More on picky eating

I recently wrote a post about the ethics (or lack thereof) of picky eating.  It seems I have an ally in Pamela Druckerman, the NYT's resident Parisian expat.  She describes the French conception of food as a social bonding ritual, which of course means that being picky and self-centered in eating totally destroys the social, cohesive aspect of it.  Here's a quote from an anthropologist who researches the US's idiosyncratic, harmful eating habits:

Americans often described eating as part of an individual journey of self-discovery, in which each person tries to “find out over time and experience what my true nutritional self is, and satisfy it.”

Once again, we see an excessive focus on the self destroying the self.  A constant quest for satisfaction breeding everlasting insatisfaction.  If I'm right, the US cult of food individualism is only good for junk food peddlers and pharmaceutical manufacturers treating diet-caused illness, but certainly not for the human beings whose satisfaction and self-discovery is supposedly the ultimate goal of the current food system in the US.

More on moving out of bad neighborhoods

I recently shared some thoughts on the US cultural tic of people moving constantly outward from city centers to more peripheral suburbs, in an endless quest to get away from other people that they consider bad.  Here is a profile from the NYT of a Chicago-area family doing precisely that, moving from an inner-ring, predominanty black suburb (surely similar in many ways to Ferguson, MO, though Bellwood, IL has a much longer history as a black town) to a farther-out, mainly-white suburb.  It is a very human and understandable story; the father of the family was shot on his front porch, leaving his traumatized wife and children to seek a safer, more prosperous neighborhood to settle in.  I don't think anyone can fault the family for their decision to leave what they perceived as a dangerous and destitute area.  But it is precisely this dynamic, this trend formed of thousands of individual families like the Polks, that bleeds the neighborhoods and towns they leave behind, and makes them ever-more-prone to crime, poverty, and all the pathologies that arise from the flight of a solid economic base.

When public universities sniff out profits

This is an article on the shift over the last decade of public universities' seeking more profit by courting more international and out-of-state students, and steadily raising tuition for in-state students.  Not good for the mission of creating a critical, conscious, educated public in your state.

Calculations on urban sprawl

Here is another article about urban sprawl.  It describes a recent study done that indicates that urban sprawl costs US society some $1trillion annually, mainly in unproductive driving time and externalities like pollution.

The author of the study makes the modest recommendation that we in the US should aim for metro area residents to live at a density of 10 people or 5 households per acre.  This seemed remarkably low to me, but I was surprised that this was the top fifth of urban density in the US, meaning that the vast majority of metro area residents live below this density.  But then I started doing the math for Chicago, where a block typically has 15 or so lots on each side of the street.  There are 8 Chicago blocks in a mile, so that makes 120 lots in that mile.  So how many lots are in a square mile?  Not 120 x 120, because lots are a lot longer than they are wide.  So a typical Chicago layout will have a block with 15 lots, but the perendicular block consists in the sequence from street to alley to street to alley to street, ie each "block" is really just half a block long, so each "real" block of 1/8 of a mile is four lots long.  That means that a typical square mile in Chicago has about 120 x 32 lots, so 3840 lots.  A square mile has 640 acres, so this amounts to only 6 lots per acre.  Anyway, many (most?) neighborhoods in Chicago aren't just single-family homes, they're two or three flats.  So we're talking maybe 12 households per acre.  But it's still a lot less than I'd initially though.  Consider that many areas of Chicago have industrial or commercial space without residents, and that even more areas are bombed-out blocks with only 3 or 4 intact houses per block, and Chicago's density goes down further.  In fact, if you take Chicago's 2010 population density of about 12000/square mile, and divide it by 640 acres, you get about 18 people per square mile, so only 9 households or so.

Anyway, the author says that, even if we simply attained this modest density of an inner-ring suburb, where many houses would still have yards to play in, we could substantially reduce the footprint of our cities, as well as all those lost costs that he describes.  The article includes a really cool chart showing population densities of major cities across the world.  Expectedly, the US is the least efficient user of space in its cities, followed by Africa and South America, Europe, then Asia, where they really know how to pack people in.  By my own rough calculation, Bogota clocks in around 65,000 people per square mile if you divide the actual urban area by the population (leaving out rural areas and uninhabited forests that are included in the official capital district), giving you about 100 people per acre, or 50 households an acre.  That's similar to Manhattan, and much denser than New York City as a whole.  Bogota certainly feels dense and bustling, but not suffocatingly so, at least not for me.  The small city where our house is in Colombia has about 36,000 people per square mile, so about 56 people or 28 households per acre. 

I was curious about how my family's living situation compares to different population densities in world cities.  Our house in Colombia is big and sprawling compared to others, but even it gives 18 households an acre, and in our four-person household's case 75 people an acre.  If we divide this in half to account for streets and parks and such, we're talking about 40 people an acre, so similar to Mexico City or Rio de Janeiro.  Of course right now it's unoccupied, so it's just a big empty space driving down the density of living, breathing people in the town.

In this case of population density, our lifestyle in Washington is greener than in Colombia.  Our apartment in Arlington, Virginia holds five of us right now in 1100 ft2, or about 105 m2.  We're more crowded than we'd prefer to be, but by no means uncomfortable, and I think that between families and college students, most of the apartments in our building have a similar occupancy.  That would amount to about 216 people per acre, before even multiplying by the ten floors in our building.  So we're talking a density of about 2,160 people per acre of ground.  Even if you subtract out the parking lots, streets, parks and nonresidential buildings in our area, we'd still be talking a pretty high population density, like in the leagues of Mumbai on that article's chart, if the whole area was like our building.  I feel good about that--I like when people use space efficiently.  That said, much of the rest of our neighborhood is big single-family houses with driveways separating them, so you've got this weird juxtaposition of ultra-dense housing and then a very inefficient use of space.  I guess that's why the houses there cost twice what they'd be worth in Chicago--they're sitting on land that's begging to have like ten times the density!

Housing first for homelessness

Here is a profile of an inspiring and astoundingly simple strategy to decrease homelessness:  giving housing to the homeless.

Five myths about riots

This is a short but incisive bit dispelling some of the common myths about riots.  The general theme is that we in the US have an overwhelming urge to delegitimize riots by claiming they are ineffective, misled, started by outside agitators, etc.  I understand this urge; I was raised to believe in the basic legitimacy and effectiveness of US-style democracy to address and resolve social problems, so the use of political violence (and any acknowledgment of its potential validity) shakes to the very core my fundamental conception of the world.  But the author shows how the facts go against any argument that seeks to easily and neatly dismiss riots as a political reality.

