"de pie, nunca de rodillas"

2012-02-02T14:59:00.000-08:00

da bible, God

(4): standardview is that Torah was divine word mediated by Moses, but narrative indicatesotherwise (instances pointing to authorship later than Moses)

(4-5): moderntheory is that Toran is not a unified whole—rather, composed of four sourcesthat were redacted together (earliest source 10^th century BC, latestwas sixth century BC)

(7): claims thatMoses wrote Genesis appear only in Greco-Roman period—originally anonymous

(8): earliestparts of Genesis were written by scribes in the context of monarchies of earlyJudah/Israel, but later parts were written as late as after fall of monarchy in586BCE

(8): in short: “Genesis was written overcenturies by multiple authors…” [what are the implications of this, for thereligious? for the sociological?]

(8): dividedinto two sections: I. the primeval history, chs 1-11; II. ancestral history,chs 12-50

(10): not scientificallyaccurate, butthis is a modern concern [hmm]. treat it metaphorically or allegorically[OK—what does this mean? take an example]

Genesis

(12): humanityis made in the image of God [what does this imply about our status? about good/evil?about free will?]

(14): twostories about creation, side-by-side [compare/contrast]

(15): theserpent and Evil, and God’s humanity [good place to raise problem ofomniscience/omnipotence]

(19): thewickedness of humanity, and God’s commitment to destroy them [again, theproblem of Evil]

(25): God fearsthe unity of humanity [God’s pettiness in nipping a rivalry in the bud? what’sthis all about?]

(32): Goddemanding sacrifice after sacrifice [why? God as petty, jealous, cravingattention]

(35): Godsometimes in the plural, sometimes in the singular [the evolution of monotheism]

(35): God askingabout whereabouts of Sarah [omniscience?]

(36-37): raininghellfire on Sodom and Gomorrah [genocide and destruction. what kind of God,again?]

(64): Onanspills his semen on the ground, and is put to death.

(65): makingslaves of the Egyptians

(80): Joseph’sbrothers are not morally culpable, because his explusion was all a part of God’splan [This raises some very thorny questions about morality and responsibility.In fact, it suggests that there can be none. We’d have to find some way todistinguish between this action, and others—so?]

Exodus

(81): similarly,“best understood as a composite of traditions shaped over many centuries by anunkown number of anonymous storytellers and writers.” clearly not written byMoses.

(81-82): explusionof Pharaoh’s workforce, figure like Moses, mass emigration—none of this ismentioned in nonbiblical sources. likely that it drew on some sort ofliberation of ‘West Asiatics’

(84): God isrewarding the midwives’ fear of him [again, God as petty, vainglorious, etc.]

(85): God ‘remembers’his covenant, after decades of their being oppressed! [it took long enough—again,what kind of omniscient, omnipotent God]

(87): God givesMoses evidence of his authority, via miracles [what does this imply, for faith?Isn’t faith supposed to be precisely the opposite?]

(88-99): astonishing--God keeps hardening the Pharaoh’sheart, but then holding him and the Egyptian people responsible for the Pharaoh’sintransigence [sadism, pure and simple]

(91): referringto his future crimes as ‘wonders’

(97): the massmurder of Egyptian firstborns

(98): andPassover, to consecrate this ‘blessing’

(101-102):Pharaoh was going to let them be, but God hardens his heart so that he pursuesMoses. Motivation is to ‘gain glory for myself’[Anything to give Him anopportunity to murder dozens of people, of course. ]

(109): theChosen people (“you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples”)

(110): “I am ajealous God” [damn right]

(110): collectivepunishment (“punishing children for the iniquity of parents”)

(111): God,again, demanding that the people ‘fear’ him

(112):injunctions regarding how to handle slavery

(114): youshouldn’t charge interest to the poor [shall we take this one to heart, then?]

(116): injunctionto demolish and expel the Amorites, Hittites, Perizittes, Canaanites, Hivites,Jebusites..

(129-130): whereMoses convinces God not to commit genocide, once again. though Moses returnsfrom the Mountain and orders the death of three thousand brothers, sons, etc.

(131): again,collective punishment (“visiting iniquity of the parents upon the children andthe chidren’s children”)

- - - -

(1) The problem of evil: whence does it arise?

(a)On the one hand, if God is omniscient/omnipotent, he’s caught in acontradiction. Surely you can’t hold people responsible.

(b)But let’s say he’s not, and that we allow humans free will. Interestingly, there’splenty of evidence for his not being, throughout what we read. Doesn’t thismean we’re working with a different conception of God than many of us probablyimagine the Semitic tradition as defending? Maybe that’s OK.

(c)This doesn’t, though, free God of the obligation to respond to much of how hedeals with Evil, in what we read. Tare several instances where he is clearlyresponsible for the actions of certain humans (cf. Pharaoh), yet he punishesthem nonetheless. There are also clear examples of punishment being leviedagainst those who are responsible only because they have the misfortune ofbeing linked, by blood, to the ‘criminal’ (cf. the Egyptian people). What isthe principle being advanced here, then? [Hint: it is totalitarian]

(d)And the awfulness of punishment? Genesis and Exodus show a God runningroughshod over civil liberties. In other words, even if we think there is freewill, and we argue that certain humans sinned, the punishments are fierce.

(2) The question of the Bible’s historicity.There are a whole host of laws and edicts that we would deem insane, by today’sstandards [Examples?]. We might explain these by arguing that the Bible oughtto be set in its historical and social context (punishments are severe, butthey’re par for the course; endorsing slavery, yes, but it was a modal social institutionat the time). But we’ve then stripped the text of its sacred character. Itbecomes a historical document. This raises a few questions.

(A)Doesn’t this spell trouble for believers? Why follow injunctions laid down inthis text, versus others, if it’s not actually the work of God, but of anynumber of anonymous humans working over centuries to codify common wisdom? (Related: if not sociologically, whatmight it mean for a believer to interpret this textallegorically/metaphorically [I have no idea])

(B)It raises a whole new line of questioning: why are certain parts of the textare emphasized, and others de-emphasized. Politicians may appeal to God, butthey’re not discussing God’s injunction that you can’t charge interest on loansto the poor. Why do certain ideas get picked up at certain times, and not atothers? In other words, if we accept that organized religion is historicallyembedded, what explains its character, and its evolution?

(3) The problem of Faith. What is it? HereGod ‘proves’ his authority by appealing to a series of miracles, in thepresence of Moses. But if the people’s faith is grounded in miracles (and, what’sa corollary, God’s destructive power), is it really Faith? Isn’t Faith whatprevails in the absence of evidence, not in the presence of it?

(4) The principle of ‘a Chosen people.’ Whatis the principle being advanced here? And to what extent do we expect thechosen people to be favoured over others? At what point does it become wrong?

(5) Emancipatory possibilities. Corradispoke about the Bible as inaugurating a sense of social justice. Do you seethis, in the liberation of the Israelities, from Egypt? [As a weak claim about ‘liberation’in the abstract, this is bizarre (i.e., that a general sense of justice isproduced by this incident): how do you highlight this specific instance (sincethere are probably plenty of others that could be adduced as general origins),how do you substantiate the causal chain (this weak sense is supposed to becomea strong sense, somewhere down the line)? As a strong claim, God save us fromthis definition of social justice (since it coincides with his Wrath againstthe Egyptians). And there is the absurdity of all the counterfactuals raised(had this not been written down by any number of scribes, we would not have hada sense of ‘social justice’?!). Surely it’s sufficient to say that appeals to socialjustice emerge wherever we see a concrete clash of interests.

(6) Looking at religion ‘sociologically.’Corradi discussed this at length, in lecture [What did he say? Durkheim, etc.]. This follows from stripping the Bible of its sacred character (though it’snot necessary to do so, to examine this angle of religion). We look at its role,in this world, in creating a sense ofcommunity through ritual, shared belief, etc. Compare, for example, what itmeans to celebrate Passover sociologically, and what it meansideologically/religiously [community ritual vs. commemoration of the slaughterof Egyptian firstborns]

(7) The Western tradition. The purpose ofthis class is to substantiate the claim that there is something universal, inthe particular. We’ll talk about this more, with Pericles. But do we seeanything in the Bible that we would identify as either factually universal(i.e., it actually prevails universally), or desirably universal (i.e., part of what we think a good society shouldhave)?

(8): The question of monotheism. Corradidiscussed observing the evolution of this sense of God’s oneness. And indeed,there are several moments in the text that hint at a plurality of Gods.

