It is still a fact that these moves dealt a blow to women’s chances of overcoming their subordinate social position. Capitalism had presented the potential for equality, but that equality could not come to fruition within the system. In the interests of the reproduction of labour power, women were isolated and atomised in the home. Their work was seen as serving their husbands and their families. They were denied financial independence. This “ideal” was never the reality for all working class women; many always engaged in wage labour. But the ruling ideas propagated the notion of the family as sacred, projecting the stereotype of the bourgeois family on to the working class as a means of ensuring reproduction. And the stereotype was what working class women and men accepted as the “norm” even if it did not match their own personal reality. Even today, as the development of capitalism has drawn the majority of women into the labour market, this view of women has not disappeared although it has been severely eroded. Attitudes to women, and of women to themselves, have advanced enormously under the combined impact of control over contraception and entry into the workforce. The way changed material conditions have changed attitudes is itself an argument against seeing oppression as the result of some mystical male ideological hold that never changes.
(...) To suggest otherwise is to deny that material conditions can change ideas or structures of society. Sheila Rowbotham makes the same mistake when she argues that the capitalist family contains elements of feudal forms of production and so is a “mode within a mode”.19 Yet vestiges of pre-capitalist society that endure within capitalism do not remain at all the same as previously. The monarchy is a remnant of feudal society but has been so totally transformed by capitalism that it bears really little relation to its previous role. So with the family. It may look the same (although even that is dubious) but its role and functions, its foundations have been transformed by capital. Reproduction through the family is not a separate mode, but part of the superstructure of capitalism. Abolition of the capitalist system – a revolutionary overthrow of society – means that the capitalist system of reproduction, the family, cannot survive intact.
(...) The Marxist theory of the family tries to explain women’s continued oppression in the context of women’s role as childbearer and rearer. Hartmann claims that Marxism is ‘sex-blind’; in other words can explain why people are in certain places but cannot explain why these people are women. Yet the theory does precisely that. It locates women’s oppression historically, or locates its continued existence in the individual responsibility for reproduction, which in turn structures the whole of women’s lives. It also puts a solution to that problem in terms of a socialism which would begin to break down both the material conditions which create women’s oppression, and the ideas which have arisen from them – ideas with which we are so familiar, about the family and childcare being natural, women in the home being natural. It can do so by switching responsibility for childcare from the individual to society as a whole. That on its own would open up a new world for millions of women and allow us to behave as equals in a new society.
(...) The feeling is that nothing can be done, so all we can do is sort out our own ideas. Consequently, arguments about changing the whole of society are replaced by exhortations to change our own lifestyles. Instead of activity we are confronted with an abstract moralism which demands that the small number of men (and women) who accept the ideas of women’s liberation purge themselves of ‘deviations’ as a substitute for changing society. The logic is that if we change the attitudes of men we can change the world – as though it were men, not capitalism, which is the problem. It is from these ideas that the theory of patriarchy has developed and which now in turn reinforces these ideas.

a history of economic thought, isaac ilych rubin (part one: mercantilism and its decline)

--- important quotes/excerpts and summary ---

(19-26): a brief history of the transition from feudalism to early capitalism in england (called the age of merchant capital by the author, standing for the period 1500-1700). insofar as this is the staple narrative against which all other history is tested, it makes sense to reconstruct this carefully.

1100s-1400s: the Later Middle Ages, characterized by a "town" or "regional" economy. Key is that "each town...comprised a single economic region, within whose confines all exchange between town and countryside took place." Rural economy involves peasants producing for their own consumption, giving some surplus to their lord as "quickrent", and selling whatever meagre portions were left on the market; also, of course, involved compulsorly labor that the feudals extracted from these peasants on their own manor. Urban economy organized into guild handicrafts--each master owns his own tools and instruments; as a member of the guild he is bound by its "strict code of rules on prices and output," even while he enjoys the monopoly that it affords him.

1500-1700: this social structure begins to break up as a result of three distinct, basic causes:

1. the rapid development of a money economy
2. the expansion of the market
3. the growing stregnth of money capital
   

colonial trade, in particular, was instrumental in bringing money capital and silver bullion to England, at this time. this caused the famous "price revolution" (which had the effect of depressing real wages for the majority of the population, but enriching the commercial bourgeoisie). peasantry begins to be displaced (and their land enclosed), as feudals look toward cash-crops, sheep, and larger/productive farmers. the guilds begin to break up under the pressure of this trade, as opportunities are sought beyond the bounds of the regional and eventually national economy (as a result of this transition, middlemen come to play an important role--these middlemen become primitive industrialists, of course, as the cottage industry takes off). an important point often elided in the apologists' history, of course, is that this nascent commercial bourgeoisie formed a ready alliance with the absolutist state, which shared their interest in undermining the authority of independent feudals.

(26): "The basic feature of mercantilist policy is that the state actively uses its powers to help implant and develop a young capitalist trade and industry and, through the use or protectionist measures, diligently defends it from foreign competition." Rubin further distinguishes between early mercantilism (which prioritizes the fiscal aims of the State--careful regulation of trade, ban on export of currency--and corresponds to period before 1600, when Britain in the main exported raw materials and lacked a native merchant class--for more, see pp 27-28) and developed mercantilism (which attempts to bolster capitalist trade and industry, defending it through protectionism).

(30): However, as "the basis of English exports shifted from raw materials (wool) to the export of finished products" (cloth) in the late 1500s and 1600s, a new merchant class is looking ever more anxiously for profitable markets in which to sell these products. "The country was now forced to purse an active colonial policy... The entire history of England from the 16th (1500s) to the 18th (1700s) centuries is a history of its struggles with these nations for commercial and colonial superiority. Its weapons in this struggle were the founding of its own colonies, commercial treaties, and wars."

(31): "And so, the money balance system, that old, outmoded set of restrictive, essentially fiscal measures, gradually gave way to the state's intervention on a broad front, as it actively fostered the growth of capitalist trade, shipping, and export industry with the aim of consolidating England's position on the world market and doing away with her foreign competitors."

(31-32): "Fully-fledged mercantlism was above all a policy of protectionism, i.e., the use of customs policies to stimulate the growth of native industry. It was protectionism which was to speed up England's transformation from an agricultural to a commercial and industrial nation. Customs duties now started to be used to further economic as well as fiscal ends. Previously, the government had, for fiscal reasons, levied duties indiscriminately on every type of export item; now, however, the state began to differentiate between raw materials and finished products. To provide English industry with cheap raw materials it required the governemtn either raised their duties or forbade their export altoghether. In the years when corn prices went up neither corn nor other agricultural products could be sent out of the country. On the other hand, when it came to finished goods, the state encouraged their export by every possible means, exempting them from duties or even offering an export subsidy... The import of wool, cotton, linen, dyestuffs, leather, and other raw materials was not only freed of customs levies, but even subsidized, and otherwise encouraged. Conversely, the import of foreign finished products was either banned or subjected to high tarriffs. Such a customs policy meant that native industry was to be shielded to the detriment of agriculture, which produced raw materials."

(32): Rubin distinguishes between mercantilist policy in England, which could only fleece agriculture so far because of the relatively speedy penetration of agriculture by the bourgeoisie, and France, where the State actively depressed trade in raw materials as part of its efforts to win the alleigance of merchants and industrialists in its fight with the feudals.

(32): Navigation Acts, issued by Cromwell in 1651.

(33): Summary of differences between early and developed mercantilism: in the former, (1) exports limited to 'staples,' (2) state exercises control over individual commercial transactions, (3) state regulates the flow of precious metals directly; in the latter, (1) policy is expansionist and colonial (aiming at maximum extension of foriegn trade and hegemony on the world market), (2) regulation is not individual but national in scale, and (3) it is understood that monetary health is acheived indirectly, by protecting the balance of trade.

(39): In the early 1800s, Rubin is saying, the bourgeoisie came into conflict with the landlords over the price of corn (the former favored a low price, because that would cheapen the price of labor-power). But in the 1600s, many English mercantilists were in complete agreement about the need for high prices of corn, since the operative problem was bringing people to work (this is the time of the maximum limit on wages, in other words).

(48-50): Thomas Mun is introduced as the first of the developed mercantilists (Hales was the represenative of the early mercantilists)--he, among other things,(1) strongly defends the carrying trade on the basis of which the East India company was making massive profits (and, in the process, losing hard currency, to the chagrin of the early mercantilists), (2) understands the link between monetary well-being and the balance of trade (so he argues that England will fix its metallic problems by crafting a strategy to export finished products, in effect).

(54-55): "The disproportionate value accorded to foreign trade by the mercantilists is to be explained not simply by its great potential for transforming products into money and attracting precious metals: the enormous profits derived from foreign trrade helped foster primitive capital accumulation by the merchant class... The process of transforming products into money was to be accompanied by the accumulation of the latter and its own conversion into profit-bearing money, that is, into capital. But for the most part, really large profits were only to be had in this period through foreign commerce, in particular through trade with the colonies... In this period the basic source of commercial profit was non-equivalent exchange. It was, then, natural that the mercantilists saw profit only in the net profit of trade, or 'profit upon alienation,' which had its source in the mark up that the merchant added to the price of the commodity."

