Capitalism Begets Socialism

Imagine the average wage a bit higher and the average intelligence a bit lower but other than that this bit of dialog from Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson caught my attention this morning while I spent 2.78 hours at the Nevada DMV. Speaking of which--you know if you change the address on your driver's license and you get a sticker to put on the back with the new address. Then some time in the future you wish to change it back to the address that is already on the license, well that cannot be fathomed by the computer mediated system. I fear I no longer exist in the Silver State, but I am registered to vote in Neverland.

But back to capitalism, socialism and other fantasies:

"The average surplus value created by American workers is thirty-three dollars an hour."

Anna said: "I wonder how they define surplus value."

"Profit," Frank said.

Edgardo shook his head. "You can cook the books and get rid of profit, but the surplus value, the value created beyond the pay for labor, is still there."

Anna said, "There was a page in here that said the average American worker puts in 1,950 hours a year. I thought that was questionable too, that's forty hours a week for about forty-nine weeks."

. . .

"What's the average income?" Edgardo asked. "Thirty thousand?"

"Maybe less," Frank said.

"Call it thirty, and what's the average taxes paid?"

"About ten? Or is it less?"

Edgardo said, "Call it ten. So let's see. You work every day of the year, except for three lousy weeks. You create around a hundred thousand dollars. Your boss takes two thirds, and give you one third, and you give a third of that to the government. Your government uses what it takes to build all the roads and schools and police and pensions, and you boss takes his share and buys a mansion on an island somewhere. So naturally you complain about your bloated inefficient Big Brother of a government, and you always vote for the pro-owner party."

He grinned at Frank and Anna. "How stupid is that?"

I know. Too simplistic, the bosses take all the risks. Socialism doesn't work; Capitalism does (see Federal Financial Institutions Bailout, Sept. 2008). Be kind, I was into my third hour at the DMV, the man next to me was reading Super System II.

How Do You Mend?

[Content Disclosure: 0% Poker, 0.3% The Book, . . . 99% other things like love and loss]
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"Eventually time passed and had its way with him; not so much a matter of forgetting as of bleaching, or numbing. We look at the past through the wrong end of the telescope, he thought one day; eventually the things we can see in there become simply too small to hurt us." --Kim Stanley Robinson

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I like the word bleaching as used here. The slow inexorable loss of color and vitality. When it comes to matters of love or more specifically love lost--the emotion drains away like it is being bleached by time. You can conjure the pain or the sense of loss almost endless, until you can't. Eventually you pick at the scab and find it is gone and the new smooth skin heals. But does the heart callous?

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I am not so fond of the image of looking at the past through the wrong end of a telescope. In fact, like Sartre, I think we can alter our past by acting in the present. One man's poison is another man's bread (from my formative years working in the pharmacy). What was once evil may become light as wisdom and experience build but you have to be alert for what is new growth and what is scar tissue.

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One wonders about reanimating the bleached dessicated memories and should be warned against it despite the siren lure of once again into the crotch of the beast. What is that writing competition where the winner strings together endless disembodied imagries? And what is the 96th most popular Biography on Amazon.com right now?

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The sodden, somber silence of the what-might-have-been.

"Lost chances."

"Right, The fate of chance."

"Some fate is character."

"Sure, But most fate is fate. It's what picks you up and carries you off. Who you meet by accident, what happens--what you feel inside, no matter what you think. And it affects everything. Everything! Every thing. People argue about politics, and policy, the reasons why people did this or that--but it's always the personal stuff that mattered."

"It's always the stuff they don't write about. The stuff they can't write about. The look in someone's eye."

"Right, the way something catches you..."

"The way it carries you away."

"Like falling in love. Whatever the hell that means."

"That's it, sure. Falling in love, being loved back--"

"Or not."

"Right, or not! And everything changes."

"Everything."

"And no one knows why! And later on, or from anywhere on the outside, they look at your story and they say that story makes no sense."

"When if you only knew--"

"Then it would make sense."

"Yes. Perfect sense."

"It would be the story of the heart, every time."

"A history of emotions, If you could do it."

"It would be the heart's story." --Kim Stanley Robinson

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I gotta learn to write like that.

Nostalgia

[Content Disclosure: Nostalgia 68%; Pondering 12%; Other 9%]

"Nostalgia from the Greek nostos, 'a return home,' and algos, 'pain.' Pain of the return home. A very accurate description; despite their blurs, words can sometimes be so exact." -- Kim Stanley Robinson

Emotional nostalgia is what is murmuring around in my soul these days. Not so a much a longing for a long ago place on the planet, but a return to a feeling of peace and joy. Music, of course, is a prime excavator of such times. As we all know "the good olde days" really weren't; but that doesn't prevent the warm sadness from percolating up to the surface when one of those melodies drifts by.

I am not really going anywhere specific with this post today. Just reflecting on how some memories are shared and others are not. A silly love song is just silly to some and so trenchant to others. Same for a movie, a book, any moment in time. For some it stands out like a beacon to all that was good and simple; hmm, that reeks of a Darth Vader quote from Field of Dreams. What surprises me is how even the most romantic people in my life will shy away from such a moment when it does not resonate from their experience. One wonders why falling into someone else's nostalgia is so difficult. Is it the lack of a shared anchor or is it perhaps the encounter with pain other than one's own?

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Addendum: A couple of regular readers pointed out that I seemed to be going somewhere with this topic and then sort of ran away from it. I confess, there are still times when my tolerance for self revelation gets in the way of just bloggin' along. I mean do I really want anyone to know that 'Moon River' actually tugged at some spot in my psyche? Sure classic rock but Andy Williams? Where are those blog lines of privacy?

Oh and for those who care (and I am shocked that you do), the photo is of Stetson Chapel on the quad at Kalamazoo College.