2012-02-01T14:43:00.000-08:00

clyde barrow, critical theories of the State

(6): Welfare State doesn't redistribute from rich to poor, but from lucky to unlucky [hmm]

(6): distribution of income from rich to poor is the work, instead, of Trade Union's, not the institutions of the Welfare State [i.e., unemployment insurance, etc.]. the premise, again, is that one has to work or be attempting to work to be eligible

(11): Lukacs wants to claim that Marxist theory refers to a method. But Marxism is rooted in certain concepts (relations of production, surplus value, exploitation, etc.) and should rise and fall with those concepts. [AMEN]

(17): Capitalist class is economic network based both on institutional position (managers, etc.) and property relations (i.e., ownership). Comprising about .5 to 1% of the population. A highly diversified working class comprises about 85% of the population.

instrumentalism, or plain Marxism

(18): for instrumentalists, this capitalist class escapes anarchy/achieves coherence through mechanisms illuminated by

positional analysis (interlocking directorates, etc.)
socialization analysis (ideology, schooling, etc.)

(25): identifying ideological subsystem as part of the State [this is silly--and he raises the problem in a later chapter: this risks making the State an 'ideological' construct. we should agree on a minimal working condition, and then think about the ways it intervenes in society, sure. But not define it by its interventions]

(26): colonization studies

(26): a historical shift from the legislative to the executive branch, in order to facilitate cohesive, regular intervention

(28): challenge of explaining why State managers (mid-level bureaucrats) intervene in capitalist ways. Miliband's explanation is ideological [can't we have a 'rules of the game' explanation?]

(30): Special interests dominate on the most important issues

(33): challenge of explaining why instrumentalism doesn't culminate in the domination of the State by competing SI networks. Answer is because the capitalist class is also organized--it has 'policy planning networks'

(40): instrumentalists see reform as the product of (a) popular protest; (b) looking out for long-term interest

(44): for instrumentalists, social democracy is an example of how capturing the State executive can yield tangible gains

(46): Poulantzas' critique that instrumentalism focuses on 'agency' to the exclusion of structure

(47): Offe's is that it can't explain well enough why things don't collapse into anarchy

(48): [challenge, in general, is to specify the mechanisms by which class struggle matters, in the instrumentalist theory of the State. proximately, need to keep business going without interruption; ultimately, danger of threat to established order, etc.]

(49): the challenge of falsifiability--but you can't rely on selective case studies, as Skocpol does, to 'alsify' the theory. especially when there's disagreement regarding the interpretation of those very same case studies.

structuralism, or neo-Marxism

(52): three sources of contradiction/crisis: (1) economic crisis; (2) class struggle; (3) uneven development

(58-59): Offe, Bridges, et. al. rescue structuralism from Poulantzian functionalism by noting two mechanisms

state's own fiscal functioning is bound up with the health of the economy
State's legitimacy is bound up with economy

(60): interesting--Best and Connolly note that this is particularly evident during downturns, as Democratic/progressive mayors have cowered in face of threat of capital flight

(61): as Przeworski has noted, these mechanisms imperil probability of a gradual road to socialism, because Capital responds

(62): soft vs. hard structuralism (i.e., do capitalists need associations?)

(68): table of pre-tax and post-tax income distribution, in US

(72): voluntarism doesn't equal methodological individualism

(73-75): imp, (alleged) problem w/ mechanism of capital flight [hmm, this is unconvincing--unclear data, untimely responses, and reliance on neo-classical wisdom. confuses the cashing out of the claims with its coherence as an argument.]

derivationist

(79): orienting claim is that State's role is to produce 'general conditions' conducive to capital accumulation. derived either from contradictory logic of capital accumulation, or from requirements of overseeing class struggle [well, obvious question is why? which it doesn't seem to answer, clearly]

(91): centralization of State authority typically seen as sign of greater autonomy

systems-analytic

(100): see graphic

(100-101): Offe's version: exclusion, maintenance, dependency and legitimacy principles

(104): 'antipodal trouble', for WS--i.e., in moment of crisis, it risks either a legitimacy crisis (via austerity and rollbacks), or a economic/politcial crisis (continuing social program while keeping dominant power relations intact) [got to break through!]

(111-112): again, importance of labour market particiaption to WS model--and thus, the problem posed by rising surplus populations and unemployment

(122): not legitimacy that people give the state, but rather their acquiescence

organizational realist

(125): state managers are self-interested maximizers whose main interest is to enhance their own institutional power. thus, state-capital relation is understood as marriage of convenience, in a sense [but this is not different from good structuralist version--State managers can have a whole host of projects in mind. the relevant question concerns the constraints imposed upon them]

(128): at moments of crisis, State managers will make their independence known [but (a) why, what's the mechanism, if not struggle? (b) cf. 2008-2012]

(131): four ways to assess the strength of States [interesting for Pak]

(135): Skocpol giving serious weight to the importance of inherited expertise (i.e., this explains why US has agricultural policy but no industrial policy, post GDepression)

(139) Skocpol proving only what she assumed, in case of AALL

2012-01-06T20:50:00.003-08:00

12/07/2011

readings today dealwith a transitional juncture in American history.

titled “the crisis ofliberalism”

typically this isidentified with the late 60s, with (1) civil rights movement; (2)anti-war movement; (3) decline of American economic hegemony

but, Vivek is saying,the core institutions of the 'liberal order' begin to degradeearlier. the quick collapse of liberalism is hard to understandunless you also understand the earlier erosion of the institutionsthat underpinned it.

what the readings todayreveal is that many of labour's gains had already beenlost/squandered—through, for example, the nature of Taft-Hartleyin1947. or, the break-up of the CIO and the expulsion of theCommunists in the early 1950s devastates the labour movement,changing the very image of what the labour movement ought to havebeen (i.e., towards officialdom, away from rank-and-file).

by the late 1950s,labour is in fact structurally very weak. it's ability to defenditself against capital is weak.

this weakness is maskedby two factors:

despite the defeats that sidelined efforts to institutionalize the shop-steward system, the shop-stewards haven't quite been displaced by the early- to mid- 1950s. this keeps alive some organizational capacity on the part of American workers, despite structural weakness.
more importantly, the period from 1945 to mid-50s, profits are heady and the going is good. workers win gains.

with the end of the1950s, though, the economic downturn begins to win. the pillarsupporting whatever little power labour had is taken away, andemployers begin to launch an offensive against rank-and-file power.by the 1960s, the day-to-day negotiation that shopstewards carriedout with management is being replaced by a bureaucratic grievanceprocedure.

workers find theirpower decreased, in short. grievances filed by workers start to pileup—unacknowleded and unaddressed.

as a consequence ofthis, the trade union leadership's legitimacy starts to erode. unionleaders are doing nothing to defend workers through the grievanceprocedure.

the rebellion in thelate 60s, which is the consequence of this, has the potential ofreproducing the 30s. but it very quickly meets with defeat.

the rank-and-filerebellion was more the 'last gasp' of the compact.

- - -

2012-01-06T20:50:00.001-08:00

11/30/2011

two issues

what was the political context for the emergence of American social democracy
what were the limitations of this framework (i.e., the New Deal)

the theoreticalchallenge, which is addressed to State theory, is to understand howto make sense of these policies.

the reason that this isa challenge, simply, to State theory is to make sense the content ofall of these policies associated with the New Deal.

in the 1980s, achallenge was posed by Skocpol, suggesting that Marxists tended tocollapse State power into class power. Marxists, she thinks, didn'tgive sufficient weight to goings-on in the State in their own right.She countered with 'state-centrism,' which was distinguished by itallowed for autonomy far more thoroughgoing than 'relative autonomy.'see 1983 article in Politics and Society, which launched the debate

she argued that theState was autonomous in two senses: (1) autonomous from class forces;(2) State managers have interests of their own, which are distinctand often independent from classes

the New Deal, for her,was an example of this.

there are twoexplanations of the New Deal.

the establishedposition, against which Skocpol arguing, was called 'corporateliberalism'--brought about by far-sighted, enlightened capitalists inrespose to the Great Depression, in order to rationalize thepolitical economy. two ends: (1) revive the economy; (2) achievelabour peace.

the New Deal policy isexplained as an expression of capitalist preferences, and the Statemore-or-less follows these dictates.

the neo-Marxistposition, noting that big chunks of the capitalist class were opposedto the New Deal, asked why it was that unenlightened capitalists lostout to enlightened capitalists? both Ferguson and Goldfield make theclaim that the core elements of the New Deal were opposed bycapitalists. what drove them to accept the reforms was driven by thelabour insurgency. the key trigger being the enormous costs that thelabour mobilization imposes on capital.

here, in Ferguson,those elements which could best afford the costs (foreign-oriented,capital-intensive) come around to the reforms. the textile industry,the Southern plantocracy are opposed, then, by the Rockefeller blocwhich breaks away and supports the reforms.

