Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%

AMERICANS HAVE BEEN WATCHING PROTESTS AGAINST OPPRESSIVE REGIMES THAT CONCENTRATE MASSIVE WEALTH IN THE HANDS OF AN ELITE FEW. YET IN OUR OWN DEMOCRACY, 1 PERCENT OF THE PEOPLE TAKE NEARLY A QUARTER OF THE NATION’S INCOME—AN INEQUALITY EVEN THE WEALTHY WILL COME TO REGRET.

By Joseph E. Stiglitz•

Illustration by Stephen Doyle

May 2011

THE FAT AND THE FURIOUS The top 1 percent may have the best houses, educations, and lifestyles, says the author, but “their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live.”

It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.

Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years—whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards “performance bonuses” that they felt compelled to change the name to “retention bonuses” (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.

Some people look at income inequality and shrug their shoulders. So what if this person gains and that person loses? What matters, they argue, is not how the pie is divided but the size of the pie. That argument is fundamentally wrong. An economy in whichmost citizens are doing worse year after year—an economy like America’s—is not likely to do well over the long haul. There are several reasons for this.

First, growing inequality is the flip side of something else: shrinking opportunity. Whenever we diminish equality of opportunity, it means that we are not using some of our most valuable assets—our people—in the most productive way possible. Second, many of the distortions that lead to inequality—such as those associated with monopoly power and preferential tax treatment for special interests—undermine the efficiency of the economy. This new inequality goes on to create new distortions, undermining efficiency even further. To give just one example, far too many of our most talented young people, seeing the astronomical rewards, have gone into finance rather than into fields that would lead to a more productive and healthy economy.

Third, and perhaps most important, a modern economy requires “collective action”—it needs government to invest in infrastructure, education, and technology. The United States and the world have benefited greatly from government-sponsored research that led to the Internet, to advances in public health, and so on. But America has long suffered from an under-investment in infrastructure (look at the condition of our highways and bridges, our railroads and airports), in basic research, and in education at all levels. Further cutbacks in these areas lie ahead.

None of this should come as a surprise—it is simply what happens when a society’s wealth distribution becomes lopsided. The more divided a society becomes in terms of wealth, the more reluctant the wealthy become to spend money on common needs. The rich don’t need to rely on government for parks or education or medical care or personal security—they can buy all these things for themselves. In the process, they become more distant from ordinary people, losing whatever empathy they may once have had. They also worry about strong government—one that could use its powers to adjust the balance, take some of their wealth, and invest it for the common good. The top 1 percent may complain about the kind of government we have in America, but in truth they like it just fine: too gridlocked to re-distribute, too divided to do anything but lower taxes.

Economists are not sure how to fully explain the growing inequality in America. The ordinary dynamics of supply and demand have certainly played a role: laborsaving technologies have reduced the demand for many “good” middle-class, blue-collar jobs. Globalization has created a worldwide marketplace, pitting expensive unskilled workers in America against cheap unskilled workers overseas. Social changes have also played a role—for instance, the decline of unions, which once represented a third of American workers and now represent about 12 percent.

But one big part of the reason we have so much inequality is that the top 1 percent want it that way. The most obvious example involves tax policy. Lowering tax rates on capital gains, which is how the rich receive a large portion of their income, has given the wealthiest Americans close to a free ride. Monopolies and near monopolies have always been a source of economic power—from John D. Rockefeller at the beginning of the last century to Bill Gates at the end. Lax enforcement of anti-trust laws, especially during Republican administrations, has been a godsend to the top 1 percent. Much of today’s inequality is due to manipulation of the financial system, enabled by changes in the rules that have been bought and paid for by the financial industry itself—one of its best investments ever. The government lent money to financial institutions at close to 0 percent interest and provided generous bailouts on favorable terms when all else failed. Regulators turned a blind eye to a lack of transparency and to conflicts of interest.

When you look at the sheer volume of wealth controlled by the top 1 percent in this country, it’s tempting to see our growing inequality as a quintessentially American achievement—we started way behind the pack, but now we’re doing inequality on a world-class level. And it looks as if we’ll be building on this achievement for years to come, because what made it possible is self-reinforcing. Wealth begets power, which begets more wealth. During the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s—a scandal whose dimensions, by today’s standards, seem almost quaint—the banker Charles Keating was asked by a congressional committee whether the $1.5 million he had spread among a few key elected officials could actually buy influence. “I certainly hope so,” he replied. The Supreme Court, in its recent Citizens United case, has enshrined the right of corporations to buy government, by removing limitations on campaign spending. The personal and the political are today in perfect alignment. Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent. When pharmaceutical companies receive a trillion-dollar gift—through legislation prohibiting the government, the largest buyer of drugs, from bargaining over price—it should not come as cause for wonder. It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work.

America’s inequality distorts our society in every conceivable way. There is, for one thing, a well-documented lifestyle effect—people outside the top 1 percent increasingly live beyond their means. Trickle-down economics may be a chimera, but trickle-down behaviorism is very real. Inequality massively distorts our foreign policy. The top 1 percent rarely serve in the military—the reality is that the “all-volunteer” army does not pay enough to attract their sons and daughters, and patriotism goes only so far. Plus, the wealthiest class feels no pinch from higher taxes when the nation goes to war: borrowed money will pay for all that. Foreign policy, by definition, is about the balancing of national interests and national resources. With the top 1 percent in charge, and paying no price, the notion of balance and restraint goes out the window. There is no limit to the adventures we can undertake; corporations and contractors stand only to gain. The rules of economic globalization are likewise designed to benefit the rich: they encourage competition among countries for business, which drives down taxes on corporations, weakens health and environmental protections, and undermines what used to be viewed as the “core” labor rights, which include the right to collective bargaining. Imagine what the world might look like if the rules were designed instead to encourage competition among countries forworkers. Governments would compete in providing economic security, low taxes on ordinary wage earners, good education, and a clean environment—things workers care about. But the top 1 percent don’t need to care.

