Author: James Livingston

A Referendum on Capitalism

Posted by | Feb 17, 2020 | , |

By James Livingston I know a financial planner who meets with his clients every quarter, to review and revise their portfolios. He recently met with one, a retired executive, who said (I paraphrase), “Donald Trump is a pig who turns everything he touches to shit.  But he’s made me a bundle this quarter.  OK, you have, by keeping me in equities.  I gotta vote for him.  Especially since if Bernie’s elected, the stock market loses 20% overnight.  You said that.” These remarks capture the mood of the majority just now.  Nobody I know–except my friend the financial planner and his ex-wife–is deeply or directly invested in the stock market, but 59% of Americans say they’re better off than last year, and fully 76% expect better things to come.  And this, according to Gallup and the Pew Research Center, even as concerns about jobs and the economy keep rising, making them the principal issues for Republicans and Democrats alike–and as, meanwhile, Bernie Sanders, who proposes to finance M4A with a tax on stock trades, remains the leader among Democratic presidential candidates. What’s going on here?  Only 10% of stockholders own 84% of shares traded on the NYSE.  The rest of us occupy Wall Street at the distance of our pension funds, if we’re lucky enough to have one (most of us do not–see below).  Why does anyone treat the stock market...

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Backstreet Boys

Posted by | Sep 28, 2019 | , |

I don’t want to spend a lot of time on campus, nobody does unless they’re a dean of something, and my teaching schedule validates this desire.  Being a professor is a pretty cool gig because most of the work you’re expected to do—read and write books—happens off campus, outside the classroom. Wednesdays are the exception, when department meetings happen. Then I’m there all day, from 9:30 AM to 7:30 PM.  I get home around 10:00.  Ah, poor me, gotta work for a living, and part of that work is dealing with the colleagues, in meetings.  But this is not what I imagined!  Precious me, I thought the life of the mind exempted me from tiresome routine. I was wrong about that, of course.  The life of the mind just is a tiresome routine.  You rehearse what has been said, and then you try to say something new, but the rehearsal is everything. G. L. S. Shackle—now there’s a name—honored this captivity in The Years of High Theory: Invention and Tradition in Economic Thought, 1926-1939, a wonderful, unreadable book that traces a revolution in economic theory, from Piero Sraffa, who made sure that Antonio Gramsci’s book orders got placed, and Joan Robinson, who made sure that Michal Kalecki got taken seriously, on toward John Maynard Keynes, who made sure that Say’s Law got displaced.  All Cambridge alum.  Beautiful trouble. Here’s...

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Slave Play

Posted by | Sep 20, 2019 | , |

Last night my girlfriend and I saw “Slave Play,” the sensational new work by Jeremy O. Harris from the Yale School of Drama (at least four other alumni are in the cast).  With excruciating forensic detail, it shows how race and sex have always gone together in this part of the world, in ways that make us sick, and suffer, and try to recover from what the therapists call “desire disorder.”  Also in ways that might heal us.  I read no reviews before seeing it, and I haven’t read any since.  It’s the kind of theater you want to experience first-hand, so that no audience or critic comes between you and the performance.  This is a mistake, of course, because there’s no such thing as pure experience—it’s always raw material; waiting for the retrospect, the narrative, that might, just might, make sense of it. That’s the lesson psychoanalysis taught us.  Freud, Ferenczi, Laplanche, and Lacan also taught us that each stage of childhood development doesn’t displace its predecessors—instead it changes their cognitive status and their social or political consequences.   They remain as durable residues, constantly detaining and deforming those who make it to adulthood.    “Slave Play” works like a shrink would, in this sense, probing the antecedents for narrative clues, not causative conditions, and indeed its second act—but there’s no intermission—is a group therapy session run by two...

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Trump, the Attempted Cure

Posted by | Aug 14, 2019 | |

To say that Trump’s tweets on Epstein’s death are demented is to suggest that he’s suffering from a disease.  He’s not, and to say so is to dignify his cretinous behavior.  This so-called man has been peddling conspiracy theories all his life.     Which is to say he’s been bullshitting, in the technical sense, all his life. As Harry Frankfurt, the expert on the subject, would say, the liar knows the truth and countermands it for a specific purpose, whereas the bullshitter is actually incapable of acknowledging any reality external to his own utterance.      Conspiracy theories thrive on a tragic scheme of motives that, as Kenneth Burke explained, bend toward both the supernatural (vertical) and the utilitarian (horizontal).  The inscrutable Gods up there have convened, and so have the international bankers (the Jews, of course) down here–there’s no way to identify them, nor their purposes, but they are so fundamentally causative that their effects are everywhere.  The conspiracy theorist has faith in the sense that Paul the Apostle, formerly known as Saul of Tarsus, described it: “the conviction of things unseen.”    Trump the bullshitter has entertained a lot of conspiracy theories in the course of his so-called career, most importantly the “birther” business about Obama, which made him the president of the United States, dedicated to undoing everything his African-American predecessor had accomplished.  His political capital, like...

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I Can Smell Death

Posted by | Aug 12, 2019 | |

I’m a turkey vulture, Cathartes aurain scientific ornithology.  I’m an ugly old bird, just about dead, but that name matters to me.  It’s from the Greek katharsis, which means to purify or cleanse.  To transform, anyway.  I don’t fly a lot these days because when I spread my wings, to 8 feet, it scares the shit out of everybody, including the morons with guns down below.  They think I’m coming for them.  I am, of course, but later, when they’re dead.  One of them tagged me today, almost blew off my left wing. I guess that’s why I walked these blocks up from the park, why I’m pecking at this mess on Donaldson Street.  A dog got run over.   Sure, it’s gross, you think vultures like what they have to for for a living?  Not anymore than you do.  We do it because we have to.  We’re not equipped to hunt animals down. We’re parasites, like you.  We wait on your demise and decomposition–although it’s true, we prefer fresh carrion, and some of us have attacked small mammals. I eat anything that is, in fact, dead.  That’s what vultures do, it’s our brand, you could say, speaking without permission of the species—the comrades, I should say–I’m just thinking out loud.  But remember this, what sets us apart from all other birds is that we can smell death, even while...

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