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What is most striking in these emotionally charged scenes is that the struggle transcends a simple plant election. The people who are politically in motion are people who work on the line every day, people who drive their own cars, people who own homes, people who have families, people who may even own the proverbial color television set. These same people are very obviously and very enthusiastically supporting an anti-capitalist revolutionary organization. Workers viewing such footage can identify with the kind of people participating and with the kind of action being taken. They can see that being a radical does not require becoming an incredible, gun-slinging hero who defies the police with every breath. A union election is one of the lowest levels of mass action, but it is mass action nonetheless, and not elite action, just as the strike and the boycott are mass actions in which the people serve themselves rather than relying upon a group of elite warriors.
Our objectives: 1. Workers' control of their places of work -- the factories,
mines, fields, offices, transportation services and communication facilities -- so
that the exploitation of labor will cease and no person or corporation will get
rich off the labor of another person, but all people will work far the collective
benefit of humanity.
-Black Workers Congress manifesto, 1971
The Forman idea of revolutionary theory and practice, "Formanism," reflected a precise, if restricted, sense of organization and an amalgam of popularized theoretical tendencies of the 1960s. The major organizational form was the umbrella group operating with a popular front strategy. The organizations had plans for becoming mass-membership groups; but more important than gaining members were the immediate goals of organizing conferences, workshops, and lectures and producing documents. This procedure would attract outside funding and prepare the ground for political education classes. The end product of this program was supposed to be the creation of Frantz Fanon Institutes. In effect, Formanism substituted ideological struggle for struggle over material conditions. The focus had to remain ideological because people were recruited into study groups and organizing commissions rather than action groups prepared to deal with immediate issues. Reduced to study groups and organizing commissions, politics was effectively separated from the problems of work and daily life. The education itself was anticolonial, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist, but ideas were not presented in the context of a serious class analysis of the roles blacks play in America or of the state of mid-twentieth-century capitalism. Unlike the economically grounded and disciplined organizational approach of Marxism-Leninism, the approach of Fanon-Formanism was exemplified by loosely structured groups stressing psychological interpretations of social reality and the accumulation of technical skills. Formanism was less a program for moving toward power than a defensive tactic for dealing with oppression.
A typical example of a runaway plant was the Briggs Manufacturing Corporation. Once an independent giant in the auto parts industry whose owner also owned the Detroit baseball team and ran the ball park as a kind of civic duty, Briggs was purchased by Chrysler in 1953. Nineteen years later, Briggs workers learned that their factory was to be moved to Tennessee within a year. The workers were told that they were guaranteed a job if they moved to Tennessee, too, but their wages would be $2.40 an hour instead of the Detroit rate of $4.30. The stunned workers also learned that Tennessee had a "right-to-work" law which hampered union activity and that the state was granting Chrysler an interest-free loan of $6.5 million. The Detroit workers discovered that they would lose their pensions, group insurance benefits, job security, workman's compensation claims, and numerous other "fringe" benefits. The affected workers were not the "new" workers written about in scholarly journals, but people whose average age was 45 and who had an average of 20 years' seniority. Many of them came from white ethnic groups. One hundred and fifty of these workers organized to fight the company. The insurgents could get no action from the union, so they turned to radical labor attorneys John Taylor and Ron Glotta, who promptly took legal action to protect the workers' financial interests.
What distinguished the League of Revolutionary Black Workers was that we were able to engage masses of black workers at a time when people didn't know how to approach or mobilize them. We learned to speak plainly in a language workers understood, but we did not talk down to them. We understood you had to speak with passion. You had to feel that passion. You had to have the courage to expose yourself as a person with revolutionary ideas and be willing to face the consequences.
from Michael Hamlin
[...] we had a loss over the course of three days that was like a ten-sigma event, meaning, you know, it should never happen based on the statistical models that underlie it. Because the model doesn’t assume that everybody else is trading the same model as you are. So that’s sort of like a meta-model factor. The model doesn’t know that there are other black boxes out there.
think about this more. could you account for this? could you add a meta element to the model that accounts for the presences of other models (which may, themselves, have meta elements)?