(58): "The first person to develop a critique of the principles behind mercantilist policy was Dudley North... North is the first of the early prophets of the idea of free trade. He dedicates his tract to a discussion around two central themes: first, the restrictions which the state, in its desire to attract money into the country, has imposed upon foreign trade, and second, the legal limitation placed upon the level of interest. On both of these issues North consistently demands that the state cease its interference into economic life."

(65): Rubin takes note of a primitive labor theory of value during the age of craft production--Thomas Aquinas, for example, taught that the "value of a product depends upon the quantity of labor and the outlays expended upon its production. This, however, developed 'normatively,' and not scientifically, as the governing concern of that time was how to establish a just price for craftsmen. Beginning in the 17th century, as capitalist competition at the market congealed, these considerations ceded to a scientific appraisal of the price that was being established by supply and demand (John Locke being its pioneer)--the "process of price formation" as it occured on the market. "The normative formulation of the problem of value had given way to that of scientific theory."

(67): Similarly, as industrial capitalism became more ascendant in the 18th century, there arose a theory of price as corresponding to production costs--this was the work of James Steuart, who was one of the last mercantilists.

(69-74): William Petty, another of the last mercantilists, was developing the original insights of the labor theory of value at this time--"the magnitude of a product's value depends upon the quantity of labor expended on its production." But Petty, Rubin continues, confuses himself because of an inability to systematically distinguish between use-value and exchange-value (in the case of the former, he integrates labor and land into his argument for the source of value).

(74-75): Locke suffers from a similar confusion, though slightly inverted--for Locke, use-values are given by labor (valueless nature made valuable by labor), whereas exchange-values are determined by supply-and-demand. (Cantillon and James Steuart are insufficient in similar ways, Rubina adds)

(81): David Hume, in the 18th century, develops the "quantity theory of money" ("according to which, the value (or purchasing power) of money is determined by the latter's overall quantity"). He traces the mechanisms by which this will happen--a cascading series of consecutive increases in individual demand for various products (this introduces the temporal element into the theory, which is key).

(83-84): "Hume's theory of money is in turn a reaction against the mercantilist concept of money and a theoretical generalization fromt he price revolution of the 16th-17th centuries (when there had been a massive influx of silver and gold from America)." Yet, what is crucial, Hume doesn't understand the analytical importance of the other source of this price revolution--namely, the technological improvements in the extraction of silver/gold and the consequent fall in their value... His "nominalist conception of money as a simple token, with no value of its own but rather with a 'fictitious' value that derives from, and alters with fluctuations in the amount of money, proved to be profoundly mistaken when applied to metallic money."

(84-86): The preceding is the first revision to Hume's theory of money. The second is a complication of his understanding of causality. Hume understood that hoarded money would have no effect on prices. Rubin notes, therefore, that one obviously needs to consider what causes money to "enter circulation." One of the factors, clearly, is the price of commodities themselves. In that sense, it is not as simple as saying as "the quantity of money in circulation determines prices", is it? This was James Steuart's argument, in part: "Steuart denies that commodity prices are dependent upon the quantity of money in circulation; to the contrary, it is the quantity of money in circulation which is determined by the demands of commodity circulation, including the level of commodity prices."

(86): "The ideas that Steuart had put forward in contraposition to the quantity theory were extended in the 19th Century by Tooke, and then later on by Marx. These two theories--Hume's quantity theory, on the one hand, and Steuart's doctrine, on the other--represent in brilliant fashion the two basic tendencies in the theory of monetary circulation that even this day are vying for supremacy in economic science.

This populism helps explain not only the success of the revolution but also the continued survival of the Islamic Republic. The Republic's constitution -- with 175 clauses -- transformed these general aspirations into specific inscribed promises. It pledged to eliminate poverty, illiteracy, slums and unemployment. It also vowed to provide the population with free education, accessible medical care, decent housing, pensions, disability pay and unemployment insurance. "The government," the constitution declared, "has a legal obligation to provide the aforementioned services to every individual in the country." In short, the Islamic Republic promised to create a full-fledged welfare state -- in its proper European, rather than derogatory American, sense.

Henry Berstein, "V.I. Lenin and A.V. Chayanov: looking back, looking forward"
Journal of Peasant Studies, January 2009

And politics? The political economy in this paper is not deployed in any ‘antipeasant’ spirit or prescriptive stance on petty commodity production. Nor do any of my observations suggest withdrawing political sympathy and support for progressive struggles because they fail to satisfy the demands of an idealised (class-purist or other) model of political action. Rather, I have suggested that part of the problem with the ‘new’ agrarian question sketched is how it posits a unitary and idealised, and ostensibly world-historical, ‘subject’: ‘farmers’ or ‘peasants’ or ‘people of the land’. The point, then, is first, to recognise and, second, to be able to analyse, the contradictory sources and impulses – and typically multi-class character – of contemporary struggles over land and ways of farming that can inform a realistic and politically responsible assessment of them. This means rising to the challenges posed by a re-energised and radical agrarian populism, to engage both seriously and critically with the agrarian movements of the present time, and thereby to recover the spirit of Lenin’s ‘fresh and creative impulses’ of the early 1920s, and of Chayanov’s contributions to ‘practical theory’.

The first phase of the India’s relationship with Europe was one of mutual trade and prosperity. Until the East India Company began to establish a monopoly for itself in Indian trade, pushing out European rivals, notably the French, followed by conquest, that first phase from 1600 to 1757 was not really an unequal ‘colonial’ relationship. The East India Company had a large vested interest in promoting the export of cotton textiles and silks from India which soon began to militate against British industrial interests. Political agitation in Britain began to demand curtailment in the trading privileges of the East India Company and an end to imports of Indian textiles.
(...) The second phase of India’s relationship with Britain and the East India Company, opened with the beginning of the conquest of India in 1757. The main interest of the East India Company was still to maximise the export of Indian textiles to Britain and Europe. To that was now added the direct extraction of surplus from the Indian countryside in the form of land revenue and other taxes and impositions. Conquest and plunder joined hands with trade. In the collection of land revenue, the paternalism of Indian feudalism was replaced with the unmitigated avarice and greed of the faceless officials of the Company.
(...) [The third phase:] The East India Company had a major vested interest in the preservation and expansion of exports of Indian textiles. It obtained Indian textiles for resale in the Far East as well as Europe, where they fetched a profit of three times their cost. But there were rising pressures in England against that trade and for protection and promotion of the cotton textile industry in Britain. It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that a cotton textile industry emerged in England. It is generally held that it was the development of the Manchester textile industry that triggered off the Industrial Revolution in England. As Landes pointed out, the ‘threshold’ of the industrial revolution in England was first crossed in cotton manufacture’. (Landes, 1970:82) It is little realised that the prior destruction of the Indian cotton textile industry was a necessary pre-condition for progress of the British Industry. It is a myth that is universally believed by economic historians (Marx among them) that it was the mechanisation of English textile production that killed the Indian textile industry. That was not so. Active steps had to be taken by the British government to suppress the flourishing Indian textile industry. The East India Company had a large interest in the continuation of Indian textile exports that conflicted with those of the rising British bourgeoisie and, especially, the British textile interests. Under pressure from them, the Company’s profitable trading monopoly was ended in 1813 and in 1833 it was required to stop its commercial operations altogether. It then became exclusively an organ of colonial government.

Even the "father of the GDP," Nobel laureate Simon Kuznets, recognized that "the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined by the GDP."