Or, more accurately, they think they don’t. Of all the costs imposed on our society by the top 1 percent, perhaps the greatest is this: the erosion of our sense of identity, in which fair play, equality of opportunity, and a sense of community are so important. America has long prided itself on being a fair society, where everyone has an equal chance of getting ahead, but the statistics suggest otherwise: the chances of a poor citizen, or even a middle-class citizen, making it to the top in America are smaller than in many countries of Europe. The cards are stacked against them. It is this sense of an unjust system without opportunity that has given rise to the conflagrations in the Middle East: rising food prices and growing and persistent youth unemployment simply served as kindling. With youth unemployment in America at around 20 percent (and in some locations, and among some socio-demographic groups, at twice that); with one out of six Americans desiring a full-time job not able to get one; with one out of seven Americans on food stamps (and about the same number suffering from “food insecurity”)—given all this, there is ample evidence that something has blocked the vaunted “trickling down” from the top 1 percent to everyone else. All of this is having the predictable effect of creating alienation—voter turnout among those in their 20s in the last election stood at 21 percent, comparable to the unemployment rate.

In recent weeks we have watched people taking to the streets by the millions to protest political, economic, and social conditions in the oppressive societies they inhabit. Governments have been toppled in Egypt and Tunisia. Protests have erupted in Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain. The ruling families elsewhere in the region look on nervously from their air-conditioned penthouses—will they be next? They are right to worry. These are societies where a minuscule fraction of the population—less than 1 percent—controls the lion’s share of the wealth; where wealth is a main determinant of power; where entrenched corruption of one sort or another is a way of life; and where the wealthiest often stand actively in the way of policies that would improve life for people in general.

As we gaze out at the popular fervor in the streets, one question to ask ourselves is this: When will it come to America? In important ways, our own country has become like one of these distant, troubled places.

Alexis de Tocqueville once described what he saw as a chief part of the peculiar genius of American society—something he called “self-interest properly understood.” The last two words were the key. Everyone possesses self-interest in a narrow sense: I want what’s good for me right now! Self-interest “properly understood” is different. It means appreciating that paying attention to everyone else’s self-interest—in other words, the common welfare—is in fact a precondition for one’s own ultimate well-being. Tocqueville was not suggesting that there was anything noble or idealistic about this outlook—in fact, he was suggesting the opposite. It was a mark of American pragmatism. Those canny Americans understood a basic fact: looking out for the other guy isn’t just good for the soul—it’s good for business.

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

Fuente: Vanity Fair, Mayo 2011

"Ciudad Juarez is all our futures" por Ed Vullamy

This is the inevitable war of capitalism gone mad

Mexico's drug cartels are actually pioneers of the global economy in their business logic and modus operandi

War, as I came to report it, was something fought between people with causes, however crazy or honourable: like between the American and British occupiers of Iraq and the insurgents who opposed them. Then I stumbled across Mexico's drug war – which has claimed nearly 40,000 lives, mostly civilians – and all the rules changed. This is warfare for the 21st century, and another creature altogether.

Mexico's war is inextricable from everyday life. In Ciudad Juarez, the most murderous city in the world, street markets and malls remain open;Sarah Brightman sang a concert there recently. When I was back there last month, people had reappeared at night to eat dinner and socialise, out of devil-may-care recklessness and exhaustion with years of self-imposed curfew. Before, there had been an eerie quiet at night, now there is an even eerier semblance of normality – punctuated by gunfire.

On the surface, the combatants have the veneer of a cause: control of smuggling routes into the US. But even if this were the full explanation, the cause of drugs places Mexico's war firmly in our new postideological, postmoral, postpolitical world. The only causes are profits from the chemicals that get America and Europe high.

Illustration by Daniel Pudles

Interestingly, in a highly politicised society there is no rightwing or Mussolinian "law and order" mass movement against the cartels, or any significant leftwing or union opposition. The grassroots movement against the postpolitical cartel warriors, the National Movement for Peace, is famously led by the poet Javier Sicilia, who organised a week-long peace march after the murder of his son in the spring. This very male war is opposed by women, in the workplaces and barrios, and in the home.

But this is not just a war between narco-cartels. Juarez has imploded into a state of criminal anarchy – the cartels, acting like any corporation, have outsourced violence to gangs affiliated or unaffiliated with them, who compete for tenders with corrupt police officers. The army plays its own mercurial role. "Cartel war" does not explain the story my friend, and Juarez journalist, Sandra Rodriguez told me over dinner last month: about two children who killed their parents "because", they explained to her, "they could". The culture of impunity, she said, "goes from boys like that right to the top – the whole city is a criminal enterprise".

Not by coincidence, Juarez is also a model for the capitalist economy. Recruits for the drug war come from the vast, sprawling maquiladora – bonded assembly plants where, for rock-bottom wages, workers make the goods that fill America's supermarket shelves or become America's automobiles, imported duty-free. Now, the corporations can do it cheaper in Asia, casually shedding their Mexican workers, and Juarez has become a teeming recruitment pool for the cartels and killers. It is a city that follows religiously the philosophy of a free market.

"It's a city based on markets and on trash," says Julián Cardona, a photographer who has chronicled the implosion. "Killing and drug addiction are activities in the economy, and the economy is based on what happens when you treat people like trash." Very much, then, a war for the 21st century. Cardona told me how many times he had been asked for his view on the Javier Sicilia peace march: "I replied: 'How can you march against the market?'"

Mexico's war does not only belong to the postpolitical, postmoral world. It belongs to the world of belligerent hyper-materialism, in which the only ideology left – which the leaders of "legitimate" politics, business and banking preach by example – is greed. A very brave man called Mario Trevino lives in the city of Reynosa, which is in the grip of the Gulf cartel. He said of the killers and cartels: "They are revolting people who do what they do because they cannot be seen to wear the same label T-shirt as they wore last year, they must wear another brand, and more expensive." It can't be that banal, I objected, but he pleaded with me not to underestimate these considerations. The thing that really makes Mexico's war a different war, and of our time, is that it is about, in the end, nothing.