Finnish schools, again

Here is an in-depth look at the Finnish school system, from Smithsonian magazine.  I have written about Finland's schools in a past blog post, but this article gave me much more detail on them.  I find it particularly intriguing that the school system manages to combine uniform national funding with local control of the details of curriculum.  It seems they manage this by giving some general curriculum guidelines that schools are free to adjust according to their needs and priorities, and also by providing a similar, very high level of initial and ongoing education to teachers.  I really like this model.

But maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe we just need more and better tests to improve the US's fairly dismal public education system.  So argues this representative of Pearson education, a corporate merger behemoth that now apparently controls over half of the "market" for educational testing in the US.  I'm more convinced though by John Oliver's argument to the contrary.

A profile of Father Michael Pfleger

I have written a few blog posts on Father Michael Pfleger, pastor of Chicago's St. Sabina Catholic parish.  Here is an excellent profile of the man by the Chicago Reader, written 25 years ago!

Millennials at church

This is an interesting article exploring what millenials (read, people of my age or younger) are looking for in church.  According to the author, they're not looking for more polished consumerist flash, but rather for the basic missions of solidarity, justice, sacrifice, and transcendental salvation that have defined Christianity since its founding.

Bad policing in Baltimore

Here is a nuanced, intelligent explanation about the falling standards for police work in Baltimore over the past few decades.  The interviewee, David Simon (former journalist and creator of the Wire TV show) attributes most of the blame for this trend to the misled war on drugs.

Interesting mom blogs

Here is a list published by the Root website of interesting mom bloggers, just in time for Mother's Day.  They look interesting, especially the Black + Green Mama one.  I checked her blog archives, and it looks like I did get the jump on her by a few months of creating Third World Green Daddy before she started her blog.  So there.

Scaling up

An important theme these days in agricultural development is "scaling up", meaning when an innovative technology or practice rapidly and relatively spontaneously spreads throughout an area, without outside support from donors or government.  The idea is that, if a technology is useful and viable, people will begin to use it of their own accord after seeing it work for their neighbors.  Conversely, if people only use a technology when they are encouraged to use it by outside support or payments, and then they stop using it as soon as that support is withdrawn, then the technology apparently wasn't worthwhile in the first place.

Reality is more complicated than these two extreme examples, of course.  Vaccines, for instance, are a low-cost intervention of proven efficacy, which means that they should have been adopted by the entire world population as soon as Jenner and Salk and company figured them out.  However, individuals can't just go to the store and buy a vaccine.  There needs to be in place a whole physical and social infrastructure of political entities that obtain and administer the vaccines, a cold chain to keep them from losing effectiveness, roads to get vaccines to people, etc.  In the case of vaccines, there has in fact been a gradual, seemingly sustainable scale-up, but lots of support from local and donor governments was necessary.  Likewise, the failure of people to universally adopt condoms as a prevention measure for AIDS, is due not to their high cost or lack of effectiveness, but rather to a whole slew of social and political factors that are bigger than the simple equation of efficacy and price.

So the challenge for development practitioners is to accurately understand which innovations are worth providing some artificial support to until they spread or sustain themselves of their own accord, and which innovations will never be useful or cost effective enough for widespread adoption.

In agriculture, there is much attention given to scaling up of improved seeds and modern inputs like fertilizers and pesticides.  We all know that peasant farmers could grow higher volumes of a given product if they used improved seeds or provided fertilizer to the plants, and the failure of these peasant farmers to do so causes much concern and hand-wringing as we try to figure out what needs to change for these technologies to scale up.  Given my background as a farming systems agronomist, I often see factors that clearly work against widespread adoption of certain technologies by farmers.  Often a given technology just isn't cost effective--the increased brute production of corn or sorghum or whatever isn't worth enough to offset the additional input costs or labor required to achieve those gains.  Sometimes the technology is cost effective, but there are other factors at play.  Maybe there's nowhere to store or sell the additional production, or maybe the new practices exhaust the soil and thus lower long-term yield potential, or maybe growing more of one crop crowds out another component of a polycrop, thus lowering overall unit-factor productivity.  There are lots of things that can go wrong in scaling up modern farming technologies.

I am fascinated by the difficulty of scaling some innovations, compared to the relatively quick spread of others.  I've read accounts indicating that a number of New World crops like maize, cassava, and sweet potato had spread rapidly in Africa and Asia by the 16th century.  There was no intervention from outside "development experts", except of course the probably inadvertent initial introduction of the crops by outsiders in coastal trading ports.  I guess the farmers in those countries knew a good thing when they saw it, and crops like those that yielded vastly more food per unit of land than existing crops would have been an easy sell for them.  This contrasts now with the difficulty we development people often have convincing farmers to even adopt a new variety of maize, just because its color is different than the existing common variety in an area.

Here is a link with an article and video describing one example of more or less spontaneous scaling up of an agricultural technology called natural forest regeneration.  It is a series of practices employed in farmlands of the Sahel, from Chad to Senegal (with its focal point in Niger) that allow the natural savannah tree habitat to regenerate, resulting in more fertile soils that can now support mixed cropping and grazing systems after having been barren before.  The scaling up of these practices happened relatively suddenly, and unperceived until recently by people outside of the region.  Now local governments and donors are trying to figure out a way to support and strengthen the dynamic that made these practices spread in the first place.  It is an excellent example of a natural, person-to-person scaling up of free knowledge.  Who knows if the deliberate efforts to promote these practices will be able to maintain the momentum of their natural spread, or somehow inhibit it?

Another example of free scale-up of very useful knowledge is training on integrated pest management in cotton in West Africa.  By holding a series of farmer field school sessions with farmers over the course of a year, the FAO was able to reduce toxic pesticide use in an entire region by over 90%, with no negative yield impacts.  This is to say that, after learning a slightly different way of managing the cotton they already know how to grow, farmers were able to drastically improve the economic, environmental, and social sustainability of their system.  Outside help was needed initially to carry out the training, but presumably these new practices, which require no special equipment or drastic changes to the farming system, will continue to spread from farmer to farmer basically for free. There are many other examples in which teaching people some simple precepts of integrated pest management can totally revolutionize farming systems.

This contrasts with the bought technologies that are often the focus of organized scaling up efforts.  Most donor money comes from countries and culture with a strong tradition of free markets and private enterprise, and perhaps because of this the most natural impulse is to find innovations that can be commercialized rapidly by private companies.  If there is a strong profit motive, the thinking goes, we can count on entrepreneurs to find an efficient way of rapidly disseminating the technology.  I understand this, and cellphones are a good example of a market-led scaling up (though with little support from donors).  Indeed, many development organizations wish they could find the equivalent of a Steve Jobs to take poor farmers from 0% to 80% adoption of improved crop varieties, just as the iPhone went from not existing to being the most-sold phone in the US in a matter of months or years.  We want rapid market penetration.