Bluntly put, he wants to warn us that there are too many angry young men outside the Euro-American world today—above all, too many Muslim young men. It is well known, of course, that world data on age cohorts reveal a higher proportion of the young—a ‘youth bulge’—in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa, relative to overall population, in contrast to the higher proportion of the ‘working-age’ population in East Asia and Latin America, or the ‘age bulge’ of Japan and Europe. Heinsohn’s contribution has been to interpret this as one of the principal threats to the West in the first quarter of the 21st century. As he generously acknowledges, Heinsohn picked up this notion from the us Defense Intelligence Agency. Clinton’s dia Director, Lt-Gen Patrick Hughes, had described the ‘youth-bulge phenomenon’ as a ‘global threat to us interests’ and ‘historically, a key factor in instability’ as early as 1997. But like a good Teutonic theorist, Heinsohn saw how to embellish the threadbare empiricism of American military bureaucracy with a world-historical idea: ‘Surplus young men’—the German word is überzähligen, over-numerous—‘almost always lead to expanding bloodshed, and to the creation or destruction of empires.’
(...) On what to do about the angry young men ante portas, Heinsohn is almost as discreet as his masters in Washington and Virginia. The director of genocide research is cautious not to say that killing them off may be the cheapest, most rational solution. Instead, he refers to a us strategy of ‘win–hold–win’, which may be translated into everyday language as kill (by pre-emption)–keep (other enemies down)–kill (next enemy, before he moves). Heinsohn makes clear that the ‘war on terror’ is a long-term offensive—‘our whole life’—against waves of rebellious young men in the Islamic world. The book was written in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, of which Heinsohn was an ardent supporter, and contains its share of sombre meditations on ‘genocidal dictatorships’ and ‘weapons of mass destruction’. In recent interventions, his perspective has become more policy-oriented—perhaps due to the fact that, on the basis of Söhne und Weltmacht, he is now a frequent guest speaker at the German Ministry of the Interior, Intelligence Service (bnd) and nato. Where possible, he argues, the angry young men should be left to kill each other, as in Somalia or Darfur. If that is not working, discreet military aid to the ‘more civilized’ side is suggested, with French arms for the Algerian regime against the Islamists a prime example. But should the angry young men become threatening to Western interests, a pre-emptive military strike will be necessary. No long-term occupations or attempts at ‘state-building’ should follow, however. These are not only costly but futile, as long as the numbers of angry young men continue to grow. The occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq have been a grave error, according to Heinsohn. He is strongly opposed to any un or eu aid to Gaza, as it merely finances Palestinians’ ‘demographic armament’. Yet his maverick views can equally disconcert established opinion from the other side—calling in the Wall Street Journal for Europeans to welcome a quarter of a million young Palestinians into their midst immediately, so as to relieve the pressure in Gaza.
(...) Like all other data, demographic statistics can become ridiculous when extrapolated from their broader social-historical context. Sweden, with virtually complete population figures going back to 1750, the oldest in the world, had a ‘youth bulge’ from the 18th century, and most likely before that, until the First World War. This has so far added nothing of any significance to our understanding of Swedish history. Demography, even when deployed in a scholarly manner, is not a moral science—which explains, in part, its attractiveness for military bureaucracies. The youth-bulge argument can tell us nothing of the oppressive character of the Shah’s regime in Iran, the terror of the Zionist occupation of Palestine, the horror of the us wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the insults of the Islamophobes, the hypocrisy of capitalist liberalism, or the stifling closets of patriarchy. The conservative appeal of ideas such as Heinsohn’s is their debunking quality: you think you are protesting against this or that, but in fact you are only competing blindly for status in an overcrowded youth bulge. Yet Pentagon fears of angry young men, from whom a contingent of angry young women should not be a priori excluded, cannot simply be dismissed as irrational paranoia. This rebellious youth may indeed be a harbinger of social change; but the direction of that change will be decided by political struggle.
(...) There have been some strong arguments for a positive demography of economic development: mercantilism saw population growth as an asset, not a social problem. In the 20th century, the Danish agronomist Esther Boserup proposed a sophisticated theory of the positive significance of population growth. Its lived truth for agrarian economics is exemplified most eloquently in the Netherlands: densely populated from early on and the major pioneer of land reclamation and agricultural innovation. In recent years the Harvard economist, David Bloom, has stressed the ratio of working-age to dependent—young and old—population sectors: in this model, children and the elderly are seen as a burden, while ‘prime’ adults are an asset. Bloom and his colleagues have argued that the comparative weight of the working-age population is a major component of the East Asian economic miracle. The Irish bulge of working-age youth, together with a decline of the birth rate, has also contributed significantly to its—by European standards, extraordinary—rise of per capita income over the past two decades. The Arab world and Africa, meanwhile, can look forward to splendid working-age bulges in about thirty years’ time.
(...) The paradox of demography is that, while it informs us about human life, it also facilitates an instrumental view of human beings. Historically close to state-power concerns, it is a science of peoples, as well as of populations. Practised paradigmatically, demography, and historical demography in particular, is a demanding, impressive intellectual effort. The left’s focus on political and economic division and polarization has often missed the weight of sums and their effects. At the same time, demographic arguments have since Malthus been used as a club of raw biology, with which to batter down hopes of popular rights and coexistence. Today we are witnessing the rehabilitation of a neo-social-darwinist discourse, a demonization of extra-European youth on a circuit that feeds from cia and Pentagon strategy papers to Bremen research institutes, and from there into the liberal media, nato commands and Israeli public discourse, on the eve of the Gaza attack. In Gunnar Heinsohn, his reception and his ilk, the world is experiencing a vengeful return of ideas that flourished before 1945, with the same scorn for the uncivilized, for lesser breeds, for the rights of other peoples.

