Yesterday my daughter turned 37; her daughters are going to turn 4 and 1 in another month. My dad hit 89 in January, and I made it to 64 in March… With these markers in time, it’s impossible not to notice how short our lives are. I’m already past the age that most people made it to a century ago. My mom died in late 2019 at 83, and my dad is still going, with expectations that he’ll make it at least to his mid-90s since he’s still mentally perfectly sharp. His mobility is severely compromised, and his hearing is going, but otherwise, why not? Meanwhile, my granddaughters are bursting with life, and my daughter is thriving as a mother, a public intellectual, an activist, and on the cusp of putting herself into the maelstrom of public school teaching for the first time. It’s all so darn interesting! And encouraging!
With age comes a deepening sense of the passage of time, but also of its immensity. And with new histories being written, reinterpreting or rediscovering histories that stretch back to times in the distant “pre-historical” past, the blip that constitutes our moment in time shrinks towards its eventual obscurity. All of my own writing and thinking are a product of the peculiar decades from the 1960s to the present (I was born in 1957). In my last post I mentioned the odd feeling of seeing government money being widely distributed, putting a thin tiny patch on a beleaguered and discredited social safety net. My whole adult life has unfolded in a time of aggressive capitalist assault on living standards, aggregate wages, the environment, and life in general, with the United States in particular responsible for a couple of dozen wars and literally millions of dead.
The persistence AND paucity of meaningful resistance also characterizes this period. I’ve been part of countless demonstrations, movements, and counter-cultural efforts to shift the values and priorities of this society, but the real experience of the past 40 years is one of continual loss, shrinking expectations, growing pessimism, and a broad collapse of empathy and solidarity all around me (albeit with many people trying their best to resist and reverse those trends). The dominant reality of being in the heart of the most militarized empire in world history, and seeing the wars and mayhem imposed on other countries either enthusiastically supported or blithely ignored, makes me feel a bit crazy. Seeing that culture of war and domination gradually engulfing daily life “at home” is enraging too, even if it’s impossible not to feel that some of those mass shootings, misogynistic violence, and police murders represent the (militaristic) chickens coming home to roost. But we know who suffers from this, and there’s no pleasure or even schadenfreude when the actual human consequences are part of the picture. As I write this, police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of George Floyd’s murder, better than not for sure, but such a rare occurrence with so much attention only underscores how out of whack the whole system is. No doubt the mass demonstrations last summer, combined with the numerous eyewitnesses and witness videos were what produced this exceedingly rare case of accountability for police murder.
Perhaps years from now we’ll look back on this as a turning point, perhaps in combination with the repudiation of Trump and his racist followers, where we finally began the actual process of reconstruction and reparation that will take generations more, but maybe at last we’ve moved irrevocably onto that path. Let’s hope so, and do all we can to make it so.
Made it on 35-mile ride on our new e-bike across the Golden Gate Bridge and San Rafael-Richmond Bridge from where this photo was taken… nice views!
Waiting in line for the vaccine at SF General Hospital, late February 2021.
I was just talking to a friend who said something like, “maybe with Biden it’ll get better,” referring to housing or senior care or food quality or… I can’t remember what it was. But I have heard this sentiment plenty of times in the past couple of months, and if you read the national liberal press, from the NY Times to the Nation or New Yorker or Mother Jones, there’s a palpable enthusiasm for the FDR-like “boldness” of the Covid $2 trillion, with its new basic income for children, its extended unemployment and medical premium subsidies, etc. The long, sordid history of Biden’s opportunism is being quickly swept under the rug in favor of this new, unencumbered embrace of a post-Reagan, post-neoliberal re-energizing of the government.