It certainly belongs to the cacophony of the era of digital communication. The killers post their atrocities on YouTube with relish, commanding a vast viewing public; they are busy across thickets of internet hot-sites and the narco-blogosphere. Journalists find it hard that while even people as crazy as Osama bin Laden will talk to the media – they feel they have a message to get across – the narco-cartels have no interest in talking at all. They control the message, they are democratic the postmodern way.

People often ask: why the savagery of Mexico's war? It is infamous for such inventive perversions as sewing one victim's flayed face to a soccer ball or hanging decapitated corpses from bridges by the ankles; and innovative torture, such as dipping people into vats of acid so that their limbs evaporate while doctors keep the victim conscious.

I answer tentatively that I think there is a correlation between thecauselessness of Mexico's war and the savagery. The cruelty is in and of the nihilism, the greed for violence reflects the greed for brands, and becomes a brand in itself.

People also ask: what can be done? There is endless debate over military tactics, US aid to Mexico, the war on drugs, and whether narcotics should be decriminalised. I answer: these are largely of tangential importance; what can the authorities do? Simple: Go After the Money. But they won't.

Narco-cartels are not pastiches of global corporations, nor are they errant bastards of the global economy – they are pioneers of it. They point, in their business logic and modus operandi, to how the legal economy will arrange itself next. The Mexican cartels epitomised theNorth American free trade agreement long before it was dreamed up, and they thrive upon it.

Mexico's carnage is that of the age of effective global government by multinational banks – banks that, according to Antonio Maria Costa, the former head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, have been for years kept afloat by laundering drug and criminal profits. Cartel bosses and street gangbangers cannot go around in trucks full of cash. They have to bank it – and politicians could throttle this river of money, as they have with actions against terrorist funding. But they choose not to, for obvious reasons: the good burgers of capitalism and their political quislings depend on this money, while bleating about the evils of drugs cooked in the ghetto and snorted up the noses of the rich.

So Mexico's war is how the future will look, because it belongs not in the 19th century with wars of empire, or the 20th with wars of ideology, race and religion – but utterly in a present to which the global economy is committed, and to a zeitgeist of frenzied materialism we adamantly refuse to temper: it is the inevitable war of capitalism gone mad. Twelve years ago Cardona and the writer Charles Bowden curated a book called Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future. They could not have known how prescient their title was. In a recent book, Murder City, Bowden puts it another way: "Juarez is not a breakdown of the social order. Juarez is the new order."

Fuente:

• Ed Vulliamy
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 20 June 2011 21.29 BST

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/20/war-capitalism-mexico-drug-cartels

Calderón avergonzado en la Universidad de Stanford

El 12 de junio de 2011, Calderón dio el discurso a los graduados de la universidad de Stanford. Mientras hablaba, una avioneta sobrevolaba con el siguiente mensaje: "40,000 dead, how many more?"

Respuesta a Eshrat: Arte Bajo el Nuevo Orden

Parecería que el arte debería ya sea de abolirse por completo – lo que fuere la audaz estrategia de la vanguardia – o de flotar indeciso entre la vida y la muerte, sometiéndose a su propia imposibilidad.[1]

Si entendemos a la desregulación como el reino absoluto del mercado, ¿Cuáles serían las condiciones de producción estética bajo dicho reino? ¿Cómo han sido el arte y su producción influenciadas por la predominancia del Neoliberalismo? ¿y por el cambio a la preponderancia de la producción cognitiva como la fuente principal de plusvalía del capitalismo?

Como se sabe, se está dando actualmente un proceso masivo de acumulación capitalista por medio de las finanzas, el despojo de recursos naturales y tierras, la aniquilación de modos de vida, la privatización masiva del bien común, la redistribución del poder a favor de las elites, la represión del antagonismo desde Toronto a Deraa en Siria, pasando por Roma y Atenas. Vemos a las ruinas del movimiento obrero del siglo XIX colapsarse junto con la burguesía industrial; somos testigos del colapso del estado de beneficio del siglo XX, rendido a los pies de medidas neoliberales tales como la externalización (outsourcing), el desmantelamiento de sindicatos, la explotación en maquiladoras, la reducción de personal (downsizing), la precarización de las condiciones de trabajo, la competitividad darvinista en el lugar de trabajo, la inseparabilidad de la economía legal de la ilegal, la especulación con los precios de los alimentos, etc. Además, el cambio que empezó a darse en los 1970s de la producción industrial de mercancías a una economía basada en el conocimiento y la información, propició a que surgiera una división internacional de trabajo. Es decir, el capital transnacional ha creado nuevas formas para movilizar y explotar a la clase trabajadora a escala global, desenraizando y desplazando a cientos de millones de campesinos del tercer mundo, transformándolos en inmigrantes nacionales y transnacionales trabajando en condiciones de esclavitud. [2] Mientras tanto, la producción en el primer mundo está basada en el contenido semiótico y se centra en la producción cognitiva, por ejemplo, de mercadeo o la creación de marcas, situando a la creatividad al centro del sistema económico – lo que Franco Berardi (Bifo) ha llamado SemioKapitalismo.[3] Dentro de este panorama, el arte lleva consigo la carga de volverse una forma de conocimiento mientras que deriva su valor del contexto en el que se expone, es decir, adquiere significado de segunda mano. Es por esto último que el arte se ha hecho cómplice de la economía del conocimiento sometiéndose a la industria de la cultura y haciéndose inseparable de – incluso colaborando con – la ideología hegemónica.