Well, the first thing is that, along with this optimistic scenario from the point of view of uniting the conditions of the working class globally, there was a more pessimistic consideration in the essay, pointing to something that I’ve always considered a very serious flaw in Marx and Engels’s Manifesto. There is a logical leap that does not really hold up, intellectually or historically—the idea that, for capital, those things that we would today call gender, ethnicity, nationality, do not matter. That the only thing that matters for capital is the possibility of exploitation; and therefore the most exploitable status group within the working class is the one they will employ, without any discrimination on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity. That’s certainly true. However, it doesn’t follow that the various status groups within the working class will just accept this. In fact, it is precisely at the point when proletarianization becomes generalized, and workers are subjected to this disposition of capital, that they will mobilize whatever status difference they can identify or construct to win a privileged treatment from the capitalists. They will mobilize along gender lines, national lines, ethnicity or whatever, to obtain a privileged treatment from capital.
(...) [Adam Smith:] Substantively, the action of the government in Smith is pro-labour, not pro-capital. He is quite explicit that he is not in favour of making workers compete to reduce wages, but of making capitalists compete, to reduce profits to a minimum acceptable reward for their risks. Current conceptions turn him completely
(...) There is evidence that the Chinese authorities are worried about the environment, as well as about social unrest—but then they do things that are plain stupid. Maybe there is a plan in the works, but I don’t see much awareness of the ecological disasters of car civilizations. The idea of copying the United States from this point of view was already crazy in Europe—it’s even crazier in China. And I’ve always told the Chinese that in the 1990s and 2000s, they went to look at the wrong city. If they want to see how to be wealthy without being ecologically destructive, they should go to Amsterdam rather than Los Angeles. In Amsterdam, everybody goes around on bicycles; there are thousands of bikes parked at the station overnight, because people come in by train, pick up their bicycles in the morning and leave them there again in the evening. Whereas in China, while there were no cars at all the first time I was there in 1970—only a few buses in a sea of bicycles—now, more and more, the bicycles have been crowded out. From that point of view it’s a very mixed picture, very worrying and contradictory. The ideology of modernization is discredited elsewhere but so far is living on, rather naively, in China.
(...) If you look at the way in which China has behaved towards its neighbours historically, there has always been a relationship based more on trade and economic exchanges than on military power; this is still the case. People often misunderstand this: they think I am depicting the Chinese as being softer or better than the West; it’s nothing to do with that. It has to do with the problems of governance of a country like China, which we’ve discussed. China has a tradition of rebellions that no other territory of similar size and density of population has faced. Its rulers are also highly conscious of the possibility of new invaders from the sea—in other words, the us.
(...) So I had the luck—from the point of view of analysing the capitalist business enterprise—of going into successively larger firms, which helped me understand that you cannot talk about capitalist enterprises in general, because the differences between my father’s business, my grandfather’s business and Unilever were incredible.
(...)
(...) First of all, we should not exaggerate the extent to which China has broken the pattern. The level of per capita income in China was so low—and still is low, compared to the wealthy countries—that even major advances need to be qualified. China has doubled its position relative to the rich world, but still that only means going from 2 per cent of the average per capita income of the wealthy countries to 4 per cent. It is true that China has been decisive in producing a reduction in world income inequalities between countries. If you take China out, the South’s position has worsened since the 1980s; if you keep it in, then the South has improved somewhat, due almost exclusively to China’s advance. But of course, there has been a big growth in inequality within the prc, so China has also contributed to the world-scale increase in inequalities within countries in recent decades. Taking the two measures together—inequality between and within countries—statistically China has brought about a reduction in total global inequality. We should not exaggerate this—the world pattern is still one of huge gaps, which are being reduced in small ways. However, it’s important because it changes relationships of power between countries. If it continues, it may even change the global distribution of income from one that is still very polarized to a more normal, Pareto-type distribution.
(...) From the 1980s and 1990s, in particular, the more important development has been the bifurcation of a highly dynamic and upwardly mobile East Asia and a stagnant and downwardly mobile Africa, and particularly southern Africa—‘the Africa of the labour reserves’, again. This bifurcation is the thing that interests me most: why southern Africa and East Asia have moved in such opposite directions. It’s a very important phenomenon to try to understand, because to do so would also modify our understanding of the underpinnings of successful capitalist development, and the extent to which it relies or not on dispossession—the complete proletarianization of the peasantry—as happened in southern Africa, or on the very partial proletarianization that has taken place in East Asia. So the divergence of these two regions brings up a big theoretical question, which once again challenges Brenner’s identification of capitalist development with the full proletarianization of the labour force.
(...) The relationship is very close, because, first of all, contrary to what many people think, the Chinese peasants and workers have a millennial tradition of unrest that has no parallel anywhere else in the world. In fact, many of the dynastic transitions were driven by rebellions, strikes and demonstrations—not just of workers and peasants, but also shopkeepers. This is a tradition that continues down to the present. When Hu Jintao told Bush, a few years ago, ‘Don’t worry about China trying to challenge us dominance; we have too many preoccupations at home’, he was pointing to one of the chief characteristics of Chinese history: how to counter the combination of internal rebellions by the subordinate classes, and external invasions by so-called barbarians—from the Steppes, up to the nineteenth century, and then, since the Opium Wars, from the sea. These have always been the overwhelming concerns of Chinese governments, and they set narrow limits on China’s role in international relations.
(...) Well, not of less relevance, because in fact it is the most serious crisis that historical capitalism has experienced; certainly, it was a decisive turning point. But it also educated the powers-that-be in terms of what they should do so as not to repeat that experience. There are a variety of recognized and less recognized instruments for preventing that type of breakdown from happening again. Even now, though the collapse in the stock exchange is being compared to the 1930s, I think—I may be wrong—that both the monetary authorities and the governments of the states that actually matter in this are going to do all they can to avoid the collapse in the financial markets having similar social effects to the 1930s. They just cannot afford it, politically. And so they will muddle through, do anything they have to. Even Bush—and before him Reagan—for all their free-market ideology, relied on an extreme kind of Keynesian deficit spending. Their ideology is one thing, what they actually do is another, because they are responding to political situations which they cannot allow to deteriorate too much. The financial aspects may be similar to the 1930s, but there is a greater awareness and tighter constraints on the political authorities not to let these processes affect the so-called real economy to the same extent that they did in the 1930s. I’m not saying that the Great Depression is less relevant, but I’m not convinced that it is going to be repeated in the near future. The situation of the world economy is radically different. In the 1930s it was highly segmented, and that may have been a factor in producing the conditions for those breakdowns. Now it’s far more integrated.
(...) Yes. I think that over the last thirty years there has been a change in the nature of the crisis. Up to the early 1980s, the crisis was typically one of falling rate of profits due to intensifying competition among capitalist agencies, and due to circumstances in which labour was much better equipped to protect itself than in the previous depressions—both in the late-nineteenth century and in the 1930s. So that was the situation through the 1970s. The Reagan–Thatcher monetary counter-revolution was actually aimed at undermining this power, this capacity of the working classes to protect themselves—it was not the only objective, but it was one of the main objectives. I think that you quote some adviser of Thatcher, saying that what they did was [to create an industrial reserve army]; what Marx says they should do! That changed the nature of the crisis. In the 1980s and 1990s and now, in the 2000s, we are indeed facing an underlying overproduction crisis, with all its typical characteristics. Incomes have been redistributed in favour of groups and classes that have high liquidity and speculative dispositions; so incomes don’t go back into circulation in the form of effective demand, but they go into speculation, creating bubbles that burst regularly. So, yes, the crisis has been transformed from one of falling rate of profit, due to intensified competition among capitals, to one of overproduction due to a systemic shortage of effective demand, created by the tendencies of capitalist development.
(...) ...What the declining power does is very important, because they have the ability to create chaos. The whole ‘Project for a New American Century’ was a refusal to accept decline. That has been a catastrophe. There has been the military debacle in Iraq and the related financial strain on the us position in the world economy, transforming the United States from a creditor nation into the biggest debtor nation in world history. As a defeat, Iraq is worse than Vietnam, because in Indo-China there was a long tradition of guerrilla warfare: they had a leader of the calibre of Ho Chi Minh; they had already defeated the French. The tragedy for the Americans in Iraq is that, even in the best possible circumstances, they have a hard time winning the war, and now they are just trying to get out with some face-saving device. Their resistance to accommodation has led, first, to an acceleration of their decline, and second, to a lot of suffering and chaos. Iraq is a disaster. The size of the displaced population there is far bigger than in Darfur.
(...) One of the major problems on the left, but also on the right, is to think that there is only one kind of capitalism that reproduces itself historically; whereas capitalism has transformed itself substantively—particularly on a global basis—in unexpected ways. For several centuries capitalism relied on slavery, and seemed so embedded in slavery from all points of view that it could not survive without it; whereas slavery was abolished, and capitalism not only survived but prospered more than ever, now developing on the basis of colonialism and imperialism. At this point it seemed that colonialism and imperialism were essential to capitalism’s operation—but again, after the Second World War, capitalism managed to discard them, and to survive and prosper. World-historically, capitalism has been continually transforming itself, and this is one of its main characteristics; it would be very short-sighted to try to pin down what capitalism is without looking at these crucial transformations. What remains constant through all these adaptations, and defines the essence of capitalism, is best captured by Marx’s formula of capital M–C–M', to which I refer repeatedly in identifying the alternation of material and financial expansions. Looking at present-day China, one can say, maybe it’s capitalism, maybe not—I think it’s still an open question. But assuming that it is capitalism, it’s not the same as that of previous periods; it’s thoroughly transformed. The issue is to identify its specificities, how it differs from previous capitalisms, whether we call it capitalism or something else.
(...) Well, I would have no objections to it being called socialism, except that, unfortunately, socialism has been too much identified with state control of the economy. I never thought that was a good idea. I come from a country where the state is despised and in many ways distrusted. The identification of socialism with the state creates big problems. So, if this world-system was going to be called socialist, it would need to be redefined in terms of a mutual respect between humans and a collective respect for nature. But this may have to be organized through state-regulated market exchanges, so as to empower labour and disempower capital in Smithian fashion, rather than through state ownership and control of the means of production. The problem with the term socialism is that it’s been abused in many different ways, and therefore also discredited. If you ask me what would be a better term, I’ve no idea—I think we should look for one. You are very good at finding new expressions, so you should come up with some suggestions.

"che guevara and the cuban revolution," mike gonzalez

take-home: it's impossible, of course, to disagree with the bulk of the author's critique of Che's sense of "revolutionary impatience." he was beholden to a kind of military vanguardism, no doubt.

at the same time, however, there is a way in which this critique is too easy--for by presenting the entire history of guerrilla warfare through the prism of this commitment to a misguided heroism, mike gonzalez is able to recover a "lost possibility:" "if only they'd remembered to make links to the working-class," one thinks. a more responsible book about che would begin with the premise that it is never this easy--does it not make more sense to think of "military vanguardism" as the recognized worst of all possible options? could it not be that, amidst a workers' movement that is uninviting and co-opted, che took refuge in sheer voluntarism. not because he was self-involved, but because he couldn't stomach "patience" or failure? rather than allow us to wrap ourselves in the wonderful gifts of hindsight and orthodoxy, that would permit us to ask the really important questions: "they were aware of what they were doing, of their departures from the orthodoxy, and they still failed. now what?"

there is a way in which this line of defense, of course, is itself "too easy." nonetheless, the author can't be allowed to get off so easily--he often elides the question of "leadership" and "vanguardism" by supplying this trite rendering of revolutionary theory as dedicated entirely to "self-emancipation" (it seems like everyone's read a different translation of "What is to be done?" than I have, to be honest). but--again-- what do you do when self-emancipation doesn't present itself? perhaps one ought to ignore the feeling of urgency that motivated che (and the book makes a strong case for the futility and analytical fallacies of that impatience), but the author doesn't do his thesis any favors by implying that the alternative is more-or-less as simple as "making links with the workers" and snapping your fingers.

none of that is to deny the points of value in the book, just to object at the simplicity of its pedagogy. the author makes important points about the way in which the pathetic state of Communist politics in pre-WWII (owing in large part to the diktats of the Stalinists) turned an entire generation off of Marxist politics, and--he seems to suggest--towards this path of "revolutionary impatience." (at the same time, he doesn't answer the question this begs--if these were the only two alternatives, was Che preferable to the "bureaucratic patience" of the orthodox Marxists of the time?)

--- important quotes/excerpts ---

(7-18): Che's upbringing in the context of the history of Argentina

1880s: President Hipolito Yrigoyen in power; Argentina becomes a meat-exporting economy, exchanging foodstuffs for goods from Europe (lots of Italian, Spanish and German immigrants drawn to the country at this time)

1916, 1918: full male suffrage introduced, as well as social security. author gives this as time of increasing militancy of this immigrant working-class, which complemented the "rising discontent of an urban middle and lower middle class largely excluded from political life." a university reform movement which demandeda "democratic higher education."

1930: the "old interests" respond--a military coup, and in 1933 the new gov't signed a trade agreement with Britain, a defeat for the working-class. this military harbored sympathies for the Axis powers; Che's father was active in anti-fascist circles.

1940: military gov't of Castillo, though, locked into dependence with Britain, of course; and "there were also ideological reasons why an authoritarian nationalist government would feel neutral towards the old imperial power, Britain." regardless, "war, for a country whose main exports--meat and wheat--drove the competing armies, was a commercial opportunity."

1943: because of Castillo's suspected sympathies for the Allies, the GOU--a group of army officers--launched a coup; state of emergency was declared. nonetheless, by 1945 the army had declared with the allies, even though the fact that many Nazis fled to the country indicates that this was more opportunism than anything else. Juan Domingo Peron was among the officers now leading--he becomes Secretary of Labor, a position which gives him a pulpit for his populism. "Peron's base of support was a layer of newly arrived workers, recent immigrants from the countryside or the smaller provincial towns, who had gravitated towards the capital in search of work in its expanding industries... Evita came from the same world as they... They were Peron's mass base..."