Goldfield's argument ismore-or-less consistent with this. he's more interested in directlyrebutting Skocpol, of course. the claim is that Skocpol overlooks thefact that it wasn't until the labour movement reached its zenith thatthe Roosevelt administration came around to the Wagner Act. theintensification of the labour movement, in other words, gave theadministration the wherewithal to approach the capitalist classpleading for concessions, and it gave them the support of a powerfulfraction of the bourgeoisie. the State found a political base withinthe ruling class.

the Lichtensteinreading was meant to convey some sense of the limitations of thepower that labour achieved. in Chp 7, he shows that the actual powersthat labour was able to wrest away from management remained quitelimited—the key thing was the system of institutionalizednegotiations that was put into place on a day to day level, betweenthe UAW and management. the instrument for negotiation in the 20s and30s centered around a very powerful shop-steward culture—the shopstewards were in a constant state of negotiation/challenge over theconditions of work. plants were run through constant negotiationbetween management and shop stewards.

the UAW tried toinitially institutionalize this power on the part of shop stewards.rank-and-file constantly pushed shop stewards to represent theirmilitancy. the union was always a union movement, even in day to dayreproduction.

Auto industries foundthis intolerable. in 1940 there's an epochal stand-off between GM andthe UAW. GM demands that an arbitration system replace the shopstewards system. Reuther concedes, which is remembered as an act ofbetrayal. one reason that he did this, of course, was to marginalizethe Left within the UAW, as part of his alliance with other elementsagainst the Communists/Socialists, who were arguing for a system ofinstitutionalize shop-steward power.

this had the effect ofde-mobilizing the rank-and-file. the shop-steward was replaced by aCommitteeman. workers had to wait for days/weeks/months. over timethis transformed the structure of the union—the whole point wasthat grievances were to be handled without disruption of production.what this did was it took the rug out from any possibility ofwildcat/extra-contractual action. the union quickly became aguarantor of labour peace.

Lichtenstein emphasizesthe importance of this turn. it incapacitated the unions for laterdecades—this was an important step towards the enfeeblement of thelabour movement. obviously it wasn't exposed in the boom years, butas the crisis set in, so did the movement's rot.

- - -

shop-stewardcounterfactual is not just imaginary—England and Sweden had strongshop-steward movements.

2012-01-06T20:49:00.001-08:00

10/11/2011

botwinick, oct 11^th

new left falselyunderstood lack of labour organizing as failure of Marxism; in fact,it's consistent with a more clearly reconstructed version of Marxism,and an appreciation of the obstacles to organizing.

these are internalconstraints on the organization of labour.

today we'll discussexternal threats.

even when workers getorganized, even once the overcome the constituent, internalobstacles, their ability to win concessions is constrained by thelogic of accumulation—the context set by captialist competition.

the central conclusionis that its not only economic outcomes that are governed by the logicof accumulation, but also political outcomes.

this is why Marx spendsthirty years on DK.

first limit:profitability—capitalism has in-built, system-widemechanisms which repel improvement of working-class life. if wagesrise, rate of investment declines, which means employment generationslows down, the reserve army of labour rises, and wages are broughtdown. this is the constraint of full employment. in contemporarycapitalism, bringing the State in, there exist institutions thatguarantee a baseline level of unemployment—the Fed's job is this,basically ('profit-squeeze' theory of crisis would fit here).

this is a limit on thesystem as a whole; wages as a whole, and profits as a whole.

but capital doesn'texist as homogenous units that are identical. the level ofheterogeneity is important.

there are firms thatare very capital-intensive, some with better techniques, etc.

workers, when theyengage in bargaining, confront capitalists with different degrees ofproductivity and capital intensity—which will mean that they willincur different costs, when they concede to workers.

now, there are threelimits

(1) 'costs ofobstruction'--as soon as employees take up demands, employershave to decide whether it is worth it to heed the immediate impulseto repress their demands. where the costs of obstruction aresufficiently high, the capitalist will not say 'no,' but will relent.

workers have to imposecosts sufficient to bring the employer to the table.

now, it will depend ontwo things

(2) do you work for theregulating capital?

reguating capitals arethose plants operating with the most widely available, more-or-lesswidely available techniques. we're not talking about those plantswith unique, and impossible to replicate techniques.

otherwise, workers areemployed mainly in subdominant capitals.

the limits to wagedemands are greater in subdominant capitals than in regulatingcapitals. an employer's ability to stay in business will depend onhis ability to re-adjust to these costs. regulating capitals have agreater ability to recoup the losses that come from wage increases.either they'll raise prices, or, more likely, some will leave thesector, inducing higher prices through reduced supply.

after regulatingcapitals have raised wages, subdominant capitals can beorganized—this is because they run the risk of going out ofbusiness, if they raise prices before regulating capitals. but ifthey do it after those have been successfully organized, workers havea better shot.

(3) the capitalintensity of your sector

when wage costs arehigh as a portion of total costs, wage increases are very difficultfor capital to accommodate.

in the history of theUS, this theoretical framework has purchase. it's at least part ofthe reason that organizing in the South was less effective thanorganizing in the North—it's not just racism, nor is it mainlyracism.

labour unions targetedthe 'price-leaders' in auto, rubber, etc. there was an understandingthat if we can organize these firms, the rest will follow. Weinberg,research director at UAW, said (1) success at better firms isimportant; (2) less efficient firms shouldn't be rewarded for beingless efficient by being allowed to avoid unions—in essence, tryingto replicate Sweden's efforts (though, w/o active labour marketpolicy, you're fucked).

it's as the crisis setsin, and US industries cease to be regulating capitals on a globallevel, they become less accommodating to wage increases—this, atthe same time that the labour movement calcifies into thebureaucratic monolith with which we're familiar. hence, concessionafter concession after concession is the story of the 1970s and1980s.

- - -

difficulty is thatbusiness unionism breeds in the context of declining industries

- - -

(1) getting rid oflabour-intensive jobs?

2012-01-06T20:48:00.003-08:00

10/04/2011

today, the issue ofclass formation

among historians, classformation refers to the structural process by which a class emerges.this isn't our concern, today—not the emergence of socialstructures, but rather the formation of class political capacity. itsorganization as a coherent actor.

you would think thatnothing is more important in Marxist theory than the question ofclass formation. but, as a theoretical issue, the issue has beensidelined; it's been central to political debates, without beingheavily theorized.

the questions werealways dealt with concretely, in context, but not cashed out inabstract terms.

the SecondInternational is full of this kind of stuff; deserves to be mined forinsights. we don't have 'data', because—unlike then—we're nowherenear power.

this issue is dealtwith, theoretically, by the 'New Left'. it didn't last long,unfortunately—partly because the New Left gives up on class, butalso because not many of the individuals on the New Left wereembedded in organizing and struggle.

central to Offie andWiezenthal's argument is the claim that there's a systematic linkbetween class structure and class formation—the structure sets theconstraints on actors' ability to organize around their interests.importantly, this is a story of differential constraints.

the argument is made ata very high level of abstraction. a strength of the theory, insofaras this suggests that certain barriers to organizing are intrinsic tothe structure of capitalism. descending levels of abstraction,introducing race and whatnot, will not erase these basic barriers.

why do classesorganize, at all?

indeed, Offie andWiezenthal argue that only one of capitalism's two constitutiveclasses has to organize. capitalists do not need organization, inorder to advance their interests. the very fact of capitalistreproduction ensures that capitalists keep the upper hand.

workers, however,cannot advance their interests except through organizing. ifleft to themselves, workers are at the mercy of capitalists.

thus, for capitalists,political organization merely amplifies an already-existingstructural advantage. in effect, capitalists can devote theirenergies to breaking workers' organization.

it is workers that haveto expend their resources on forming organizations.

thus, first, thefacts about the class structure explain why some actors have toorganize themselves.

the second partof the argument concerns the question of what makes workerssuccessful. for the New Left, the failure of workers to organize wasan indictment of Marxism, exhibiting the irrelevance of 'class' tosocial structure, etc. hence the flight from class.

the power of Offie andWiezenthal's analysis is that it undermines this, at its root. theysuggest that the 'infinite divisions' argument presupposes a world ofinterest groups, not of classes. this is pluralism—politics comesout of the contingent clash of interest groups.

