Marxism Did Not Fail

      In many of my classical economics classes, almost every professor talked about how Marxism is flawed and does not apply to human nature, thus it was deemed to fail.  Human nature is selfish, but human nature also trys to encourage people not be selfish and cooperate with the others to survive. From my extensive travel experience covering twenty countries and regions, my observation is that Marxism has already succeeded in the West while capitalism is succeeding in the East. Look around what we have today in the West and compare to what we did not have before Marxism, obviously, Marxism has done a great job in transformation of class polarization.  What we have today in Europe and North America is the result of the influence from Marxism over one hundred years.

     Karl Marx envisioned an ideal society that has no class struggle does not necessarily mean that everybody has to have exactly the same level of income, a big population of middle class in a society would satisfy his dream. Violent revolution is nothing fun, if possible, through reasonable taxation or redistribution, a society with good social welfare programs, such as: universal health care, free education, social security fund, free child dental care, workers’ union…etc., may create a big population of middle class and a sustainable economy, because, consumers do not have to save a big portion of their income for above causes, so, a higher spending may create a bigger GDP which means less unemployment. And the reason that Europe is suffering less than the USA in the recession now is because of their better social welfare programs.

      Karl Marx was also right about the feature of recessions in a primitive or pure capitalist economy which means an economy that does not have social welfare system. He believed that recessions were created by big pure capitalists for their selfishness and greed and thus a more class polarized society. No matter in what kind of recession, the people who have cash to buy low and sell high are always the ”best and brightest” capitalists and they would be creative enough to create recessions as frequently as they can. Of course, people like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett are not pure capitalists, they are advanced capitalists and philanthropists, and they did not exist in Karl Marx’s time or they might be the products of Marxism. Without the influence of Marxism, even laws, such as Antitrust Law and Minimum Wage Law, etc.,  might not have been established.

      If Karl Marx did not wake up the proletariat working class and question the authorities, the West might not be the same as today.

Blog 1 – ssck4 = scoyne

Something I have been thinking a lot about for a long time is the issue of voice and whose voice and whose narratives we are hearing in the mainstream. And even beyond that, how a specific narrative dominates the rest and transcends narrative to become objective truth. It makes me question popular ideas and arguments, history books, nearly everything. Learning about HPPs so far has brought to light how these ideas become constructed as natural and indisputable. It has made sense to synthesize these ideas. Because if there is one word that is seriously lacking in the usual economics courses I take, it has to be the word “power” and its endless implications—or put in simpler terms, political economy.

These days I am obsessed with reading books and listening to music that offers me an insight into a life I do not live or one I do that itself isn’t reflected in the mainstream. In particular I’ve appreciated the alternative views we’ve read about and hearing the testimonials of the high school students in Straightlaced. I think it is dangerous not to question or search for alternatives and improvements, especially when learning about processes as life-altering and pervasive as economic development and free market capitalism. I look forward to taking this class because I feel it’s an opportunity to develop the ability to think critically and question in a safe encouraging environment.

Blog 1

Although I’ve learned about injustices with regard to race and gender, before this class I wasn’t able to explain how our notions about minorities and women came to be. After learning the Hierarchical Polarization Processes, I could explain the effects and reasoning behind certain actions. For instance, over the summer a couple people told me that I spoke good English and I can now see that it came from the essentialism that all people that look Asian are foreign.

In the documentary “Straightlaced”, it was interesting to see how people broke stereotypes of gender and sexuality. With a couple of the participants, I automatically pegged some of them as having a certain sexual orientation based on stereotypes about gays and lesbians, but was surprised when a couple of them revealed their sexual orientations and it ran counter to what I had assumed. It really revealed how deep my assumptions about people run and made me think to be more consciously open-minded especially since I don’t appreciate being labeled.

Meditations on the Chronology of Progress

In discussing the Hierarchical Polarization Paradigm in class these past two weeks, I’ve come to think more extensively, more philosophically, about the way change is initiated.  The HPP model outlines the processes under which society devises its “order”—our rights, as individuals, are determined by our gender, our socioeconomic status, our race, our sexuality. What we have determines what we are, and the problems arise when these determining factors are biologically fixed, like sex and race, and socially stagnant, given the nature of political distribution amongst upper class, white males.