I understand this impulse, but the example of cassava in the 16th century, or natural forest regeneration in the Sahel, offer a very different model for how this scaling should or could happen through decentralized, unplanned sharing of free ideas between normal people.  Even for the rapid spread of cellphones in Africa in the past ten years, while there was obviously a market dynamic in the sale of cellphones and the provision of service, there were few proprietary technologies being used--Third World cellphones are often Chinese non-brands that either use no patented technology or just rip it off.

Another advantage of scaling up of nonproprietary technologies is that there is not as much risk of coercion or abuse.  When a seed company wants to push farmers to replace their freely-available seeds (that are constantly, dynamically being developed by local people and adapted to local conditions) with a proprietary seed that farmers must buy year after year, people understandably become suspicious.  Because seeds are alive, if you give up your traditional landraces or even open-source improved varieties for a few planting seasons, those varieties can disappear, and you will from then on be dependent on the privately-owned varieties in the market.  This isn't always a question of coercion--farmers in the US largely gave up their corn landraces in the mid-20th century because they made a relatively free choice to use the privately-sold seed.  It's still a tragedy to use valuable landrace diversity, but at least there's no abuse or tricks involved.

But let's get deeper into the question of seeds and scaling up.  The spread of transgenic corn and soybeans (and cotton, to a lesser extent) has been one of the most amazing, striking examples of rapid scale-up of a proprietary technology.  In this case, having useful genetic traits controlled by just one or two huge companies allowed the companies to scale up use of seeds with these traits, first in the US, and then in Argentina and Brazil--though the expansion in South America was often via "pirated" seed that was shared between growers with no royalties paid to the private companies that held theoretical rights over those traits.  This has been touted by the companies pushing it as the fastest scale-up of any technology in modern agricultural history.

Unfortunately for us who work in agricultural development, it is not easy to replicate this kind of rapid scale-up for other productivity-enhancing technologies.  This is so much the case that an author on the Grist site recently argued that transgenic technology is thus far a two-trick pony, because 99% of the world's transgenic crops possess either Bt insect resistance, glyphosate herbicide resistance, or both.  There are no other major transgenic technologies that have proven worthwhile on a global scale, thus far.  The author perhaps unfairly discounts the promise of genetic engineering of crops based on the narrowness of its achievements thus far.

There is though one corn seed innovation that some people are lauding as the next important, revolutionary breakthrough, at least for peasant farmers in Africa.  Farmers in many parts of the continent suffer from Striga or witchweed, a parasitic plant whose dormant seeds "wake up" when they sense corn or sorghum germinating nearby, then send out eel-like roots that suck onto and insert themselves into the growing corn roots, thus sapping all the corn's energy.  By the time you see the witchweed above ground, it's too late to do anything; it's already latched onto the corn, and you can't pull or spray the weed without killing the corn.  Even if you do kill it one year, there is a store of millions of seeds in the soil that will keep coming back. 

Enter BASF, a chemical company that had a competitor product to Monsanto's Roundup herbicide.  This product, Clearfield, operated on the same logic as Roundup:  it used a broad-spectrum herbicide called imazapyr that kills any plant it touches.  Normally it would kill corn, too, but the geneticists at BASF induced a mutation in corn that made it resistant to imazapyr.  They were able to say that it was not transgenic, because the "new" gene conferring imazapyr resistance was not inserted into corn from another species, but rather arose when they exposed corn seed to highly toxic mutagenic chemicals and high doses of ionizing radiation (a pretty scary process that is just as morally objectionable as genetic engineering, if you believe in the sanctity of ecological integrity, and certainly more dangerous).  Clearfield never captured a big share of the US market, I think because the herbicide imazapyr is more expensive and/or less effective than Roundup. 

A novel use of imazapyr-resistant corn was that you could coat the seeds with very low doses of the herbicide, and the corn plant would take up the herbicide in its system as it germinated, without being hurt by it.  This is potentially useful for African farmers struggling with Striga, because when the parasitic witchweed seeds germinate and send their tentacles into the corn roots, the parasite gets killed off by the herbicide.  It's a pretty ingenious innovation called StrigAway, and lots of development agencies are now trying to push the Strigaway system (imazapyr-resistant corn seeds coated in imazapyr herbicide) as the next big scale-up, to varying success. 

I don't know if Strigaway will take off.  If it does, I would be somewhat pleased because it really is a well-thought technology that can potentially address a huge problem using very low doses of herbicide.  Some people (fairly or not) worry that Strigaway may be part of a larger BASF strategy to gain worldwide market share for its Clearfield products, thus throwing into the mix concerns about that element of coercion that I'd referred to.  Of course, the real long-term solution to fix Striga would be to have longer, diversified rotations incorporating things like peanuts, cassava, beans, cotton, sesame, soy, okra, melons, and any other number of typical African crops into your mix.  These are all non-hosts that slowly wear down the germinating witchweed seeds looking for fresh blood.  Strigaway corn could be a part of such rotations, but shouldn't be the only or the dominant crop. 

So on the one hand I laud the innovation of the inventors of the Strigaway team, but I also recognize that it's in some ways an overly complicated and ultimately unimaginative alternative when compared with the common-sense good husbandry of maintaining diversified, healthy cropping systems.  Beyond this though, my earlier thoughts about proprietary technologies apply here.  Why did/would an herbicide-based Striga control strategy have to limit itself to the proprietary imazapyr herbicide?  There are plenty of other broadleaf herbicides like atrazine and 2,4-D that would potentially control witchweed without hurting the corn.  I've only found one study on the use of seed treatment with these other chemicals to control Striga.  It didn't give promising results, but surely if there were a number of great minds working on this question, they might find an answer, just as the profit-driven BASF researchers did.

Of course a strategy based on these freely-available technologies, much like the FAO's farmer field schools or the Sahel's forest regeneration management, would not bring great profits to any one company, since no one company has rights to those herbicides.  But what if the public sector had put just a little bit of money into research on such possibilities, in order to come up with a totally free-source innovation that could do what Strigaway is doing?  For me, such open-source, non-propietary innovation is the best chance we have of scaling up groundbreaking technologies.  This model of innovation won't make any one company a lot of money, and it won't even be possible for development agencies to track with indicators, and certainly not to take credit for.  But scaling up through organic innovation and sharing processes would create a huge impact in terms of incrementally improving quality of life for lots of people.

