Class in America

This week and next week we are reading The Iron Heel, which talks a lot about economic classes and class antogonism.

What are classes? Basically, economic classes break down like this:

Workers own little to nothing but their ability to do manual labor, which they sale for a wage--hence, workers are sometimes called "wage slaves." Workers then take that wage and spend it on consumer goods that they just made at the factory.

The capitalist class do not labor for a living -- they do not sale their labor for a wage. Rather, they may be working wealthy -- maybe they own the machines and factories ("the means of production") in which workers labor each day for a modest wage and they own the stores in which laborers purchase their goods. Or capitalists could be part of the idle rich -- meaning they don't work for their money. Usually, their money is held in the form of investments and they make income from the dividends paid to them by the various companies.

Middle class folks sit somewhere in between the workers and the capitalists. They probably own a nice home and they may own a small business, but they probably work there each day alongside their employees, or they may be middle managers who earn a good salary but are not wealthy.

In America, the number of poor people is increasing. The middle class is getting smaller as more people fall from middle to working class. 

Workers and the shrinking middle class in America work more with fewer days of leave, less maternity leave, and fewer days of paid vacation compared to others around the world. Click on these images for a better picture of the emerging situation in the US:

At the same time, the wealthy are fewer and getting richer. CEO pay keeps going up while worker pay stays about the same. 

The gap between the wealthy and the working class is getting bigger -- while many citizens keep imagining that it is not, as this video shows:

Some people, however, see an increasing conflict between the classes -- as these graphs from Pew Research show.

What do you think? Are there classes in America? Is the gap between the classes too large -- is there too much inequality? If you think that gap is too large, what should be done to close the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest? Or, is the gap between the wealthy and the poor just about right? Should our policies aim to keep the wealthy wealthy and the poor poor? Are there any potential political problems of high levels of inequality?

Surveillance and You

Surveillance, which means to be watched or observed, is an important way that one person or group can exercise some amount of control over other individuals or groups.

Recall the father's actions in The Road. He regularly used binoculars to scan the landscape and to look for any signs of people or movement. If he saw people at a distance, then the father avoided contact.

Government agencies also use surveillance to exercise control over the population -- this includes domestic populations and international populations. People are closely observed as they pass through security at the airport or when they go through a sobriety road check or when the National Security Agency uses illegal wiretapping to watch people inside the US.

Here are some of the ways that the government uses different kinds of surveillance to exercise control over different populations:

1. The US government and other governments around the world request that Google provide user data. Here is a nice graphic that illustrates the frequency of requests.

2. The US federal government has recently empowered the FBI with greater surveillance powers over the domestic population:

WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.The F.B.I. soon plans to issue a new edition of its manual, called the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, according to an official who has worked on the draft document and several others who have been briefed on its contents. The new rules add to several measures taken over the past decade to give agents more latitude as they search for signs of criminal or terrorist activity.

3. Some members of Congress (not all members of Congress) are working to pass laws that would empower certain domestic police agencies to gather "geolocation data" -- that is, the information stored on a person's GPS and cell phone that tracks their movement. This would enable the FBI to gather that information.

4. The FBI uses GPS devices to track peoples' movement. Without a warrant, FBI agents secretely attach a GPS tracking device to a person's bumper and monitor their movement.

5. City governments also conduct surveillance. Major metropolitan areas like Washington, DC, New York City, and Chicago have extensive surveillance systems that enable police agents to monitor peoples' activity. Chicago has 10,000 cameras placed around the city, for instance.

Here are my questions for you to consider and thoughtfully comment on:

What do you think?

Surveillance is an important aspect of modern government. Does that mean all government surveillance is justified? For reasons of security, should the government be able to conduct as much surveillance as deemed necessary? Or, can there be too much governmental surveillance? If there can be too much governmental surveillance, where is the limit? Who should be responsible for drawing that limit -- and saying this is the proper amount of surveillance and we will accept no more? And, what are the potential risks to the population if the government collects information on all aspects of peoples' lives? What is the value of having a part of our lives that are outside of governmental surveillance?

Anarchy in Somalia

What if there was no government? What is the absence of government called?