(agency is an 'elixir'that dissolves all social structures)

Offie and Wiezenthalreject this. centrally, their argument is that the structure ofcapitalism doesn't just distribute interests differentially, but italso distributes capacities unevenly. the organization of workers iscontinually undercut by the structure of capitalism.

the inability ofworkers to organize is not a refutation of Marx's theory, but aconfirmation.

why? what are themechanisms?

when capitalists andworkers undertake their exchange on the market, they do this as classactors.

when they organizethemselves, inhibiting mechanisms appear.

the firstweakness, for workers, is the uniqueness of labour-power as acommodity. capital is a fluid, malleable substance, that can bedetached, split up, and also amalgamate. it's never attached to aperson. workers cannot become bigger and bigger workers,individually—they can only become bigger associations of workers.this is associating (for workers), versus merging (for capital).

critically, this facthas differential consequences. when you try and form bigger andbigger associations, workers will be more effective—BUT, you haveto combat the problem of its constitutive heterogeneity.

three problemsemerge.

first, theproblem of trade-offs—different workers will attach differentvaluations to different issues/demands, in a campaign. associationswill have to prioritize demands. the issue of interest aggregation.

second,different workers have different bargaining positions. for someworkers (the least-skilled, the poorest, etc.), collectiveorganization is everything; for others, though, there are workers forwhom individual survival strategies are practicable. [here we'vedescended a level of abstraction, of course].

now, the task fororganizers is to convince some workers to redefine their interests.

third, for everyworker who is employed by a capitalist, he cannot avoid the problemthat he can't escape his employers' interest. workers depend on theemployer for their livelihood. the viability of the employers firmhas to be one of the constraints that the workers take on board, whenaggregating their interests. this is not true for the employer.

this is the structuralroot of business unionism (the philosophy that says labor and capitalare partners in an enterprise). it's rational, all else being equal.this is where Bob Fitch goes wrong.

fourth, allunion organizing takes place in the context of managerial power. onceyou see reason for some employees to resist association, employershave the power to repress all organizing efforts. William Z. Foster'sessays, on this score.

these are all thedilemmas that enter into the formation of organizations.

the next dilemma, Offieand Wiezenthal argue, regards organizational sustainability. unionsneed to be large, but largeness begins to entail trade-offs that leadto bureaucratization. unions, also, have to exert control over theirmembership—they have, after all, promised their employers labourpeace. they have to squelch the internal life of the union. as thishappens, the union is less likely to generate feelings of solidarity,and thus less likely to induce members to act. workers are morelikely to become free-riders, seeking to minimize the costs they willbear in the course of collective action.

thus, if despitecapitalism's continual generation of antagonisms, it remains stable,this is why: it is exceedingly difficult for workers to effectuatethe strategies required to defend their interests. capitalistdominance is built into the structure of capitalism.

this is the cruel ironyof capitalism—the agents that most need organization are those whoare least able to effectuate it.

- - - - - -

2012-01-06T20:48:00.001-08:00

09/28/2011

class structuresgenerate rules of reproduction.

in capitalism,capitalists have to find and utilize labour to produce commoditiesthat they have to sell, competitively, on the market.

workers have to findemployment, and submit to the authority of capitalists for a givenperiod of time (to some extent).

this process pits thesetwo classes against one another, generating antagonisms.

'labor and monopolycapital' virtually started labour process theory. this was anenormously influential book.

thelabour process is common to all social structures. defined as the wayin which workers and means of production are put together, to producegoods. has a validity across MoP. in class societies, this canalways be divided into necessary labour, and surplus labour.

butthere's something distinctive about capitalism. prior to capitalism,the weight of the surplus component is limited by the necessarycomponent; the surplus component is a residual. this is because of(1) weakly developed productive forces; (2) in all pre-capitalistsocieties, the guiding motif is use-values—what is produced isgeared to 'needs' of producing classes [is this the best way tocash this out? shouldn't it, instead, be in terms of what producerscan be forced to do? because there are always imperatives to increasesurplus]

inother words, the surplus is not driven by the immediate needs of thesurplus class to produce a profit—they will need militaryexpenditure, and they will need things to consume—but neither ofthese imperatives place a significant weight on the direct producers.[a 'weak compulsion' argument (which is different from Brenner'sarguments about feudalism, which is more of an 'incapacity to compel'argument]

incapitalism, all the emphasis is on the valorization process—thelabour process is now subjugated to it.

thesecarries two consequences

now, the capitalist is not merely trying to extract surplus labour—but he's trying to extract it to the maximum level possible.
moreover, the capitalist wants to extract surplus at levels of efficiency that enable him to compete effectively.

inother words—capitalists try to get workers to work as long and ashard as possible in order to successfully compete.

oncethe capitalist takes control of the labour process and tries toextract labour at a competitive level, it generates a conflict. thedrive to rationalize the labour process invariably induces aresponse, to resist.

thisis the crucial precondition for the resort to managerial authority.managers exist for one basic reason—workers don't do whatcapitalists want them to do, absent being told to. workers are notfundamentally driven by the competitive logic that drivescapitalists.

managershave to find ways to reduce workers' resistance to the change of thelabour process and technological change—and the way they do this isby removing their control over work. one example of this, of course,is through the breaking of the monopoly of knowledge that workershave over their work (vivek arguing that breaking monopoly ofknowledge is an instance of a more generic drive to seize control;otherwise unduly highlighted in the literature, instead of this moreimportant fact of seizing control).

this is the source of'de-skilling'. in some ways, this isn't the best term—what hemeans, more, is the 'breaking down' of tasks, within a workplace. astasks are broken down, workers will require less skills, of course.BUT, this should not be mistaken as a secular tendency towardsde-skilling, at the general level of the economy. Braverman'sargument is cashed out at the level of the job/task, not the level ofthe economy.

the issue ofresistance—Braverman is often accused of ignoring resistance ofworkers to technical change. (1) this misundertands the object ofBraverman's work—he isn't predicting an inevitable outcome. he'ssimply trying to theorize capitalism's drive to break down the labourprocess. resistance introduces ineterminacy, OK; (2) moreover,empirically—the basic fact is that capitalism has won.

the goal of theory isnot to make you feel better about the world. one has to understandhow capitalism works; except in very exceptional circumstances, forshort periods of time, capitalists win. 'if everything wascontingent, we wouldn't need socialism.'

is Foucault likeBraverman? first, Foucault doesn't have a theory—no explanation ofwhere a 'disciplinary' drive comes from. for Braverman, its Capital;for Foucault, doesn't exist. second, Braverman'snormative/descriptive framework has some understanding of what humanflourishing is, what human interests are. this is what it means forthis to be a 'degradation' of work. Foucault's entire project isdriven by the denial of human interests.

in Foucault's ontology,the human agent is the consequence of power structures. whereas forBraverman, we are confronting humans, with interests, stuck in powerstructures.

re: racism, twodistinct claims: (1) capitalism everywhere generates racism; (2)race/racism is integral to capitalism, when describing it at thehighest level of abstraction.

it doesn't follow thatyou can abstract away from gendered/racialized identities tounderstand the real world. although, of course, we are stakingimportance in our abstract model—we think capitalism's drives existeverywhere and importantly independent of any given culture. we thinkit explains the world—re: race, we think it explains the terrainthat generates racism (in other words, we don't give it theoreticalpriority—its not the 'base'), and on which we will have to fightour anti-racist struggle.

see Jane Humphries RRPEon women's oppression

abstract labour is nota different kind of labour, from concrete labour—labour is alwaysand everywhere concrete.

2012-01-06T20:47:00.001-08:00

09/21/2011

EO Wright's fundamentalcontribution is that class is not 'income', but the conditions underwhich people labour in order to acquire a certain income.

today, we'll see theway the class structure generates strategies for capitalists, andworkers.

fundamental fact isthtat everyone has to sell in order to buy—capitalism generalizesmarket-dependence (preferred, by Vivek, to the idea that what definescapitalism is 'generalized commodity production. the two go together,but the former is preferable as a succint conceptualization ofcapitalism).

what distinguishesworkers and capitalists is what they have to sell.

w-class sellslabour-power

capitalists sell goodsproduced by labour-power. this, of course, presumes that they havebought labour-power (so they must buy labour-power in order to beable to sell commodities).

M – C – M is adescription of what capitalists do, but it's at too high a level ofabstraction. because this also describes what merchants do. andthat's not what we're after. merchants sell goods that others haveproduced; but capitalists sell goods whose production they havesupervised.

C – M – C is thelogic in which the worker is entrapped, he/she is after use-values.his/her main concern is the reproduction of oneself.

(1) so, in order forthe capitalist to begin the production process—the capitalist hasto 'mobilize' labour. this is not historically trivial, at all; theexistence of a large mass of wage-labourers is historically specificto capitalism required the creation of a 'doubly free' body ofworkers.

when capitalists'first' incorporated workers into the production process, they werefound with the skills of artisans of feudalism—an accommodation ofthe skill-set with which workers were found. they, first, wereworking at the behest of capitalists, but not at the command ofcapitalists.

this, of course, is theformal subsumption of labour, to be contrasted to the realsubsumption of labour.

