librarypunk - 006 - Commulism

Episode Date: March 14, 2021

This episode we are joined by Sam Popowich to talk about ideology, specifically the liberal kind, and how it permeates libraries and library workers. We also talk dual power, and ask if libraries would exist after the revolution? Plus we finally talk about anime again. Buy Sam’s book: Confronting the Democratic Discourse of Librarianship: A Marxist Approach.  Follow Sam on Twitter, @redlibrarian  More to read: Professionalism and Labour Aristocracy The Social Theory of Neutrality — Sam Popowich

Welcome to Library Punk, the only podcast that's a DPLA hub. Okay, my name is Justin. I'm a Scholar Communications Librarian. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I'm an IT administrator at a public library. My pronouns are she, her, or they them? Oh, is it me now? It is every week. I don't know. I'm Jay. I am a metadata and discovery librarian, and my pronouns are he or they. I'm Carrie. I'm a health sciences librarian, and my pronouns are she her. And I'm Sam Popovich.

I'm the head of discovering web services at University of Alberta, and my pronouns are he and him. Yay, Sam. So we have a guest this week. And Arthur. And Arthur. I'm actually really bad at being a podcast host, as Louisa pointed out, before we started last week, that I didn't remind people that they're coming on and don't know how to intro

people. It's not like it's not like you took a class or like went to night school for how to be a podcast host like Can you imagine that? You're self-taught. Can you imagine that class

though? It would just be full of like the worst like dudes with opinions that are way too loud. Yeah. I could go back to grad school like retrain. Like a room full of Rogans in there. How bad. Like, everyone's going to be wanting to smoke up in there. And it's not going to be the kind of people you want to smoke up with. You know what I'm

No, probably not. Yeah, it's a bad room. So the reason we wanted to have Sam on this week is, in part because you wrote a book that I've been reading a lot during the Texas blackout because my phone ran out of battery and I had absolutely nothing else to do so I powered through the entire thing in like an afternoon. Fucking primitive man. Until daylight ran out.

Still not good at reading a candlelight. It's called Confronting the Democratic Discourse of Librarianship, a Marxist approach. It's available on the internet where you can buy it for money. Money can be exchanged for goods and services. Including the book. Including the book.

Yay capitalism. Yeah. There's actually a really long section in the book about knowledge as encapsulated in the form of the book, but that was getting into some, not bales. Who was the other guy who wrote about the end of the book? I skimmed. Lafabre? I can't remember. He wrote a really disjointed book about how, like, book is not a meaningful concept, which I think.

is just a cover for shoddy writing. I have a whole bunch of books on books. Meta books? Yeah. I did a history of the book class and it was like the best class I ever took in grad school. Obviously super relevant.

But I don't remember what I read. I remember I read bin humming. That's about it. And to prep for this episode, I put a couple of your articles in the notes professionalism and labor aristocracy and the social theory of neutrality

because not everyone is going to have time to get the whole book. But I wanted to just basically hold you hostage and ask dumb questions about theory that I'm too lazy to learn myself. So we're going to start with like an easy question.

So this is from page 64 of your book. And I think, you know, everyone open your your marked copy. turn to the page, please. You should have brought your book today. Did I even get that far? It's in the syllabus. Okay. We were going over this.

Arthur says bye. He doesn't want to read. Bye, Arthur. So this is a quote. The reason for it is precisely to do with reification and the ways in which the commodity form, commodity logic, and commodity exchange have structured our way of understanding, experiencing, and being in the world.

And you have a quote from Feenberg, this cultural approach is no more reductionist than capitalism itself, a society unique in the cultural significance that assigns to the principal exchange. And so, really easy question. In the anime full metal alchemist, all alchemy and magic have the principle of equivalent exchange, which means you can't do alchemy without exchanging something of equivalent value. And I think that leads to a very obvious question, which is full metal alchemist and also Wicca capitalist reductionism.

You have 30 seconds to respond. So I don't know anything about full metal alchemist. But I guess what I would ask is what's the measure of value? Right. Like if two things can be equivalent exchanged equivalently, then what's the measure that allows them in an abstract way to be considered the same amount? And that's the question Mark starts with in capital. Right.

So this is where we start talking about linen coats for a really long time. Yeah. Yeah, which is like super gripping, actually. People joke about that. But I love it. Yeah. So, okay, the first thing they learn about this is they try and reanimate their dead mom. So we need to know the equivalent exchange for dead moms.

So how many dead moms? A social reproduction. Yeah. The ability. I mean, I guess that would be like a gift of, our moms are like a gift of nature. I'd argue with that. Yeah. I'm only saying that because it's women's history month.

And, you know, as a person who has a mother, I appreciate women. What is the value of motherhood? Virtue signaling much. Welcome to Library Punk, where we virtual signal all day, every day. I like that you gave our silly anime question actually very good. serious answers. Like, oh, yeah, well, how do we define labor, like, value? Yeah, but I mean, I think the questions about social reproduction and motherhood are really valid there, especially when you're talking about page 64, I don't know anything about

full metal alchemists, and I was going to tell Justin that that was a stupid fucking question, but I didn't. No, it's not. It's very important and meaningful question. It made me laugh, but I've also, you know, read full metal alchemist. So as long as we're not bringing up like the girl dog hybrid thing, I think we're okay. Well, that didn't really, yeah, what did they exchange to do that? They just kind of mushed them together. I guess that's dialectics. I just saw Jay's soul leave his body.