National Geographic fails on Naxalite coverage

I recently wrote a post on a weak article in National Geographic that didn't seem to meet their normal journalistic standards of informing and enlightening the public on complex topics.  In fact, of late I've been dismayed quite a few times at the quality of National Geographic stories.  There have been a few that really seemed like fluff, or worse still, like biased agenda pieces.  A recent example is their coverage of the Naxalite insurgency in India. 

I don't know a whole lot about the Naxalite insurgency, and after reading this article, I still don't know much.  The author, Anthony Loyd, tells us that the indigenous and peasant villages where the Naxalites operate are destitute, and that there is pervasive fear and death hanging about.  He interviews low-level field commanders of the Naxalites and shows us how murderous, unintelligent, and incoherent they are.  He interviews high-level representatives of the Indian government who articulate an erudite, coherent vision of what is happening.  He shows us photos of sad children and villagers whose family members have been killed in the conflict (implicitly by the Naxalites), and noble photos of military and police forces doing their exercises to get ready for battle.  In short, he tells us nothing of the why and wherefore of the conflict, and what reasoning he does convey is either his own as an uninformed outsider, or that of the government party line exactly as he receives it, with no critical analysis.

I've already hinted at the problems of his reporting, but let me get more specific, point by point.  First off, the author discusses the destitution of the area where the insurgency operates.  He mentions the Naxalite argument that this poverty is a result of underdevelopment, of exclusionary political economic and political processes, of conscious neglect by the larger Indian society.  But then he basically discounts this argument, claiming that the Naxalites are only taking advantage of local people's poverty so as to fool them into tolerating the insurgency.  We get an idea of how the author could be so dismissive of the words of his own subjects because Loyd tells us that the Naxalites "should have been relics of history".  This is at once biased, since Loyd is simply discounting a seemingly valid argument because it comes from a group he doesn't like, and patronizing of the local population that, for better or for worse, must be offering tacit or even active support that has allowed the insurgency to continue for so long.  Indeed, the author assumes of the villagers that "few of them wanted their traditional hunter-gatherer life, an existence without an alphabet, schools, electricity, roads, in which many babies and mothers died in childbirth and the village shaman treated every affliction, from cerebral malaria to cholera," but offers us no evidence (and certainly no direct quotes) of the real aspirations and priorities of these villagers.  He certainly does not explain why, if they are so eager to change their way of life, the indigenous villagers have not simply moved en masse to Calcutta or Chennai.  This despite a direct quote from a villager, "Our land is everything to us".  Of course, exploring their ties to their land and lifestyle might have shed some light on the drivers of the Naxalite conflict, and I guess this was the last thing the author wanted to do.

Indeed, Loyd seems to be one more person who regards the villagers as simple voiceless pawns as opposed to an important, perhaps the most important, actor in the conflict.  Instead of entertaining the possibility that the insurgency and the support it enjoys are due to ongoing, contemporary dynamics of power and exclusion in the modern world, he acts as if the "middle-class communist radical" Naxalites showed up one day with a pre-set (and obsolete) ideology, and simply lucked out that they "had been thrown a lifeline by the demands of development and the globalized economy, as mineral exploitation and land rights became catalysts of a revitalized struggle".  So let's get this straight--in the present day economy of unprecedented energy exploitation that inherently advantages comparatively wealthy global consumers at the expense of (in this case) indigenous villagers who have seen their land seized and their air and water polluted, an ideology that discusses the dynamic of exploitation and exclusion is an obsolete relic?  I guess so, if that ideology is articulated by "angry killers", their "eyes glowing with the luminosity of radicals".

Now let's talk about violence.  In any armed conflict, there is violence.  That's what makes it an armed conflict.  We all know violence is bad, but by definition both sides in an armed conflict use violence.  There are some clear-cut cases in which the approach of the two sides differs greatly in use of violence, but often these apparent differences dissolve away once you look deeper.  The Nazi machine for enslavement and/or extermination of civilians was indeed unprecedented in the US or Britain (though our Stalinist allies were no strangers to such practices).  The Japanese in the second World War used some tactics like abuse or execution of prisoners, or kamikaze attacks, that were not considered acceptable behavior, but the Allies firebombed German and Japanese cities with reckless abandon, just as the Axis did in London and China.  The US today has similar difficulties making an objective, coherent case that its tactics in the War on Terror (torture, consistently high levels of civilian collateral damage, support to fanatical militias) differ greatly in spirit from the beheadings and massacres of its insurgent rivals.  In most cases of internal insurgencies (El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Argentina, and I believe Nigeria), the objective numbers show equal or higher (sometimes much higher, as in Colombia) civilian deaths caused by government and affiliated paramilitary forces than by left-wing insurgencies.  This makes sense, since insurgencies don't have as much firepower and do need to maintain the support and legitimacy of the local population.  I don't know how the numbers stack up in the Naxalite case, whether government or the insurgency have claimed more civilian lives.  From reading Loyd's article, you'd think that the Naxalites go around massacring people and the government has never killed anyone but confirmed insurgents. 

Even short of the heinous issue of war crimes, we can neither usually differentiate two parties to war by the personal qualities of their members.  There will likely be silly, immature boys and even bloodthirsty ones at the field level of either side, and as you go up the ladder each participant in the conflict will be motivated by a varying mix of conviction, convenience, opportunism, ego, compassion, humanity and a number of other factors.

So if war is violent and ugly, and often both sides use despicable methods that can be qualified as war crimes, both sides have essentially forfeited any claim to moral superiority in terms of their conduct.  And if those waging war are all a mix of coherent values and incoherent or selfish motives, we can't describe one side as totally valid and the other side as simply evil on those criteria either.  Loyd attempts to circumvent these truths by presenting only the vain, incoherent traits of one side, contrasted with the reasonable rhetoric and human concern of the other.  Loyd describes the first Naxalite he meets as "fresh from killing", just to make sure that we know what a bad guy he is, that his face and body are "burned out ... cadaverous" due to nothing other than the evil lurking in his own soul.  On the other hand, we hear from a decent, ethical former minister of rural affairs for India who authoritatively explains how opportunistic and cynical the Naxalites are, operating basically as a nihilistic protection racket in cahoots with big industry.  “Where there is mining, there is Maoism, because where there is mining, there is more revenue, and where there is more revenue, there is more extortion,” he added. “Some of the best-known names in Indian industry are running businesses in the Maoist areas by paying off the Maoists. I don’t want to name names, but these are the biggest names in Indian industry.”  I hope Loyd is not trying to subtly imply that all Naxalites are bloodthirsty soldiers, and all anti-Naxalite corruption-free, moral people, but I suspect that this is precisely what he's trying to do.

