Ironies of the Left

For me and the Korean guy, our English colleague and mentor gave us each this book, whose name escapes me, about the financial crisis that had just ebbed away recently. You know, the one that brought the world to its knees and pushed it to the brink of a depression. The book is written by this guy who got disillusioned with defense law and got a job at a financial services firm, making a lot of money selling securities. Then he started writing books about the finance world, and this latest one, based on the first page I read, was a very unflattering assessment of the greed and irresponsibilities in that world, as well as the irresponsibilities and ignorance of regulators that were supposed to protect us from the consequences of human frailty in the sea of so much money. I thought it was interesting that someone who worked nearly all his life in finance would want me to read this. I somehow had this very irrational assessment of the people who work for the finance sector. Actually, most aren't greedy, aren't victims of their own frailty in the face of tremendous amount of money and the pressure inherent in managing this money. It is true that the goal of the group where we work is to keep an eye out for suspicious activities regarding trading, but I doubt that was his goal in life: watching people who might play too hard with money of ordinary investors. I think it is worth remembering that a great deal of people work for the finance industry. You just have to go down to lower Manhattan, or take the train by Stamford. And don't forget other places in the country, such as Charlotte, NC, or other places in the world, Hong Kong, London, Frankfurt. There are those who blame the finance sector entirely for the mess the world nearly couldn't get out of the past few years. And by doing so, they collectively blame the people who work for it. Far from illegal activities like drug and gun running, finance, being a structured management of money, does make the world go around in the most legitimate ways. Those who don't understand the role of the financial industry in spinning the planet faster than nature does, don't understand how almost everything that is and does happen around them has some hand of the financial sector in it. The world is driven by buying and selling of all sorts of things, and not just material and services, but the reallocation of capital that makes the use of those material and services more flexible.

Exactly a week ago, after celebrating with my parents the new Chinese year, I had some time before dancing. So I walked around one of my favorite neighborhoods in New York, probably my favorite in Manhattan. It is full of young, mostly white, yuppies who manage to be able to afford living in the East Village. It never escaped me the irony of gentrification. This neighborhood, when I was going to public school more than two decades ago, was one of the no-go zones. There was even a major riot because a black woman accused white police officers of raping her. Only after the riot did she confess that she made it up. Now you can't find parking here without spending at least a good half an hour. There are always throngs of young people chatting on the sidewalk, at the doors of expensive and hyper-hip clubs, restaurants, bars. The rent here, as I browsed online, is sky-high. It is also the home of the world-famous art school of Cooper Union, hence all these young people milling around. I know of an art couple that live in a tiny tiny apartment. They aren't rich. But I am guessing most young people are rich, in the sense that someone in their family is rich. This is a phenomenon I have seen in the gentrified areas of Brooklyn, particularly the ones by the three bridges to Manhattan.

The irony is this. Before all these white, young, and almost always, ultra-leftist people came with their money to raise the rent and property values, there was a lot of working-class people. Some areas were mixed, with a lot of ethnic groups, some areas were just mostly black people. Life was tough, sometimes violent. People didn't care much about politics, at least not vocally expressive of their views. In the same manner they didn't make a big deal out of art. Then after a decade or so, the scenery changed. It can't be called an ethnic or racial change, simply. It's a change in the age, in the social background. My parents' neighborhood, where I spent most of my New York growing-up years, remains very Russian. But that's because it's at the "Deep South" of Brooklyn, too far for the impatient white artist. Too quiet with its few night-clubs that seem so suspiciously like mafia meeting places. The new people are different in almost every way from the working class people they have been displacing. The point I find interesting is their expressiveness of almost exclusively leftist views. When I was walking down St. Mark's Square, I saw on a window some anti-capitalist cartoon. You would never expect that from the people who used to live in that apartment but couldn't afford it because, ironically, the landlord was very much a capitalist who let the market forces decide that an anti-capitalist white boy could take over and help drive the property prices even more, not only because his money paid for a higher rent, but also because it would bring more restaurants and other businesses to the neighborhood once closed down by the lies of a black woman.