Well, that's dialectics. That's when you take two things and rub them together. I've not watched it, but I've absorbed it by being on the internet. As stupid as that metaphor is, it's the one thing that got me to understand dialectics when someone finally said it to me. It was dialectics as you take two things and rub them together and see. what happens. Kinky. Is that true?

I mean, it can be. I mean, probably not, but it got me, it finally got me kind of thinking about what the process of dialectics is. I kept trying to read definitions of dialectics, and I didn't really understand it for a really, really long time. Someone says, oh, read Mao. It's no worse than when

props will just put, like, thesis plus antithesis equals synthesis on a blackboard and say, that's the dialectic, and you're done. It's no worse than that. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense to be. Like, okay, so there's an antithesis, but it's not necessarily antithetical because it's not like the opposite of the thing. It's like, no, here's two dumb things that keep happening in our job.

And yet they both have to happen at the same time. Kind of like later in your book you talk about how like neoliberalism invades sort of everything you do in a library, whether it's, you know, what you would consider, like the budgetary stuff, but also in trying to solve issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or you're trying to even analyze the issues that neoliberalism causes in the academy, you still are making all of these value judgments within because it's a totality. It's a totalizing force, and you're really having, see, this is why I started with the dumb question because when I ask a serious question, it just sounds dumb.

But you raise a good point. I think one of the obstacles to people getting a sense of what the dialectic is, is that when they teach it, it's like you're taking one isolated thing. You know, you're taking a red sphere and then you're taking a blue cube and those are antithetical in some way and then you come up with, you know, a purple triangle or something and that's supposed to be it. But it's the totality piece that I think makes it a lot easier to get, where you think about the thesis is the ensemble of everything that's going on. You can't separate any piece out from any other piece. And so as that moves forward through historical moments, every item in there is going to hit its opposite number in some sense. Or Hegel talks about it as being a negation. So even if it doesn't

hit its opposite number, what it represents within the total system is going to drop out. It's going to become absent. And that absence is going to be productive and add more motion to the thing. And so it's less a sense of like there's all these individual pieces going through dialectical motion in the world so much as there's one world and it's evolving in a dialectical way. I think that's probably how I found it easier to get my head around. because that totality piece isn't really taught when when people are talking about Marx in undergrad classes particularly.

They're afraid of that idea. Right. And you went, did you go to like a university that had a strong Marxist tradition? Because like I grew up in the South. Like that didn't happen. No. I heard stories. So I was at University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. I started my undergrad in 95. So four years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. So there was no, you know, we were full in. in Fukuyama's end of history phase, so we weren't talking about it. I heard stories that the history department at U of M had been pretty radically Marxist,

and there were still a few people, I think, in economics and Pali Sae, who for the time might have come across is pretty radical, but not the way it is now. Post-2008, things, from my perspective, things have changed a lot in terms of people taking Marxism seriously, people taking all kinds of social justice seriously, but prior to that, just was marginalized.

Yeah, the dovetails quite well, actually, because in the book you outline, like, areas of capitalist production and try and, like, make... The great thing for me about trying to learn theory is if you apply it to something that I already kind of understand, like, libraries. So that way it actually stops being such an abstraction.

And you kind of go to these four areas of capitalist production. So, like, the industrial period, the First World War and Depression, the war economy, liberalism entrenched kind of boom, post-war boom, I guess you could call it. And then the neoliberalism and financialization. And then you stop at 2008 because you say we're still living in a post-2008 world where it's hard to see what's going to happen next.

It's hard to understand. It's hard to do an analysis while you're still in it while it's still unfolding. Have you changed your mind? since finishing the book about that? I think so to a certain, to a little, to a certain extent. I think, I mean, I was writing the book well after 2008, but I think things were less clear. I think now having, you know, after a year of pandemic,

I would say that the indications after 2008 that neoliberalism was coming to a close and something else was developing that they, its place have probably that's probably been cemented by the pandemic, right? The vast amounts of unemployment in Canada and the U.S., just as an example, the amount of public spending that's had to go into desperately trying to save things, the failures in public health mobilization, things like that, I think all of that is indicating that the neoliberal model in particular

is going to have to be replaced by something else. Not necessarily because of a left wing push to get there, but simply because of the mess that they've made in responding to the

the normal crisis capitalism pieces that have come out of the pandemic. And you look at stuff like it's NFTs today, but it was the game stop thing a couple of weeks ago. And it's just like the whole financial world just seems to be completely out to lunch. And I don't see how a combination of that, which is obviously way too much liquidity and

ability to spend and stuff like that, coupled with massive amounts of unemployment, is going to not have a dialectical effect on each other that produces some other form of capitalism. I don't think we're out of capitalism, but I think we're out of, I think we're well out of neoliberal capitalism. And we'll see in the five to ten years after the pandemic, we'll see what happens. Yeah, I think we're, I think it's a really interesting way of positioning it because I think that's something that I've kind of thought a lot about too is like, how do we situate our current, I guess, political economic moment, especially in relationship to

like what's happening? And I've thought a lot about this is like, is 2020 like an 1848 in a lot of ways. Like trying to situate our kind of current political, social, I think the social component's really important to consider as well, trying to situate all of that around kind of like these, like situated around historical events and what have you. And I think you're right. Like it was easy like prior to whatever has been happening to say like 2018 was like,

a major fallout, et cetera. And thinking about what impact 2018 had on, you know, because it was so massive for a global market. But that is different when you consider what has had more of an international

impact. And I think that what is happening in 2020 with just considering like an overall state of the world, for instance, on global market, effect. I think that's a bigger impact. And I think like there's, there's in a lot of ways, like a lot of the same similar conditions that you can look at and point to places in time like