So is the argument that any movement that seeks to finance its own operations is invalid?  The Indian army presumably uses taxes to finance itself, and presumably the Indian state faces the same tricky queries that all states face.  By taxing cigarettes or alcohol or gasoline, are we somehow condoning vice or pollution?  By taxing food are we keeping people from eating?  What is the right proportion of revenue to destine for education and social services, versus military expenditure?  I have seen many articles that similarly dismiss the ideological cogency of the left-wing insurgency in Colombia, because it funds itself through taxes on or trafficking in narcotics, petroleum, minerals, or straight-up extortion.  I understand that it may seem incoherent that a Communist group finance itself through levying taxes on capitalist commerce, but given that all armed groups must finance themselves with the resources at hand, why would we somehow hold these insurgencies to a different, higher moral standard than we apply to our own legitimate governments? 

I know these are all difficult questions, but that's precisely why we need good journalists to get in there and offer us some elements to answer them, not simply to regurgitate the values and ideas that we had to begin with.  If we want to differentiate one side from another and perhaps decide which side's arguments or vision seem more valid to us as an observer (or even a participant), then we must have a clear, nuanced, relatively objective accounting of what exactly it is that each side wants or is arguing for.  This National Geographic article does not do that.

Violence in general is baffling to most of us.  I am not a Naxalite, and so it is difficult for me to understand why they fight and what they're fighting for, and especially how they justify their use of violence.  It is a journalist's job to answer precisely these questions, and the way they must do that is by stepping outside of their own frame of reference, their own middle-class Western values, and entering the minds and the logic of the target of their reporting, in this case the people involved in both sides of the Naxalite conflict.  If the writer of this article, Anthony Loyd, had done that, it would be a real service to the readership, because it would give us insights on this conflict that most of us know little about and understand even less about.  But he chose to use the article as an opinion piece, to convey values and ideas he probably had before even speaking to anyone involved in the conflict.  That being the case, he would have been better off staying home and writing an ill-informed blog about it that no one would read (something I am very familiar with!).  I personally know nothing about the tradecraft of journalism, but that notwithstanding, National Geographic would have spent their money better paying me or anyone else with a modicum of intellectual integrity to go to India and write up their story on the Naxalites.  To his credit, Loyd does try to show the connections of this "complex insurgency that links European economies with a roadside IED planted for a police vehicle approaching an Adivasi village in Chhattisgarh. They look like a phenomenon of the globalized present rather than the Maoist past."  But his prejudices, and perhaps his interest more in the global economy than the local reality, prevent him from doing the excellent job he could have.

For a much more nuanced, informed take on the Naxalite conflict, check out this short essay from Counterpunch.  The author recognizes both the valid arguments and the opportunistic actions on both sides, and closes with what I think to be a very accurate description of many insurgencies.   

The best work of revolutionaries is, of course, done by the establishment of the day.  It is they, more so than the Naxalites, who will change.  Till that happens, the Maoist group shall remain what China’s People’s Daily (Jul 5, 1967) once described as: “a peal of spring thunder”.

That is to say that, regardless of whether or not you agree with their methods, often insurgent and terrorist groups are pushing arguments that may have some validity.  In the case of the Naxalites, they are drawing attention to the unjust dynamics of opulence, exclusion, and environmental destruction caused by an extractive economy with little concern for human rights.  In this sense insurgencies play the role of pushing the State not to enact their entire program, but to at least make some often-welcome moves in a different political direction.

Complexities of public transit planning

Here are two articles that seem to be saying different things about public transit in the big cities of the US.  This article is a rundown of the cities where large proportions of the population don't own a car.  The percentages they come up with (27.9% of Chicagoans with no car, and 26.3 commuting to work with public transit) seem to apply only to actual city residents, not the suburbanites (who in Chicago's and many other cities' case comprise a much larger population than the city proper).  So in some ways it tells an overly rosy picture of how many people are using public transit. 

This other article tells a very different story, showing that for most cities in the US, even those with good public transit systems, driving is faster than public transit.  There's a study where a team of researchers divided each city up into gridded squares, and then calculated square by square what the fastest way of getting to every other square in the city would be.  The results show that in the majority of cases, public transit is slower than biking or driving.  Now this study has a similar weakness to the other one, in that it doesn't look at the larger metro area.  If they did, the parts of the geographic area where it is easier to get to by car would look even higher.  But if they looked just at the city proper, but factoring in the traffic generated by the cars of the entire metro population trying to come in and out, public transit would look a lot more attractive, even in fact for many suburban commuters.  Which I guess explains why the public transit ridership described in the first article I cited is in fact higher than you'd expect from the second article's studies.

Another funny thing I noted--Chicago doesn't compare well to DC in terms of the area of the city where it's fastest to get by bike.  While most parts of DC you click show that a quarter to half of the city is best accessed by bike, no point in Chicago gives you much more than 8 or 10% of the city fastest reached by bike.  I assume this is due to a number of factors.  Chicago's grid layout really is an efficient way to get around by car, while DC has a grid that just doesn't quite work that well.  Furthermore, Chicago is almost four times as big geographically as DC, so much of the city is just inherently farther away from any given point.  Lastly, the proportion of Chicago that the researchers' program comes up with that is best covered by car includes a lot of sparsely-settled areas.  Population density in Chicago is overall a bit higher than in DC, but it is very unevenly distributed.  So you've got large sections of the North Side, lakefront, and near downtown that have really high densities of people and amenities (the type of stuff you'd be likely to be trying to get to), and then large swathes of the South Side with very low density of people, businesses, and other attractions.  So for most of the city's population, trying to do most of the things they're likely to want to do, the effective size of the city shrinks, and the percent of that smaller city that is accessible by bike would go up.

In any case, what these maps have shown me is that my anecdotal impression is right--Washington DC is a great place to get around by bike, and when I have the choice, I'll take bike instead of the Metro.

Exploring the superstructure

I recently read a book called New Ideas from Dead Economists, by Todd Buchholz.  As you might guess from its title, it is a witty treatise on Economics for the layperson.

