David Graeber's Thoughts on an Occupation

Yesterday I finally had the chance to hear David Graeber speak. The author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Graeber is credited with being one of the architects of the consensus decision making at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement. I had hoped his talk at Bertell Ollman's Friday afternoon seminar would focus on Debt, as I'd been hankering for some sort of in-person Cliff Notes for the hefty volume that arrived, appropriately enough, under the Christmas tree two months back.

Instead Graeber focused on the rise of Occupy Wall Street, a decision that did not disappoint.  His talk revolved around the question of why this movement has caught the attention of the media and the imagination of the nation when other social movements of the past thirty years were largely ignored.

In answer to this question, he offered a series of possibilities: of course there is the advent of social media and the indignation that follows the immediate webcasts of police brutality. And there is the internationalization of the mass media, so that the earliest reports of OWS were carried by Al Jazeera, and in the Dutch, German, British and Japanese media, leaving the usually conservative American media compelled to cover the movement simply by force of peer pressure. A member of the seminar-sized audience reminded the group that the September 17th events had nearly perfect timing, coming as they did after the infuriating summer of 2011 where the U.S. Congress frittered away the possibility of a jobs bill while debating the increase in the debt ceiling and daring the financial industry to lower the government's credit rating (thereby, of course, dramatically increasing the debt due to increased interest rates.) Americans could not have been more disgusted with their representatives in that moment of rising unemployment rates and congressional stonewalling. The people were primed for someone, somewhere, to fight back against the forces of financialization and congressional intransigence.

But the most provocative idea from Graeber's freewheeling talk stemmed from his analysis of the content on the We Are the 99 Percent tumblr blog, where photos and text tell the stories of hundreds of indebted and unemployed, under-employed, or minimum-wage Americans who share a photograph of themselves with a note detailing their dire economic circumstances. Graeber observed that the preponderance of people posting on this site are women, and that among the men who have posted, most are either in the traditional helping professions of teaching or healthcare, or they are war veterans (our version of caring, mission-driven work for working class men). 

He went on to argue that the indignation that the Occupy movement tapped in to comes from a sense of moral outrage that goes something like this: I've followed the rules, I've done everything the society expects of me (worked hard, studied hard, gone to college, shouldered student and mortgage debt), and now, having entered into some caring profession, I have been rendered so indebted that I cannot even take care of my own family. Meanwhile, the folks on Wall Street have plundered and pilfered the economy, and we've been bailing them out.

The depth of this moral outrage, Graeber asserted, stems from a desire to pursue meaningful work that is thwarted by a system that punishes altruism and rewards greed and swindling.

Graeber continued with his analysis, extending it to the culture industry: For the most part, only the wealthy can afford to take up meaningful work, whether caring or creative.  The price of entry for a job in the arts, or the media, or most of the creative professions is a couple of years working as an unpaid intern — living on nothing in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Anyone without parents wealthy enough to support such a career launch is priced out of creative work—shut out of these fields.  This, he argued, explains the resentment of Americans toward what can be easily cast as a privileged intelligentsia in the media, the universities, and elsewhere.

Photo David Shankbone, October 6, 2011, New York City.
Used under a CC BY 2.0 Attribution License.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shankbone/

Graeber's talk led me to wonder whether the rise of OWS might be seen, at least in part, as a crisis in the work of care.  Traditionally care had been the unpaid work of women in the home, and to a great extent, it continues to be.  But the move of women into the professional labor force created a gap (this becomes a "second shift" for women who can't afford to buy themselves out of the work of care, but represents a market opportunity for entrepreneurs who find ways to sell in-home care services to those who can afford it.) This shift in how care is provided has created an underclass of low-paid nannies, nursing home staff, and in-home healthcare aids, and, at the same time, has priced most of us out of being able to afford care for ourselves and our families. This situation, in turn, creates a market for new financial instruments such as long-term care insurance. The work of care — the intergenerational debt we owe each other — becomes another site where financiers can step in and capture a percentage.

In Self-Help, Inc: Makeover Culture in American Life, I argued that the self-improvement industry's success is driven by American anxiety about remaining employed or employable, and married or marriageable.  I argued that self-help practices are a form of immaterial labor, where individuals are urged to work on themselves to secure themselves against individual obsolescence and that readers of self-help literature find themselves in a cycle of belaboring themselves in order to remain economically viable. But when work on the self, whether through self-improvement regimens, or through the more traditional respected avenues of higher education, leads only to further immiseration, one has to wonder how long it will be before so many belabored selves seek a new occupation.

(This post was originally published on Micki McGee's blog at www.self-help-inc.blogspot.com/.)

Beginning of Junior Year and Johan Norberg

Another year began at Fordham University this week. I must admit I had grown used to an empty and quiet campus over the summer but the returning students have brought back a lot of life and activity to Rose Hill.

This will be my junior year. I'll have more opportunities to explore the courses offered to American Studies majors, look into taking on a minor (I'm considering African and African American Studies) and put thought into studying abroad in the spring (but probably not).

The year began for me last night at a guest lecture by Johan Norberg. Norberg is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based out of Washington DC, and the author of two books. The event was co-sponsored by the College Republicans and the Young Americans for Liberty, a new group at Fordham that has just recieved official club status. Since I was one of the first 20 people to arrive I was lucky enough to get a free copy of Norberg's newest book, Financial Fiasco: How America's Infatuation with Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis. The jury is still out on whether I'll actually have a chance to read it as classes started and I'll be hard pressed to find time to do any personal reading until December.

Norberg's lecture focussed on, what else, the current economic crisis. He claims that the crisis has been caused by 7 steps including easy money, home ownership and the creation of the shadow banking system to handle repackaged and redistributed mortgage securities. Norberg admitted that it was a little rude of him to blame the Americans for the crisis (himself a Swede) but assured us that other countries were trying to cause the economic crisis as well, we were just the only one with the size to do it.

The lecture was incredibly informative. At this point I must admit that before last night I would have been unable to explain the economic crisis to anyone who asked beyond mumbling about "subprime mortgages" and "the housing bubble." After last night's talk I feel I have a much better understanding about what happened to cause the economic crisis but unfortunatly, like everyone else, I'm not really any closer to understanding how to fix it.

Norberg claimed that many of the fixes being proposed and enacted now are the same kind of bad decisions that led to the original crisis, such as lowering interest rates and creating lots of liquidity in the market. He also said that by bailing out certain groups that were "too big to fail" we have created a precedent that encourages these groups to participate in the same risky deals that they were before, now safe in the knowledge that if they fail the government and tax payers will be there to bail them out.

At the end of the lecture the floor was opened up for questions and one struck me in particular as an American Studies major. The question was about how China owns a great deal of our debt and whether or not that might actually effect our sovereignty as a nation. Norberg replied that although it is true that China owns an inordinate amount of American debt, and that they are possibly calling for a second reserve currency in the world, China's status as owner of so much US debt actually creates for them a vested interest in American economic success. As he put if "If you owe the bank a hundred dollars, you have a problem, if you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem."

Overall the lecture was a great way to kick-off the new academic year and I look forward to more stimulating discussions and lectures as the semester progresses and, of course, blogging about it.