(2) the secondthing that capitalists must do is exploit labour – they mustproduce a surplus. workers will have to work long enough to produceenough stuff, over and above costs, to be worth it for thecapitalist. here, of course, we get the struggle over the length ofthe working-day. the struggle, for the capitalist, is to make thesurplus part of the day as relatively large as possible.

there are twotactics

(a) extension of thelength of the working-day—increase of surplus-value by absolutemeans

(b) decreasing theduration of the portion that goes into necessary labour-time, whichis effected by productivity improvements in the production of themeans of subsistence—increase of surplus-value by relative means.by and large, this latter fact will be an 'unintended consequence' ofcapitalist competition.

in general, the formalsubsumption of labour is co-eval with the production of absolutesurplus-value. the real subsumption of labour, on the other hand, istypically co-eval with the production of relative surplus-value.

but the pursuit ofabsolute surplus-value lives on, of course, in advanced capitalism.

historically, theachievement of the 8-hr working day initiated the 'shift' to theproduction of relative surplus-value. (1) there's a question, here,of course about collective irrationality being the result ofindividually rational action. (2) moreover, why isn't competitionsufficient, in this stage of capitalism? it's not clear that modernmanufacturing begins, really, until the 1870s. economic historiansare clear that machine innovation was in quite specific parts inEngland till much later than is commonly understood.

why do you need tocontrol the labour process if you're producing relativesurplus-value? this is Braverman, of course—you need the power tofire workers, and you need authority to shape the labour-process.

(3) the thirdthing that capital has to do is reproduce the labour supply. but docapitalists, as a class, possess the rationality to do this, ifthey're pursuing their individual self-interest? there are a lot ofradical/left theorists who have argued that sections of capital havebeen 'more rational' in this regard; Marx's arguments, aroundabsolute surplus-value, suggest differently. if the latter is true,you obviously need a third actor (the State).

the reproduction ofworkers has to occur in a way, of course, that also reproduces theirdependence on capitalists. if you were to give everyone an 'opt-out'that also reproduces them (a guaranteed living-wage), capitalistswill oppose it.

here introducinggeneral law of capitalist accumulation.

as capitalism grows,you might well get tighter labour markets. wage is bid upwards.

however, the law ofaccumulation also brings with it technical change (at a faster rate,when wages are high), which expels workers into the reserve army oflabour. this maintains a baseline level of competition amongstworkers, for jobs. all this is an unintended consequence—captialistsdon't necessarily design the existence of a reserve army.

one can capture thebalance by thinking about the competing effects of the'labour-shedding' effects, and the 'labour-incorporating' effects.

(4) the last step ofthis argument, of course, is to explain why the competitive driveamongst capitalists exists. why is it the case that capitalists haveto compete against each other?

what makes capitalistsattempt to maximize surplus-value, of course, is the fact that theyare pitted against each other. if they don't behave ruthlessly, theygo out of business. the structure of capitalism compels capitaliststo innovate.

- - -

the 'historical/moral'component of the value of labour-power—there are certain needswhich come to be understood as necessary.

productivity defined asstuff produced/variable capital

in that case,productivity increases as 'organic composition rises'--i.e, whentechnology is labour saving. that's built into the definition

capital productivityvs. labour productivity vs. land productivity?

rationality has twodimensions: formal rationality, which means that individual pursuestrategies consistent to given ends; substantive rationality, whichmeans that individuals pursue strategies consistent with theirwell-being.

2012-01-06T20:46:00.003-08:00

05/08/2010

class introduced us tothe MoP, and its internal dynamics.

Marxism predicts thatyou can divide up history so it appears to be a distinct sequence ofmodes of production—each MoP is identified by its distinctive classstructure, which has its own dynamics and its own contradictions.

the question thatarises is whether the sequencing of these sets is random—or whetherit has to occur in the way that it did.

if there is a 'link',then you have not only a theory of social forms, but also a theory oftransitions. at its most ambitious, Marxism aspires not only to be atheory of MoP but also a theory of historical develompent.

the question forMarxists, then, is you have two 'regional' theories—are bothequally plausible? is one of them more plausible than the other?

the verdict that Cohentries to give is that the theory of 'directionality' is 'valid'theoretically. the core of Cohen's defence rides on the 'optimality'thesis (which imposes an extraordiarily strong constraint on HM—itinsists that when any given MoP descends into crisis, the PR thatreplace the existing PR will be selected for the functionality wrtthe further development of the PF).

the question thatarises is whether this is plausible. for the selectional mechanism towork, of course, there has to exist a mechanism.

the verdict that Wrightgives, of course, is a 'weak' version—they argue that the PR willbe conducive.

Vivek argues that eventhis is not plausible—we have only a 'minimalist' HM that can besalvaged.

with this, the theorybecomes so weak that it loses much of its 'explanatory' punch—the'explanatory' punch now moves to claims re: “class struggle.” asthe claims of canonical HM weaken, HM has now become a'class-struggle'.

this does not mean thatPF have no role. if that were the case, history would be a randomwalk.

does this bode ill forMarxism?

Vivek couldn't come upwith a single reason that Marxism needs a theory of history.

there's not very muchat stake here. for what Marxism is supposed to be, it's not clearthat much is lost by not having a theory of history.

it's useful to clarifythat Brenner's theory is not an 'open' theory—it is a 'productionrelations' determinism, but not 'productive forces' determinism.

2012-01-06T20:46:00.001-08:00

05/01/2010

Moody's framework forunderstanding the rise of neoliberalism is quite different from thework that's currently appearing. This work tends to focus on'electoral coalitions'--the decline of old voting blocs, understoodin pluralist terms. Understood as the reintegration of oldconstituencies into new voting blocs (David Mayhugh). In sociology,there has been good work—it has looked at data on PACs and fundingsources for politics. But predominantly it looks at it through twolenses: (1) institutions—no real theory, Vivek is arguing; (2)thinktanks—so the idea is that thinktanks generaate ideas, ideasfloat into the heads of politicians, and hence you have shifts.Political economy has been shifted off the table.

It's trivially truethat there were shifts in the 'meaning' universe. But thinktankswere creatures of the corporate community, and the 'causal arrow'definitely runs the other way.

The approach that Moodypresents proposes to situate these factors in an analysis of shiftsin political economy—underlying all these shifts, he argues, was anunderlying shift in the balance of power between classes. Theescalation of an attack on labor in the late 70s, and the comingtogether of business in a class project.

Underneath this isanother mechanism—what triggers the corporate onslaught is anunderlying crisis of profitability. This, of course, addresses thequestion of why corporations mobilize at this point? ('leftish'answers have been given: the 'compact' between Capital and Labor wasbroken by the social upheavals of the late 60's, or by globalization,etc. Common to this view is that this resolution solved someproblems—“Fordism”. Misleading for several reasons, Vivek isarguing: Capital didn't 'agree' to anything. It agreed to 'live' withwhat was imposed upon it. It never was a compromise. It was 'mutedhostility'. The only reason it put up with it was because attackinglabor would have been two costly, both in terms of direct costs andopportunity costs. What changes in the 60s is the profits crisis.

Thus we are alerted tothe fact that 'politics' is always 'political economy'--the space forpolitical contestation and political alliances was affected by thetempo of capital accumulation (greater space in the 50s, less in the60s/70s).

This is the theoreticalframework of Moody's argument: that 'class struggle' proceeds in thecontext of shifting economic facts.

It is the shift inthese social forces that explains the tectonic shift in Americanpolitics as a whole. What Moody is explaining, in short, is whyeverything shifts to the Right.

- - - - -

active labor market requires serious political strength, no?

nationalization as astrategy is threatening to capitalists. so the Swedes thought thatthey couldn't have both an active labor movement and nationalization,in the 1930s. the Fre7nch bourgeoisie, on the other hand, could livewith nationalization, because you didn't have a labor movementmobilized in the same way.

2012-01-06T20:45:00.003-08:00

04/23/2010

New Deal was put intoplace through an intensification of 'class struggle'--that was thepoint of last week's lecture. (Debate took place in the 80's—startedby Skocpol, who wrote about it as the action of bureaucrats actingagainst the whims of Capital).

The Marxist responsewas to say that she was partly right, insofar as Capitalists didn'twant the New Deal. But she was wrong in missing the importance oflabor mobilization. (There is debate amongst Marxists, of course—somerefer to 'enlightened capitalists' addressing the system'scontradictions)

What the readingstherefore emphasized was the power of labor.

This week's readingsattend to the limitations of the New Deal legacy. These do notanalyze the weaknesses of the New Deal (a full analysis would have toinclude thinking about Southern Planters and the weakness of thelegislation itself).

The extent to whichLabor did well in the Golden Age masked, in effect, the weaknesses ofthe movement—these readings tried to identify the structuralsources of the labor movement's weakness. Whatever the list is, itwill include the following: though the labor movement grew, it wasnever able to extend unionization across a plurality of theworkforce; union membership was regionally highly concentrated, whichgave American corporations a serious regional flexbility—before'globalization', American capital began a migration within thecontinental land mass of the US; the internal source of weakness wasthe defeat at GM in the late 30's, where the parameters of theagreement shifted to a 'committeeman' system, leaving therank-and-file less necessary for officials (shifted towards a'monological' culture).

Added to this is twostrategic decisions: the decision of the Communist Party in 1937 todraw back from its militant line, and especially after 1939—thistook the most reliable wing of the trade union movement, andeffectively neutralized it; the civil war within the labor movement,as the Left was basically kicked out by the late 1940s by Reuther andco—related also, obviously, to towing the line of the Dem. Party.