The thought that some one person has to begin a movement by questioning how we interact is incredible, in my opinion.  For an individual to imagine a reality in which these social constructs didn’t exist and to propose a solution that others can stand behind, in opposition to what is commonly accepted, is a huge feat.  While studying the processes that have been taught and inferred unto us for generations, the complexity behind how they i.e. polarization, essentialization, etc. are instilled  into our way of thinking—stratch that—BEING, as few think to question why we associate the color blue with “boy” with “masculine” with “strength” with “better.” The train of thought is instantaneous, we hardly ever stop to consider why, as a little girl, you wanted to the ride the “boy” bike.  It was just “better.”

All this being said, I begin to reflect on the movements, the revelations, that have taken motion and how truly remarkable a process it is. Take, for example, Seneca Falls in relation to the launching of the women’s movement.  What began as an idea, that women are and should be treated as equal to men, has evolved into a general consensus; though women are still fighting for equal opportunities professionally and as unpaid labor in the home 150 years later, the fact that women now have a platform to say, “Hey, just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean I am any less valuable.”  We have statistics to back it up, theories have been dispelled proving women as inferior. Sex does not determine intellectual capacity; there needn’t be a hierarchy.  A century and a half later, however, the constructs that bind us to this subconscious idea that men are more proficient leaders still exists, and who knows how many more generations it will take to wipe out the stereotype completely.  The slope steepens when gender stereotypes are paired with race and class categorizations and the polarities implied, depending on whether you’re white, black, rich, poor.

Despite the ongoing efforts still needed to obliterate traditional notions, it’s important to be reminded that the progress we’ve seen once began as merely a one-word question: why? In response to overwhelming opposition at the hands of this simple query, citing social disruption and the high probability of failure, that same courageous individual then asked: why not?

WAGES: Women’s Action to Gain Economic Security

ECON 243 – Blog Post 1

Ever since our class discussion on transformative processes, I have been categorizing current events/movements into the seven types of processes. This morning I read a New York Times article about an environmentally friendly initiative to decrease phosphorus levels in dishwashing detergent, to help prevent against contamination of water supply. Through this article I learned about a new nonprofit organization, WAGES: Women’s Action to Gain Economic Security (http://wagescooperatives.org/). Immigrant women and women of color often work as housecleaners in the US and typically do not make enough money to cover their basic needs. WAGES works with these women to get fair pay for their work and hopefully gain economic security. In addition, they teach these women environmentally friendly cleaning practices so they can protect themselves and the environment from hazardous cleaning chemicals. By learning about and using these “green” products, these women can market themselves to environmentally conscious consumers and potentially receive more pay for their cleaning services.

WAGES represents a couple types of transformative processes. First, the organization combines many hierarchical polarities; the organization’s main goal is trying to eliminate gender, race and man/nature polarizations. In addition WAGES values the devalued by giving low-income women the opportunity to receive the wages they truly deserve. Looking back through the google doc on transformative processes, I realize that examples of these processes are everywhere; we are living in a time of change and questioning, weighing our options on how best to move forward. By being able to organize these ideas and movements into different processes I find it easier to understand what people are fighting for and what kind of economic and social values people want in the future.

I am an Economics major and in my past two years at Wellesley I have taken six econ classes.  All of these classes have been about theory, whether it was micro or macro.  Although very interesting, these theory based classes have always felt limiting.  You can say that I never really had any real personal connection to the classes.  Therefore, I am very excited about this econ course. This econ class is extremely different than any other econ class I have taken and it is very refreshing.  The fact that our class is so heavily discussion based is something I am not used to in the economics department so far and it has been great so far.

As a Latina, originally from Los Angeles, CA, I am very interested in issues related to race and socio-economic class.  The fact that I can learn about both in an “economics sphere” is amazing.  The one reading from the past five classes that really had an impact on me was “Disempowering Idea 3: We must overcome Human Nature to Save the Planet” by Frances Moore Lappe.  One thing I loved about this reading was how the writer wasn’t dogmatic about how we should all become environmental.  She gave me an entirely new way of seeing the environmental movement.  Instead of giving me a list of things I should be doing, she gave me a list of innate human characteristics that can make any environmental change possible.  Humans are multi-faceted and we are not just “selfish, profits seeking capitalists”.  We have innate qualities that can allow us to change our current way of living.  I loved her approach and it really made me think about how change can happen regardless of the misconceived notions about human behavior.

-Mariaesther Moncada

Schadenfreude

On Thursday (September 9), we were discussing the natural qualities of people as described in the Lappe reading. These include a desire for efficacy, fairness, etc. Lappe argues that humans are naturally empathetic beings, but we see that in a competitive, hierarchical polarization paradigm, people are acting against this natural instinct and are in fact feeling pleasure out of others’ misery.