La academia, por medio de la teoría crítica y la historia del arte, se ha dado a la tarea de validar al arte como una forma de conocimiento dentro del mercado. Esto se debe, por un lado, a que en el actual orden económico, el sector de las artes y de la cultura se ve como un área de potencial auge financiero y por lo tanto donde se debe invertir. Como lo dijo Rosalind Krauss en 1990: el arte se convirtió en un activo financiero y lo que le da su valor no es que se le considere patrimonio cultural, sino que se supone que el arte es la encarnación única e irremplazable del conocimiento cultural que tiene el valor de puro intercambio.[4] Por otro lado, de acuerdo con Jean Baudrillard, el arte cumplió su potencial vanguardista de haberse combinado con todo, incrustándose en todos los aspectos de la vida cotidiana. Actualmente, el arte puede utilizar todo para sus propósitos propios: “Desde reciclar basura, hasta formar comunidades, de investigar cuestiones políticos y perfumes, a jugar con la televisión, la antropología, la biología y la tecnología.”[5] Ya que el arte es indisociable de otros aspectos de la vida cotidiana, necesita validarse como una forma de conocimiento. Con respecto a esto último, Sylvere Lotringer localizó un cambio de paradigma en la producción artística basado en la recepción del libro Simulaciones de Jean Baudrillard en el Artworld de Nueva York. Lotringer escribió:

El año 1987 fue un verdadero punto de inflexión para el mundo del arte newyorkino, un momento en el que hordas de jóvenes artistas comenzaban a inundar el mercado del arte buscando desesperadamente a un César, un “master thinker” o gurú, cualquier cosa para poder comenzar su carrera; tomaron entonces al libro de Jean Baudrillard, “Simulaciones” como manifiesto estético (mientras que era un diagnóstico antropológico) y se apuraron a transformarlo en el sustento intelectual de su arte.”[6]

Desde entonces, la academia ha servido el propósito de conferirle al arte estatus de conocimiento (o al menos de afán intelectual), también para separar al arte de las relaciones socio-económicas, ya que necesita probar su estatus como espacio crítico afuera del sistema capitalista. Al mismo tiempo, ha habido esfuerzos en el mundo del arte por buscar (o no) de distinguirse de las empresas transnacionales corporativos que reclaman (¿o colonizan?) a la creatividad, que antes le pertenecía al dominio del arte. Por ejemplo, Chris Kraus argumentó recientemente que la compañía American Apparel “llenó el vacío que habían dejado los procesos de vanguardia del siglo pasado, los cuales ya no son prácticos para los artistas que necesitan mantener sus carreras profesionales.” [7] Para Krauss, American Apparel es “una obra de arte conceptual gigantesca,” con sus tiendas que parecen galerías en barrios a punto de ser gentrificados, con su modo operativo warholiano, con su actitud anti-marca y sus anuncios que parecen arte de estudiantes de maestría en artes plásticas, el cual cita obras de arte conceptual.[8]

Una de las consecuencias de que el arte se haya expandido a los procesos económicos y de que haya migrado a discursos sobre la “creatividad,” ha sido que emergiera la “clase creativa:”[9] una clase económica conformada en base no a que sus miembros tengan ciertas profesiones, sino porque adoptaron un “estilo de vida en común: una visión de vida que atraviesa y junta distintos registros de trabajo, ocio, auto-actualización y bienes sociales.”[10] Otra consecuencia es que el arte ha dejado de importar como arte, y por lo tanto su política ha desaparecido:[11] en el mundo del arte global, el mercado y el compromiso político no se encuentran en desacuerdo el uno con el otro sino que coexisten para mutuo beneficio.

Dentro de este esquema, mucha de la producción artística se encuentra limitada por los confines establecidos por la ideología liberal que por un lado, reduce lo político a la cultura al institucionalizar el desacuerdo y al poner en escena al antagonismo. Por otro lado, el modelo de práctica artística que predomina refleja la ideología corporativa, por ejemplo: el productor cultural es un enterpreneur nómada en contra de la centralización del mundo del arte; el compromiso político – están muy lejos las políticas de visibilidad de los 1980s y 1990s – significa diálogo, cooperación y la creación de comunidades; se busca la mejora en vez del cambio; la cultura y el conocimiento sirven como herramientas en contra de la pobreza; la interacción relacional espontánea y la autopoiesis son los medios para desarticular estrategias representacionales inamovibles.[12] El papel vanguardista del artista como mediador no tiene cabida, y la clase explotada aparece como un “tema social,” sujeta a la intervención directa y a la denunciación, por ejemplo, de la opresión de las mujeres musulmanas, la violencia religiosa fundamentalista, la explotación de los inmigrantes, las crisis humanitarias, las condiciones de vida en las favelas, etc. Como trabajo politizado, las intervenciones estéticas y los gestos politizados son batallas dentro de un teatro de sombra que se quedan cortos para si quiera atisbar las nuevas realidades del capitalismo. Además, el arte contemporáneo florece dentro lo que Mark Fisher llama la “estética de la agonía,” dándose a la tarea estético-política de mostrar los horrores del capitalismo de la forma más realista posible, transformando a los espectadores en contempladores pasivos y estupefactos.[13] La estética la agonía abarca trabajos que abstraen las formas de violencia actualmente ejercida en el tejido urbano y social, cosificándolos por medio de objetos y gestos. La estética de la agonía se caracteriza por ser directa, real e inmediata. Al eliminar la mediación hace que los mecanismos de la transmisión se hagan transparentes, de forma similar que la “objetividad mediática.” No es azaroso que las prácticas estéticas coincidan con los medios masivos de comunicación, ni que ambos regimenes se queden cortos en sus intentos de transmitir el dolor, miedo, la ruina de las ciudades, las secuelas en la psique colectiva dejadas por los asesinatos, tortura, violaciones, guerra. Sin ser coincidencia, el arte comparte con el periodismo el método de la investigación empírica como la base de su producción: como los periodistas, los artistas son “ciudadanos del mundo” y testigos de las consecuencias de la globalización en el planeta. El problema es que tanto el arte como los medios masivos de comunicación crean un horizonte de legibilidad en común, dibujando un marco de lo que se pueda hacer y decir, cuáles posiciones pueden tomarse legítimamente (por ejemplo: la indignación) y cuales acciones pueden ser comprometidas o no: el periodismo o el turismo cultural, la intervención cultural o los debates llevados a cabo por “expertos.” Este horizonte de legibilidad es cuestión de relaciones de poder y tiene que ver con la articulación de fronteras políticas en un discurso y por lo tanto, las divisiones sociales se convierten en cuestión de límites creando un “dentro” y un “afuera.” De esta manera las divisiones sociales son establecidas entre los ciudadanos del mundo consternados y las víctimas, los productores culturales y los informantes y sufrientes, los productos culturales y los sujetos de la obra, víctimas y espectadores.