Thus, by the 1950s, thetrade union movement is seriously weak—even while it's stillgrowing, of course, until 1953-1954 (peak of union density). Unionofficials now relied much more on partnerships with Capital. Itseemed to be working, though, only because of uniqueness of theconjucture, i.e., the unprecedented expansion of the economy—nocompany wanted to disrupt the inflow of profits, at this stage. This,for trade union bureaucrats, clarified that an 'accord' withmanagement was the future. What they were relying on was not amobilized rank-and-file, but the hesitance of employers, at a time ofgrowth, to attack labor at a time when revenues were flowing in.[Doesn't the Brenner reading also argue that this had to do with'wildcat strikes', etc.?]

This, it goes withoutsaying, masked the serious weakness of the Labor movement.

After a few strikes inthe late 50s, a 'honeymoon' takes on the guise of a confrontation.The beginnings of a total war. You see a serious, noticeable'speed-up' of the labor-process at the shop-floor—made possible bythe fact that shop-stewards are impotent. They file grievances, butthis does nothing, of course.

It's in this context,that you see an explosion of unrest—from the late 1960s to early1970s, the mid-west is rocked by a wave and wave of wildcat strikes.Workers fighting not just management, but their own officialdom, aswell.

Thus, serious fissuresare showing themselves, in the 'liberal' order. By the 1960s, you seethe structural weakness of American liberalism. It is after theupsurge, of course, that you see the full-frontal assault onLabor—Reagan, and the rise of the Right within the DemocraticParty.

This week the importantmoral was the structural weakness of the Labor movement, even at itsheight, which lays the basis for understanding what it is thatAmerican capital is motivated by, when it launches its assault. Theyrealize that they cannot recapture their profits without attackinglabor: because of higher costs, and the welfare state that itsupports.

- - - -

A big problem for T.World countries is lack of domestic market, which producedunderutilized capacity (insofar as your importing machinery designedfor bigger markets). Another reason for underutilized capacity is thelack of suppliers for spare parts, etc. [Important discussion here of'racism', and whether it matters sui generis in determining whether'farm workers' are excluded from the Wagner Act]

Roosevelt's AAAmechanizes agriculture—this has knock-on effects that lead,ultimately, to the collapse of the racial order, the agglomeration ofworkers in Southern and Northern cities, and the civil rightsmovement. In the 1920s, even the murmur of mobilization meantdeath—but in the 1950s, planters can accommodate this.

Why not organizing theSouth? 1. change from mobilization strategy, to corporatist strategy;2. resources problem; 3. level of racial antagonism.

2012-01-06T20:45:00.001-08:00

04/16/2010

new deal lecture

question of theconditions under which reform under capitalism are possible.

the general argument,of course, is class struggle. but what is about class struggle thatproduces this?

thomas ferguson givesan argument that is reminiscent of botwinick's framework—concessionsbecome rational when the cost of obstruction is greater than the costof concession.

the consequence, ofcourse, is that working classes have to impose cost on capitalists.

what ferguson shows isthat the reform coalition within the american business community isconstituted by the degree to which they feel the costs ofupsurge—those that feel the costs of concesssions to labor theleast, in other words, are most likely to feel the costs of theupsurge first (and can best afford those concessions, of course).

the second fact thatthese readings introduce is the 'blockian' argument that reform willbe transmuted to be acceptable to the ruling classes, to capitalists.the mechanism for this, of course, will be that legislation will beshepharded through the State.

in these articles, theorganization of the labor movement are black boxed. the lichtensteinreading foregrounds the micro-history of the organizing (chapter7—the key point in that chapter is the inability toinstitutionalize the role of shop-stewards; instead, it had to resortto a bureaucratized grievance procedure as a means for expressingworkers' power. this makes shop stewards a cop, rather thanamobilizer).

- - - - -

additional socialorganizing is not redundant to labor organizing, and maybe not evenjust additive—but possibly interactive/multiplicative. calling intoquestion the entire social order, not just economic questions.

first new dealcoalition as an attempt to shore up the old order (you see thistoday, too), but it didn't work (today the crisis has abated,and without a labor upsurge)

question of whethercapitalists approach the state as an 'organized fraction,' or whetherthe State itself does the organizing of 'fractions', etc.

american politicaleconomy after new deal characterized by two things

welfare state
an expansionary push

2012-01-06T20:44:00.001-08:00

04/09/2010

on ideology('structured musings')

what is often timescalled a 'theory of ideology' is not, really, a theory at all. whenyou try and distill theoretical conclusions, it's usually fairlythin.

thus far we haveexplained—why class matters, the rules of reproduction ofcapitalism, how laws of motion work themselves out through theaccumulation process, how the accumulation process leads toantagonisms, how the roots of the stability of the system lie in thecollective action problems, and how that stability is reinforcedthrough the State.

we have explained,therefore, the stability of capitalism without referring to'ideology', at all. this is a stark difference to classic accounts.not just in sociology, but even in 'western marxism' (interwar periodto 1960s and 1970s).

we've gone against thisgrain—a startling conclusion: ideology is not a fundamental orcentral factor in explaining the stability of capitalism.

so, then: what isexactly the role of ideology?

a kind of Gramsci-ism(mediated through Stuart Hall) answers that ideology is importantbecause the working-class consents, through ideology, to itsdomination. but what does consent mean, here?

a resignation to being exploited. if this is what we mean, though, you don't need ideology—it comes from the structural limitations confronting the workers in a given situation.
something narrower—meaning that workers take their exploitation to being 'legitimate'. if that's what you mean by consent, it's most likely empirically and demonstrably false. the hold of this kind of consent on the minds of lower order is tenuous (sby the way, this was poured into gramsci by the post-althusserians. he's not to blame).

this means thatinvoking ideology here is probably mistaken.

so we're back to squareone.

one of eagleton'ssuggestions: the main role of ideology is not to secure worker'sdomination, but enabling workers to make sense of their domination.to 'rationalize' their situation. it provides workers with a 'story'that makes sense of their social world. in so doing, it doesn'tcreate social stability, but it does help 'reinforce' it. in sum: thebasic conditions for social stability come from the structuralcontext, but this is further reinforced by the story spun to them.[how exactly do we attribute analytical weight, then?]

note, there is noreason that 'ideologies' have to be false or distorted—workers mayvery well understand their situation accurately, but still have tolive with it. or even, as Eagleton says, many a true statement canserve 'ideological' functions. most people who are confronted with asituation that they would like to change, are confronted by serious'cognitive dissonance'--they'll probably come up with some kind ofstory [but this is a private conception? how about social roots ofideology?]

how does it do this,though?

by painting the socialorder as legitimate, it is traditionally said. but this is a thinreed, it seems—the assessment of social order as being legitimateis strongest amongst the wealthy [but how is this cashed out?surveys?]

Marx often points totwo other mechanisms:

taking the social order to be 'natural'--you reify the social order insofar as you take it to exist naturally independent of your own practice.
not by blocking people's conception of the unwholesomeness of their situation, but by diluting it (roots of economism).

what are themechanisms, then, by which ideology serves these functions? here'swhere we're getting into the 'murkiness'. where do these ideologiescome from?

'ruling ideas as theideal expression of the dominant material relationships' – sayingthat socio-structural changes generate dominant ideas, rather thanvice versa

two importantthings:

a materialism that is quite critical, clearly.
but there is a problem, then—there's no mechanism to explain why these ideas, in particular, ought to be 'ideological' ideas. but unless you think that all ideas are 'ideological', you still need to explain how these ideas emerge that perform these functions. [possibility of selection, though? by trial and error?]. certainly, the same relationships and same experiences have to produce a revolutionary, critical set of ideas.

what is the mechanism,then?

'the ideas of theruling class are the ruling ideas'. class with means of mentalproduction, etc.

the dominant discourseof a social epoch is one which is going to take a set of materialrelationships and advance them through the 'media'. notice, here,your firmest gruond here is going to be on the side of 'ideologicalproduction'--we have a pretty robust theory of why media, incapitalism, is biased [see chomsky]. if you shift to 'ideologicalreception', though, we have more of a problem. it becomes much moremurky.

there has been atradition in the understanding of 'ideology' that has advocated for adefinition that's much wider (not a 'negative' conception, but a'neutral' one)--the possibility of working-class ideology. Marxopposed ideology to science; Lenin opposed bourgeois ideology toproletarian ideology. and Lukacs, of course, takes this much farther.

if you start with amaterialist premise, that ideas are generated from practice, theninsofar as 'unjust ideas' are produced by that same materialpractices/institutions (media, trade union bureaucracy), it followsthat a critique of ideas will be bound up with a critique of thoseinsitutions and practices that sustain injustice and unjust ideas.all those institutions and practices which produce distorted ideasmust be dismantled. [materialist theory of ideas vs. materialisttheory of ideology?]