Buchholz's book is a great general overview of Neoclassical economics, with a decidedly (and unfortunately) Neoliberal bent.  He will give you a pretty comprehensive understanding of the important ideas put forth by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, all the way through to Keynes and Friedman.  He also gives some personal and historical color to his accounts, with a witty, entertaining tone throughout.  Sometimes this tone serves to gloss over important complexities in the economists' ideas that may run counter to the gross caricature provided by the Neoliberal narrative.  He spends a page or two of copy in Alfred Marshall's or David Ricardo's chapters dwelling on their personal life, with the rest taken up by adroit explanations of their theories.  In Marx's chapter, on the other hand, there's nary a page describing any pertinent economic theories on the German's own terms, but rather almost an entire chapter devoted to Marx's dysfunctional marriage, slovenly housekeeping, and petty personal hypocrisies.  We get a good bit of detail on John Stuart Mill's intellectual and aesthetic evolutions and phases, even a fair amount about his nervous breakdown, but nothing about his avowed socialism.  Indeed, sometimes it seems that the personal stories and dime-store psychoanalysis serve mainly to distract us from the more difficult nuances of economic thinking that does not fit into the Neoliberal mold.  As it was originally written in 1989 and then lightly revised in 1999 or so, the book is also peppered with a few awkward paeans to supply-side economic policy (the nasty, incoherent mutilation of Smith that has been debunked by most economists ever since the Reaganomics era), subtle digs at immigrants and the poor, 90s-era predictions that private IRAs would be much more stable and secure than Social Security, or that Russia was entering an economic golden age after Communism, and absurd climate change skepticism.  Buchholz even gets in a few good digs at Keynes and Galbraith, essentially insisting that heavy government intervention in the economy had become obsolete by the unbridled laissez-faire growth of the 1980s and 90s (which of course in hindsight proved to be based largely on a series of bubbles and scams).

But despite his philosophical/political biases, Buchholz does a great job summarizing the corpus of orthodox economic theory for the layperson.  I would highly recommend New Ideas from Dead Economists as a primer to get your head around the major economic concepts, and then I'd recommend that people follow it with something by Ha-Joon Chang to throw a bit of heterodox questioning and complexity into your conception of how the world works.

If you really want to explore the nuances of economic thought and different ways of explaining the world, then Socialist Thought:  A Documentary History is the book for you!  As the title implies, it's a great overview of socialist thought, with key excerpts from all the important thinkers from Rousseau and Babeuf up to Gramsci.  Reading it was a real eye-opener for me (and I think a sufficient dose for now of the original sources, which I don't have much desire to read in their entirety!).

I was born during the Cold War.  It so happens that my childhood took place in the waning days of this Cold War, but nobody knew that back then--the Communists were still the undisputed champion bad guys in the US of my childhood.  This was of course confusing to me, since I grew up at once surrounded by the anti-Communist fervor in society at large, contrasted with a pretty radical leftist father, and a devout Catholic upbringing.  As I gradually learned about Communism, through my incomplete (or perhaps remarkably prescient) child's viewpoint, I didn't understand how people could be Christian yet at the same time rabidly anti-Communist.  Every time I asked people what the Communists were or did that was so bad, they would tell me things like, "The Communists think everyone should share their stuff, that no one should have their own things," or, "The Communists take things from rich people."  At least that was my childlike rendering of the arguments people were using to show me how bad Communism was.  And I didn't understand, because in Mass and the Bible and Sunday school, we learned that Jesus believed everyone should pool all their stuff together, and that the rich should give away everything they have in order to follow Him.  Not to mention the constant injunctions from teachers in preschool to always share and not be greedy.  Greed was a sin, so how could you be a capitalist and Christian at the same time?  I guess I still feel much the same way, and my discovery of Liberation Theology in my teens and 20s, crowned by my reading the original book on Liberation Theology just recently, have only strengthened my conviction that there is at least a fundamental tension, if not an outright incompatibility, between Christianity and the free market.

Anyway, as I grew up and started reading and listening more to the things around me, I found that I couldn't blame people for not being too sold on socialism.  The examples given to most of us in the US pitted ugly, sterile, oppressive Bolshevism against a more or less free, prosperous society.  Who would choose the socialist alternative given that dichotomy?  Later on, in college, I even read some Bolshevist writing, and it didn't speak to me at all.  The doctrinaire infighting between long-dead Russians, with a tone at times lugubrious and at times acerbic, was a far cry from the vital solidarity with the poor that could move my spirit.  Furthermore, it seemed like much of Soviet Bolshevist theory aimed to lay down on paper as unmoving laws things that were really just the result of random, fortuitous circumstances.  Lenin's victory in St. Petersburg has never seemed to me the inevitable result of well-understood forces and natural laws, but rather a lucky ball that dropped in the right place and the right time for the Russian Bolsheviks.  The same thing didn't happen in Haymarket Square, or 1848 Frankfurt, or 1918 Berlin, even though these moments seemed to have offered much more propitious circumstances.  So to try to extrapolate iron laws of how certain objective facts will always lead to a successful workers' revolt seemed like a waste of time, which is to say that much of Bolshevik writing seemed like nonsense to me.

Furthermore, the ambience that framed some of my most formative years was the Neoliberal circle jerk that followed the fall of the Iron Curtain.  Never since has there been such an outbreak of self-congratulatory theorizing about why Neoliberal capitalism is the inevitable, natural endpoint to the trajectory of all societies.  Come to think of it, Fukuyama and Huntington's theorizing about the iron laws that result in capitalist victory over state-controlled markets sound a lot like Lenin's lionizing of his group's having simply been in the right place at the right time seventy years prior.  In any case, my formal economic and historical education was filled with seemingly irrefutable demonstrations that collectively-owned enterprise is doomed to failure (while conveniently ignoring the many cases to the contrary, from efficient Medicare to self-supporting Social Security to state-owned enterprises in East Asia to public sector dominance in Scandinavia to major cooperative businesses like Land o Lakes or Fagor).

In short, the one-two punch of having Bolshevism presented to them as the only form of socialism, and having Neoliberalism presented as the only valid, correct way of understanding and running a society, probably predisposed most kids of my generation in the US firmly against socialism.  Even the contrarians who claimed they were socialists seemed to do so more to root for a losing cause, or to distinguish themselves from the crowd.  At least in my eyes, no one took socialism very seriously as a way to organize a society.  How could they?  Neoliberal capitalism (or maybe I will coin a new phrase and call it Ultraorthodox Economics) was an objective science.  It wasn't even a science--it was just what worked, how the world was naturally.  It had nothing to do with human values or preferences or social causes or philosophy, just rational, objective fact.  It was the closest thing to unimpassioned, impartial truth you could find in terms of running a society. 

None of this was true, of course, but this narrative framing of Neoliberalism successfully served to separate the descriptive aspects of economics from the normative aspects, prizing the former and downplaying the latter, as if the economy were some creature like an ant or a meteor, totally independent of human influence and best studied without interference from the observer.  Once you've accomplished this mental separation, it doesn't seem ridiculous to maintain a reverent remove from what is in fact an eminently human creation.  Once you've separated description of economic phenomena from their shaping, it doesn't seem absurd or immoral that some people are served well by the free market and others are not.  It is not ours to change the economy, only to ensure the smooth, oiled functioning of its whirring machinery.  Indeed, once you believe in the sacred ideal of a pure, undistorted market, you will never think to step in and correct market failures and suboptimal social outcomes; you will never even realize that the rules governing the economy are in large part rules that we humans create ourselves, and that we are free to change! 