At this point in the discussion, a fellow student mentioned that there is actually a word in German to describe this phenomenon. Schadenfreude.

Schadenfreude is a word to describe the happiness that you get from other peoples’ suffering and misfortune. So why does this happen if we’re naturally supposed to feel pain when others feel pain? In a society that is so focused on getting ahead of the crowd, it only makes sense that people are no longer the empathetic creatures that they are born to be. As depressing as it is, we’re all a part of this sad cycle. We’ve all had that moment, however brief, of happiness when the straight A student does worse than you do on the test, when you’re accepted into a prestigious program and your colleague is not, when your ex-boyfriend gets his heart broken, when movie stars’ seemingly perfect lives are shattered and spiral out of control, the list goes on.

So what do we do from here? I guess acknowledging the existence of this phenomenon in our society is a first step. What next? Can we change this dog eat dog world where keeping up with the Joneses isn’t just a catchphrase but a national epidemic?

While we’re working on that, here‘s a humorous twist to the tragic concept.

Drawing Parallels: Feminism

Wellesley is a liberal arts college, and as such, preaches to incoming students about connections: making connections between people, between courses, between departments. But never have I experienced two classes that so strongly complement each other as two I’m taking this semester – one of them being this class, and the other being a history course taught by Lidwien Kapteijns called “The Changing Construction of Gender in the Modern Middle East.” The latter is very heavy. We discuss the concept of discourse, delve into dense critiques of Orientalism, etc. etc. Recently, though, we had a class focusing on an analysis of problems among the feminist movement concerning so-called “third-world women,” and I felt that it really emphasized what we’ve been discussing in our class.

Personally, I tend to think of hierarchal polarization as being white man vs. everyone else. (It is easy, you must admit, to use that example endlessly.) However the reading we did for this history class (1) harshly re-examined the ‘white women different from and above non-white women’ hierarchy. The author, Chandra Mohanty, offers an insightful critique of feminist writing in response to a scholarly field that was mostly dominated by white, affluent women for the latter half of the nineteenth century. It wasn’t until around two decades ago that women who had been formerly shoved into one sweeping category – ‘third-world women’ – and dubbed universally oppressed came forward to debunk this generalization.

At first I was partially opposed to what she was saying – that as feminists, we ‘Western women’ can’t assume to speak for all women – only because it seemed to support a divisiveness that was counteractive to a movement that (especially back then) needed all the strength in numbers it could muster. She kept reiterating the importance of examining historical context for each group of oppressed women, in my mind suggesting that these should all be separate groups fighting for different goals. But how could that possibly get anything done?

The discussion that day in class offered a historical context of which I had been unaware – that Mohanty was reacting to a feminist conference held in Europe that invited ‘third-world’ women, then refused to touch on the political issues that were a huge factor in the devices used to oppress them.(2) With closer examination of the reading, we discerned that Mohanty was really only warning against the isolationism that comes from being unaware of the myriad of issues (social, economic, political) surrounding those for whom you speak, especially in the literary world.

It was just such a concrete, in-depth example of what we’ve been talking about for these past two weeks. I had never before considered the technicalities and benefits of an alliance of movements over a single, monolithic movement in terms of accommodating for the different needs of different women. Without much background knowledge, I had previously viewed the feminist movement as a one-dimensional series of events, but these two classes have really opened my eyes to the complexity, flexibility and strength of the contemporary feminist movement with all its emerging ‘third-world’ factions. I’m not normally one for cheesy declarations, but I just wanted to express how amazing it is to be here and to be realizing the depth of the opportunities that the world has to offer. I haven’t considered myself a particularly naive person, but as a privileged white woman, these are the things I simply haven’t thought to ask. Well, before now.

Before, I could have told you that yes (of course) we can’t generalize and we can’t assume we know everything about women from different historical contexts, but now I get it. Now I understand how feminist alliances can encompass so many diverse backgrounds while still being considerate of these women, and still moving towards common goals, and still allowing for goals that may not apply to every woman. Now I can apply this concept to movements other than feminism, even to movements that encompass feminism (why hello there, solidarity).

I don’t mean to be agonizingly bubbly here, but I’m kind of having one of those bursting-with-optimism moments. Thanks for bearing with me. I’m done now.

p.s. Also, sorry this is so long. A lot of it is summarizing, so I felt I had to compensate for that.