Let's talk about anarchy in this post.

Anarchy, which as we mentioned in class is the absence of hierarchy, is an ideal concept. We can never find pure anarchy in observable life.



Conditions in contemporary Somalia, however, offer an approximation to anarchy. Government in any formal sense has little practical hold on life there.

Somalia has not been under the control of a single national government since 26 January 1991, when military strongman Siad Barre was toppled.... During the 1990s, the conflict in Somalia was between rival warlords and clan-based militia. This led to widespread hunger and the UN and US intervened before a humiliating pull-out.

Fighting continued but with less intensity until in 2006, the Union of Islamic Courts became the first group to exert control over the whole of the capital, Mogadishu, for 15 years.

Ethiopia then invaded to oust the Islamists, with US support. But the Ethiopians were unable to exert control and now the capital is the scene of regular battles between the UN-backed government and the al-Qaeda linked militants, al-Shabab.

What is life like in Somalia?

Somalia has been consistently ranked as the worst failed state on the Failed States Index published annually by Foreign Policy magazine.

Approximately 20% of the population, or about 2 million people have become political refugees.

Piracy has become a source of employment for a sizable portion of the male population.

Businessmen opened their own hospitals, schools, telephone companies and even privatized mail services. Men who were able to muster private armies, often former military officers, seized the biggest prizes: abandoned government property, like ports and airfields, which could generate as much as $40,000 a day. They became the warlords. Many trafficked in guns and drugs and taxed their fellow Somalis.

Beneath the warlords were clan-based networks of thousands of people — adolescent enforcers, stevedores, clerks, truck drivers and their families — all tied into the chaos economy. Ditto for the freelance landlords and duty-free importers.

Yet, Benjamin Powell says:

It is hard to call any country mired in poverty an economic success. Yet by most measures Somalia’s poverty is diminishing and Somalia has improved living standards faster than the average sub-Saharan African country since the early 1990s. In that sense Somalia is at least a relative success story. The most interesting part of Somalia’s success is that it has all been achieved while the country has lacked any effective central government.

Plus, since anarchy took hold of life in Somalia, the life expectancy rate has increased (people are living longer), the GDP per capita has increased (people are wealthier), the infant mortality rate has declined (infants are more likely to survive), adult literacy has improved (more adults can read), and telecommunications have spread (cell phones are widespread).



What do you think? Does a place like the anarchical Somalia have something to offer that a governed society lacks? Does less government and less publicly provided security mean more freedom? Would you rather be secured by police officers that sometimes take liberties with their jobs, or would you rather be secured by Somalian technicals like those shown in the pictures above?

Visions of Anarchy

In class, we talked about four visions of anarchy, life without government, and the origins of government -- this included Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, and Kropotkin.

Kropotkin offered one vision of anarchy. For him, life without government would be far less coercive and far more cooperative. For example, we can see examples of this kind of anarchy in the case of Belgium, which has been without a government for around 500 days [read about it here, here, and here]. Also, the wild west during the American frontier days was anarchical and apparently less violent than some American cities today. There are also a number of anarchist communities that have existed. Radical Christians, for instance, peacefully and voluntarily live in anarchical communties today.

Hobbes offered another vision of anarchy. For him, life without government was nasty brutish, and short. It was men against men in an all out struggle to survive -- and because of this constant struggle, there would be little wealth, little learning, few grand structures, little clothing, and no commerce. For example, we can see this vision of anarchy played out in places like Karachi, Pakistan. Somalia is another example. It has been without a centralized government since 1991 and is consistently ranked as the worst failed state in the world with 20% of its population living as political refugees. Like slum lords building houses in Karachi or the businessmen opening hospitals in Somalia, some people are making money and benefiting from the lack of government, but life is pretty hard for a large number of people.

What do you think?

Which vision of anarchy do you think is most likely to occur? Are people likely to voluntarily cooperate, as in Belgium? Or, do you think that people are more likely to engage in an all out struggle, as in Somalia? Or do you think something else? Tell me: What do you think life without government would be like? Does life without government have something to offer that a governed life does not?