1848, for example, just from kind of just like some roughshod reading I've been doing. I think it seems more like a shadow of things to come, sort of as you say, have more of a climate crisis and a sort of permanent state of crisis. that markets are going to fail to do anything about. There's going to be a constant failure of response. So that could be the defining new characteristic is, I don't know what you would call it, just constant crisis capitalism.

Yeah, constant. The line doesn't have any attachment. Is what I like to call it. I also just love the, someone had the phrase a while back, but it was just like, I love the optimism in the term late stage capitalism. And I just keep revisiting that.

It's like how late stage are we actually? Because it keeps threatening to be worse and it keeps getting actual worse. Like it keeps challenging what our definition of worse is in a lot of ways. Like that is what capitalism seems to be doing right now. And it's, I don't want to say it's a delightful treasure because it's horrifying. But it's like the feeling of how I'm sure the Germans have a word for it, right? Like there's a powerful welsh merits about it. Like I don't know like to be so fucking powerless.

And I think that speaks to, you know, disproportionate power relationships in the world. And whether or not democracy actually exists as well. So one of the funny things about late capitalization, is I assume it entered popular language from Jameson's book on postmodernism. But in there, he talks about how that was an homage to the Trotskyist historian Ernest Mandel, who wrote an economic book on called Late Capitalism, where he was talking about like the 60s.

He wasn't even talking about neoliberalism. He was just talking about the welfare state. And it's unfortunate. And Jameson admits that it was only an homage. It wasn't meant to be a description the way he used it. But it is easy to fall into that trap and think that it means that the revolution is imminent or the collapse is imminent. Now here we are debunking the fake news right here. We've debunked the fake news.

My worry is that what will pull the nuts out of the fire is another war because that's what happened 100 years ago. But it took the war to create the post-war compromise, which allowed the pressure of unemployment and the pressure of poverty to be taken off just enough to kickstart recovery and prosperity for 30 years. And I assume something similar will happen to that and we just, we haven't hit it yet. So Carrie makes a good point that it keeps getting worse. And I imagine that we're headed for some kind of war in 10, 50 years. That's kind of what I think too. And there's something, you know, I love geography and I love geopolitics in particular. And I work at an institution with a very excellent map library and really gets really outstanding geography scholars to come and do stuff and they do great exhibits.

And they had a really amazing series of lectures and exhibits a while back on before. before doing stuff outside your home was illegal or like you know not a good idea i guess anyway it was about like redraw the politics in the geopolitics of redrawing the maps after world war one and like everything that went into that and it's like imagine like what it would take to have to fucking redraw the boundaries of the world again like and i mean they were working with a much different set of players than we are now. And just

like, can you imagine, like, if we had another World War, which we could be potentially heading towards, what would the players at that table look like? And how would they even begin to divvy that up and, like, how would

that happen? But, like, anyway, sorry, I just totally derailed that. But geopolitics, fun and exciting. everybody should be into it. I actually had a question very quick. So going back to the point about, you know, not being able to really define what to call the era of capitalism we're in

because we're still in it, by not being able to like define the era that we're in. And how that, and to me it kind of feels there was some sort of connection in my head with that. And the work in libraries where it's like, We try to fix things, but it's still within the system. Because it feels like sort of like if you can't define it, then you can't really engage with it or critique it. Like is that, could that be used as like an excuse as well as like when you're working within a system? You sort of can't critique the system because you have to work within it.

So I didn't kind of, you know, how that sort of we're in it so we can't define it or really talk about it, how that might relate to this sort of concept of, you know, what we, have you been applying this to librarianship and stuff? Yeah. That made sense at all. It did. Yeah, no, it totally made sense. That was always, for a lot of critical theories and a lot of, I mean, not just Marxist, but a lot of the structuralist and post-structuralist stuff, a lot of the criticism that liberal thinkers had about that was, well, if what you say is true about social structures or about ideology or whatever, then there's no privileged place outside of those structures from which you can be an observer and look down and analyze it all. And so what you're saying is just as problematic as what anybody else says. Therefore, we shouldn't listen to you. But it was an insight of Marx's and certainly plenty of later people in a bunch of different traditions.

