Jacobin Magazine: Time After Capitalism

The obligation to profit shapes our experience of time: minute to minute, as we hustle to catch the train to work; day to day, as we calculate whether we have enough cat food to avoid the 6 PM supermarket crush; and decade to decade, as we spend years preparing for work and equate our adulthood with climbing the professional ladder. Anyone who has had to cancel plans with friends, put an infant into day care before he or she felt comfortable doing so, or work through a migraine knows how unforgiving the demands of profit are, how they brook no disruption, from personal trauma to simple fatigue. [...]

Other sectors, particularly service and retail, have instituted just-in-time scheduling, leaving employees with no idea when or how long they will be working. These workers cannot enroll their children in regular childcare, buy a weekly bus pass, or make plans with friends and family. They often get stuck near their jobs in airports or outlying shopping centers with hours of “garbage time” between shifts — time they could be relaxing at home or enjoying a hobby.  [...]

In a society free from the burdens of profit, leisure could become more central to human experience. Today, we often conflate leisure with idleness and idleness with immorality, but it need not be so. Indeed, a Latin word for “business,” negotium, reveals how seriously some societies used to take non-laboring time. Negotium literally means the absence (indicated by the prefix neg-) of leisure (otium). Romans, in other words, described business in negative terms, as the mundane stuff one does when not attending to the enjoyable aspects of living. While we would not wish to return to ancient Rome’s patriarchal, slave-owning society, we could do with taking leisure more seriously. [...]

Would we still live our lives according to workweeks and career paths? Many might. But instead of seeking a work/life balance, we might just have life: our time on earth in which the activities of living — convalescence, child rearing, friendship, daydreaming, bereavement — get their due alongside labor.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Void Stares Back

Don’t get Blinder wrong. He didn’t want to disenfranchise the population, but, rather, to give their values and long-run welfare more effective expression in government. In his scheme, “value judgments” would still be made by elected representatives, but “technical judgments” were left to the technocrats, allowed to pursue the broad objectives set by the representatives who appointed them. The voters were cast as both Ulysses’ sailors and the sirens: binding government to the mast so it couldn’t respond to them later. In case of regret, they could always choose to undo the shackles, though that process should be neither easy nor quick. [...]

What if, Zakaria asked, racists and fascists prevailed in the free and fair elections of the Balkans? Would you rather live in democratic Haiti or the “liberal semi-democracy” of Antigua? Should we promote the spread of democracy in the Middle East if this created regimes that “would almost certainly be more illiberal than the ones now in place?” In Zakaria’s account, it was the liberal part of liberal democracy that had led to the flourishing of the West, and when the two sides come into conflict, it was the liberal part that should be defended. [...]

It may seem odd to forecast the end of “the age of party democracy” at a time when, by many measures, democracy is more pervasive than ever before. In 1900, almost no country in the world extended universal suffrage. By 2000, almost two-thirds did, covering 58 percent of the world’s population. [...]

In theory, there is nothing stopping sovereign power from altering or repealing the legal framework on which capital depends. Once upon a time, democracy was seen as a genuine threat to capitalism. This fear motivated the composition of all the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classics Zakaria draws from in his defense of the “basic liberties” against the encroachment of “illiberal democracy.” The prospect of extending the vote to the propertyless terrified the propertied. And not without reason — redistribution and regulation were the point of getting the vote for many who fought for it. [...]

Mair helps us understand the decline of the social-democratic party, and therefore the conditions for its potential rebirth. Parties do not simply reflect a set of preferences that are out there in the electorate — they help shape and articulate those preferences. Parties have to be successful on two fronts: they must build and maintain electoral popularity, and they need effective policy strategies that account for the economic context in which the capitalist state is embedded.

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FiveThirtyEight: Why Dozens Of Mass Shootings Didn’t Change Americans’ Minds On Guns

The exact number of mass shootings is hard to pin down, but gun violence is disturbingly common in the United States, especially compared with other developed countries. And repeated exposure to acts of violence — even when that exposure comes secondhand through the news — can have a numbing effect, according to Yuval Neria, a professor of psychology at Columbia University.