Confrontando a las contradicciones de la práctica estética politizada dentro del actual orden mundial, se ha dicho que el capitalismo es una máquina que tiene la capacidad de recuperar la criticalidad del arte. Sin embargo, la recuperación de la criticalidad por el capital es un mito si consideramos la distinción que hacen Eve Chiapello y Luc Boltanski entre “crítica social” y “crítica artística” junto con el giro “creativo” del capitalismo desde los 1970s. Las dos formas de crítica conceptualizadas por Chiapello y Blotanski postulan demandas de liberación. Por un lado, la crítica social denuncia la pobreza y la explotación y exige la liberación de la opresión sufrida por un pueblo sin auto-determinación política debido a condiciones históricas. Por otro lado, la crítica artística exige la autenticidad y la auto-realización. En términos de auto-realización, la crítica artística va en contra de las alienaciones genéricas que surgen de la religión, la autoridad, la propia comunidad, o el haber nacido con un cuerpo determinado. Con respecto a la autenticidad, la crítica artística va en contra de la estandarización y masificación del capitalismo. De acuerdo con Chiapello y Boltanski, mientras que la crítica artística ha sido parcialmente cumplida y subordinada a la creación de plusvalía desde los 1970s, la crítica social y el anti-imperialismo fueron atenuados al haber sido sustituidos por la ética y por los derechos humanos, reducidos a la denuncia y el desacuerdo, a hacer visible lo que los medios masivos no muestran. Todo ello confundiendo al trabajo social con el arte comprometido, desprovistos de base ideológica y consignados al basurero de la historia.[14] La crítica estética, por su lado, se ha situado al centro de la vida, deviniendo ideología y fuente de ganancia capitalista. Es decir, el “estilo de vida” (Lifestyle) se ha convertido en un valor y el sitio para la invención creativa del “Yo liberado” al igual que la base para la práctica del hedonismo en nombre de la búsqueda de la libertad personal; además, la auto-realización ha venido a significar darle propósito a la vida propia junto con la responsabilidad social. Podría decirse entonces, que la crítica artística se ha situado al centro de la actividad humana haciéndose parte de la tendencia ideológica de vivir en nombre de la auto-realización y hacer la vida propia significativa. Como lo dijo Zizek:

Tenemos esta ideología que te interpela como individuo privado y que te acepta; tú no estás destinado a preocuparte por grandes causas sino a dedicar tu vida a la auto-realización. En esta situación, nuestra identidad ideológica es la de un individuo cuya tarea de vida es realizar su verdadero potencial y de hacer de su vida algo significativo.[15]

Por lo tanto, la actual ideología de la auto-realización implica des-alienación, y el “estilo de vida” es el sitio para la invención creativa de un “Yo liberado” socialmente responsable. En otras palabras, la crítica estética provee un marco para darle sentido a nuestras vidas. Para concluir, si la forma ideológica que predomina es la de cultivar el “estilo de vida” propio, podría acusarse al arte contemporáneo de incapacidad de crear un modelo alternativo o crítico u opuesto a la ideología hegemónica; incluso de alimentarla. Chris Kraus, en diálogo con la evaluación de Baudrillard y de Lotringer que el arte se ha sumergido completamente con la vida escribió: “El arte sigue siendo la última frontera del deseo de vivir de forma distinta.” A su modo de ver, los artistas están buscando una nueva forma de vida, documentando sus experimentos comparándolos unos con otros, reclamando el espacio y tiempo públicos. La crítica artística integrada a la visión capitalista, como vimos, enfatiza la creatividad y la auto-realización como la forma predominante de ideología como estilo de vida. Una de las consecuencias devastadoras es el efecto que ha tenido la predominancia del Lifestyle sobre nuestra capacidad crítica y perceptiva para comprender a las fuerzas que sirven de base a nuestros deseos y pulsiones personales; ello dentro del contexto de las guerras interminables y el inquietante paisaje geopolítico y económico. El potencial crítico del arte va más allá de lo que Boltansky y Chiapello llama crítica artística, ya que existe la posibilidad de expresar y presentar lo inclasificable, invendible, inmostrable, lo choqueante, incluso obras de arte abyectas. Ello tiene lugar más allá de los márgenes dados de antemano por la industria de la cultura a las obras y escritos de arte comprometidos.

Respuesta a la entrada: "El sistema del arte y la teoría como medio," Por Eshrat Erfanian

http://comiteinvisiblejaltenco.blogspot.com/2010/08/el-sistema-del-arte-la-teoria-como.html

---

[1] Theodor W. Adorno, “Letter to Walter Benjamin,” Londres, 18 de marzo, 1936 en Aesthetics and Politics, (Londres: New Left Books: 1977).

[2] William I. Robinson, “Global Capitalism and 21^st Century Fascism,” Al Jazeera English, 8 de mayo de 2011. Disponible en red:

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/04/201142612714539672.html.

[3] Ver: Franco Berardi (Bifo), The Soul at Work (Nueva York: Semiotext(e) 2009).

[4] Rosalind Krauss, “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” October 54 (Otoño 1990)

[5] Sylvere Lotringere, “The Piracy of Art,” The Conspiracy of Art (Nueva York: Semiotext(e), 2009), 13.

[6] Ibid, 14.

[7] Chris Kraus, “Where Art Belongs,” (Nueva York: Semiotext(e), 2011), 136.