To say that the very idea of that transcendental objective position from outside a point of stability is a myth, is ideological in and of itself. And if you maintain that you found one, you're probably doing that for a political reason of your own. So whether it's tradition or race, you know, blood, anything that you're that you're positioning as natural and therefore uncriticable, right, gender binary. If you're proposing any of those as some objective fixed position from which you can then take a certain stand on things, you're probably reproducing some ugly policy. there. And a lot of the writing on critical theory, the kind of specific critical theory, Frankfurt School critical theory, talks about how the point of that critical theory is that

it's able to critique itself. It recognizes that it's enmeshed in all of these processes. It takes that into consideration, and therefore it can take a hard look, a hard critical look at its own perspectives and commitments. And I think that's That's another thing that really worries, you know, and I just use liberalism as a shorthand for that. It really worries people from that perspective. Because if you say, I'm not just, you know, nitpicking or swiping from the sidelines on your tradition, I am also turning my critical lens on my own tradition. That worries them because they don't like if you claim to do that, right? If you say that that's actually how you're approaching what you think about the world.

they expect you to participate in the kind of unconscious, uncritical attitude towards the world where you just accept everything that you're brought up in. But if you turn that around and say, well, no, I'm also going to critique what I think about things constantly. That's a really destabilizing thing for a lot of people. So, yeah, that's a really, I mean, what you said was exactly right. just one second. I think it's always helpful in these kinds of political discourse conversations to kind of just take a second and define what we mean when we mean liberalism just because I think sometimes that can throw people who think of it as a particular

political orientation when actually it can meet, it doesn't necessarily mean a party belonging as it often can kind of conicate to connotate in the United States but I think in the context that you're referring to it liberalism can occur on all sides of the political spectrum which is that

like you kind of believe in this like common idea of democracy right that it's like a social good and that I mean feel free to toss in other things that you would be you would think are like characteristic of what we talk about

when we talk about liberalism the big thing for me free speech yeah yeah free speech yeah individualism um free speech intellectual freedom academic freedom etc um those are like the big things that are like hallmarks of capital l liberalism like democracy boating rights etc like and all those things you that you just mentioned i tend to think of them through that lens of individualism so yeah an individual is yeah and an individual is is someone who can bear those rights. So under liberalism, an individual is the bearer of the right to free speech. They're the bearer of the right to own property.

They're the bearer of the ability to enter into a contract. And they are the bearer of the right to vote. Yeah, I think that's kind of like really well summed up by this idea of like freedom isn't free. And freedom for them, acknowledged or not, they tend to go back to the kind of social contract idea of freedom where, you know, humanity is a collection of individuals who have nothing to do with each other. And that's pure freedom. And they have to give up a little bit of freedom to choose to enter into social relations. Right.

Right. I feel like, you know, Marxism. Like, that was like the peak patriot. That was like the peak rhetoric around the Patriot Act. Right. I remember when that was passed. Yeah. That was a lot of the peak rhetoric around that.

Yeah, I was just about to say that's like the entire way that we talk about privacy and security a lot of the times is sacrificing freedom for protection kind of thing. And that's pure social contract, right? That you're going to give up some of that freedom for the protection of either a strong centralized sovereign, which is Hobbes's view or the kind of more comfortable view we have, which is you're going to give up some of those individual rights. for the protection of some kind of government that is held to account through checks and balances. And that's the Rousseau-Lock version. Yeah, yeah. But as soon as you start saying, and this is really my thing, is in the stuff that I do about intellectual freedom now, I keep coming back to what is the unspoken assumption around freedom that I have absolute at stake?

because I think it's not the only conception of freedom that we could be talking about, but it's the one that's assumed. Yeah, and that's, I think that's where we really cross paths, I guess, on our take a lot, is that like the institutional concept of freedom versus the systemic concept of freedom. Yeah, it's like in the introduction of your book, I think it was where you talk about how, There's, I think in specific in the ALA Code of Ethics, you talk about how there's a lot of ambiguity with the language use, and that's kind of on purpose, because then it can be co-opted to kind of be used for whatever you want it to be used for. And so by not defining what the freedom is in intellectual freedom, it can mean whatever you want it to mean and serve your own purpose, which we see it happen all the time. to bring it back to something a little more concrete,

or at least just something I've been thinking about, because you mentioned Joe Roken earlier, and you know how all these guys are moving to Texas, and the thing they say is, like, well, there's more freedom there. And, of course, the way they define freedom is, like, they don't have as many labor restrictions. They don't pay as much taxes.

That's how the individualism can also, you can also view capitalism through that individualist lens, which is not as easy for me to do. I usually when I when I'm talking about liberalism I just mostly mean like free market capitalism and I kind of just put that in comparison to everything else. But I think putting it through the prism of individualism should work. But it's it's just not it doesn't come naturally for me. I wanted to also I still I think it's a little bit important though to delineate between like populist populism and like like libertarian populism like people who. who are uber focused on sovereignty and like centrist like George H.W. Bush who still like

chipped in towards AmeriCorps programs because like I think someone like George H.W. Bush who like did more toward social welfare programs was more part of the liberal project than people who are more focused on individual sovereignty and libertarianism like libertarian populists are. Yeah. I mean, that's that's usually when you want to annoy an anarchist. you tell the anarchism's a bourgeois ideology because it's hyper individualist, which, you know, I've been on Twitter enough. I've seen, you know. We're all on the internet.

