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It’s hard to imagine what the 1960s would have been like if TV viewers, flooded with nightly news reports of atrocities, emergencies, and horrors, had simultaneously been getting their entertainment jollies out of fantasy versions of the same atrocities, emergencies, and horrors. But that’s more or less the situation today. If contemporary TV has a unifying theme, it boils down to this: no refuge.
Well before Trump came along to validate the conceit, The Walking Dead had added a mordant dimension of political parody to its original survival-of-the-fraughtest premise by introducing David Morrissey as “The Governor,” essentially a psychopath in messiah’s clothing. By now, the series dwells more on rival humanoid factions battling each other than it does on dispatching dull zombies, and the implicit joke is that they’re vying for supremacy in a wasteland that will never again resemble the U.S.A. they once knew. You couldn’t ask for a better preview of next year’s midterm elections.
For his part, Franklin D. Roosevelt blamed usurers, among other financial malefactors, for the crash and relentless depression; he quoted the Bible to condemn the high-interest practices that flourished in and out of sanctioned institutions throughout the nation. But a decidedly moral view of American finance, where it had existed before, was losing its influence among observers of the American economy. In a collective effort to dodge blame, various banks, lenders, and other moneyed interests began to identify the nebulous “market” as the source of the nation’s ongoing financial ills. This insistence on self-regulating markets was the culmination of a great transformation in economic mentalities that political economist Karl Polanyi called the emergence of a “market society,” where markets are imagined to possess their own intrinsic logics, mechanisms, and moods—to which humans must adjust, not the other way around. The term “market,” which before would have been a cursory reference to supply and demand, now became a self-evident defense against populist reason, one that demanded no interrogation. When asked in 1929 why he lent so much at such high rates, one executive answered simply, “I can tell you why we loaned so much money. Because there was a demand for it at excessively high rates, over and above what we could get from what we would normally invest in.” Translation: the market made me do it. Next question.
But capitalism is abuse by design, and there can be no lasting truce between lenders and borrowers until the lenders are no longer motivated by profit. This is because capitalism doesn’t just permit exploitation of the working class by the owning class; it requires it. Abuse will manifest itself in every sphere dominated by capital, whether in compliance with or in violation of the law. [...]
The financial industry—its every hedge fund, every savings and loan association, every brokerage firm, and every mortgage company—is dedicated to one thing only: capital accumulation. Capital accumulation is the process by which capitalists turn large sums of money into even larger sums money. And where does that money come from to begin with? To take a cue from Marx, all value under capitalism is determined by labor, and all profit is generated by the exploitation of that labor. To compete in the market, businesses must pay obeisance to the profit motive—and since suppressing wages is the surest way to gain an advantage and outperform competitors, this inevitably results in a race to the bottom. Working people’s bodies and time are exhausted, and the fruits of their labor are extracted by their employers, who set about multiplying all of this through investment. All capital in the accumulation phase bears the mark of abuse.
Yet the cycle of abuse doesn’t stop with material production. Where there is capital accumulation there is always what Marxist geographer David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession,” the process of separating people from the basic resources they need to get by, like houses to live in, transportation to work, and even money itself—and then duplicitously offering to grant access to those resources . . . for a fee. Predatory lending is a prime example of accumulation by dispossession, designed to target and extract wealth from the bottom and siphon it to the top. It makes the rich richer and keeps the poor under their heel—which makes them more acquiescent workers and more desperate, reckless borrowers
[...] In public banking, as in health care, the state is guided by more than the profit motive—namely, it risks self-damage if it forces borrowers into debt, for those suffering people will either become more eligible for public-funded programs or will otherwise drain the resources of the state. Right now, there is a contradiction in banking—it’s a hugely consequential feature of public life, and yet it rests in private hands and is thoroughly oriented to maximize private gain. Because the state is at least partially incentivized by the prospect of improving the financial health of its citizenry, and thus its overall economy, a public bank can help resolve that tension—especially if paired with an array of other universal social programs which can supplement the financial services offered through the state.
