The Counterpublic Papers vol. 3 no. 15

Last week a book came out arguing that the president was an illiterate madman. Some bookstores had midnight openings just to handle the volume. Reminded me of a Harry Potter release.

But for what?

We know Donald Trump’s mad. We know his people know he’s mad. And while he’s literature enough to barely write tweets, we know he doesn’t really get along with books.

None of this is news.

Perhaps the only thing that is news is that people who are actually supposed to report the news aren’t doing more along these lines to write out loud what the world knows.

(No I don’t want a copy. Thanks for asking. I learned watching a free screening of Strange Days almost twenty years ago that time is the one thing you can’t get back.)

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Over the past year plus there’ve been a number of pieces about uniting the working class. Daria Roithmayr wrote a piece in Law and Political Economy that’s worth a quick read. It’s part of a larger project she’s writing in the wake of the election. It sounds straightforward right—organize people around shared interests and then use that organized power to change the political system. She’s onto something. I think her ideas about labor—shifting from organizing private workplaces to organizing sectors, makes a great deal of sense. The only “workspace” uber workers share is the freeway. Similarly you’d get a lot more bang for the buck if you organized the McDonald, Wendy’s, and Burger King workers on the same block (who probably take the same bus to work—when the bus is on time) much less the same city, as opposed to trying to (impossibly) organize people in one franchise. Further I think she’s onto something when she talks about the race/class thing. But the most important thing is that she recognizes that whatever change we’re going to make will have to come by working on an issue by issue basis, using the power of organized bodies to put issues on the ballot folks care about. And then using this to gradually build a new framework. However what stands out about the Law and Political Economy blog is that it understands that the economy itself is a product of laws and regulations that shape interests, institutions, ideas, and identities. What institutional framework has to be created to make the politics she wants to see more possible?

This is the question she should be asking. The question we all should be asking.

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So sometime last year I think I got an email about the Ted Talk I gave a year and a half ago. They wanted to turn the Ted Talk into a book, and they offered to “assist” me.

For a “small sum” of course.

Instead of asking them if they actually knew who they were emailing (“you know I’ve already written two books already right?”), I think I respectfully told them thanks but not thanks.

Then I came across a post by Seth Godin.

Godin, for those who don’t know, is probably the self-help marketing guru most attuned to the shift to the internet and then to social media. I forgot how I came across his work but I read his posts every now and then to twist my brain a bit. He was probably one of the reasons I published Knocking the Hustle with Punctum—the purpose of a book is to get the idea out there, not so much to make money.

Anyway, he’s trying to help a friend generate support for her new project, and referred to the concept of “Book in a Box”. His description of it sounded a lot like the pitch the people made to me last year.

Sure enough.

For only $25,000 you can take an idea and make it into a Malcolm Gladwell type book that is sure to hit the best seller list.

Only $25,000.

Who knew?

I do happen to think a short book called How the Free Market Devastated Black Communities (the folks at Tedx gave the talk this title…it sounds a lot better with whatever title I came up with) would be worth reading. And writing. I’m just not about that pay-$25,000-for-someone-to-ghost-write-it life.

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One of the books I’d been meaning to read last year was Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. A standard space opera about a soldier on a mission to assassinate the leader of an interstellar empire. What caught my eye though was the fact that this was no ordinary soldier. In Leckie’s universe space ships are not only sentient, they are embodied in as many different “ancillaries” as there are individuals needed to run the ship. The “ship” then is both the hardware and software of the spaceship itself but is also the person at the helm, the person at communications, maybe even the janitors cleaning the toilets. The hardware isn’t only circuits then, it’s gristle, bone, epidermis.

The soldier in question is the only ancillary remaining from the ship, which was destroyed. The ship is now embodied, but kind of the same way we’d be embodied if the only thing left was our pinkie finger (a sentient pinkie finger).

This enables Leckie to deal with some of the standard dynamics of a space opera—interstellar politics, weapons of mass destruction, personal heroism and tragedy—but also questions of identity (in general and around gender specifically), of colonialism and its relationship to empire. I read it pretty quick. Glad I did.

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Two of my three youngest children attend public schools in the county. (My youngest began the year in a public school but is now being homeschooled—something I might come back to in a later issue.) Because the weather’s been so bad—it’s been Detroit cold, with temperatures hovering in the single digits before the wind chill is taken into account—they’ve been going a couple of hours late.

In the city it’s another story entirely. Because several schools don’t have heating, students have been forced to go to school in all of their winter gear.

One Coppin State student ended up starting a gofundme campaign. The pictures are heartbreaking. She had a target of $20,000 but was able to get triple that amount. Baltimore school and political leaders point the finger at Governor Hogan. Hogan in turn argues that the city had to return over $60 million back to the state because of malfeasance.

Most people read this as normal political conflict with the kids stuck in the middle.

And then others with politics read this as another issue of racism rearing its ugly head. The headline here writes itself—white students would never be treated this way. There is likely something to this—while the city is approximately 40% white the schools are over 85% black (whites in majority black cities rarely send their children to attend schools with black kids for a range of reasons including but not limited to racism).

I’d suggest another dynamic at work. Baltimore City Schools face a budget shortage, as does the city. This budget shortage is the partial byproduct of a series of decisions made over the past few decades to use public funds to subsidize capital. For sports stadia, for downtown development, to a certain extent for casinos. These subsidies rarely pay off in ways that help Baltimore residents and end up hamstringing the city’s ability to provide a range of services. The one exception here is the police, but one could make the argument that even here the city’s been hamstrung—the police have far more political power in the city than they should not just because of state law (the Maryland police officer’s bill of rights for example) but because given the stark increase in inequality the only way to truly deal with the consequences of inequality is to empower police to do it.

This is the neoliberal turn at work.

Using this frame we can understand why someone would take the step of turning to charity as a means of dealing with the issue—the go fund me campaign above intends to use the money in order to buy space heaters. And though I don’t think it’s happened yet I can easily see this turning into more claims for black led schools. While we can understand both moves, neither get at the heart of the problem. Indeed if Baltimore were better organized it might have been better to organize a strike of some sort as opposed to a charity campaign.

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A couple of folk actually took me up on my newsletter suggestion. If you’re interested in issues of race, class, and labor, check out Steven Pitts’ newsletter.

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Christmas day I lost one of my fraternity brothers, who died in as a result of a house fire. January 4 I lost another one—someone I’d just seen on December 27. I figured I was looking at yet another year of high highs and low lows. Although the year is young that kind of confirmed it to me. I said this on FB—which I’ll probably use less and less over the upcoming year—and it fits here. 2018 will likely take someone close to you. May take more than one. Tell them you love them. Hold them close if you can.

Next week.