1946: elections pitting Peron (who enjoyed support from business groups and right wing nationalists, as well) against the Democratic Union (which enjoyed support from other business interests as well as socialists and Communists). the Communists' base had been eaten into by Peron, and they also saw his support for the German-Italian axis through the eyes of the Soviet Union. Guevara's parents' sympathies were similar, resoundingly anti-fascist. all this spelled disaster for the Communists, insofar as they were "siding with imperialism, with the US government which was relentless in attacking Peron, and with the old landowning and industrial class against the man who claimed to speaking for all Argentines..."

(17-18): "Peronism had mobilised masses of working-class people, but in support of an authoritarian figure whose devotion to the people's cause seemed shallow and temporary. In any case, the people with whom the young Ernesto talked politics were unlikely to offer any kind of defense of Peron--they shared his distrust. On the other hand, authentic revolutionary tradition--the Communists and the socialists--were a poor lot in the Argentina in which he was growing up. They were rigid, corrupt, and manipulative, and unprincipled in their willingness to form alliances with people who should logically have been the enemies of the class they claimed to represent."

(20): "In many ways, the history of modern Argentina is a struggle between the city on the banks of the River Plante, whose connections were always with Europe, and an interior--a vast expanse of varied landscapes--whose natural links are with Latin America"

(24): in 1952, revolution (at the forefront of which were miners) and co-option in Bolivia

(29-30): history of Guatemala:

1900s: coffee and later banana economy, oriented towards the US market--"for the first forty years of the 20th century is the history of one major North American company, United Fruit, and its founder and owner, Sam Zemurray... By the early 1940s, some 40 percent of Guatemala's land was under the control of the company known throughout Central America as La Yunai.

1944: Rafael Arevalo annuonces a reform program--key to which was land reform and trade union rights

1951: Jacob Arbenz, a young military officer who had served under Arevalo, comes to power, intending to carry the program through to completion. "It is important to emphasize that Arbenz was no revolutionary. In a sense, his project was the modernization of the economy under a Guatemalan state able to control and determine the allocation of its own resources. But the process of fairly moderate reform that he set in motion unleashed other forces which he could not easily control... The process, therefore, was announced from above but driven from below."

1954: "...several key figures in the Washington government were intimately involveed with the United Fruit Company--among them John Foster Dulles, Secretary of Staet, and his brother Allen Dulles, head of the CIA... Together they organized the overthrow of Arbenz, which was to led by a financed military force under Carlos Castillo Armas."

(31-32): "At a fairly basic level, the intransigence of the North Americans encouraged Che's instinctive feeling that there was no alternative to armed resistance. When the coup came, and Guatemala City was bombarded from the air for weeks, there was very little armed resistance. The reasons why are still a matter of debate..."

(34): what Che would learn from the Arbenz coup:

He could have given arms to the people, but he did not want to... Now we see the result.

(39-40): Cuban history:

1898: Cuban "independence"

1901: Platt Amendment, which gave US right to intervene to defend its interests. Guantanamo Bay ceded on a 99-year lease--"Washington nominated the head of the national bank, the customs service, and the police. It was an early step in the incorporation of Cuba into the US economy--as a supplier of the sugar that was becoming so important a component of the new urban diet, and as a market for US goods [raw materials and captive market, check] "Within the first three years of indepdence... speculators from US... bought up an estimated 60 percent of the land."

1921: by this date, US owned bulk of large sugar plantations.

1929: Depression hit Cuba hard--popular resentment against then-in-power Machado grew.

1933: protests toppled the government--the leader of the non-commissioned officers in the army, Batista, called upon the students to name the new president. He was a professor named Grau San Martin. He "introduced the eight-hour day, rescinded the Platt Amendment, and announced the coming nationalisation of the electric industry."

1934: Sergeants' revolt led by Batista takes power, though, with tacit backing of US--Batista in effective control from this point on, though he takes presidency in 1940. Communist Party supports him, owing to the "popular front policy"--"this strategy was not a consequence of the particular conditions in any one country, but the result of the Soviet Union's concern to build a wide international coalition against Nazism... its political cost was enormous... In Spain for example, the consequence was that the Communist Party opposed the development of a revolutionary response to the fascist uprising of 1936 and instead threw in its lot with a coalition of centre and right wing parties whose one unifying feature was their fear of a workers' revolution."

1944: Grau San Martin becomes president. by 1947, after the end of the peace of the "popular front" era, he has turned on the Communists.

1948: "the slippery and corrupt" Prio Socarras takes his place.

1951: Chibas kills himself on air in the run-up into the 1952 Congress elections. soon after Batista takes power in a coup that was to last till the revolution. "His immediate actions once in power were a sign of things to come: he banned political parties, filled the state with his cronies, and launched a campaign of repression."

(44): "Like many middle-class student nationailsts, [Castro] was suspicious of the Communists... In Cuba, as elsewhere, they had colluded with governments that were corrupt and authoritarian in exchange for support for the Soviet Union. Communism was a discredited and corrupted notion by the time Castro's generation encountered it."

(46-47): Raul was the link between the July 26 Movement, and the Communists. Nonetheless: "For Raul and Fidel, change could be the result of armed actions of a minotirity. They, and not the working class, would be the subjects of this process of change. This way of understanding what it means to be a revolutionary reflected the group's middle-class background, but much more importantly it betrayed the political distance between them and workers. Their project saw an independent state which could decree change in society from above. In this process, the main instrument was not mass organization or the power of workers, but the arms held by the revolutionaries."

(58): December 1956--Celia Sanchez was to meet them; but waited two days and left. There was also an abortive urban uprising, led by Frank Pais. "Of the 82 men who had boarded the Granma, just 19 had survived. Another eight would join them later... The 26 July Movement had supporters and sympathisers scattered across the island, but they were not connected with the trade unions or any other organizations outside their own circle... "

(59): "No guerrilla group (or foco, as Che would later describe it) could survive without the support of an urban movement. The relationship between mountain (sierra) and plain (llano) was at the heart of the political debates in the years that followed--above all, in the argument about which section should lead the movement."

(62): "The reality is that in [Che's] vision of the revolutionary war--a war conducted by revolutionaries on behalf of the masses--the staet of the workers' movement or the mass urban resistance was not an essential issue. In Che's view, the heart of the struggle was in the guerilla struggle in the mountains--la sierra."

(66): Frank Pais making the right noises about building support in the urban areas, maybe opening another front; Fidel, though, "imposed his political vision. The building of the rebel army was to be the absolute priority, and a call was to be issued for the organization of a 'civic resistance' whose essential function was to support the guerrilla fighters..." Author attributes this to increasing authoritarianism on Fidel's part.

(70): [crux of author's critique]"[Che] identified urban politics (the llano) with reformism and the politics of the guerrillas in the hills (the sierra) with revolution. Che spoke about the city as an undifferentiated place. In fact, his dismissal of the urban struggle effectively marginalised trade unions and workers too. Yet the sierra was not rural Cuba, where a class of peasant farmers and agricultural workers might have been seen as an alternative base for a revolutionary movement. These sections of Cuban society lived on the 'plains' too. Che (and Fidel) meant the more remote and difficult terrain of the Sierra Maestra--ideal for a cat-and-mouse military strategy, but not a region whose sparse and scattered population could build a social movement. The strategy that Che and Fidel had in common envisaged a guerrilla war conducted by small groups of revolutionary fighters rather than by the masses in whose name they claimed to be waging the struggle."

(72): failure of the Cienfuegos attack in 1957--300 tortured and killed by Batista. US increasing fed-up of Batista, it seems, rumors of possible contacts through Frank Pais?

(73): Che on discipline: "Che was extremely harsh with his own men and with anyone who endangered the cause, deliberately or otherwise. He readily executed informers and deserters, yet was magnanimous with enemy soldiers. This was a response that could only have arisen out of military code of honour."

(73): "He described himslf as a Marxist now. Yet for Marx, a revolution was the moment when the working class achieved its own liberation through collective action. This does not appear in Che's worldview."

(78): failure of the general strike called by 26 July Movement in 1958 (Batista had postponed elections). "In the aftermath, the 26 July Movement made a decisive turn..." towards the guerrilla struggle. Fidel's authority confirmed.

(78): "Che had reached the conclusions that he would later develop in Guerrilla Warfare.First, that a popular army can win a military struggle against a regular army. Second, that in the particular conditions of Latin America it is the poor peasants who are the most revolutionary class-rather than organized workers in industry or agriculture. Third, that the conditions for revolution do not need to exist before the struggle begins--the revolutionary foco can create them."


