Working Week

"New Building"

Some years ago there was a retrospective of Avraham Soskin’s photographs at the Tel Aviv Museum. Soskin’s pictures give us the earliest Zionist settlements and towns. It’s a world in which Arabs do not appear — his famous and quite remarkable picture of the ground-breaking ceremony marking the founding of Tel Aviv suggests the general perspective.

Recently, Segal and Weizman edited a book called “A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture” — focusing on building in the occupied territories. My mother and her partner are working on a collaborative project, documenting (partly in pictures) ruined, abandoned, and destroyed Palestinian villages within Israel proper.

Boy Hitchens has greeted Israel’s most recent anniversary with an article on living with contradictions. In a somewhat related spirit, here are some pictures of Tel Aviv’s “Neue Bauen” of the 1930s.

The pictures are peculiar in giving us an urban world largely without people. But they capture something of the city’s feel: central European ideas set down on the Mediterranean coast, facing sea air and acquiring a sort of second-world decay.

An archival picture of brand new workers’ homes:

Tel Aviv more recently:

Black Cat // White Cat

One could take the first of May as an occasion to renew one’s appreciation of the wonders of the for-profit economy. Take, for instance, a fragmentary piece of evidence consistent with the wicked sort of Marxism espoused by Bill Warren. Or the old observation that profit-seeking has given us “wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals.”

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The port of Oakland is a massive affair — commonly described as the fourth busiest in the USA. The other West coast behemoths through which we receive goods from across the Pacific are Long Beach, LA, and Seattle.

One can drive along an access road that edges the port. The road terminates in a strangely isolated park, and gives views of both San Francisco and the great machinery used for lifting containers off the ships from China. From a distance, one does not see people. The work is highly mechanized and capital intensive.

On May Day, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union plans to stop work at the ports running up and down the Pacific coast — from Southern California to Washington state — to protest the war in Iraq. In San Francisco, the ILWU will organize a march departing from Dolores Park.

All this brings to mind Alan Sekula’s pictures of ships and shipping, and the recent news that the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union has refused to unload a shipment of arms bound for Zimbabwe — giving us a moment of respite from reports on the election and its aftermath that (even when not in pictures) leave us regarding the pain of others. (I am also reminded of Frederick Cooper’s remarkable studies of dock workers and decolonization in African history.)

Cybersyn

In the 1930s, economics enjoyed the socialist calculation controversy.

Some were committed to seeing a New Jerusalem in the East.  Friedrich Hayek was a prescient critic of the experiment in social engineering. 

There was, Hayek wrote, “no reason to expect that production would stop [under centrally planned socialism],  or that the authorities would find difficulty in using all the available resources somehow, or even that output would be permanently lower than it had been before planning started.” 

But Hayek observed that our world is one in which all the actors have only “bits of knowledge,” and that “it is only through the process of competition that the facts will be discovered.”   Hayek emphasized that the competitive market process transmits fragmented and dispersed information – most especially information bearing on our many and varying desires.   And so he anticipated that output would be relatively low in a planned economy, that the planning authorities would have only a limited and crude understanding of the finely grained texture of economic needs, desires, and aspirations.  They, in a word, would be unable to attach the right values to things – and not only to things.

The retorts have been many, running from Polish economist Oskar Lange’s work in the 1930s to more recent attempts to float plans for some sort of market socialism.  But the New York Times has recently given us a remarkable story about another missed (and doomed) future – in Chile prior to September 1973.