- - - -

Marxists talk about'ideology' simply because the detritus of ideas heaped upon workersare a primary political obstacle to organizing. And this is also whycapitalists and the State spend so much time on fomenting 'ideology'.

2012-01-06T20:43:00.001-08:00

4/2/2010

theoretical parametersof vivek's book are a bit askew from what we've been looking in, inthis course.

two enduringforms of the State

welfare State
developmental State

wanted to show that thedevelopmental State could be understood in the same frame as thedevelopmental State. it used to be thought of as a 'third-worldState'. and when the 'developmental State' came around as atheoretical category, it was understood a-theoretically. viveklooking at it as a 'capitalist State'.

the terms of thisdebate, though, were different.

the key conceptthat was developed came from the debate about the Welfare State,which was 'state capacity' – when Marxists say that the welfareState functions to perpetuate capitalism, they assume both awillingness and a capacity to administer to capitalist interests.this cannot be taken for granted; it has to be built.

because it has to bebuilt, facts about the State itself are going to have a large bearingon whether and how State capacity is built. in the developmentalState literature, this had a large impact. it came out of the contextof neoliberalism, where the argument was that State's willnecessarily muck it up (rent-seeking, or crowd out, or whatever). inevery case, the State will harm development. this came out of LatinAmerican stagnation—they squelched private intiative.

BUT: by the late80's/early 90's you had a growth miracle in E. Asia. and you hadextensive State intervention. what the developmental State literatureargued was that what distinguished these States was 'Statecapacity'--they had the capacity to intervene successfully. thequestion was not State intervention, but the quality of Stateintervention.

the question that wasnot asked, however, is how State capacity gets built. the argument,when it was made, was as simple as, well, politicans built it (PeterEvans' book is a partial answer—you need good bureaucracy and goodties to the private sector. But even here the answer is not given asto the origins).

in vivek's book, therewere two cases: India and Korea. in the former, it was a failure; inthe latter, a success. difference was capacity. why?

easy answer: gift oflong historical process. determined at the outset, in a sense.

but neither country hadmuch of a developmental apparatus, when it started out. that meansthat there was a punctuated period of State building. in Korea, thiswas successful. in India, not.

the answer that vivekgives is that it has to do with the reaction of the capitalist classto State-building. this was novel because it was assumed, prior tothis, that capitalists don't matter, because these were poorcountries. but in fact, vivek shows that the opposite was true.

what it shows, then, isthat the developmental State was constrained by bourgeois powerbecause the caiptalist class was able to forestall State-building.the attempt, then, was to bring

why did the Indiancapitalist class rebel?

- - - - - - -

remember, the twotheoretical arguments re: the State

instrumentalist accounts
structuralist account, the most important of which has to do with 'business confidence'

theda skocpol offers anaccount of 'full autonomy' – that the State can ride roughshod overthe capitalists, if it will.

in dev. stateliterature, the notion of State-centeredness was at its height in thelate 1980's, mid-1990's. it was a counter to the neoliberal argumentsthat had been dominant, at this time, after the Latin Americancollapse in the 1980's (those countries where States had intervened,in the past). the only way, it was said, to accelerate the pace ofCapitalist development was for it to become a 'nightwatchman State'.

Amsden and Wade upsetthis apple-cart. it was not the fact of State intervention thatdetermines the outcome, but rather the quality.

well, what conduceshigh-quality State-intervention? the answer that emerged was: Stateswith adequate capacity. if the State has this ability, then, it canovercome the obstacles people pointed to (obstacles were rent-seekingon the part of private agents, and State predation).

KEY--oneargument could have been about the 'social setting'--a kind ofMarxist account, about the history of the two countries, etc. in Leftliterature, there had been this notion that in the Third World,classes are underdeveloped (Hamza Alavi). the idea, here, being thatStates are much more powerful, viz-a-viz social classes. the onlyactor that was seen as being capable of upsetting the State's agendawas the landed class. this literature in Latin America, andelsewhere, always points to the absence of land reform. as aneconomic fact, certainly, but as a political fact (the power oflandlords). this, however, was an inference; it wasn't an argument.nowhere was the industrial bourgeoisie seen as being capable ofblocking the State's agenda. [a subsidiary argument was that, even ifindustrialists do matter, why would they care? it's going to be aState, for them—capitalists were thought to be natural allies ofthe developmental State.]

a very powerfulargument at the time was that Korea succeeded, at the time, becauseit was an authoritarian State. vivek's argument is that the oppositewas the case, in fact (to be developed, later) – in anauthoritarian state, a class that you should find that is unable toimpose its will on the political process, in fact, is labor, notcapital. it's true, maybe, that your control over labor might makecapitalists more amenable to a partnership. four countries: taiwan,korea, france (45-68), japan (54-mid 1980's)--'successful capitalistplanning'. the latter two were democratic states].

the argument in theKorean State is that, even when the State controls finance, it issubservient to capital. example being given is the switch to heavyindustry in Korea in 1973. control of finance is only a weapon whencapitalists have a high demand for finance, which presupposes'business confidence'.

[if military takes oncapital, workers may lose jobs. if workers take on capital, capitalloses its power of the 'investment strike,' because work is alreadystopped]. think through this.

in both India andChina, Nehru and Park have political hegemony. Nehru could havepursued his agenda, but political elite pointed to the go-slow. InPark the political rivals didn't have the support of the capitalistclass. this is key, clarifies the impotency of a 'within-state'argument.

the question of landreform—if the book had been about growth, then land reform wouldhave had to be in the book. what vivek is looking at is one part ofwhat explains growth, which is State capacity. [key--absenceof land reform increases the incentives for capitalists to ignoreplan directives. planning, remember, is premised on the notion thatcapitalists pursue industries that have high private returns but lowsocial returns (luxury good sectors, niche sectors, etc.). highlyunequal income distributions, which follow from failed land reform,give rise to these kinds of sectors. so land reform does matter, inthis sense.]

[thinking about brazil,chile, etc., and the transition of the 1920's/1930's/1940's] whatabout the landed class? it wipes out the dominant, landlord class.the immediate reason is because the evidence didn't show any landlordinfluence (found one petition from landlords). all of the two-dozenbusiness organizations expressed their opposition to thislegislation. what that said was that they're just not a factor. why?what about latin america, and the supposition that landlords didn'tlike developmental state (remember, this is not about economicgrowth)? the commitment to build developmental states is really aphenomenon of the post-1930s; the commitment to industrializationstarts in the Great Depression, mostly as a necessity (because thirdworld countries are cut off from their markets). when you compare thetwo threats, is it not the switch to rapid industrialization, ratherthan the switch to the developmental state that threatens them?industrialization, remember, threatens to wipe out the landed class.the supposition is that industrialization rendered them politicallyhelpless—how do you get the onset of developmentalstates/industrialization without land reform? the explanatory task,here, would be to understand how the power bloc shifted in the 1930'sand the 1940's.

from 1960-1975, Indiawas far less corrupt than Korea. today, the most corrupt state in theworld is also the world's fastest growing economy. [cf. Mushtaq Khan]

Japanese multinationalsin Korea were using the country as an export platform; European andAmerican multinationals used India as a home market, blocking Indianaccess to the American market.

size of the domesticmarket (domestic demand) does not produce an export-led strategy(China, DR/PR). export markets are not more attractive becausethey're highly competitive (they're used as places to dispose ofexcess inventory at firesale prices, sometimes).

twocounterfactuals

you use the labor movement, as in France, to push a developmental State, then you push them out. labor has a role in state installation, but nothing in State reproduction.
you would have had a social-democratic developmental State. so it's important not to think of ISI as mal-development, ISI is a world-historical success. but, of course, pound for pound, India could not have matched Korea. [yes, ISI carries internal contradictions—but so does ELI. this happens in the mid-90's in Korea, they cease to be interested in a developmental state.]

- - - -

KEY, thequestion of the 'flying geese'--what Japan did with Korea, remember,is give them low-value niches, so that they themselves would haveroom for capital good exports. Korea and Taiwan do the same thing,later, with South East Asia (and this helps the book'sargument—Indonesia and Malaysia don't have developmental States, sothey're not nearly as successful as Korea and Taiwan).

also, let's rememberthat Japan's strategy, re: Korea, is greased by the executive branchin the US (Congress is more ambivalent).

Twocontingencies, in this book:

Opening created by the arrival of the Japanese
Park Chung-Hee's taking advantage of opportunities granted him by the Japanese.

