where do you draw the subjectivist line?

"the rich and the poor had each availed themselves of precisely the extreme examples that will best serve their case, examples that will have to be conceded by the 'other side'...the implicit purpoose of these competing ideologies is not just to convince, but to control; better stated, they aim to control by convincing."
james scott from "weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance"

" the market- what marxists used to call the cash nexus. more generally an ideology of ranking and valuing everything according to its perceived monetary value."

"after all, the victorian prescription, quiet recrimination, remains the most widely sold elixir in our pharmacopeia of expectations for the poor."

"people who are poor but not in imminent danger of perishing have more of a chance of catching their breath and actually conceptualizing their poverty."
willam t vollmann from "poor people"

and it is fear of that "conceptualizing" that keeps the bureaucrats in the pay of the economic elite searching for new ways to force the poor to spend their time scrambling to make sure their "paperwork" is in order...or meeting new requirements for entitlments...or quietly going underground and submitting to "the market" and its mechanisms that insure inequities...perpetuate stereotypes and "quiet recriminations"...( and let's not forget the tendency of the legal system to make the side-effects of poverty, such as loitering, vagrancy, begging, etc. vaugely described crimes so that the forces of law and order [agents of an oppressor class] can keep the unsightly detritus eroded from the system out of sight of "nice people"...why demonize the poor as "shiftless"? because they do not contribute to the holy growth of the gdp...if you cannot or will not agrandize wealth you may as well not exist) i am not poor...i have never felt particularly deprived at any point in my life even though there have been difficulties...there are, no doubt, many who would characterize me as such and my working class subdivision as a row of crackerbox hovels ( they might also characterize me as stupid, or lazy, or unmotivated, or brainwashed, or genetically inferior for stubbornly remaining as i am...well...fuck my critics...we do not move in the same circles...they are clueless, and, judging by the behavior of the market recently, utterly doomed...just too boxed in by their self-perceptions and need for "growth" to see the writing on the wall...i will be too busy to celebrate capital's demise...but i won't miss it)...once your basic material needs are met ( "...not in imminent danger of perishing...) poverty becomes an interior landscape informed by temperment and culture...while i hesitate to dignify the consumerist utopia by calling it a culture, like it or not it is what informs our concepts of poverty through the drug injection system of the mass media ( the "control by convincing" part i borrowed form james scott [thanks for the tip captain...great book])...engineered desire...a mass comparison of self to "the market's" idea of what a consumer should be..pretty far removed form what actually makes people happy...look at all the useless crap you have lying about that profited someone else when you bought it but you don't really use...i have some ( i was enculturated by tv like everybody else around here...but the tv broke when i was twelve and we didn't get another one until i was nineteen...those seven years played hell with the programming...that and the acid)...i have been giving it to the salvation army or goodwill or the landfill recently in an effort to pare back the sheer mass and to do some "conceptualizing" about what actually constitutes the "poverty" in my life...there is some...but it has nothing to do with material goods...goodwill industries and better world books are seeing to that and allowing me to move as far outside the consumerist utopia as possible with out cutting all ties and moving to the wilderness...no doubt there will be many who disagree with my assesment of current events...fine...i haven't been shy with my criticisms...life is subjectivist, non-linear, and empirical...we can neither be right or wrong all the time...i just call 'em like i see 'em...so sue me.


6-11-2011 8:08 pm

"any census of unemployed persons would be forced of necessity to include the shiftless and unemployable sections of the popultion, as well as those on the borderland of unemployment."
encylopedia britannica 1911 edition

a fine british imperial edwardian social darwinist interpretation of the lower castes of society...inherently blaming the unemployable for their condition and equating them with shiftlessness while recognizing the necessity of a pool of unemployed to the smooth functioning of industrial capitalism...doubtlessly some edwardian academic was responsible for the article arguing against any sort of effort to quantify the unemployed...if you delineate the problem you might be forced to actually do something about it so ignore it...analogous to christian science's " to name it is to claim it" and a hangover from the victorian inabillity to address any sort of isssue that might reflect badly on the social ordering fostered by an aristocratic elite...i'd love the brits if they weren't such reprehensible shits ( scotch and irish in extraction on dad's side...celtic loathing of anything anglo-saxon may be genetic ) no wonder they loved maggie.