(1) “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” by Chandra Talpade Mohanty

(2) I have to look into the details on this conference – I hadn’t written it down in my notes. Will get back to you on that.

Slow change

Mankind has the incredibly unique ability of adaptation. By adaptation, I don’t mean that we can change the color of our skin like those butterflies that assimilate to their surroundings for survival. But in some sense, we are exactly like those butterflies: changing into the “right clothes” in order to assimilate to our peers… for social survival. We are incredibly social creatures, and are engineered to care about what others think, to “fit in”. Perhaps this is what makes transformative processes difficult, because it is against our nature to stand-up for a socially unacceptable cause. But when the once “radical movement” becomes more mainstream, it is surprising how quickly everything suddenly becomes an accepted ideal of society – or at least on the outside.

The once intensely controversial women’s suffrage and feminism movements have now become an accepted fact. And of course no one will make explicitly sexist remarks anymore, or at least not at Wellesley. But psychological studies have shown that most of us already have internalized sexist mind frames. It is somewhat pathetic that I, who strongly believe that women are just as smart, if not smarter, than men, was shocked to find out that my economics professor was a woman. I would like to think that our new societal ideals are not just another layer of clothes, but a complete change of mindset. But it is probably closer to another challenging adaptation process, like breaking in a pair of new leather boots, with the inevitable initial blisters. The good news is that these internalized mind frames were not inherent, but instilled by the environment that shaped us as children. This means that there is yet hope for the future, if we succeed in our adaptation to these new ideals and can somehow change the entire subliminal environment for our next generations.

The irony is that all of these “problems”: racism, sexism, stratified class structures, and damages to the environment were created by our ancestors. It is absolutely amazing that we can recognize their wrongs, change the way things are, and somehow adapt to completely new norms of life.

Jessie Zeng

Domestication

Domestication: Integration?

The man/nature relationship is, I think, one of the hardest concepts to approach in this class. The concept is totally ingrained in our culture – I’m sure many of us don’t like a certain kind of animal due to a bad experience or stereotype of that species. Trees and entities such as forests are non-sentient, which causes us to have a very different relationship with them, than, say, different races. Most importantly, the quickly expanding human population and endless need for resources makes it important to our survival to both devalue and value nature. The factory-based consumption we thrive on distances us from our food and the resources from which we live, so often we fail to see the direct result of harvesting those resources.

In many areas, a large migration to cities accompanies population growth. This has sprung up possibilities for animals such as pigeons, crows, and rats, but totally choked out most wildlife, flora and fauna alike. Although many operate under the ‘out of sight, out of mind’ philosophy, there are numerous studies which show that humans can suffer from what is essentially nature deficiency. We grow depressed and listless without the sight of a tree or fresh air.

However, living in the city does not stop one from owning a pet of some sort. The direct benefits to humans through owning, for example, a dog, come through lowered blood pressure, better cholesterol levels, and improved general happiness. In class, we mentioned domestication as one of the hierarchical polarization processes for man over nature. I can see the reasoning behind this point easily. Domestication is a far cry from living in the wild, and in many cases the animals are treated horrendously. The popularity of certain breeds has led to the rise of puppy mills and surprisingly harsh breeding techniques. The worst part of this is that most people don’t really care – a monthly magazine from the Humane Society with some bad stories is enough to make one pause, but for the most part there is little reaction or activism to build more shelters. Our pets are truly beneath us – and non-pet owners in particular are less likely to identify with and care for a dog or cat.

On the other hand, domestication is our way of integrating animals into our lives. A lot of training is based on what the animal’s natural habits are, and how to teach them to fit in with us. Pets encourage the maintenance and growth of natural areas and parks in our cities, and safe spaces for animals to run free. The dog that eats at the table is a common jokes in the Sunday comics. In many cases, the pet is a partner rather than an expensive source of entertainment.

At home in Seattle, our family friends are strongly into dog racing on sleds, scooters, and skijoring. One couple in particular breed and race sled dogs for a living together. Their whole lives are centered around this team of dogs that they have built up. Although the dogs are their work, they’re also their friends, and they know all of their personalities in and out. My newest dog was taken from their team – they had tried for years to work him into racing but he was much more interested in socializing. Recently, one of the dogs died, and I clearly remember the husband telling me that it was his hunting buddy, and that nobody else could replace him. It was obvious that though they worked and profited off the use of the animals, they were primarily working with them. I think that most pet owners have similar relationships with their pets. Domestication cannot be dismissed as only a method of lowering animals, but also as partnering with them.