This effect has been mostly studied with regard to terrorist attacks in countries like Israel that have experienced chronic violence, but there’s no reason to imagine that it wouldn’t extend to mass shootings or other acts of gun violence as well, Neria and other psychologists said, because the two events aren’t psychologically distinct. “There isn’t a difference between mass shootings and acts of terrorism in terms of how they affect the brain — they’re both intentional, man-made acts that inflict horror and fear,” he said. [...]

Slovic’s research has shown that because feelings and intuition play such a strong role in our evaluations of risk, we’re less likely to instinctively perceive items that are familiar or beneficial as something that’s hazardous and should be banned or regulated. This has particularly strong implications for gun owners. “A lot of people own guns or know someone who owns a gun or see a general benefit to guns,” Slovic said. “Positive feelings about something like guns can dampen the emotional response to an event like a shooting and make it feel less risky.” [...]

Another crucial distinction between terrorist attacks and mass shootings, from a psychological perspective, is that terrorists’ ideologies and goals are relatively clear, while mass shooters’ motives tend to be diverse or opaque. The apparent randomness of mass shootings makes it hard to collectively focus blame or anger, according to Sarah Lowe, a professor of psychology at Montclair State University. This could help explain why repeated exposure to terrorist attacks in Israel is seen as having helped strengthen national unity, while mass shootings in the U.S. seem to sow divisions.  

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Politico: Blueprint for a democratic renewal of the eurozone

Since the eurozone crisis, the intellectual consensus has gradually solidified around the hope that once the financial system is repaired, the creation of a banking union, extended with a capital markets union, would allow for enough risk sharing as in an insurance system to stabilize the currency union. If properly designed, this might convincingly redress the worst flaws of the initial architecture, but it is not enough to ensure its success. [...]

Institutional and political issues, rather than the economic solutions, should be at the heart of the reform debate. The last few years have shown that the institutions governing the eurozone are not fit for purpose in preventing crises and even less so in managing them. Economic policy orchestrated by an ineffective combination of complex rules, erratic market discipline and loose inter-governmental cooperation arrangements cannot continue to be the way forward for the eurozone.

Instead, a new political approach would include a real European executive that is democratically accountable before a parliament of the eurozone and leads economic policy with expertise and a larger degree of political autonomy. [...]

Third, unlike the current EU budget, this eurozone budget should entail the ability to raise taxes, decide on expenditures and issue debt. The last point means it would be a supplier of eurozone risk-free assets in times of crisis, thereby complementing the constrained capacity of member states to supply safe assets. This would be crucial if member countries were to default on their national sovereign debt.

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The Local: Is Italy’s League a ‘far-right’ party?

The League was founded 27 years ago on the pipe dream of separating northern Italy from “Roma ladrona” (“thieving Rome”) and southern Italians, whom it characterized as layabouts and criminals. But under Matteo Salvini, the League’s leader of just over four years, the party has dropped references to secession from its programme, aiming instead at national power. Its anger has been redirected at Brussels and most especially, immigrants. [...]

“If today many people confuse it with the far right, it’s essentially because it fiercely opposes immigration and demands national sovereignty as regards the European Union and its policies. But it’s a question of specific convergences, not a deep affinity.” [...]

In its former life, the Northern League converged with the centre and the left, counting former communists, socialists, anti-fascists, federalists, libertarians and others among its ranks. Throughout its first decade it talked about teaming up with centrist and leftist movements, and in some cases did so; one left-wing prime minister described the League as a “rib” of Italy’s left. [...]

“Its programme has aspects that put it mainly near the right (for example, defending small and medium businesses, criticizing the tax system) and others that place it less far from the left (policies that favour working people and those at the lower end of society – provided they’re Italian by birth),” says Tarchi.

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