I'm not anymore because I'm a Twitter jail. Hashtag free Jay. Get it trending. Everyone wants to show. I don't know what's going on in the world. Everyone wants to show Jay things on Twitter and we got to put him in the discord for him. Super obnoxious. Like, I'm not getting paid for this.

labor hashtag free j all i'm asking i thought about tweeting it whitehouse dot gov petition get it going please we should do it change dot org dear joe biden free jay get jay back and give me my fucking money get us paid i wanted to go back because you said something interesting about how if there's another war in the next 10 15 years and you have like this post-war social compact again between capital and labor. In your book, you outline that as the point where the neutrality debate comes into librarianship, where libraries kind of give up their role as curators of society or educators of society and instead go, oh, you don't be really good as if we just adopted

this pluralism and didn't shake the vote. And we went along with that ideologically. think that that kind of ideology would be mirrored by the by the pure nature of what that requires? I think, I mean, I think it's whatever comes out of the war is going to look hugely different. We, because labor now in this kind of, you know, whatever we call it, transitional period or late neoliberal period, labor in the center, so labor in Western Europe and North America is, not just deindustrialized, but it's been, and I'm not, I'm not strong on the political economy stuff, but it's been devaluized in a way, right? The salaries that we make are not even remotely connected

to the value that we produce anymore. The value that's floating around in the financial machine is not remotely connected to the worth, right? Marks in one of the footnotes, It says that it's always funny how people will use value to mean the kind of reflection of a thing, the abstraction of a thing. They'll use the Anglo-Saxon worth to mean the actual real stuff that's in it. But, you know, you look at, again, the NFTs and the GameStop stuff, and the financial value that's floating around is so disassociated from any actual worth that I think whatever post-war compromise comes out of that will be very, very different from the one in, in 1946. where there was just a redivision of the industrial value being produced. So we'd be talking about a post-war compromise that would have to take post-industrial value into consideration. And whatever that looks like will determine the form of ideology that becomes dominant.

And libraries being what they are, that would be the form of ideology that libraries participate in and try to shore up. So it's likely to be liberal in some sense. It's likely to focus on negative liberty, which is what you were just talking about about Texas, right? Liberty conceived as elimination of obstacles. And both of those things would probably tend again towards some kind of neutral position. But it doesn't have to. There are kind of positive commitment versions of that that would also serve to shore up neoliberalism if you needed to recruit people to do certain things. So if there's, you know, something I could see happening, and I'm just speculating would be the recruitment of volunteer labor, right? Like, it would be positioned as volunteer, but you'd be taken away from your jobs for six weeks and made to do some kind of project twice a year, and you wouldn't get paid for it. And in order to make that palatable, there would have to be some kind of ideological leverage brought to bear.

I think libraries would participate in that, so they would probably have something that wasn't neutral, but was in fact, you know, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country kind of ideology in that sense. But again, I'm just talking now. I have no idea. No, that makes perfect sense to me. I could see us handing out the rakes and the trash bags and feel like, here you go, go rake the governor's lawn. I mean, a good invention of the Soviet Union in Cuba. It would be ironic. I mean, and don't we already kind of do that anyway? Because like so much of, at least like public library stuff is like, there's so much volunteer work already that happens in libraries. And we get away with it because

of the bastion of democracy kind of thing. Yeah. Do you want to know about the relationship between Mormons in public library systems? Oh, do tell me, because I lived there for years. Yeah. I want to hear this is a former Mormon. Yeah. I worked in a library system that had a genealogy library. Oh my God, the genealogy. Yeah. So you know where this is going, Sadie.

They had volunteers, and this is, Sadie, this is in Independence, Missouri, and which to the Mormons is the location of Zion, as prophesized in the golden tablets that, the prophet Joseph Smith, Jr. received. Yeah, great timing. And so there's a lot of genealogy records at this library in Independence, Missouri, called the Midwest Genealogy Center.

And it is there that they have Mormon missionary volunteers that go there, and they scan genealogy documents for something like 12 hours a day as part of their mission. and it's totally volunteer labor. Yeah, the actual family history library in Salt Lake City is all volunteer like missionaries. And that is public library labor supplied by volunteers from the LDS church. I mean, I kind of think about this sometimes because like the couple, the handful of times I've tried to volunteer to do anything. Like, I can't because I work during the times that they need. you know, people to do it. So it ends up being an entire, entirely retired volunteer force.

And then you think about, well, who are the kind of retirees that have, you know, the energy and means to then continue like labor and stuff, you know, like people like my mom with personalities. Yeah, yeah. Well, exactly. Like, you know, if, you know, the life expectancy of, you know, trans people is so much shorter than your random cis people, how many of those people are going to reach retirement to then be able to do any volunteer work. If people would stop murdering them. Yeah, no, exactly. Exactly. I'm just saying that, like, you know, your volunteer force is going to end up just being white rich ladies with a lot of time on their hands and like, you know, six tiny white dogs with eye crusties.

That and grad students. Yeah, and grad students. So, you know, you don't, you're not going to get a very diverse field. Yeah. Exactly. And like I see that at the public libraries I've worked in pretty much the entire, you know, like friends of the library stuff. It's all over glam and in zoos. You have the exact same people who volunteer at zoos, like old white people.

They're like, oh, I'm going to take pictures. I can take pictures. I can teach classes. I can walk the goat. That's 238 pounds, which is not a healthy weight for goat. be, by the way. It's interesting because there was a discussion about volunteering around vaccination stuff last week.