The story isn't so simple, of course. For all I know, the person living there isn't white, could be working class, and maybe is living in a rent-controlled apartment, like a tango friend of mine, who have lived in this neighborhood all her life (even went to my own high school), and pays some insanely low rent. That, however, is, I am certain, an exception. The world doesn't thrive on rent-control, unfortunately. That is not to say that capitalism is good; "good" only if your view of a good world is economic progress at all costs. What I am saying here isn't a defense of capitalism, but to show how ironic it is that those who claim a leftist position, who are so vocal in defending some ambiguous and confused version of socialism just for the sake of venting their anger against the evils of capitalism, often don't know, or don't care, the roles they themselves play in helping capitalism thrive. They can get emotional when they read or see documentaries about what globalization is doing to water shortages, or what the rich is doing to fatten their coffers at the expense of schools in poor districts. But after they are done venting with some nice red wine they go back to their nice loft in Williamsburg or the East Village.

And so it's not a wonder that some of them have a dim view of the finance world when they have never worked in the field, never really understood economic theories, wouldn't be able to tell you what hedge funds are but might tell you how they are bringing the world down because they are unregulated. They wouldn't believe that someone who has worked decades in an industry that directly or indirectly uses your money to make financial decisions for the sole purpose of fattening up his company, that this person would buy me a book denouncing the greed of the finance industry. Of course, the book would probably have more evidence to back its screams than most anti-capitalists milling around the expensive sushi restaurants on Tenth Street.

I think the lesson here isn't so much about finance, or even about capitalism and leftist movement. I don't think most left-leaning people are the passionate screamers with a vapid heart that doesn't allow them to see how ironic their lives are in being a tool and beneficiary of capitalism. I know many people who are even more left than me who do work, who center their professional lives, in helping to make a world "better", better in the sense that everyone's living standards be raised, not just those fortunate, not just smart, enough to maximize their hold of world resources. These people are often quiet when it comes to issues for which they actually have intelligent things to say, but they aren't in any need to express them, to defend them. And that's the lesson, I think. People who like to scream out how evil some potent force of the world is really are looking for some attention, some outlet to let off steam. This is true not only for leftists, but rightwing extremists, too. In this sense the two adversaries share something in common. They look outward, see what's wrong with something other than themselves, and scream at it, without really look at where they are, how they lived. I know some people who care a lot about their own behaviors with the environment, saving water where they can, never wasting food, and it's not because they can't afford to waste water or food, it's because they can't start changing the world, or expect the world to change, if they themselves don't.

The matter of gentrification is difficult. I was in Jackson Heights the other day with a friend who moved there a year ago. He was a white middle-age man from the liberal part of Connecticut. He is your typical leftist white man, without the shouting and the leftist propaganda cartoons. He told me he couldn't get used to the Hispanic community, the stores, the people only speaking Spanish. He preferred the quiet streets, as opposed to the loud and often Reggaeton-ridden main streets. He preferred to visit luxury wine shops or this hip coffee shop (run by a Bengali ex-doctor and his white wife). I couldn't understand why he was having such trouble adapting to this ethnically mixed neighborhood, why he insisted on being the white liberal who drinks expensive coffee while talking about the destruction Republicans are doing to the world. But I guess he is bringing yet another culture with him, in the same way that the Poles, the Punjabis, the Pakistanis, the South Americans, the Koreans, the Chinese, and many others have brought with them to this neighborhood. I guess white liberals are a culture of themselves. What I prefer not to see in gentrification is the take-over of one culture and dissolving away the existing one. That would be a huge shame, even if there's a lot of beauty in art and cafes and European-style foods and chic yoga studios that these people bring with them. On the other hand, looking at my parents' neighborhood, I don't see how even if the white liberals take over with their art galleries, this is so different from what other ethnic groups have done. My parents' neighborhood used to be Italian-Americans. Now they are almost non-existent, replaced by nearly always Russian Jews. The final counter-argument is, however, that the Russian Jews had been here, though not as early as the Italian-Americans, but much longer than the world gentrification existed.