[8] Chris Kraus, “Where Art Belongs,” (Nueva York: Semiotext(e), 2011), 138.

[9] El término es de Richard Florida.

[10] Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman, After Globalization (Nueva York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 82.

[11] Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman, After Globalization (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).

[12] Ver: Slavoj Zizek, “Against Liberal Communists,” London Review of Books Vol. 28, no. 27 (Abril 2006).

[13] Ver: Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Londres: Zero Books, 2010)

[14] Luc Boltanski & Eve Chiapello, "The New Spirit of Capitalism" (Londres: Verso, 2001), 346.

[15] Zizek in an interview about his book, On Violence in the radio program “Against the Grain” on September 9^th, 2008. Available on line: http://www.againstthegrain.org/program/92/id/370220/tues-9-09-08-i-ek-violence

Comunismo liberal y militarización: Business as usual

La imagen que apareció en la portada de La Jornada del 30 de mayo de 2011 muestra a Cristina Fernández admirando una de las reproducciones en bronce del escultor Francés Auguste Rodin en la colección del nuevo museo Soumaya, de Carlos Slim. Llama la atención que Slim haya recibido a la presidenta primero que Felipe Calderón (quien ofreció a la dignataria una comida en el Castillo de Chapultepec al día siguiente), y también que la hayan acompañado en su recorrido empresarios y líderes corporativos como Roberto González Barrera (presidente de Maseca y Banorte) o María Asunción Aramburuzabala Larregui (presidenta de Tresalia Capital). En total, casi cien empresarios mexicanos interesados en invertir o que han invertido en Argentina disfrutaron de una cena ofrecida por Slim en el museo después del recorrido. Con ocasión de la cena, Cristina Fernández dio un discurso en el que alabó la arquitectura y el contenido del museo, diciendo que es un “orgullo” que los mexicanos tuvieran un empresario que haya brindado a su comunidad este museo y compartido sus obras de arte con el pueblo. Para Fernández, el gesto de Slim es uno de “responsabilidad social” el cual para ella, debería de caracterizar al empresariado. Con su combinación de política, cultura y corporativismo, este evento es emblemático del actual discurso que podríamos llamar “comunismo liberal,” del cual evidentemente Cristina Fernández es abanderada. El comunismo liberal implica que el mercado y la responsabilidad social no se oponen, sino que pueden unirse para beneficiarse mutuamente. Dentro de este sospechoso discurso (o modelo) – de quien Bill Gates es el pionero y representante icónico –, la responsabilidad social implica “compartir” la riqueza. Otro de sus aspectos es la inseparabilidad entre estado y corporaciones – Por ejemplo, Fernández agradeció a los empresarios mexicanos haber invertido en Argentina desde el 2003. El comunismo liberal celebra también al consumismo: Como lo dijo orgullosamente la presidenta, aludiendo a uno de los proyectos de inversión de Grupo Carso, Argentina es el consumidor no. 1 de celulares por persona en el continente Americano. El modelo económico aplicado actualmente en Argentina y bajo su mandato está enfocado al crecimiento y a la inclusión social – que son la clave para la sustentabilidad de su modelo económico. Siguiendo el trend de los Fujimori, los Colom, el fracasado Shagún-Fox, Clinton, Bush, etc., de re-establecer la oligarquía en sus respectivos países, Fernández enfatizó la continuidad de su presidencia con la política de Ernesto Kirchner de quien es viuda y quien canceló la deuda de Argentina con el FMI en 2003. De acuerdo con la doctrina del comunismo liberal (que es unos grados menos intenso que el neoliberalismo crudo) Fernández exaltó a los empresarios a ser creativos y a repensar los viejos dogmas y modelos para gobernar, dejando que políticos, economistas, empresarios y trabajadores gremiales manejen al país, ya que son los pilares de la política económica.

El Museo Soumaya simbolizó durante una noche la unión entre política exterior (hecha directamente por los empresarios, en lugar de representar sus intereses), corporativismo y cultura. Al día siguiente Calderón ofreció una comida a Cristina Fernández en el Castillo de Chapultepec, símbolo del patrimonio histórico “nacional” y por lo tanto del bien común – a diferencia del Museo Soumaya que es un bien privado abierto al público. La visita de Fernández hizo evidente que la diplomacia corporativa queda por encima de la diplomacia transnacional. El comunismo liberal ha logrado estatus hegemónico por medio del consenso ¿y quién estaría de acuerdo con los dogmas del comunismo liberal, que son, responsabilidad social, inclusión, creatividad? Sin embargo, todos los comunistas liberales son sospechosos. Dicen que Cristina Fernández sostiene que Italia es un modelo para mirar e imitar, aún cuando es bien sabido que las empresas italianas se apoyan en la desregularización, la xenofobia y la superexplotación para crear plusvalía. Finalmente, se hace evidente que a pesar de la guerra contra el narcotráfico, los negocios florecen en México. También que tal vez, la guerra de Calderón, que ha facilitado la ocupación norteamericana de México, se trate de business as usual.

Coming soon...

Arundhati Roy vs. Ingrid Betancourt

Lifestyle Drugs and the New Wave of Pharmaceutical Personality Sculpting

At a the annual conference for the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality last year, I heard a researcher describe how the pharmaceutical industry “jukes the stats”—that is, crunches numbers creatively in order to persuade the public that their products actually accomplish their stated tasks. This researcher, Dr. Duryea, offered a succinct finding: Antidepressant manufacturers go to great lengths to disguise the fact that people kill themselves during the “wash out” phase of antidepressants. Once participants stopped taking certain antidepressants (and, in clinical trials, before they resumed taking them again), those taking the antidepressants had an increased risk of suicide compared to their pre-drug state. Of course, since these users were not technically ingesting the drug during this “wash out” phase, the pharmaceutical industry convinced the FDA that antidepressants did not increase the risk of suicide—a creative interpretation with a potentially fatal cost to those who blindly take these drugs.²