Lost in all this, besides Biden’s decades of support for racist policing and his corrupt pandering to credit card and banking industries, is the role of concentrated capital in running the show. There’s no way Biden or Harris is anything but in service to concentrated capital. So to understand this moment better, we have to go beyond the immediate drama of whether or not the Democrats will take the power they hold by a sliver and expand it through DC (and maybe Puerto Rico) statehood with its two (or four) new senators, put through the voting rights acts bills that have already passed the House, etc. Any serious effort to hold, consolidate, expand, and extend their power simply requires they overcome the reticence of Feinstein, Sinema, Manchin, and the other millionaire Senators defending the Jim Crow filibuster in the name of a long-lost bipartisan comity.
But to what end would they consolidate power? What is their real agenda? Finally spending some of the massive federal budget on people below the top 10% of wealth is an easy and long overdue adjustment that may gain the current Democrats enough political capital that they can stay in power longer than their multiple neoliberal predecessors who squandered every opportunity to take care of their erstwhile base. But we still don’t see clearly what their agenda is. Which parts of capital, which futures, are they working for?
From Ocean Avenue on a recent bike ride to the sea, I caught this view…. Farallon Islands visible on horizon just left of the sun streaks.
Decarbonizing the energy economy is a worthwhile goal, whether or not one has any aspirations to break from capitalism per se. Using the pandemic to further consolidate medical capital, maybe even nationalizing parts of it through Medicare and the like, while freeing up Big Pharma and the hospital chains to continue their monopolizing (oligopolizing) ways, looks like one goal. Bolstering the concentrated power of big banks and private equity syndicates seems like another, reinforcing their control over the cash-rich spigot of housing. And maybe the leaders of those industries recognize that their legitimacy has already outlasted several moments when it might logically have collapsed. A turn toward repairing the social safety net, even expanding it modestly, is one way to relegitimize the larger system’s existence and its ongoing control by the .01%. A massive redistribution of wealth, while deserved and necessary, is explicitly NOT the goal of the current regime—the unfamiliar warmth of a shot of stimulus to the safety net already feels like more than we could hope for after four harsh decades. We’ve normalized the austerity imposed during that kleptocratic frenzy, unleashed by Reagan in the proudly greedy ’80s, and that reached its desultory zenith in the venal stupidity of the Trumpist swamp that sought to drown everything in itself.
So now there is a tepid social-democratic left minority in the Congress, claiming the mantel of a Left that wants to check the power of capital. But AOC and Sanders and the gang are all bound to collaborate with the logic of capital accumulation since they have no vision beyond that. The much-promoted “Green New Deal” is fundamentally a strategy of industrial growth and job expansion at a time when we should be reconsidering the basic logic of how our physical lives are organized. Such a consideration might lead some readers to think in personal terms, but that’s exactly wrong, as well said here by Raj Patel and Jason Moore in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things:
…your ecological footprint isn’t a lifestyle choice. It’s a choice in the same way that English peasants, once kicked off the land, were “free” to find wage work—or starve. Worse yet, footprint thinking teaches us to consider the drivers of planetary crisis as grounded in the aggregations of “people” and “consumption” rather than in systematic dynamics of capitalism and empire… these modes of thought explain our present, disastrous state of affairs by consistently and significantly underestimating how the present is the product of a long past, of a bloody history of power, capital, and class, entwined in the web of life. (p. 204-205)
More industry, more economic growth, more work, are not goals that I associate with a future worth fighting for. A left agenda should be focused on work reduction, resource conservation, ecological repair, and working on a new social consensus on how we measure and self-manage our well-being as a society—and not just locally or regionally or nationally, but globally. And fortunately, there are many examples of new thinking about how we conceive of, and measure, economic life, and well-being more broadly. No matter how we ultimately shift our thinking—even if we embrace my favorite goal of radical work reduction, there is much to do. Reconfiguring how we interact with water, soil, air, and energy are fundamental to our ability to adapt to and thrive in a world that has locked in inevitable climate chaos.
