The Banks are Made of Marble

Yes, but then they turned around, played for all the marbles, and won ours (which is pretty much what they had been doing before they temporarily lost theirs!)

Just stumbled over this:
Debunking Economics by Steve Keen.

http://www.monbiot.com/2011/10/10/sounding-the-deeps/

Anybody read the book and cares to comment?

As a note, it appears the Pete did not write the song:

Les Rice, the composer of this song, is a New York State apple farmer and one-time president of the Ulster County chapter of the Farmers Union. His songs have made him well-known to farmers throughout the northeast. Perhaps his most well-known composition is “Banks of Marble” which achieved great popularity among union members throughout the country and even in Canada, where new verses have been found.

Loved the photograph, since my writing is about how Americans survived the first Crash in the Dust Bowl.

I’m waiting for the new Pete Seeger of the new Crash to emerge.

Meanwhile, I’d love to hear the Occupiers on Wall Street singing a huge and really in-your-face version of Handel’s Messiah. Or maybe the real verses to “This Land Is Your Land”?

piglet @ 4 I haven’t read Debunking Economics but was on the Post-Keynesian list with Keen when he was writing it and am familiar with his more non-technical arguments. I think Keen has basically got it right in terms of proximate causes.

Behind the debt to GDP ratio, though, lurks the question of what is impelling the immense expansion of private debt. The short answer is income inequality. The producers of wealth (workers) are not receiving enough income to buy enough of what they produce, so the gap is filled by credit.

So then what generates the growing income inequality? At this stage of the investigation a lot of people are tempted to jump to an “evil-doer” hypothesis that singles out the political power and campaign contributions of the big bourgeoisie. Although there is some truth to the explanation it is not sufficient. Why are people letting them get away with it? Here’s where Keynes’s “money illusion” and Marx’s absolute and relative surplus value come into play. But there’s a paradoxical bit of doggerel from American labor history that sums it all up:

“whether you work by the piece or by the day, reducing the hours increases the pay.”

If that verse sounds ridiculous to you, it is because you don’t comprehend the money illusion and the different forms of surplus value. If you comprehend those two analyses, you’ll grasp what Mary Steward was getting at: the illusory pursuit of higher nominal income by workers can result simply in boosting the rate of absolute surplus value — a treadmill effect in which workers are running faster and faster yet falling further behind.

Thanks for this, Chris. I think no social protest can do without songs and poetry (and slogans, but they have those!), and this song is very strong indeed.

I think no social protest can do without songs and poetry

Lately I find myself thinking back to some of the classic topical tunes of the Thatcher years (“Ghost Town,” “Stand Down Margaret,” Robyn Hitchcock’s “Brenda’s Iron Sledge,” Elvis Costello’s “Tramp the Dirt Down,” Kirsty MacColl’s “Free World”) and being struck by how timely they are at the moment.

And I wonder whether OWS has the potential to inspire (directly or indirectly) some equally compelling music, and where it might come from. The US indie rock scene appears to be lodged up its own whimsical, self-reflexive, post-post-post-ironic backside for the foreseeable future, so there’s not much cause for optimism there.

Or maybe it’s already out there and I’m just not looking in the right places.

Aren’t we just repeating the popular front craze for kitsch with this call? Stockhausen Serves Imperialism is probably required reading for anyone demanding politically involved art. Stockhausen expressed the horror of the world in Vietnam far better then Cardew’s delusional hymns to the British working class, just as the horrors of fascism meet their best denouncement in the violence of Webern and Schönberg rather then Brecht’s lyricism.

@16:

First, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, despite the ridiculous title, is actually still (just about) worth reading, and asks some hard questions about the relationship between art and politics even if its answers to these questions are absurd.

Second, and much more important, it is objectively true that Cheryl Cole, David Jason, Freddie Flintoff, Katherine Jenkins,David Beckham, Gary Lineker, Ross Noble, Rhod Gilbert, Jason Manford and Lee Evans and Tim Westwood (not to mention Christopher Hitchens, Michel Houellebecq and Martin Amis and Bernard-Henri Levy and all the other fashionably reactionary ‘thinkers’ of our time) do in actual fact serve imperialism and few people call them on it, or even notice.

