by
Ray Carney
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A young man shouldn’t worry about being suckled, he should just go out and be a man. Go into a diner and sit down with a bunch of hardhats. Sit there and drink coffee with them and feel your manhood with them. Go to all the places you’re uncomfortable in and prove yourself, because someday you’re going to have to prove yourself. Do it while you’re young and you’ll never regret it.
To Rowlands: Make them laugh. Do anything you can to get them to laugh. Don’t worry. You can do it.
To Cassel and Blewitt: Whatever you do, don’t laugh! Act any way you want to, but whatever Gena does, please don’t laugh.
JC: [an aside] I don’t direct. I set up situations and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t.
To have a philosophy is to know how to love. And to know where to put it. And to know the importance of friendships and the importance of continuity. And all the other philosophies, negative philosophies, seem to be a more modern bastardization of what philosophy is. And I don’t think a person can live without a philosophy. That is, where can you love? What’s the important place that you can put that thing because you can’t put it everywhere. You’d walk around, you gotta be a minister or priest saying, ‘Yes, my son’ or ‘Yes, my daughter, bless you.’ But people don’t live that way. They live with anger and hostility and problems and lack of money and lack of . . . with tremendous disappointments in their life. So what they need is a philosophy. What I think everybody needs in a way is to say, ‘Where and how can I love? Can I be in love so that I can live? So that I can live with some degree of peace?’ You know? And I guess every picture we’ve ever done has been, in a way, to try to find some kind of philosophy for the characters in the film. And so that’s why I have a need for the characters to really analyze love, discuss it, kill it, destroy it, hurt each other, do all that stuff – in that war, in that word-polemic and picture-polemic of what life is. And the rest of the stuff doesn’t really interest me. It may interest other people, but I have a one-track mind. That’s all I’m interested in, is love. And the lack of it. When it stops. And the pain that’s caused by loss or things taken away from us that we really need. So Love Streams is just . . . another picture in search of that grail . . . or whatever.
At a high level of abstraction, the current period of globalisation is defined by a trilogy of ideal-typical economies: superindustrial (coastal East Asia), financial/tertiary (North Atlantic), and hyperurbanizing/extractive (West Africa). "Jobless growth" is incipient in the first, chronic in the second, and absolute in the third. We might add a fourth ideal-type of disintegrating society whose chief trend is the export of refugees and migrant labor. [...]
[...] for most of the postwar era, US capital was mainly focused on extracting “relative surplus value” — i.e., generating profits by relying on increased productivity. The key inflection points for us are in the late 1960s through the 1970s, a period of intense industrial conflict in the United States, largely in resistance to capital’s enormous speedup of production. This was the era of rank-and-file rebellion, in which blue-collar workers went on the offensive against their bosses (and often their union leaders as well) in a fight against deteriorating working conditions, while millions of public-sector workers joined unions for the first time. Partly as a result of these high levels of conflict, productivity growth during the late 1970s virtually collapsed, leading to a decline in profit rates. The rebellion came to an end with the recession induced by Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker’s sudden increase in interest rates in 1979, which announced the start of the neoliberal era.
Looking at those private-sector “services” most likely to employ workingclass people (excluding FI R E and professional services), service jobs grew by 14.2 million from 1990 to 2010. Some 8 million of those jobs, or 57 percent of growth, were in employment associated with the labor of social reproduction, such as health and social care and food services. This is due in large part to the increased participation of women in wage labor, including women with children, beginning in the 1950s. As the economy expanded following World War II, capital drew on those engaged in social reproduction in the home, vastly increasing the number of hours they worked for wages — from a median of 925 hours per year in 1979 to 1,664 in 2012. For women with children the increase was even greater, more than doubling from 600 hours per year to 1,560 over this period. 16 The resulting relative shortage of unpaid female reproductive labor in the home opened the door to the commodification of such labor outside of family, in the market.
in the US. just sucking more and more people into the market without any real net gain
There are also clear downsides for workers in consolidation through M& A s. For one, merged companies typically close some plants or facilities, which can lead to workforce reductions. In addition, experience shows that the new owners will try to undermine existing conditions and pay and to squeeze even more work out of the remaining workforce. Industry consolidation is not a free ride for labor. Nevertheless, the outcome is necessarily an industry in which fewer but larger firms compete, the combined workforce of more and more firms is relatively larger, and the new production methods and links are more vulnerable. In the long run, this is a situation that makes the industry more susceptible to unionization, as was the case in the 1930s after the 1916–29 merger wave that produced corporate giants such as General Motors, John Deere, and Union Carbide.
[...] Given the obvious inequalities and injustices of contemporary capitalism, how is it possible that such societies can stably reproduce themselves over time? Bourdieu’s answer to this undeniably real puzzle is symbolic power, which can be best grasped as, in Mara Loveman’s words, “the ability to make appear as natural, inevitable, and thus apolitical that which is a product of historical struggle.” Bourdieu’s account of symbolic power closely parallels the French Marxist Louis Althusser’s theory of ideology. Bourdieu, like Althusser, claims that the misrecognition of the social world is a precondition for action; therefore, a false, imaginary, or incorrect understanding of the social world is the universal default condition of actors in capitalist society. Furthermore, like Althusser, he emphasizes that this condition of universal misrecognition is reinforced through the education system. Therefore, the school is the central institutional mechanism of social reproduction under capitalism. [...]
[...] Bourdieu and Passeron put the argument:
Nothing is better designed than the examination to inspire universal recognition of the legitimacy of academic verdicts and of the social hierarchies they legitimate, since it leads the self-eliminated to count themselves among those who fail, while enabling those elected from among a small number of eligible candidates to see in their election the proof of a merit or “gift” which would have caused them to be preferred to all comers in any circumstances.
Schooling and examinations thus translate class inequalities into inequalities of merit legitimating these inequalities both in the eyes of the dominant and subordinate classes. According to Bourdieu, to a large extent the dominant class of contemporary is a credentialed elite. To recall, this is also Althusser’s argument: that the school ISA is the key institution in reproducing capitalism.
quote from Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. relevant to my theory of meritocracy (retroactive legitimation)
[...] One hypothesis to explain the attraction of Bourdieu’s work is that it turns the potentially radical energy of social critique inward, thereby creating a form of political engagement that promises the attainable goal of accumulating “symbolic power” in lieu of confronting real exploitation and domination. The appeal is best indicated, again, by Brubaker’s gloss: the point of Bourdieu’s texts “is not simply to interpret the world; it is to change the world, by changing the way in which we — in the first instance, other social scientists — see it.” This pale recapitulation of Marx’s (uncited, naturally) eleventh thesis on Feuerbach is an effective summation of Bourdieu’s appeal. In him we have a thinker who mobilizes vast intellectual resources in the pursuit of a militant project to transform sociological consciousness in place of transforming society.