But we aren’t even talking about anything as basic as that. It’s not hard to understand why, given that at least half the population of the U.S. is committed to a backward-looking White American project—based on heavy industry and centralized agribusiness, oil, cars, a segregated suburbia—that is already disappearing into history’s dustbin. Nevertheless, to gird ourselves for the deeper transformation rushing towards us, it is helpful to peruse some of the historic roots of the particular configuration of capitalism we have now, a capitalism that has promoted a process of hyper-concentration that used to be called monopoly (and oligopoly).
With the recent announcement by the Mayor that outdoor restaurant parklets should be made permanent, there is a boom in construction going on… this is Valencia at 18th.
Another long break from blogging… my last post, on the absurdity of rising rents in San Francisco’s “affordable housing,” was written as part of an ongoing organizing effort behind the scenes at various buildings subject to the Mayor’s Office of Housing rules. More to come on that.
Meanwhile, since I wrote in December we watched the final flailing efforts of Trump to promote his imaginary idea of the world beyond his cult following, and fail for good after the surprising January 6 riots at the Capitol. Watching that (later) was weird, because it looked so familiar, but in a bizarro world version—they weren’t anarchists streaming through the halls of Congress, they were ultra-right racists and Trump cultists! A lot of ink has been spilled since the November election and especially since the January 6 riots and ensuing impeachment, most of which I find terribly boring. The endless handwringing by liberals about our sacred institutions being violated seems comical at best. The vitriolic focus on Trump as the cause of it all is also wildly off-base in my opinion… the guy is an inept, failed grifter who has used overt racism and assaults on objective reality to hone his message to his cult following, but that “following” was there all along, and has been seeking a “leader” long before Trump came along to fill the role. I recommend reading “The Trump Inheritance” by Fintan O’Toole in the New York Review of Books for a surprising look at the America First movement (and the weird 2005 tale of Trump’s first planned presidential run as a centrist with Oprah Winfrey as Veep, and a message of unity and racial tolerance!!). In the article O’Toole nails the underlying truth of the “voter fraud” myth: “The concern is not, at heart, that there are bogus votes, but that there are bogus voters, that much of the US is inhabited by people who are, politically speaking, counterfeit citizens,” referring obviously to anyone who is not a white, “real” heartland American… Anyway, I’ll come back to this topic in a later post. I’ve already written quite a bit about racism and the ongoing legacy of slavery and genocide in posts over the past year and a half… and more to come!
A gorgeous old oak tree above the Calaveras reservoir in Alameda County.
The divergent realities we are living in today, with silo-ed bubbles of media and information creating largely unintelligible worlds living side by side, is just a spectacular version of a deeper reality that shapes our assumptions and worldviews. Most of us grow up learning some version of evolution that proposes that humans started as cavemen, eventually becoming skilled hunters (and wiping out all the prehistoric big game as proof of our growing intelligence), later domesticating various animals and developing agriculture which allowed humans to settle in permanent communities. Surpluses were created, monarchies and priesthoods arose with armies to protect them, cities developed, states emerged, and eventually wheels, wagons, trains, and cars came along, then we all got popsicles, pills, and smartphones and isn’t the modern world great?
This simplified timeline of history sounds silly on its face, and of course, it is. Especially when it comes to the received story about California, and the people who lived here for thousands of years and their relationship to nature. We have been propagandized by Franciscan missionaries, Gold Rush-era hucksters, and boosterish historians ever since the beginning of modern California. We’ll dig into that in a moment.
But there’s an even deeper issue to how our sense of the world has developed, how we have come to “know” things. Most of modern sensibility takes it for granted that the plant world, vegetal life, is unconscious, unaware, essentially inert and manipulable by humans. The logic of Christian Dominion comes to mind, where supposedly God gave humans dominion over all other forms of life, which by definition are inferior to and thus necessarily subordinate to humans. But what if that logic has blinded us to the dynamic, interactive, mutualistic forms of life all around us, not just the obvious intelligence we are increasingly aware of among animals, but also among plants?
On a trail above the Russian River in Sonoma County.