It’s becoming increasingly the case that working in what Adorno called ‘The Culture Industry’ and having any sense of political commitment or (increasingly) any kind of common sense or basic intelligence, is simply a contradiction in terms. Our ‘culture’ is seleb culture. How could it be anything other than aggressively reactionary? (And the cosy ‘satire’ of 8 out of 10 Cats or HIGNFY doesn’t count).

One of the things I’ve been increasingly struck by is the extent to which our modern ‘culture’ for the first time in my experience, not only does not reflect modern experience, but has almost no relationship to it.

Very true. There are some faint stirrings, though. Much is being made of the fact that one of the writer/producers of Sex and the City is also a producer of a new sitcom called 2 Broke Girls:

“The girls from ‘Sex and the City’ had relationship check lists; these girls barely have checks.” He added that he and Cummings liked the “really scary dynamic of talking about money on TV,” a topic usually glossed over or ignored — kind of like Carrie Bradshaw’s ability to afford designer duds and spiffy apartment on a columnist’s salary.

A far cry from the Gang of 4, granted, but even the most cursory acknowledgment of reality is something at this point. (Not that I have any intention of watching the show, mind you.)

Love Pete Seger. We don’t have any modern equivalent and we need one.
/Maybe Steve Earl?

Hidari, I read it as a moment in which you could somewhat honestly claim that revolution was around the corner. But it wasn’t Stockhausen who was the reactionary but Cardew. Cardew’s politics was a mirage, activity masking Stalinist regression in the highest degree. Stockhausen’s music, even if bourgeois, was at least honest about the reality of life. Today’s political responses in art will do exactly the same thing. Of course, to not go to Afghanistan would be to objectively support the Taliban. Such is life when the revolution has passed us by, and so the honest thing may be to no longer make art.

Well, that is an interesting question. At one level the accusation thrown at Stockhausen by Cardew was simply Stalinism. But it also had a ring of truth to it: how dare you make indulgent art for the few when you art could lead the masses to revolution? And with so many artists viewing their work (especially today) as political, the absence of politics must make for an absence of art. By contrast commenting on Crooked Timber isn’t something I have illusions about being political, and its something that does actually help me be political: Henri’s question about what factors caused trends over time is one that has forced me to rethink how I deal with something like neoliberalism for example. #OWS might lead to artists painting another generation of bad murals commemorating it. But that’s very different from Kandinsky’s response to the Russian Revolution, in part because #OWS won’t open up similar opportunities for society.

“…how dare you make indulgent art for the few when you[r] art could lead the masses to revolution?”

The Liberal response to the threat of revolution was a limited policy of structural co-optation disguised in the egalitarian plumage of upward mobility and meritocracy, where the would-be working class leaders to any potential revolution were economically separated from their class affiliation and integrated into the framework of a capitalist economy.

“…in part because #OWS won’t open up similar opportunities for society.”

You’ve got it backwards, again. It’s not the responsibility of the Occupy Wall Street movement to create opportunities for society. It’s the responsibility of a capitalist society to siphon off the potential leadership of a revolutionary movement.

Woody Guthrie: “We worked through spring and winter, through summer and through fall. But the mortgage it worked the hardest and the steadiest of us all. It worked on nights and Sundays, it worked each holiday. It settled down among us and it never went away. … It would put them to the test if the farmer took a rest, then they’d know that it’s the farmer feeds us all.”

But “farmer feeds us all” and “banks of marble” have three elements: a clear victimizer (banks, mortgages, interest rates); a clear (and sympathetic) victim (farmers, poor, but hard-working); and a clear (or in any event, easy to express) logical link between the two (farmers suffer from paying high interest on loans, and from foreclosure; banks benefit from those).

So for “#occupy x” what is the clear and sympathetic victim group (students with loans? auto workers? unionized teachers? people who bought too-expensive houses) and what is the (not-too-convoluted) logical link between the victimizers and the victims? Until we’ve got this straightened out, it will be hard to write an effective song.

How about this one?

Henri, its precisely because we can’t beat them that we don’t join them. OWS will only produce another hundred bad murals across america commemorating another defeat as victory. That would be joining the forces of reaction by diminishing everyone’s sense of what is possible and plastering over the real questions of why the Left is dead. I propose we remember what is missing: anything that could be genuinely political.

Even though I am sure no one is checking this thread anymore I just had to post this:
http://boingboing.net/2011/10/22/occupy-wall-street-pete-seeger-arlo-guthrie-sing-this-little-light-of-mine-in-columbus-circle-nyc-video.html

/Love ya Pete.