it or not), and after that we may be discussing the work of Immanuel Wallerstein in his book "Utopistics, or Historical Choices of the 21st Century." Or maybe not. The group will have its own ideas, and we'll see where they lead. I'm just learning about this discussion group thing, so come and help us figure out how to do it! If you are not on the mailing list for the Club, get in touch and I'll put you on it. Even if you don't make it to the meetings, you'll be sent the readings that the group is doing, and they're pretty interesting. I only plan to mention the Club occasionally in the pages of the Notes, so you have to be on the mailing list to ensure that you don't miss anything. |
|
Since I've been talking about labor lately, let me announce for the benefit of readers in and around the Twin Cities that the Ninth Annual "Meeting The Challenge Labor Conference" will take place at the end of the month, Friday evening Feb 23rd and Saturday the 24th, over in St. Paul. If you want to get the "big picture" of what the progressive side of the labor movement is thinking about and acting on, this is the place to be. This year's theme is "Globalization at Home: Effective Organizing in the Global Economy." Pretty timely. They'll have theater, video, high-powered speakers, panels, and a fishbowl discussion (whatever that is). The winner of the annual Minnesota Solidarity Award will be announced, and wait'll you see the literature tables and the stuff they're handing out! All events are free, although you'll want to donate something, I'm sure. This is a great annual Twin Cities event that lots of people don't even know about. Call 651-696-6371 to get more details. |
|
The January 18th New York Times ("All the News That's Fit to Print") reports that "the government's failure to recruit and retain skilled employees is one of its biggest problems, severely impairing the ability of many agencies to perform their missions." This worker shortage is in part due to the fact that federal agencies "drastically reduced or froze their hiring efforts" in recent years, steps made necessary by the "balanced budget" mania of the nineties and continuing today. Besides cuts in services that many Americans need, the contrived labor shortage also means that many regulatory functions of the government are simply not being done. These tight budgets in times of plenty are part of the ongoing attack on the regulatory and service parts of government that the owning classes hate so much, and they affect all sorts of agencies, as the report confirms. Here are a few interesting quotations from the article:
In case there is anyone who thinks that there is some basis in reality for these extreme limitations on all sorts of standard government practices, the Congressional Budget Office informed members of Congress late this week that it expects the federal budget surplus to swell to $5.610 trillion over the next decade. This is $1 trillion higher than the budget office's previous estimate, in July, and about $600 billion more than the Clinton administration's final projection, which was released in December. |
|
As regular readers of Nygaard Notes are well aware, I derive immense amusement from reading the newspapers. But that's not why I talk about them so much. I talk about them because I consider them excellent indicators of our culture's dominant ideology, and I think that's important to understand. And, at the same time as they reflect dominant beliefs and attitudes, they also shape the beliefs and attitudes of the "average" person. This, in turn, affects how the "average" person understands the world. In a nominal democracy, in which "average" people have to approve the actions of the government (or at least have to shut up while the government does its work), the role of media in supporting the elite world-view is crucial. Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman call this job of the media the "manufacture of consent." Last week I talked about some of the things we miss out on by not having a labor section in our newspapers. This week's "Quote" of the Week gives an example of how standard "news" reporting serves to reinforce certain ways of looking at the world. The Bush spokesman was quoted as saying that Labor Secretary-designate Elaine Chao "has committed [herself] ... to protect and help develop this nation's most important resource: working men and women." I hope readers noticed the owning-class bias in this remark. To the owners of capital, workers are "resources" to be "protected and developed." Similar to timber, say, or petroleum (of course, we don't even protect them, but that's another story). Human beings, on the other hand, have inalienable rights, and they sometimes even – Gasp! – believe that they should have some say in how their labor is applied. This truly radical idea is sometimes referred to as "democracy." The view of workers as "resources" comes naturally to the owners of capital, and is to be expected. What has been alarming to me in my lifetime is the degree to which the views of that class have come to be adopted by – or at least have come to seem reasonable to – working-class people whose interests would seem to be completely different than those of the owners. It's more than "interests" that are completely different. The favorite and most cutting epithet that my recently deceased friend John Huebner could cast at anyone was to call them a "capitalist!" The accusation was meant to label the object of his derision as having internalized the values of the owning, or capitalist, class. He was expressing his disdain for a different way of looking at the world, a way that values product over process, that values things over the work we do to create those things, that sees people as resources rather than as creatures with hearts and souls. Class and Thinking I worked for many years in a collective, worker-managed business, and I clearly recall an argument that we had over what to call one of our committees. The committee's job was to be to look after the way we divided up and were compensated for our labor. To a minority of us (maybe 2 or 3 out of 12) the obvious name for such a committee would be "Labor." But the majority automatically assumed that it would be called the "Human Resources" committee. So we fought about it. What's in a name? Plenty, in my opinion. I believe that most of my co-workers, good souls though they were, had been quite thoroughly socialized to think of workers – themselves! – as "resources" rather than as people. Another conversation I had around the same time, in the same workplace, was also revealing. I tended to have frequent disagreements with one of my co-workers in particular, which I suggested to her might have to do with our different class backgrounds. After she told me that my comment was the silliest thing she had ever heard, she agreed to let me explain. I posed a hypothetical situation in which the group identified a problem and began to seek a solution. How did she approach this process? "It's obvious," she said. "You figure out the best way to get the result you want and then you make a policy." I pointed out that this is exactly what I would expect to hear from a person from her class, which is managerial/professional. "How else could you do it?" she asked, and she really couldn't imagine. I said that a person from the managerial or owning class would typically have the expectation that a policy would simply be carried out, so the only question is to figure out the most "efficient" (or cheapest, or quickest) thing to do. A worker, on the other hand, will always be aware that a policy includes not just an outcome, but also requires somebody to do the work necessary to achieve that outcome. And, in contrast to members of the upper classes, that "somebody" is going to be us. As a result, I pointed out, the problem-solving approach of a worker will typically include a consideration of not only the "result," but also the process by which that result is to be achieved. Not only is this more sensible for everyone in the long run, since it is more likely to incorporate sustainable working conditions into the solution, but it is a more humane approach that values the worker – that is, the person – as much as the product. The ultimate "outcome," under capitalism, is profit. So, to the degree that one has internalized the values of capitalism, that is the degree to which one would be expected to evaluate policies, jobs, government programs, and everything else by how much wealth they produce. My alternative, anti-capitalist, vision for a society is thus the building of collectively-run workplaces in which work itself is valued as much as the product of that work The outcome, in other words, would be our lives. This subtle and oh-so-difficult-to-achieve vision is what many of us used to have in mind when we would shout "People Before Profits!" And some of us, those who have been successful in resisting the dominant ideology of capitalism that is growing more powerful and far-reaching by the day, still have this vision in mind. And helping others to resist this commodified ideology is a large part of the reason that Nygaard Notes exists. As for the Bush spokesman and the quote about "protecting and developing" the nation's two-legged resources, it's worth noting that this was reported as a DEFENSE of Ms. Chao. If any reporter questioned the assumption underlying this comment, such question did not make it into the newspaper. It probably wasn't asked. As for this "vision thing" (as George Bush, Sr. used to say), what if Ms. Chao had committed herself to "Improve working conditions for all of America's working men and women and see to it that those men and women receive their fair share of the wealth created by their labor?" Now THAT would be the "Quote" of the YEAR! |