And Emily was talking about the support for volunteering in New York where basically every public servant in New York, you work for university, you work for anything else, you're given time off to go volunteer to help vaccination. And that's the kind of thing I think would give the state and capital an idea and say, you know, ideologically we would love to rely on. on grad students and old people, old white people. But in fact, we can extract more unpaid labor if we give people a couple of days off a week where we basically set up Corvay work for them to come and do what we tell them to do for

nothing. And so it's those kinds of dialectical processes, right, where you start with volunteering being attractive because it brings in the right kind of people to volunteering being a requirement to deal with an absolute public health crisis in New York City to let's figure out a way to make that kind of volunteerism a model for the extraction of surplus value, right? That kind of thing. Right. Well, and like as someone who did.

So in the States, we have a program called AmeriCorps. I don't know if you're familiar, which I did for six months on a forestry crew, which was a way of maintaining public lands in the state of Montana without hiring additional forestry crew. But actually we had better benefits than the forestry crews didn't because of our labor terms that were negotiated because it was a government program versus the way forestry crews are contracted because the labor laws for hire. hiring a forestry crew because you're a contract worker as a forestry crew person, which I always thought was really interesting. Even though we were only six months, their labor terms were shorter. And so they couldn't get health insurance because of the tethering of health insurance to your job. So Jameson wrote an interesting book that I think a lot of people took more seriously than he intended it,

where he basically argued that in order to give every American a pension, health care, retirement benefits, whatever, have them join the Army. So you run them all through a two-year tour of duty in the Army doing whatever. And then all of a sudden you've got universal health care, you've got universal pension, you've got everything else. And he meant that as a utopian, like an admittedly utopian. Right. But I always thought that like conscripted service could be like domestic in nature like conservation work. like the triple C model or even like domestic education work or like even like library work. Oh, I don't know. And you can see how the, but you can see how the response to crises ends up bending capitalism more towards communal responses.

Oh, absolutely. It's desperately going to try and extract surplus value from all of that. Oh, and it happens every time there's a disaster, you see it in action. Like, they are all, anytime there's a natural disaster in the U.S., guess who gets called up? All the AmeriCorps programs. That's another reason why they have AmeriCorps is for disaster response. Yeah, no, exactly. Like you spend six months sawed down trees and then Hurricane Sandy happens, and then you can send like six crews out to New York City to take care of it, which is exactly what happened when I was in forestry.

It's also, it seems, it's kind of similar to the way that we use. the National Guard in the sense that we've hauled out everything else. There's really no one else to send. So you could have a different model where there is like a CCC. Oh, you mean like trained personnel? Yeah, I don't know. Like a public health core, like which is something they tried to build in the 1930s? Yeah.

Or, I mean, I think it would be more likely to just do what we saw during COVID, which is they're like, oh, the library is closed. take all the library workers and make them go give COVID tests. Like, I think that's a more likely interstitial period. Or like how we tried to make all police officers social workers. Well, luckily, they're all going to be robot dogs now. So they're going to be out of a job. You mean robocops?

I think I saw a documentary about it by this director named Paul Verhoeven. It was set in Detroit. Not enough dogs, though. He missed the dogs. Well, he should have made him cuter. It was about dog's best friend, man. I've heard of him. I wanted to, how close are we to an hour?

I'll skip to the utopia question. We're close. This last question could take a while. So I want to do, so this is actually something that's inspired by your book, which is I always want to ask a question about what would we see in utopian society? Because we have to be able to dream about these things. it's really the only way we can be critical and sort of escape like capitalist realism. So in fully automated luxury, gay space communism, would there be libraries? The end of your book talks about methesis and dual power.

And if you could kind of go into those terms first and then maybe answer the question. Yeah. So dual power is, again, that Jameson book called an American Utopia is about dual power. And it's an idea that it's been around a long time. The main kind of touchstones are the Soviets taking over administration of at least St. Petersburg and I think other Russian cities in parallel with the provisional government after the February revolution, the liberal revolution in 1917. But also Jameson refers specifically to like the breakfast programs of the Black Panthers, other social programs they ran, social programs run by Hamas

in parallel with the official government. And so there's this idea that we could set up, and it's interesting because when Jameson was writing this book five or six years ago, the term mutual aid hadn't come back into our discourse. Now it has in large part due to the pandemic in Dean Spade's book and things like that. But we talk a lot more about mutual aid than than we did five years ago. But essentially what Jameson was saying was that dual power means that you could set up an alternative network of mutual aid. The classic communist view is that you have to seize power, you have to take control of the state, you have to run the government, and you basically force socialism on society through the dictatorship of the proletariat. But

But dual power says that you could in fact run a network of mutual aid in parallel with the official government, not really challenging it. You probably butt heads at some point, but not really challenging the official state structure, but having this layer of mutual aid underneath it. And that, you know, in a utopian sense, that could be sustainable, right? That doesn't necessarily have to be an unstable temporary thing. I tend to equate that. I read a lot of Italian autonomous Marxists, so I equate that with the idea of constituent power, which is the power of the people as people that we all already have. We have the power of entering into mutual aid networks. We have the power of doing lots of social and political things. But that constituent power is constantly being foreclosed and disciplined and constrained by the constituted power of capital or the state. So I like it. the dual power constituent power idea. I live in a part of North America where mutual aid is not really a big thing. I live in the Texas of Canada.