This worker is teaching people to use the iPads that will one day replace her. It’s an awkward phenomenon that now pervades a growing cross-section of industries, a type of techno-solutionism that’s unbearable because it insistently capitalizes on quick fixes for problems that didn’t exist to begin with. It’s also a disadvantageous mutation of principles that marketers have historically leveraged to make us feel bad about ourselves so that we’ll buy more shit we don’t need. It is all of these things, and it is also becoming the operating motive of the music industry.
preach
But who’s to blame? Saunier recognizes the tough spot so many artists and labels are in, where they’re unable to outwardly criticize their corporate overlords without risking total irrelevance. “The people I would blame the most are the greedy chauvinists in charge of companies like Spotify and [those] who own Google,” he goes on:
These are the companies that have presented themselves as hip, huge, harmless . . . In fact, they are ruthless and as hungry for profit . . . They’re shark-like. Just eat up everything, take all of the world’s creations. Digitize them and offer them back to humanity either for free or for an incredibly low price. And don’t pay, or massively underpay the creators, and just kick back and put your feet up, and know that if Greg from Deerhoof doesn’t like it, well that’s fine, because there are a million other people lined up behind Greg who are perfectly happy to volunteer their music to exactly such a scheme in hopes of doing something besides being a barista their whole life.
quoting Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier
[...] With this in mind, and when I worry over the publications, labels, and artists who have (reluctantly or otherwise) embraced Spotify, I can’t help but think of that airport restaurant server who teaches you how to use the iPad, thereby contributing to her own obsolescence. Why is the music press generating value for a platform that in every way plans to eliminate it? And what will become of music criticism in a world without records? Will publications review discovery feeds and write profiles of playlists? What good will criticism be when all of music has coalesced into algorithmically preordained Muzak?
I want to believe that it’s not too late to beat the billionaires and the bots. But earlier this year Spotify signed a lease for fourteen floors at Four World Trade Center. The company’s gone on a hiring spree, with plans to add a thousand employees. The new lease costs $2.77 million in monthly rent. And it lasts until 2034.
although I feel like there's value in a music press being more about personal storytelling (like that incredible piece on The National), I agree with her sentiment and also think that Spotify planning ahead for 2034 is fucking terrifying
Calhoun is an analog to Marx, in other words, in the same way that public choice theory is an analog to the Marxist theory of the state. In the name of freedom, public choice theory would shackle the ninety-nine percent of us who exist in the lower orders of neoliberalism. Public choice theory is the Marxism of the master class.
In order to reclaim the mantle of freedom, we must reclaim the anti-statism of Marxism, the liberty embedded in a theory of freedom for all. It is perfectly understandable why liberals and leftists embraced elements of statism in the twentieth century. The state not only tamed the chaos of a market-based economy that left most people deeply insecure, it also protected the rights of people in dire need of such protection, namely black Americans.
But this is only half the story. If we only focus on this half, we will remain mystified as to why so many people are enthralled with libertarianism. For in addition to civil rights protections, the state is also Vietnam. It is drones, bank bailouts, tax cuts for the wealthy, prisons. The state is Trump. If we want to reclaim the mantle of liberty from the master class and their court intellectuals, we must also reclaim a theory of the state for the masses. And now that Trump is overseeing what looks to be the final capitalist enclosure of state power, the urgent project of democratic revival must hinge on nothing less than the full repudiation of libertarian fantasy in public life.
Contrast Wayne’s legacy with the Trumpworthy approach to Today’s Content. In today’s mediasphere, headlines are crafted not merely to grab eyeballs but to jerk knees and get share-buttons clicked.
And somehow, all the twitching and the Pavlovian sharing is supposed to create a viable personal brand through conspicuous consumption. Except here nothing is actually consumed and certainly nothing is digested; it’s just cooked in short order, plated and passed around till it’s cold and moldy and forgotten. We come hungry to the internet and TV and, occasionally, quaintly, the magazine and the tabloid. We pick something off the menu, rave about it to our friends and kin, then rush off without eating, hungrier than ever. We come to value the appetite more than fullness.
Wayne’s journalism made you sit down and chew your food. Maybe every meal didn’t please your palate, but many more of them did, and you were always happy for the nourishment.
Wayne died the day before Donald John Trump of Queens was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States. Since then—before then, to be honest—I’ve been adrift, dumb, immobile, confounded by my world. And then, a while ago, an editor emailed me to ask me for a piece on Wayne. This all has a point, I swear. I’m just getting to it now.