[...] What tends to happen in financial markets is, bad things happen when you really divorce the people who take the risk from the people who understand the risk. What happened is that that distance in the subprime market just increased and increased and increased. I mean, it started out that you had mortgage companies that would keep some of the stuff on their own books. Subprime lenders, it wasn’t a big business, it was a small business, and it was specialty lenders, and they made risky loans, and they would keep a lot of it on their books.
But then these guys were like, “You know, there are hedge fund buyers for pools that we put together,” and then the hedge fund buyers say, “You know what? We need to fund, we need to leverage this, so how can we leverage this? Oh, I have an idea, let’s create a CDO and issue paper against it to fund ourselves,” and then you get buyers of that paper. The buyers of that paper, they’re more ratings-sensitive than fundamentals-sensitive, so they’re quite divorced from the details. Then it got even more extended in the sense that vehicles were set up that had a mandate to kind of robotically buy that paper and fund themselves through issuing paper in the market.
this is eerily similar to how i've been thinking about the gig economy
Today, where people have made bad investment decisions, where people built houses they never should have built, there’s a misallocation of resources. The loss has already happened. The loss isn’t what happens on a balance sheet; the loss is what happens when someone cuts down a tree, makes cement, builds a 6,000-square-foot house in a place it should never be built. So the loss has already happened. The question is, how do you allocate that loss? And if you don’t allocate the loss, if you pretend it isn’t there, then this has really baleful consequences for the economy. So what we’re going through now is this process of loss allocation. It can be done swiftly, fairly, and intelligently, or it can be done slowly, and messily, and inefficiently, and also it can be not done at all. If it’s happened, the best is to deal with it swiftly and fairly. And when the shareholders get hurt really badly and the banks have to recapitalize at punitive levels, or get taken over $2 a share, I think it’s fair—the banks made bad decisions, the equity holders are the prime beneficiaries of the activities the bank is undertaking. When things go poorly, they should be the primary bearers of the loss. I think that’s good.
think about this in the context of startup valuations or sales or whatever (or when it turns out a startup has a fraudulent product). the loss has already happened, but in private; the financial stuff in the news is just accounting
One of the oldest, in fact I think the oldest money market fund, the progenitor of the whole industry, a fund called the Reserve Primary Fund—Primary had meaningful exposure to Lehman paper. Something like 2 percent of that fund was in Lehman paper. When Lehman went under, people who had shares of the Reserve Primary Fund, especially institutional investors who were very much on top of what Primary’s holdings were, started to ask for redemptions from that fund. So that led to a run on that money market fund.
As a result, Primary “broke the buck.” They had to mark down their Lehman exposure. The holding, the value of one share of the Primary Reserve Fund, was no longer $1—money market funds always try to maintain the value of one share at $1. And that just caused people to—I think the technical term is “lose their shit.” People just lost their shit. You thought you had money; now you don’t have money. And you don’t know how much you have in Reserve Primary Fund, really…“We think people will recover 98 cents on the dollar, we don’t know how long it will take to get people back their money,” and suddenly all these money market funds fell under suspicion. [...]
oh man this is just wild
I think at AIG and at some of these investment banks, there were people who were doing these securitizations who knew that ultimately they were going to blow up, and they didn’t care. They didn’t care because the structure of compensation at a place like AIG and certainly at the investment banks leads people to take a future-discounting model, that’s what I’d call it. There’s this year’s compensation period…and then there’s the future. And the future is very heavily discounted. And many of these risks, like the risk of an economic shock grave enough to cause these brittle subprime securitizations to break, was something you wouldn’t expect to happen every year, it would take a couple of years, and because people were paid according to mark-to-market profits in a given year, they continued to do this business even though they knew that it was storing up risks for an eventual meltdown. That’s true of AIG and that’s true of the investment banks.
kind of a funny way to put it (discounting the future). reminds me of that scene in the pale king where DFW fails the final because of the compounding effect of not studying (depreciation schedules)