I bring up this anecdote because it is one of many in a long list of such problems that occur in the U.S. today surrounding the issue of “lifestyle drugs”—drugs one takes not just for a temporary cure to an ailment (in the way Penicillin kills bacterial infections), but rather, as a response to lifelong, forever ailments (e.g., depression, anxiety, high cholesterol, acid reflux, impotence, and so on). As anyone who has watched television commercials in the last decade can imagine, the pharmaceutical industry expends enormous sums of money to encourage consumers to “ask their doctor” about a host of drugs, nearly all of which advertise “lifestyle” remedies. Get erections that last for days! No more burping up acid after eating mountains of salty, fatty, chemical-laden food! Stop feeling anxious despite chronic sleeplessness and slaving away at your vacationless McJob! And, like all advertising ploys—particularly ones where astronomical sums of money are expended—it works. Not only do people in the U.S. tolerate direct-to-consumer advertising (note that, within the Western world, the U.S. is alone in such a practice), but we indeed do consume more and more lifestyle drugs each year, making us the most medicated, and pharmaceutically-profitable, society around.

So how do we explain this phenomenon? What about the U.S. lends itself to this perfect synthesis of self-medication, corporate greed, and pharmaceutical horsepower? I propose that to tackle such a question, we must consider three separate entities: first, the invention of sickness, whereby normal aspects of daily life get branded as illness, like inventing female Viagra because women may not always desire sex; second, our refusal to live with the most basic elements of the human condition, as evidenced by the multi-billion dollar antidepressant industry; and third, our nearly reckless disregard for common sense, as evidenced by a host of lifestyle drugs, particularly Viagra for men. It is not just that those in the U.S. have been duped, or that the pharmaceutical industry wields uncanny powers, or that we largely cannot decipher the difference between self-generated needs and manufactured needs (all true); additionally, at its most basic level, people in the U.S. have embraced a new wave of pharmaceutical personality sculpting,³ a philosophy arguing that pharmaceuticals can compensate for our unfulfilled desires and needs.

Let’s begin with the case of female Viagra. Six years ago, pharmaceutical efforts to repackage the success of Viagra into a female-friendly version began in earnest. First, Pfizer attempted to replicate the powerhouse success of male Viagra with a simple goal: create physiological arousal in women, simulate lubrication and swelling responses, and (voila!) women would achieve orgasm in unprecedented numbers, thereby ending their relatively higher rates of “sexual dysfunction.” Unfortunately, this did not come to pass as expected. The big problem? Women who became aroused physiologically still did not choose to initiate or submit to sex with their (male) partners. Unlike male Viagra—where physiological arousal and desire for sex allegedly worked more in tandem—female Viagra successfully achieved physiological arousal but failed to generate mental arousal or motive for sex. Women with aroused vaginas still said no. This frustrated Pfizer to the point where, during one interview with the New York Times, researchers declared, “Although Viagra can indeed create the outward signs of arousal in many women, this seems to have little effect on a woman’s willingness, or desire, to have sex…Getting a woman to connect arousal and desire…requires exquisite timing on a man’s part and a fair amount of coaxing. ‘What we need to do is find a pill for engendering the perception of intimacy.’”⁴

Perhaps said in jest, this statement nevertheless perfectly illuminates the first of three problems that contribute to the age of pharmaceutical personality sculpting: illnesses are invented, often for profit, by industries that have a serious investment in making people believe they are sick when they are not. In a for-profit healthcare industry where sickness is money, invented sickness makes even more money. Case in point, a recent psychological study by Jan Shifren and her colleagues found that, though 43.1% of women reported feeling that they had some form of sexual dysfunction, less than half felt troubled by this fact.⁵ Rather than rely upon women’s self-description, the pharmaceutical industry instead convinces women through conversation and commercials that their inconsistent sexual desire is a defect, and that their bodies are imperfect and in need of drug treatments to “repair” their “dysfunctional” libidos. We live in an age where illness makes profit, and where the invention of “disorders” improves the economic bottom-line of the health care industry. Such profit-driven health care requires the consumer to imagine these invented illnesses as real. Unless people learn to call out and resist such inventions, pharmaceutical personality sculpting will become the mainstay of the industry.

Step two in the process of selling people on lifestyle drugs involves an almost laughably ill-advised premise: convince people that the human condition no longer entails sadness, anxiety, depression, loneliness, social unease, lost erections, ups and downs in libido, and grief. Indeed, the antidepressant industry has swooped in during a time when we have a lot to be unhappy about: unprecedented class warfare (the top 1% of U.S. earners now make more than the bottom 95% combined!), new and insidious forms of sexism (women’s desires usurped by the whims of patriarchy, ongoing failure of the Equal Rights Amendment, increasing reports of eating disorders and body dysmorphia, alarmingly high rates of women faking orgasm, national failure to recognize working mothers’ needs, and so on), rampant and shameless forms of racism (states retaining rights to block interracial marriages, anti-Obama rhetoric latching onto anti-socialist rhetoric throughout the nation, erosion of communities of color, overrepresentation of men of color sent to Iraq, etc.), and, in essence, a whole lot of things to be anxious, depressed, and un-aroused about!

Again, denying the difficulties of human existence seems to be a peculiarly U.S. phenomenon. Along with their ironic taste for high cholesterol foods, plentiful red wine, and good health, the French (yes, the French!) construct tragedy as an unavoidable process of the human existence. It is entirely remarkable that people in the U.S. want to manufacture an existence without such tragedy, yet this is exactly what antidepressant manufacturers count on. They make a bargain, albeit without full consent: Take these drugs and you’ll feel less—both positive and negative. Those on antidepressants report exactly this: they feel less sadness, they can get out of bed in the morning, and they can go to work and walk their dogs and enjoy modest pleasures. However, they no longer feel the same happiness they once felt either. They are dampened down, as the clinical literatures say. The antidepressant industry wants to trick us out of experiencing ourselves as fully human, as fully engaged in the process of being alive. How bad for business if we accepted that, when people die, grief is a horrendous, sometimes long, and certainly painful process, but one that we need to experience in order to process death. What a blow to their bottom line if people in this country started considering what their anxiety at work meant about their job satisfaction? What a downer to the share holders’ stock portfolios if we stopped to consider that feeling bad might propel us to take action in order to feel better? After all, aren’t we at least a little bit suspicious that Prozac and Zoloft and Wellbutrin create obedient, gracious, mellow, toned-down citizens, ready for the work of tolerating gender inequities, pay inequities, class inequities, and race inequities? What if people instead confronted their reasons for being upset, depressed, and anxious?