Neoliberal economics even presented its major weakness, namely an impractical and unrealistic proliferation of abstract models and theories, as a virtue.  Neoliberal thinkers could pride themselves on describing very small pieces of the economy with great precision, even while having few answers for the larger, socially relevant questions of what should or should not be.  (In fact, even the supposedly accurate description of how economies work that Neoliberalism claimed to offer proved itself fleeting in many cases, as country after country collapsed under austerity, privatization, and structural adjustment, instead of experiencing the renaissance the Neoliberals often predicted.)  At the same time, the Neoliberal high priests criticized socialist thought (cynically equated with decadent Bolshevist systems) for not describing the exact technical details of the watchwork functioning of the microeconomy; the high priests didn't concern themselves with the question of whether these same, theoretically imperfect socialist systems actually delivered preferable real social outcomes.  How dare anyone pretend that the economy is in fact intimately linked to other fields like the natural environment, social relations, law, morality, belief, culture, tastes, ideas, propaganda, violence, war, power?  Those things might mess up the divine clockwork of abstract models!

Reading "Socialist Thought" opened me up to a whole world of richness and nuance that I hadn't known existed.  Socialism is NOT only Bolshevism (I knew that before reading the book), but it is neither even just the mixed welfare states of Europe and the US.  There are two and a half centuries of thought that fits more or less under the label "socialist", and while all these different ideas and traditions bear in common certain aspects and a unified spirit, they are a diverse and illuminating pool to delve into.  Within socialism there are abstract musings on the ultimate origins of human inequality, as well as schemes to improve physical wellbeing through technological innovation that hardly touches inequality itself.  There are discussions of how we know and experience the world (even a questioning of Descartes's "I think, therefore I am"), how we change the world and the world changes us, really deep ontological reflections.

The proletariat as a defined, coherent group only comes along after decades of socialist thought, and of course Marx was the one to lay out a unified consideration of what the proletariat is and why it exists.  But even after Marx, whose authoritative works seem to have quelled out some of the prior obscure schools of thought (many of which are very compelling to me, and which I think would have benefited humankind had we explored them further), there are countless differences within the universe of socialism.  There are debates on whether the poor are a benighted class needing outside revolutionary help, or the noblest of classes forging their way to their own inevitable liberation.  Can socialists work within the existing State, or must they destroy or usurp that State and build a new one?  Or maybe any State at all is bad? 

Is Marx correct when he says that capitalism must become exceedingly decadent and oppressive in order to inspire the socialist revolution?  If so, should socialists work not for the betterment of the living conditions of the working class, but rather for their debasement so as to hasten the revolution?  Should we work for change or wait for crisis?  (This last question is relevant for anyone contemplating desperate situations that must change, not just the abuses of capitalism but global warming, racial injustice, even the coming of the Messiah!).  If living conditions are improving, does that mean that capitalism does not in fact hold the germ of its own destruction?  Is gradual, democratic legislation the best way to improve the lot of the downtrodden, or is it sudden, violent action?  If a materialist interpretation of the world is true, that is a belief that history arises from the interaction between humans and their surroundings, what is the place of idealism, of thoughts that arise sui generis, not simply from material conditions?

I hadn't known that all this nuance existed.  It has helped me to learn better how the world works--not as a single, absolute theory, but as different facets that seem to describe certain aspects of what I've seen in my life.  In this sense, socialism can never vie with Neoliberal certainty in terms of accurately explaining the world using a single, narrow criterion.  But I think that socialist thought in all its threads can offer us a good understanding of the world's complexity, because it, like the world, includes not just economic laws but normative philosophy, history, power struggles, and the very mix of objectiviey and subjectivity that defines the human experience.

The last author in my book of socialist thought is CAR Crosland.  He attempts to lay out five factors that are common to the body of thinking that might be called socialist.  They are:

1. "a protest against the material poverty and physical squalor which capitalism produced"
2. "a wider concern for social welfare--for the interests of those in need, or oppressed, or unfortunate, from whatever cause"
3. "a belief in equality and the classless society, and especially a desire to give the worker his just rights and a responsible status at work"
4. "a rejection of competitive antagonism, and an ideal of fraternity and cooperation"
5. "a protest against the inefficiencies of capitalism as an economic system, and notably its tendency to mass unemployment"

Crosland, writing in the postwar boom of mid-century Europe, dismissed points one and five, saying that they were responses to the excesses of early capitalism that had since been made irrelevant by economic growth and a redistributive state.  But in the 21st century, as US food pantries do a bustling business and jobs disappear across the developed world, these points seem just as relevant, if not more so, than the other three.  I think Thomas Piketty might agree.

One intellectual thread that runs throughout the socialist writings since Marx is the materialist idea that the economic and social surroundings you live among largely determine your way of experiencing and seeing the world, and even your thoughts and tastes.  I had long known about this current of socialist thought, and it always made intuitive sense to me, but it didn't seem like that profound or powerful of an insight.  But lately in my daily life I've really been seeing a lot of how the social superstructure determines people's actions.  People's race, politics, geographic origins, and economic status are such powerful determinants of how they act and think.  Indeed, it sometimes seems as if people are fully conscious that what they're doing is like a scripted, automatic response, but they almost relish adopting that predetermined role.  Maybe folks are just afraid to break the mold, even when they know it's there. 

I consider myself a pretty open-minded person, and it seems to me that I and others I know really make an effort to go beyond just a narrow, pre-defined set of allowable thoughts permitted to us by our social position.  I guess that is why for a long time I didn't lend much credence to the idea that class is such a dominant, overpowering determinant of outlook.  But as I live longer and meet a broader range of people, I don't think that this open-mindedness is how most folks operate.  Frankly, it may not be the way I myself operate--I may just be giving myself too much credit for free thought, when I too am in fact one more cog in the superstructure.  Or even if I and my friends are in fact true free thinkers that to some extent transcend the rigid limitations placed on the rest of society, maybe this role is itself accomodated within the superstructure.  Maybe I can flatter myself by thinking that we are the source of the shocks and challenges to the superstructure that topple one system and set up another.  For this is part of Marx and Hegel's scheme as well--people and thought are shaped by their material and social surroundings, but they also in turn shape these surroundings, particularly in bursts of change when the social arrangement is no longer a viable way to organize the existent material reality.