But that's kind of that idea. The methodic library... There's a lot of mutual aid going on when we had no power for a week. Well, exactly. It takes things like that. But I mean, like, that wasn't happening when, like, y'all couldn't breathe for like a month. Right. Yeah.

Yeah, it's certain kinds of crises, right? Not every crisis provokes that. But I was watching Twitter and I saw people participating in mutual aid networks. My thesis was in particular an idea of like, we do a lot of teaching in libraries. We talk a lot about teaching. We are engaged in a lot of teaching activities. But what if we ran, what if we set up maybe in a dual power sense, the idea of libraries is a place where you learned without being taught? where you were able to avoid the kind of power and ideology relationships that are involved in teaching somebody something. And that probably comes out of my terrible experience in school and undergrad, where I just don't trust a lot of that kind of teaching and did a lot of learning on my own. I think that the library can provide that. And we could set up policies and procedures and spaces to foster that. and I can't remember if I mentioned this in the book, but there's kind of an idea that if you fostered that kind of self-reliance

and didn't rely on people coming to a class at a particular time and sitting in rows and being lectured at, that that might actually contribute to the formation of mutual aid networks because it would give people the feeling of that constituent power that they already have. So in, what was the acronym used? Not Falk. Fogiske.

I don't know. I just write it, because I don't know. I just write it because I don't want to type it out every week. Sure. Would there be libraries? Yeah. Yeah, there would be libraries. Because why would you want or need to have books or have all books just on your own, right?

You want to share books. You'd want to have conversations through the loaning of books. Okay, sorry. What's the, yeah, like beyond books, though. I don't think of libraries as beyond books. I'm kidding. Yeah, John Fink's going to hate that answer. John Fink is my nemesis.

Hi, John. He's not listening. Well, okay, let's, what's the right corporate term to use that instead of books? Information packages, right? We would want to share. Items. Materials. Materials.

Yeah. Sadie knows what's up. It kind of reminds me of how you always see people, like, recently saying, if we didn't have libraries and tried to invent them now. that they wouldn't be accepted because they're too socialist. And I actually think, I saw Violet Fox, I think it was, to make a tweet about this where it was, like, yes, she agrees with that, but like, that's not true with the way the libraries operate now. They're very much beholden to, like, following with the status quo, like, they would absolutely be allowed. So I think it's interesting to sort of think about, well, if even right now they're not, this, like,

socialist utopia that people are always sort of saying that they are. Like would the way that we even like not just yes, there would be libraries and we would share books and other things. But like, how would that even operate? Like would it be the same sort of workflow and policies or would it be something vastly different? Will we still be as shitty as it at it as we are right now? Or would we be better at it if we did it fresh starting now? Well, I think the crux of the question is, are libraries as institutions redeemable? Because when you're talking about dual power,

you're talking about outside the state, are our libraries too much in the part of replicating ideology to be useful in a dual power structure? Well, and I also think that goes back to something that like Sam was writing about in the introduction or it's either like the interd, I think it's in the first chapter of this book when he's talking about, um, Wigran's

like dumb writings about like, libraries reciprocal relationship with democracy. Like how much has libraries have played a role in democracy and vice versa? Like, what if libraries didn't exist? It's like a butterfly effect question, I guess. Like, what if libraries didn't exist? Well, we live in the same, like, world with the same social conditions that we do right now.

Like it begs the same fucking question. Like, why even ask that question? Like, we're, we can't, we can't start fresh. There is no starting fresh. So it's nice to like imagine, I guess. But in a sense, I think it's, it's inescapable. Yeah, I'm really disinterested in that question, honestly, is what I'm saying. It's like, why would you want to start fresh?

Because then whatever you would do wouldn't be informed by what you don't want it to be. Yeah. There's like, there's no point in talking about that question. Like, someone just wanted to, like, talk about it on Twitter. Like, someone just wanted some internet attention is I think what was happening. But I can relate. Yeah. But anyway, I'm just like not interested in that question because there's no point in it.

Like, what's the discourse of it and what's the point of the discourse? No. Although something did give me thinking this week kind of along those lines, which was the article that came out talking about how Amazon is the world's biggest ebook retailer and doesn't sell e-books to libraries at all. And I was kind of thinking, as media and streaming and everything diversifies more, are our library is going to get locked out entirely without digital first sale? And I think the lucky part is that no one's reading those audible books and those Amazon books. Like they do the most, but they're not the most read. In a way, though, imagine if we did get frozen out of all that stuff. I think that would be an amazing opportunity.

Because all of a sudden, we no longer have to worry about dealing with all that mass market shit that we're currently doing. We no longer have to worry about all kinds of technical. infrastructure that we have to maintain. And we could actually take the opportunity and, like, figure out what we're there for. Like, what is the thing we're trying to do, which we've lost, right? I mean, we try to do absolutely everything. And as a result, we're lousy at so much of it. Do one thing really well instead of everything kind of shitty.