Which brings us to the third point: The pharmaceutical industry relies upon our most basic denial of common sense, intuitive wisdom, and self-affirmation. Consider the recent discussions about the paradoxes of the modern food industry. As Michael Pollan has pointed out, we have lost touch with common sense about eating because the food industry has systematically done three things. First, the food industry has asserted a singular, authoritative knowledge of what kinds of food make us healthy. Second, it has extracted, via “nutritionism,” the elements of food that yield health without considering the interplay between enzymes and vitamins within a whole piece of food (e.g., Eat Omega-3s!⁶ Don’t worry if it comes from actual salmon or fish oil tablets! It’s all the same!). Third, the food industry has assaulted our common sense by forcing us to rely upon their definitions of “healthy food” at the expense of what our grandmothers and great-grandmothers already knew to be true (e.g., we eat processed boxes of chemical goo that claim to be “low fat” and “enriched with vitamins” rather than simply eating an apple or a carrot or a head of lettuce in the produce aisle). The same process has occurred with other elements of health, particularly mental health. Rather than considering the ways that our unhappiness, anxiety, and grief stem from elements in our lives that deserve our attention, “experts” feed us insights about how pill-popping and pharmaceutical personality sculpting will come to the rescue.

Case in point: A friend of mine once dated a man who had erectile dysfunction with onset in his early 20s. All physiological tests came out normal, indicating that doctors could find no physiological reason why he had erectile dysfunction. He tried Viagra for four or five years, with decreasingly successful outcomes. He had a more and more difficult time becoming erect, and often could not get an erection even in the most stimulating of circumstances. Viagra eventually stopped working entirely (as it often does). The man sought out psychological therapy to discuss his distress about his seemingly inexplicable erectile dysfunction. Frustrated by his lack of success at relying upon Viagra, he eventually discovered, during the course of a multi-year therapy, that his lifelong incestuous relationship with a family member—one in which he consistently became aroused in situations of potential punishment and shame—had contributed greatly to his current erectile dysfunction. Indeed, all of the signs pointed to his traumatic sexual history as a culprit to his current dysfunction. He had begun to masturbate at work, and could get aroused only right before his boss walked in on him. He had asked his partner to have sex in crowded movie theaters, subway cars, and park benches. He could never become aroused while at home in bed with her. During this course of treatment, he began a slow and difficult recovery, disentangling his associations with shameful early life experiences and replacing them with healthier models of consensual, non-punitive sex. I tell this story because it represents, most basically, a truth that should seem obvious to most people if they consider common sense: erectile dysfunction, like most “illnesses” treated by lifestyle drugs, is rooted in a person’s reality, and without addressing that reality, the drugs simply mask the underlying issues.

Yet, we in the U.S. continue to perfect our skills at denying common sense to the point of rapidly dismissing the real rootedness of our psychological problems in the reality of our existences. We do this with food and we do this with mental health. We eat fewer and fewer apples because food-industry consultants have told us to eat fiber-enhanced apple-flavored fruit-roll-ups. We deal less and less with the complexities of our psychological lives because “scientists” have told us that a pill will solve the problems of our brain chemistry and will repair our wounded histories. We rarely stop to consider why unhappiness pervades our culture because the “experts” have told us that it not only ispossible to medicate this away, but is in fact medically sound to do so! This all comes at a great cost, personally, socially, and culturally. A generation raised on Lean Cuisine and Paxil has learned to condition away the intuition of mind and body. As a consequence, we do not recognize what tastes good any longer because experts have successfully tricked our taste buds into believing we are eating “butter” when we aren’t. We do not recognize that unhappiness can have positive, affirming, enriching results on our lives (as in, motivation toward something else—a new partner, a new job, activism on behalf of oppressed groups, and so on) because we have become susceptible to marketing campaigns selling us on the fundamental lie that life is pleasant. We have already begun selling women on the promise of pharmaceutically terminating menstruation for “convenience” and trimming their labias in order to generate better orgasms, despite known tissue damage and reduced sensation from such surgeries. Just last week, advertisements promoted a new “mint” that will disguise the vagina’s natural smell. We sculpt and trim, tweak and prune. This comes at a considerable cost, as individuals, as a society, and as a potentially toxic contagion within the global community. Until we seriously challenge the impact and reach of the pharmaceutical industry, these assaults on our most basic ways of being human will continue in earnest.

• Footnotes

1. www.northernsun.com [↩]
2. Duryea, E. J. (2008, April). What every sexuality specialist should know about ‘sexual numeracy’: How we present quantitative information is important. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, Western Region, San Diego, CA. [↩]
3. This phrase was first used in Zita, J. (1998). Prozac feminism. Body talk: Philosophical Reflections on sex and gender. New York: Columbia University Press. [↩]
4. Harris, G. (2004, February 28). Pfizer gives up testing Viagra on women. The New York Times, C-1. [↩]
5. Shifren, J. L., Monz, B. U., Russo, P. A., Segreti, A., & Johannes, C. B. (2008). Sexual problems and distress in United States women: Prevalence and correlates. Obstetrics & Gynecology, 112(5), 970-978. [↩]
6. Pollan, M. (2009). In defense of food: An eater’s manifesto. New York: Penguin. [↩]

By Breanne Fahns, from the website: http://thepublicsphere.com/2009/12/lifestyle-drugs-wave-pharmaceutical-personality-sculpting/