Regardless of my own lofty pretensions, for most of us in society, in so many ways and places, it seems that people are preordained to think a certain way, to ask or not ask certain questions, to prefer or not prefer a very narrow range of things.  I've seen this in many parts of the world, but at least in my contact with people from different social strata in Colombia (and more limited contact with people elsewhere), they seem interested and willing to change their ways if someone else shows them a new idea that makes logical sense.  In the US though, the social superstructure seems to be more stubborn--if I do something in a way that goes against the preconceived "right" way of acting, people will not only not be open to discuss the merits of my ideas, but they actively, hostilely reject the very possibility of veering off the well-trodden path offered to us by social norms.  There is at times a paralyzing dread of going off-script.  It's a sad, stark contrast that in Colombia and other developing countries, where for most of their history externally-imposed political and socioeconomic arrangements kept the masses marginalized and muzzled, people who haven't had the benefit of a liberating education are at least capable of recognizing and separating nonsense from sound reason, if they're given a chance; while in the nominally free and egalitarian US, we the people seem to take charge of muzzling and policing ourselves, even to the point of actively restricting our own free thought.

I was reminded of this recently when my wife and I hired a babysitter from a service to take care of our kids on a day when their school was unexpectedly canceled, and we both had to be out of the house.  It turned out that my stepdaughter, who is currently living with us, had her plans unexpectedly canceled that day too, so she ended up staying at home while the babysitter was there.  (In fact, my stepdaughter ended up doing most of the babysitting herself, but that's another story).  My stepdaughter at one point offered the babysitter a mandarin orange or something, and the babysitter sort of chuckled to herself and shook her head, as if it were ridiculous that anyone would think that she would or could eat a mandarin orange.  Now there was no physical barrier to it--the oranges were there for the taking.  There was no objective physiological barrier--mandarin oranges are delicious to everyone I've ever met who's tried them.  I mean, everyone likes sweet flavors, and mandarins are sweet.  But something was keeping the babysitter from allowing herself to eat a mandarin orange.  Something similar happened with the salad my stepdaughter prepared, and even the suggestion that they take the kids outside to the park.  On the other hand, the babysitter was very enthusiastic about showing the kids movies and stuff on her cellphone, despite the fact that there are well-publicized campaigns that little kids need to watch less, not more TV.  Apparently she had a very rigid scheme of "normal", acceptable things to do, like watching TV or having the kids watch it, and other things that were prohibited, like eating fresh food or going outside.  As it so happened, the social superstructure was prescribing for her precisely the opposite of what we value in our family.

My point here isn't to demonize the babysitter, but rather to marvel that certain things in the social structural framework around her were determining what she did or didn't do in life, even to the point of overriding natural impulses like taking kids outside, limiting TV, or following your tastebuds to sweets.  I assume the babysitter was from a relatively low economic stratum--you don't take precarious positions in the on-call, day-laborer staff for a home care company if you're economically privileged.  But many of the idiosyncracies I'm noting in her are not limited to the poor.  Indeed, being stuck to your phone, wary of natural food offered in friendship by others, and reluctant to pursue active entertainment seem to be traits exhibited by many people in the US, from varied economic and racial strata.  But they are very specific to the US, or perhaps to the post-traditional, consumerist way of life that the US is always at the vanguard of, with other developing countries soon to follow.

When I was in high school and college, I used to get really frustrated with these eminently irrational (and ultimately self-destructive) tics I noted in US society.  An attraction to the synthetic, a rejection of simple, human pleasures, an uncontrolled addiction to all manner of consumption and fads.  I ultimately left the States and stayed away for a very long time in large part because of these things.  But the years have perhaps softened my outrage, and now I'm more inclined to see these idiosyncracies not as personal shortcomings, but rather as social afflictions that my fellow citizens are subjected to.  When I think of it that way, my response is no longer to scorn and condemn these people, but rather to sympathize and seek out solutions to the aspects of the sociocultural superstructure that are holding people back from attaining their highest potential.

This framing of simultaneous outrage at unjust, inefficient social arrangements yet sympathy for the brothers and sisters suffering from those arrangements (even as they themselves also perpetuate the arrangements by their own behavior) makes me think of Malcolm X's autobiography.  A constant challenge and dilemma for Malcolm, perhaps the principal challenge of his life and ministry, was how to deal with the collective, widespread shortcomings and pathologies of the people he loved.  He often decried the addiction, the criminality, the aggression towards the weak and submission to (or collusion with) the powerful, exhibited by the black underclass of his Harlem home.  But at the same time he was profoundly aware that these pathologies were not simply personal failures, but rather conditions imposed on his flock by a larger superstructure.  Malcolm is keenly tuned in to which people are ready to hear the truth at a given moment and snap out of their established, oppressive routines, and which ones are still "brain-washed Negroes" that wouldn't be able to hear what he's saying.

Anyway, for a time I was reading the Socialist Thought book on my daily train commute, and reading Malcolm X to my son at night (he's now old enough to make me uncomfortable with questions about white devils).  I saw a lot of commonalities between Malcolm's vision of the white suprmacist superstructure and the socialists' descrition of the economic superstructure.  A recent interview I read with a black post-Marxist philosopher named Charles Mills has further solidified my view that both race and class are part of the superstructure shaping most people's actions in the US.  And the only thing more omnipresent than the superstructure is people's willing blindness to it, what Mills calls an "epistemology of ignorance".

The epistemology of ignorance combines with the meritocratic ur-narrative that we tell ourselves in the US, to yield an ugly trend of blaming the marginalized for their lot.  Whether it's angry white folks insisting essentially that unarmed young men deserve to die simply for appearing black and menacing, or the Neoliberal status quo blaming the poor for their unfortunate lot in life, the epistemology of ignorance leads the powerful to overlook their own shortcomings or flaws while simultaneously emphasizing the foibles of the oppressed, as a way of justifying the way things are.  This from Fabian Socialist Sidney Webb:

"When we have bound the laborer fast to his wheel; when we have practically excluded the average man from every real chance of improving his condition; ... then we are aggrieved that he often loses hope, gambles for the windfall that is denied to his industry, attempts to drown his cares in drink, and, driven by his misery irresistiibly down the steep hill of vice, passes into that evil circle where vice begets poverty, and poverty intensifies vice, until Society unrelentingly stamps him out as vermin.  Thereupon we lay the flattering unction to our souls that it was his own fault, that he had his chance; and we preach to his fellows thrift and temperance, prudence and virtue, but always industry, that industry of others which keeps the industrial machine in motion, so that we can still enjoy the opportunity of taxing it."

But to those who would sanctimoniously scold the victims of an unjust system, Brecht and Weill warn,  

"Your vices and our virtue are so dear to you,
So hear the simple truth of this our song. 
Wherever you aspire, whatever you may do,
First feed the face, and then talk right and wrong. 
For even saintly folk may act like sinners
Unless they've had their customary dinners!"