Yeah. And that's, I see exactly what you're talking about. And I have actually worked in public libraries where circulation was not our thing. thing. Like, I worked in an urban public library branch where our thing was computer usage. Like, that was our thing was computer usage in DVDs. And I mean, like, that's what you have to be able to look at and see what kind of a need you're fulfilling and figure out how to meet those needs. better. And I work at an academic library that historically has had probably way too much money. Like it's had huge budgets for 20, 30 years. And the last couple of years, we've had our budgets

absolutely slashed. And I actually think that that's that opportunity, right? Is rather than just thinking whatever we decide to do on a whim, we can, we'll have the money to do it. We actually have to stop and say, choose between services that we want to provide, choose between staff that we're going to be able to hire, choose between services and programs that, you know, maybe we would have just done because we could before, but didn't really have a purpose. And I'm not saying that I think all library budget should be slashed. Yeah, way to, we need to see the bad thing, Sam. But I see the bad part out loud.

If there is an objective thing that happens, like libraries get frozen out of participating in certain services or circulating certain kinds of materials, maybe there's an opportunity there. A student said they thought what I was saying was a very conservative viewpoint the other day. And I was shocked. I never heard that before. No, I mean, I can see how they heard it that way. Because, I mean, they're probably used to hearing that sort of thing. And not necessarily in a...

If you're hungry, you'll figure out how to eat, kind of. Yeah, yeah. Right. Kind of like, this is a Christotunity. Yeah. It's like I would love for us to be able to maybe start asking those questions, without having the budget crisis first. Exactly.

Kind of thing. Yeah. The way I think about it is whenever budgets get cut, it's an opportunity for me to start saying no to doing stuff. Because then I'll be like, I don't have any support. I'm not doing it. Yeah, that's the, you slash a budget enough, and there's only so much that you as a library can do to keep supporting.

And so they're going to eventually just fuck around and find out what happens when you slash budgets. I actually, one of the public libraries I worked for while I worked for them, they didn't pass a levy. And I forget what the service was, but the very first thing they did was they just cut out a service. And when we were, when, you know, they're like giving us talking points and stuff, because I was working in circulation at this point in time, you know, like, what do we say to the people who used this service? You know, they literally were just like, it's, they didn't pass the levy. It's got to go, it's got to go somewhere. And then five years later, they passed a levy.

And at the time, I remember not really being pleased with how they handled it. But I do remember liking that fuck around and find out. You don't pass a levy. You're going to fuck around. You're going to find out that you don't get a bookmobile service anymore. Or you don't get, you know, that, you know, you don't get hoopla or whatever kind of deal. And then when they passed the levy, they did the exact opposite thing. They said, these are the very detailed services we will be able to restore.

And that worked. But yeah, the getting frozen out of, you know, like the big publishing and the e-book thing, it really reminds me of back when e-books really became a thing. And I forget, it was a Colorado library. They were really like, we're going to own everything and we're going to make it, we're going to make it so we have control over it instead of going to go in the overdrive route. Yeah, I think that was part of the Amigos Consortium. I was working in public libraries at the time when ebooks, like when we first started giving ebook libraries, like this was when like there was like the Kindle had just come out. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I was working in public libraries around that time. Like we had to learn how to teach people how to use their candles and their notes. I spent a lot of time doing that. Yeah, it fucking sucked. That was like when I realized like I can't. not be a public library and this is not what I'm good at. But my point is that like I think that a lot of those sort of solutions like got tried. And so if it does, we do get like shut out again. Like will it manifest differently instead of a,

this is the way we think it should be from the ground up? Is it going to be more of a fuck around and find out sort of thing where it's like, well, we tried this before and this is where we got to. so now we know what not to try. I don't know. I'm not entirely certain of what I'm trying to say here. Yeah, you could end up with like a massive controlled digital lending boom where just everyone goes, okay, well, we can't license e-books, so we'll do controlled digital lending and scan all these e-books and throw them in a warehouse

somewhere, and that'll satisfy it legally. So we're at an hour. Sam, I know you said you didn't want to do much more than that, because we can go along. Did you want to plug any upcoming articles or books or your Twitter? Or do you want people to leave you alone? No, I'm always happy to chat on Twitter. Twitter is Red Librarian. I have a couple of articles currently in peer review, one on Canadian politics and political theory

and the other one on Wittgenstein intellectual freedom so that one might be fun we'll see you I love Vickensstein it's like a Marxist reading of Wittgenstein which is my thing right now

so yeah those are what's coming awesome I'll have to read that Vittgenstein one thanks so much for coming on thank you for having here thank you so much

thanks for putting up with our shit I love talking about snooty political theory it's so fun Well, it's not that soon. I know. Let me out of Twitter jail. Hashtag Trey. It's over a week.

Whitehouse.com slash PJ. Dear Joe Biden. Because I'm so annoying and I never shut up. Please let Jay get back on Twitter. There was a decided last year. Decided lack of the M. Forster on my timeline. That and me like crying about opera.

Right. And then posting pictures of Arthur. Yeah. Yeah. So Sam, hang on a second. before you log off because I've got to let the recording upload. And also, I'm going to play us out with the song I. But don't we have a user question or listener questions?

We can do it next week. Okay. Sorry, Steve. Yeah, I think back in the week. All right. So good night.