(79): Key page of author's critique [not very satisfying, i must say, particularly this strange fealty to the orthodox prescription in demonstrably heterodox circumstances]: "Che was reacting against a certain pessimist gradualism that he had heard from other socialists--the notion that 'objective conditions' had to exist before change was possible... Yet in identifying the poor peasantry as the key social group in the revolution, Che was specifically rejecting Marxistm's central idea--that it is the power of the organized working class alone that can bring about a social revolution. Some countries in Latin America were still dominated by small-scale agricultural production--and the argument that the peasantry was a revolutionary class still had some weight in those circumstances. But like his own country, Argentina... Cuba was integrated into an international economy as a mono-producer of sugar and was already highly urbanized... Che's conception of revolution only acknowledged the role of those who carried the arms and did the fighting. They alone were the revolutionary actors. What of the uban workers, the students, the people in the small towns? Their task was to supply the fighters... In a military structure there could be neither democracy nor transparency--both could spell disaster in a military context. But in a society, their absence would be a disaster."

(83): Fidel towards the Communists was at this stage, pragmatic--didn't want to give the US an opportunity, in particular. "Che, on the other hand, while fiercely critical of the Cuban Communists in many respects, described himself as a Communist. He supported the Soviet Union... Yet as the revolution evolved, Che would become increasingly critical of the Soviet model while Fidel would become the leader and symbol of Cuban communism."

(89): the tide turned mainly due to objective factors: "The failure of the elections, the sucess of small-scale but well publicized guerrilla actions in the area, the increasing brutality of Batista and the growing alienation of the population that it produced, had accelerated the collapse of the regime--particularly as increasing numbers of conscript soldiers gave up the fight."

(92-93): argument here that though Fidel was eager to take full credit on behalf of the 26 July Movement, there were many other factors that led to Batista's downfall, notably the ending of support by the US (an arms embargo was in place), as well as agitation by other political organizations.

(95): dispensing "revolutionary justice:" about 55 executed in Havana in the first few days (70 executed by Raul, in Oriente). By May the number had risen to around 550. "These were the torturers, the police spies, the most zealous servants of Batista's police state."

(102): again, the critique re-phrased: "The notion that revolution comprises the self-emancipation of the working class is absolutely central to Marx's thought. From being the objects of the interests of others, the majority become the governors of their own lives by transforming society through their own actions. It is a core principle in revolutionary Marxism. Yet the guerrilla war theory replaces this idea with another--that the revolutionaries will make the revolution on behalf of the wider class."


(105-106): "Who were these young revolutionaries? ...they came largely from the middle class and were driven above all by a hatred of imperialism. They were largely nationalists for whom national independence and self-determination was the most important issue. For the most part they did not come from a Communist tradition... When Che insisted that revolutionaries need not wait for the objective conditions for revolution to exist, he was obliquely referring to the Communist parties..."

(106-108): three concerns in the early months--(!) how to ensure defence of the revolution; (2) an economic program, and what kind of land reform (class of peasants, or collectivization); (3) what would the political direction of the revolution be?

(108): "How could a small economy, dependent for more than 80 percent of its export earnings on one product--sugar--break its dependency? One answer was to diversify the economy--the other was to develop industrially."

(123-124): The beginnings of revolutionary terror--Che making illegal any offense to "revolutionary morality," founding a "labor camp," etc.

(125): "At first, the response of the Cuban population was extremely positive. Yet there was a missing element in Che's argument. Involvement and participation could be ends in themselves, provided they were real. Endless declarations of loyalty by the leaders to the led, however, were no substitute for a genuine workers' democracy in which it was the popular organizations which made the decisions and the government which carried them out."

(127): on eve of Bay of Pigs, Cuban state rounds up 35,000 people!

(129): by 1962, 500,000 people, bulk of Cuba's professional class, had fled to the US

(131): "Che's impatience with material realities was at the heart of his political theory. If the revolutionaries could substitute for the masses in making the revolution, the revolutionary state could overcome the material limitations it faced, he argued."

(140-141): "Che emphasises over and over again in his essay that the guerrilla army must be located in the countryside, and recruit above all among the peasantry, because it is they who have suffered the most brutal exploitation. But suffering, of course, does not create revolutionaries. On the contrary, without collective organisation and the confidence that comes from the experience of struggle, and without the power to strike at the very heart of capitalism--the machinery of production--suffering can produce despair and a sense of impotence." This impatience, the author argues, came into conflict more and more with the USSR's commitment to "peaceful coexistence."

(148): Che's critique of the USSR in Algiers, declaring in favor of Third World solidarity--decrying the USSR for their failure to support liberation movements, calling them 'accomplices of imperialism.'

(149): on Man and Socialism: "Why did he lay such emphasis on the question of a new consciousness? It was certainly not for economic reasons, or because committed people are more efficient producers... It went to the very heart of Che's political ideas, for it emphasized the subjective over the objective, the effort of will that could overcome uncompromising material conditions. This was a central notion in his Guerrilla Warfare... It flew in the face of a revolutionary tradition which recognized the dialectical relationship between the individual and his or her circumstances...

(149-154): misadventure in Congo, where the "disorganization was total." Nasser had warned him that he would become 'Another Tarzan, a white man among black men, leading and protecting them... It can't be done.'


(160): most salient critique of Che's strategy in Bolivia--he set up shop in the Eastern region, which was home to the peasantry that the 1964-coup leader, Rene Barrientos, had wooed. much more suited would have been the mining areas of the West that Barrientos had repressed and home to a "glorious revolutionary tradition."

(164): "This was not an ideal moment for a major offensive, but it would have been a perfect time for the patient rebuilding of political organization, especially with the enormous moral authority of Che behind it. Guevara, however was wedded to the idea of guerilla warfare, and did not see the organized working class as a central actor in his vision of revolution."

(168): in the words of one Richard Harris:

The defeat of Che's guerrilla operation and the main flaw in Che's strategy--as well as Debray's theorising about revolutionary guerrilla warfare... might be called a kind of military vanguardism. By reducing popular revolution to a special form of guerrilla warfare, Che's strategy and Debray's early writings overemphasized the military aspects of initating a revolutionary struggle against an unjust regime. And they underemphasized the political dimension of organizing the base of popular support needed for a successful revolutionary struggle.

(168): "It does Che's memory no credit to refuse to acknowledge the brutal truth that this was a terrible and costly failure born of Che's insistence that the will of the revolutionar can overcome objective conditions and substitute the individual for the movement of an entire class. That way lies martyrdom, not social revolution."

"the black man's burden," basil davidson

take-home: again, an interesting book that hints at the quirks of the man, one suspects. my initial reaction was less kind than my reaction, on reflection.

a first reading of the initial sections leads one to suspect that davidson's book will be far too kind to the precolonial. however, if you interrogate much of what he does say about the possibilities lost in africa's precolonial history, it is possible to argue, i think, that he is actually highlighting individual historical details (it doesn't help that he frames these in language that suggest the "blanket assertions" that they are perhaps not).

thus, the general merits--he makes a strong even if simple case that the failure of the "national question" to resolve the "social question" is at the root of the failures of the "nation-state." at the same time, he is clear that those who fought for the "social question" were an integral part of the "national struggle," as well. in other words, the struggle for nation-states always involved before it deceived the masses who made everything possible (1848 in Europe is obviously case-in-point).

he argues that the colonial encounter was disastrous, and decisively so, for the evolution of African institutions. here the contrast with Japanese history is introduced; Africa might very well have produced a merchant class (and, he implies, a bourgeois nationalism) had it not been so cruelly interrupted (his consistent anticolonialism on this point is great, of course.)

again, after an initial reading of the early parts, one cannot help but be struck by his emphasis on the possible virtues of this indigeneity--almost as if he is ignorant of the possibility that these polities were themselves racked by the definitional conflict over distribution of the surplus (the "class question," in other words). but as one reads further, one sees that he isn't blind to the class question, and that--indeed--it is at the core of his central thesis. so, in that sense, one is tempted to give him the benefit of the doubt--perhaps the "legitimacy" that he identifies in the precolonial was exceptional (in fairness, he establishes it in a confined way--the Asante and a couple of other examples, maybe). and if not that, perhaps it is enough to locate his reading in the anticolonial posture of his work--as a retort to the mission civilizatrice.

if one's not to give him this benefit of the doubt, then the weakness of his book is this--his failure to capture the spirit of marx on primitive accumulation, where a contempt for premodern elitisms co-exists with an indictment of bourgeois triumphalism. but, then again, it's also impossible to reject out-of-hand his unwillingness to resolve the tragedies he chronicles in orthodox marxist fashion-- with the promise of socialism. he is, after all, writing in the shadow of the USSR and the stalinist denial of national life. and in that sense he is right not to take refuge in the marxist promise.

there is, i will say, something infuriating about the way in which this theme of the "lost promise" does a disservice to the thinkers who imagined much more than the cooption of the "social question"--in other words, he seems to suggest that we can only see the loss of the "social question" with hindsight, a posture that allows his solution to suggest itself. but people understood the prominence of the "social question" and the importance of responsiveness to "spontaneity," but they still failed. that really is our burden.

nonetheless, even if the ending is somewhat trite and facile (that the answer to the perils of the nation-state lie in more and better democracy), the book is by no means just this--there is a lot in here worth remembering, particularly the emphasis on how the "social question" becomes the "national question," and these fragmentary reflections on the evolution of the concept of "tribalism."

a last note: he throughout stresses the "hardening" of colonial rule in late 1800s, which is an important sociological point.

--- important quotes/excerpts ---

(10): [GUIDING THESIS/QUESTION:] "Primarily, this is a crisis of institutions. Which institutions? To this the answer is easier. We ahve to be concerned here with the nationalism which produced the nation-states of newly indepdent Africa after the colonial period: with the nationalism that became nation-statism. This nation-statism looked like a liberation, and really began as one. But it did not continue as a liberation. In practice, it was not a restoration of Africa to African's own history, but the onset of a new peiod of indirect subjection to the history of Europe. The fifty or so states of the colonial partition, each formed and governed as though their peoples posessed no history of their own, became fifty or so nation-states formed and governed on European models, chiefly the models of Britain and France. Liberation thus produced its own denial. Liberation led to alienation."

(11): here he first draws the distinction that runs through the book--between "tribalism" of precolonial africa, which is more-or-less the nascent nationalism of the european experience, and the new "tribalism," which unfolds in genocides and "mindless" violence.

(12): [in a sense, this passage encapsulates the limitations of the book, i think] "Because, according to the British, there were no African models, these states would have to be built on European models. So these, being alien models, failed to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of a majority of African citizens, and soon proved unable to protect and promote the interests of those citizens..."

(21-22): "Privations had been bad in the "old days" of the Atlantic slave trade, before the trade began to be made illegal early in the nineteenth century: according to such statistics as may be found, about one in seven of all the captives shipped for the Americas were dead before the voyage was over. But now, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, the mortality was higher still, for the old "close packing" of the legal slave trade, horrible enough as that had been, had given way to the dense packing of the smuggling trade."

(24): the legal end to British involvement in the slave trade didn't do much to put an end to smuggling: "The task was simply too big for the scale of the measures used [i.e., the naval blockade]. In the 1840s each slow-moving warship had to patrol some forty miles of coastline."

(26): [re: Sierra Leone and Liberia] "Africa had sent them into slavery. Europe, but especially Britain, had rescued and set them free... And for a while, before the racist constrictions of a new age of imperialism struck at them in the 1890s, these men and women felt the winds of a liberating history in their sails; and they prospered."

(35): Basil Davidson is using the aspirations of these descendants of freed slaves to stand-in for the modernizers' arguments in the "modernizers" vs. "traditionalist," though he rightly complicates the terms of the encounter: "It was not really a battle between tradition and modernizatoin. Enterprising chiefs and kings were as eager as anyone else to assimilate the fruits of modernization, so long as these could be made digestible to accustomed ritual and historical custom; while the best of the modernizers well understood that there must be some accomodation with tradition."

(40): [the possibility for a Japan-like Meji restoration, he's arguing, was lost as...] "But in Africa--and the case became general--modernization had to mean precisely that [alienation]. In the 1870s Britain, and the French still more, turned sharply to military enclosure. Armies marched and colonies were defined, filling up the "empty map." And with this there came by the end of the century a stifling tide of Eurocentrism, of the racism that held that Europeans are naturally and inherently superior to Africans, with lesser codicils assuring that Englishmen are superior to Frenchmen..."

(41): "So it came about that by 1912 Africans in Sierra Leone, for example, held only one in six of the senior official posts, whereas as recently as 1892 they had still held nearly half of those posts."

(42): [though we might have qualms with his reading of the post-colonial fall, there can be no question that his politics are fierce and well-meant] "In retrospect, the whole great European project in Africa, stretching over more than a hundred years, can only seem a vast obstacle thrust across every reasonable avenue of African progress out of preliterate and prescientific societies into the "modern world."

(47): [the tragedy of imitation] "It was, in this large and decisive sense, the European response to African acceptance of colonial alienation. Yes, to become civilized Africans they must cease to be Africans, but in order to ensure that this should duly and completely happen, they should never be allowed to become Europeans. They should wander in some no-man's land of their own until the trumpet of destiny, at some unthinkable time in the future, should swing wide the doors of civilization and let them in."


(48): [this is important--colonialism allies itself with "backwardness," of a very specific sort] "The racism of imperial government went hand in hand with a growing reliance on the 'savage backwoods' for the purpose of colonial rule. Nothing, it seemed, was to change except that the 'acknowledged chiefs' were now the agents of foreign domination instead of being, as in the past, the guardians of African tradition"

(52): "the two faces of nationalism: its capacity for enlarging freedom, and its potential for destroying freedom."

(52-62): the Asante project, and what might have emerged

(65): again, Basil Davidson is contrasting the African and Japanese experiences to highlight the explanatory importance of colonial disposession

(68): [why no merchant class?] Thrusting African merchants along the western seaboard, men such as King Ja Ja of Opobo, who now soared to commercial power on the export of palm oil, began to induce the rise of a capital-owning and -investing group that might have hope, given time, of becoming a middle class of nation builders in the European sense of the term. But they were not given time.

(70): instead of waking to find themselves outcompeted by these private merchants, in other words, the nascent African states were compelled to ally themselves with colonial crown and capital--one gets a sense that its not this simple, either in Davidson's book or in history, but this is a start (and it certainly parallels South Asia)

(72-73): these two pages encapsulate the flaws of Davidson's book. in brief there's an image of a "lost salvation" which is profoundly misleading, and hostile to any serious attempts at a materialist rendering of the colonial problem. he's giving space to subjectivity, but not in any dialectical, thoughtful way.

(75): [this, on the other hand, is critical--perhaps the take-away] "The history of precolonial tribalism (by no means necessarily the same thing as later forms of tribalism) was in every objective sense a history of nationalism: of sociopolitical categories, that is, corresponding to the origins and development of unifying community formation in one terminology or another."

(76): [THE THESIS, IN A SENSE] "However exotic Asante might appear in its African guise, it was manifestly a national state on its way toward becoming a nation-state with every attribute ascribed to a West European nation-state, even if some of these attributes had still to reach maturity. It possessed known boundaries, a central government with police and army, consequent law and order, an accepted national language; and beyond these it even possessed, by the 1880s, an emergent middle class capable of envisaging the role of capitalist entrepreneur. Thereupon its whole dynamic and potentials were suddenly dispossessed by colonial takeover, and all indigenous development stopped."

(76-81): informative pages--he's re-telling Africa's pre-history to emphasize the absurdity of the Hegelian reading.

(80): [travelers came to an Africa disrupted by the slave trade] "To most overseas travelers and chance observers, Africa seemed to live in a malevolent condition of chaos; and for this almost universal conclusion among Europeans and North Americans, we can now ascribe several reasons. One was that the impression was partly true. After about 1850 travelers and observers in East Africa began to enter lands ravaged by a relatively new slave trade; and they found, from the Swahili coast westward to the great lakes, or from the Southern Sudan southward through Mozambique, appalling evidence of death and devastation because of this slave trade."

(87-88): here he's arguing that pre-colonial African institutions were generally accepted as legitimate. the proof of that, of course, is that they endured, and were relatively stable. but while that goes some way towards refuting the colonial narrative, it's not infused with the urgency of a marxist analysis--for surely we're not going to fall into the rainbow lenses of the premoderns. history is always the history of class struggle, whether you're writing against the colonial narrative, or not.

(94): he understands this, of course, as he makes clear on this page--but doesn't do his understanding explicit justice throughout the book.

(95): "but what the core peoples of the regna did not favor was nationalism. They could not have the slightest interest in promoting or provoking ethnic self-assertion, including their own. they simply stretched their rule over many ethnic groups, extracted tax and tribute, and left it at that... When the African regna in due course fell apart and disappeared from history, pretty well by the beginning of the seventeenth century, their subject peoples--just as in Europe--by no means followed them into the void." [some key points here: he's making a distinction between the Asante and the pre-nationalism regna (the European and African forms being indistinguishable)--but this opens up his analysis of nationalism to a class critique; how can you justify subjecting only the feudal and thus "pre-national" to a class critique, in other words? there is plenty to despise about the bourgeois nationalism that Europe constructed, and Africa failed in constructing. what's lacking, really, is a spirit infused by the Marxist contempt for BOTH feudal elitism AND bourgeois triumphalism.]

(99): "The new nationalists of the 1950s would then embrace nation-statism as the only available escape from colonial domination. Striving to transform colonial territories, they would find Africa's wealth of ethnic cultures both distracting and hard to absorb into their schemes. They would fall back into the colonial mentality of regarding it as "tribalism," and, as such, retrogressive. This diversity, it seemed, had to be just another hangover from an unregenerate past."

(100): "tribes" both pre-existed the colonial encounter, and were constituted by its divide-and-rule aspirations

(102-103): an important point about the modernizers here--they recognized pre-colonial Africa in rhetoric, as a response to colonial racism. but they didn't integrate it into their activism or aspirations.

(104): and the British tried to combat the new appeal of the modernizers by handing authority to the chiefs

(106-108): there is--and this is perhaps another merit of Davidson's book--an honest critique here about the shallowness with which many of these new "nationalists" came to know their country. and in that sense one can understand Davidson's lamenting a "lost possibility" in the failure of precolonial authority and these elites to ally. but, at the same time, i find it hard to believe that the "masses" wouldn't have been written out of that picture, as well (and indeed, that's where his account is most deficient, is it not? in the contention that these pre-colonial elites had "legitimacy" in the eyes of the masses...)

(112): [here he starts to give his thesis some substance, i think]: "The competing interests of the "elites," as they began to be called by sociologists and others, took primacy over the combined interests of the "masses." The "social conflict," one may say, was subordinated to the "national conflict."

(113-114): [two principles that led to the "fall," even if Davdison overstates his case, here] "The first principle, universally accepted like the second, was that advancement toward the nation-state was the only feasible route of escape from the colonial condition... Any such large and constructive reorganization of frontiers could never suit the imperial powers, eager still to retain "neocolonialist" levers of interest and influence... The second principle, servant of the first, was that the 'national conflict,' embodied in the rivalries for executive power between contending groups or individuals among the 'elites,' must continue to take priority over a 'social conflict' concerned with the interests of most of the inhabitants of these new nation-states."

(127): [the Janus-face of nationalism. in essence a class critique, but articulated through this dichotomy between national/social]--"After the unification of Italy in 1861, the new Italian nation-state would turn quite shamelessly to colonial enterprises in Africa. The very steamship company whose boats had carried the Thousand to Sicily would be foremost in Italian colonialism; and Garibaldi himself would speak in favor of loading on Africans the chains of servitude that Italy had struck from itself. But in 1860, for a little while, the two aspects of nationalism--the 'national' and the 'social'--were in happy unison"

(134) [CRITICAL PASSAGE--it prefigures a critique of Davidson's overgenerous portrayal of the pre-national, even as it indicates his awareness of the importance of that same critique] "the rise of nationalism in its nineteenth-century context was the outcome of a combination of effort between rising 'middle classes,' few in numbers and weak in the power to impose themselves, and the multitudinous masses of the 'lower orders.' After gaining power, of course, the 'middle orders' would abandon the 'lower orders'--just as, in the Italian case, most of the survivors of Garibaldi's Thousand were demobilized into poverty or unemployment... But that would be later: meanwhile, nationalism could advance boldly under the banners of populist democracy. Indispensable to nation-statis success in all the many upheavals of the nineteenth century, as E.J. Hobsbawm has insisted, were the agitations and uprising of peasants and urban workers. These were 'lower orders' which had until now played no role on the widening stage of statist claims and conflicts. But now it was the 'laboring poor' who died on the democratic barricades of Europe's 'great year of revolutions,' in 1848, against aristocratic and tyrannical power."

(135): [can't fight the feudals without fire, after all] "... all the political revolutions which reduced Europe to nation-states were in fact or immediate anticipation, social revolutions of the labouring poor."

(136): "But all the democratic revolutions of 1848 were crushed. The nation-states that came eventually to birth were to be the political work of 'middle strata' who prudently survived aristocratic reprisals, while the 'labouring poor' paid the price of defeat... Nation-state Europe began in the bloodshed would stay with nation-state Europe"

(138): [class consciousness dressed up as national consciousness--CRITICAL] "But the "middle strata," some of whom also did their fair share of fighting and dying, needed to seat their legitimacy as rulers on something more solid and respectable than class ambition... They presented their nation-state as the product of a national consciousness rather than a class consciousness. In this way the emergent state seemed to be the product of nationalism, whereas in truth it was nearly always the other way around. As it was going to be in AFrica in the twentieth century, it was the European state in the nineteenth century that demanded the nation."

(146): [in Romania, made independent through this kind of work, the national question didn't resolve the social question, and the peasants rose]: "This peasant revolt of 1907 was a vast and desperate affair; but it failed. True to the style and form of the nineteenth century, the "romantic nationalists" in power came smartly to earth and called out the truths... When good national order was restored, the toll of the peasant dead was found to be about 10,000 persons."

(166): [this is a timeless and critical story--struggle invariably prefigures more than the world it consolidates] "Like the European movements of the 1840s, it was always the 'labouring poor' whose involvement and effort in the 1950s gave the tribunes of the 'national struggle,' who were the educated elite in one manifestation or antother, their ground to stand on. Without...mass pressure, the educated elite would have remained upon the sidelines of everyday life..."

(173): notes on the depoliticization of the civil service

(178-179): the civil service was not anticipating independence--still obsessed with the African's inability to govern

(183): "Like it or not, the leading nationalists found themselves obliged by imperialist policies, fashioned in London and Paris, 'to seek independence within the existing power unit' of their colony, rather than in any more rational or historically logical territorial unit."

(190): suggestion, here, that the planet of the slums was born in the mass flight of peasantry to the cities in the wake of the great depression. "as many as one in six AFricans were already living in 1946 outside the rural areas that had produced them; by 1953 the proportion was one in four..." [the numbers are modest, relative to what we see today]

(192): "Yet Africa even in the 1980s, with some 450 million inhabitants, or at least triple the population of a century earlier, would still be relatively underpopulated when compared with other continents. What looked like a crisis of "overpopulation' was really a crisis of underproduction of food and maldistribution of goods."

(206): it is almost like he is saying that the only type of "class society" is bourgeois society--that is not what he is arguing, but almost

(208): "The systems that were 'taken over' might vary in detail and culture, but all of them--from the British and French through to the Belgian and Portuguese and Spanish--supposed that the actual work of government, and all the crucial decisions depending on it and from it, would be exercised by a bureaucracy trained and tested in authoritarian habits and practices."

(210-211): the well-known story of the modern country celebrating its city at the expense of its countryside; "Part of that price has had to be paid in a reliance on imports of foreign food into a continent which had always been self-sufficient in food."

(220): the continuing tragedy of the terms-of-trade

(225): important reflections on "tribalism," the new kind, and its evolution--argument that it represented a survival strategy in the absence of a viable state to protect individuals from slaving and colonial excess.

(232): [this will be Davidson's response to the critique of his presentation of bourgeois nationalism--and it is very apt]: "If the solutions of capitalism meant turning one's back on a nationalism centered on the social struggle for improvement, and were in any case hamstrung by the absence of a 'true economic bourgeoisie,' what about the solutions of socialism? The trouble with them, of course, was that a 'true economic working-class' had likewise failed to appear. Rural multitudes had become proletarians in the sense of posessing nothing. But this was not at all the same thing as saying that in doing this they acquired a proletarian consciousness of class and category, and would or could unite around that consciousness..."

(251): [nice re-statement of the argument, in short] "The colonizing process was invariably presented... as a 'modernizing process.' In fact, as we have seen, it induced in practice one after another form of moral and political disintegration. The decolonization process has repeated this downward slide. Once the force of the 'social struggle' of the colonized was spent, the drive against social inequalities and perceived injustices was supplanted by a 'national struggle' within the institutional 'containers' of an imported nation-statism. At this stage there ensued, and evidently could not but ensue, a dogfight scramble for state power by would-be ruling groups acting outside and against the rules and restraints of historical cultures and their compromises. To reach for the AK-47 was then a step both short and easy."

(261): important reflections on bourgeoisie-formation--if foreign aid fails, maybe banditry will succeed? (indeed, he adds, it has always been banditry)

(267): in Central and Eastern europe, he argues, the formations that emerged at independence matched better onto the precolonial past than in Africa.

(268-269): what's more, they possessed two characteristics further in parallel to the African experience: (1) the incapacity of the 'middle strata' to assert itself; (2) the structural, economic weakness that reduced all of the new states to "more or less complete submission to external controls."

(272): ecological catastrophe that was Stalinist model

(273): [BRILLIANT!]1953, in East Germany: "After the Berlin rising of that year, official leaflets of the government informed 'the people' that they had 'forfeited the confidence of the government'--in which case, asked Brecht, would it not be simpler 'for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?'

(287): towards an alternative nation-statism: "for was it after all so sure that newly clamorous nationalities in, for example, Soviet Asia were shouting for nation-statism; or were they not in revolt, rather, against being governed from afar, governed by a rigidly centralized system they could seldom influence, and therefore governed badly?"

(295): in Davidson's defence, when he speaks about the "stable" societies in pre-colonial Africa, he is employing his expertise and being selective. he identifies only select societies, which fulfill the criteria of being responsive to their people. insofar as we can only suspect him of over-reaching, it behooves us to be kinder to his analysis--because the rest of his book does demonstrate that he's alive to the "social question"

(300-305ish): interesting analysis of Angola and Mozambique where, he argues, admirable intentions went astray in their overemphasis on central authority vis-a-vis peasant spontaneity. failed to strike the balance between a strong state, on the one hand, and a responsive state, on the other.

(315): nonetheless it's clear where the solution lies, for davidson--"...the modern state can become stable and progressive only in the measure that it wins back for itself the popular legitimacy it has lost or never sufficiently posessed, and that it can do this only by processes of participatory democracy, no matter where the actual mechanisms may be found to be."