2012-01-06T20:42:00.001-08:00

javeed alam, casteand left politics April 2010

what makes Leftpractice increasingly difficult in India? and not worried aboutleaving a pessimistic impression.

here discussing thefailure of the Left to win over its core constituency (the'peasantry').

the Left has seen arelative decline amongst this population [here, it seems, quite clearthat the Left means the CPI-M].

the question of theworker-peasant alliance—and its importance, not just for theseizure of state power, but also for buidling the foundations ofsocial democracy.

revolution, let's beclear, is not predicated on the depth of knowledge about a society.

here, then, speaking ofthe specificity of the class formation, in India. new classes areforming within peasant communities in India—you have a big growthof poor peasants, for example. but because of stregnth of 'caste',you have fragmentation—poor peasants are not coming together.

the way to understandthis phenomenon is to begin to look at international differentiationwithin caste communities

a long period of capialist development, followed by land reforms, moderniztion, education, etc. after independence, the backward castes all became proprietary peasants, where they were, before, tenant farmers. new modern classes have emerged amongst the castes.
where land did not often go to the direct tiller (in the land reform), many dalits were forced to remain agricultural laborers. if the land reforms had been of a different nature (gone to the tiller), the pattern of development would not have come about in the way that it did.

within the classformation, the middle class (largely drawn from the rich and middlepeasants) has also been in the course of formation within these castecommunities. these are central to the process.

manylarger/intermediate caste formations have been breaking up (thedravidian movement, for example, is breaking up)

a new, white-collarmiddle class, which is seen as the only path to success. and thisunification under these classes is, simultaneously, the domination ofthe rich peasants.

this is a kind ofabsence of freedom which is forced, collectively, by one jat onanother.

and also, the realitythat the call for caste social justice (for dalit justice) is abourgeois demand—there is hardly any economic agenda in the demand.whether it is a democratic advance is not germane, right now. butthis shows a shift, in the conception of democracy.

major argument, in sum:casteism has emerged as a major phenomenon because of thedecomposition of the consciousness of the middle classes.

caste has typicallybeen thought of as a 'superstructural' pheonemon. here contestingthat—the development that I have traced are conditioned by ahistorically-grounded material force (what has been the nature of thebondage of the direct producer? by asking the question, you shift theterms of debate from the earlier discussions. this is central, eventoday. because what you call the 'dailt', today, were actually theproducing classes in india, either in agriculture or secondarymanufacture. pre-capitalist social relations linger on, in thecurrent mode of production. all these sections of society were madeup of dependent jatis on the upper-castes—what is important to noteis that the dependence was of a collective nature, which haslong-term implications for the form of struggle that emerged later.the nature of the unfreedom of the producer was of a collective kind,which was different than the unfreedom of the european serf.)

[here, starting to saysomething absolutely absurd—the degradation of manual work, here,explains why indian immigrants come to the US and becomewhite-collar!]

2012-01-06T20:41:00.001-08:00

Chandresekhar atColumbia, April 2010

collapse ofactually-existing socialism 'has to do' with the collapse offinance—the increasing exposure of hese countries to finance. [?]

an 'informationalinadequacy' that confronts central planning, it is argued (hayek'sfatal conceit). planners working at cross-purposes.

the danger, also, of'bureaucratization' (irfan habib: when socialism is established,there is no economic law pushing it in advance.)

the argument ispremised on the proposition that the alternative has to be fullyelaborated. you can only elaborate these mechanisms in practice.

what we do need torecognize is that the 'collapse of actually-existing socialism' hasdelayed the Left alternative. with this in mind, there need to be'reformist'/'welfarist' measures in the interim (without making ussound like those who call for a 'human face')

in Latin America,neo-liberalism is thoroughly discredited. in Africa, it destroyed theState. but in Asia, you have 'successful' engagement withinternational capital (E. Asia). you have countries like China andIndia, as well. the point is that these are 'successes'. (crisis of1997 was because of a more definite shift to neoliberalism, loss offinancial controls, etc.). Asia as the region on which the reputationof neo-liberalism depends.

this 'working' (in agrowth and balance of payments sense) means two things

there exist a group of people who can sustain this kind of growth trajectory—you have a section of the upper middle-class which (1) has additional incomes; (2) generates a situation where you expand the univers of borrowers because of the freedom you give to investors (you relax the requirements on financiers) [the 'feel-good' factor: confident lenders and confident borrowers are both necessary if you want a debt-financed trajectory to work]. today you're in a situation where you have double-digit inflation, but not seen as a threat. this used to be fatal. now not so much, because vocal classes have been co-opted. in other words, the 'middle-classes' are separated from the Left.
as part of your 'success', you are the 'flavor of the season'-- you need foreign capital and footloose productive capital. you're caught, then, in a situation where pushing against the status quo, you're confronted with the exit of capital. you can't even find your way to a reformist line.

you use all of thesearguments, at an ideological level, to discount all alternatives.

the obvious implicationis that you have to pursue different tactics, which the Left isdoing. basically, we are talking about the need to be innovative.

in addition,fundamental structural constraints:

the organized working class is 6 or 7% of the total working class; and you're anyway confronting growth of informal and casualized labor (you're not progressing amongst the vanguard class, but in fact progressively seeing the undermining of the vanguard class). even within the formal sector, you're getting a lot of informal workers.
when employment increases, most of it is amongst self-employed workers. you have workers who don't have an 'enemy' in their productive life. who do you organize these workers against?
stagnation in real wages, but a rise in productivity-- you have a collapse of the shares of wages in value-added. those who are outside this citadel of formal workers have to come to terms with the fact that what set the standard is something that, itself, is eroding.

so you have what seems,almost, like a conspiracy. an attack all-round.

this is not to say thatthere is no Left, that the Left has disappeared. it is simply to saythat this is a long and arduous struggle.

- - -

anwar's questions

neoliberalism as a global phenomenon?

what is it aboutcapitalism that in the US, for example, one of the most tightlyregulated financial sectors in the world was demolished. why didcapitalism 'allow' for this trajectory? now, ruling classes pursuethe path of 'international' financial credit, rather than publicexpenditure (taxation, etc.)

success as growth and employment?

success, the realargument, is growth, resolution of balance of payments problems, andthe attenuation of inflation.

multiplier effects of public and private investment?

- -

it doesn't make anysense to argue that we need growth before we can re-distributesurpluses, precisely because the form of growth that is pursued hasthe effect of incapacitating the State (the State's ability to doanything in the long-term, certainly, but also its ability toattenuate short-term deprivation). and I would add,in fact, that thisis entirely unscientific and politically backward—who, exactly, isgoing to demand and push the redistribution of that surplus at theend point?

2012-01-06T20:40:00.001-08:00

Capitalism,Development and Democracy, RSS (1992)

(2): capitalism isnecessary, but not sufficient for democracy

(4): working to makesense of the cross-national finding that democracy is correlated todevelopment, in specific, historically-robust terms (pg. 30—theveto of the empirical generalization)

(5): considering threebalances of power

classes and class coalitions
the State and its relationship to civil society
impact of transnational power relations

(6): summary ofargument—urban working class as most frequent proponent of theextension of democratic rights.

(6): capitalism does afew things to push this process forward—brings workers together,urbanization, improving means of communication increases literacy(tending towards a 'dense civil society')

(7): it is not theprotagonists of capitalism (the market, and the capitalists) that areat the vanguard of the push toward democracy; rather, it is anunintended result of its contradictions (the working class and themiddle class growing stronger, the landed elite being weakened)

(8): class profiles

working-class, most consistently democratic (except where co-opted by charismatic authoritarianism)
landed upper-class, most consistently anti-democratic
bourgeoisie, generally supportive of constitutional and representative gov't, but not the extension of suffrage
middle classes were ambiguous, pushed for their own inclusion but otherwise contingent on the threat they faced, and available alliances
peasantry also was variable—independent family farmers were pro-democratic, but where dominated by large landholdings they were more authoritarian

(8): note that in L.America, the middle-classes played the leading role, butdemocratization was consistently of a restricted form as a result.

(21): Weber onRussia—hangs bourgeois reform on 'ideals'.

(22): summary ofO'Donnell's work on ISI, and dependent development/authoritarianism,which undercuts the modernization thesis

(23): critique of Moorefor evacuating the working-class

(36-37): outline of themethodological strategy--'analytic induction'

(43): certainly, theyare critical of democracy, but see in it the important role it playsin advancing the interests of the working-class—even the long-terminterests, they think [this is being done via a misreading of theMarxist position, I would argue]

(46): central thesis isthat democratization can be explained by class interest;fundamentally shaped by the balance of class power ('relative classpower')

(54-55): the 'inherentambiguity of collective action', re: the working class

(59): relative size anddensity of organization of working class are of critical importance(discussion of impact of uneven development, etc.)

(60): the morelandowners rely on state-backed coercion, the more anti-democraticthey will be

(61): the bourgeoisieis caught between the formal liberalism of bourgeois democracy, andthe substantive demands made by subordinate classes.

(63-64): the thesis ofpotential, variable autonomy of the State [hmm...]

(66): not too muchState dependence on dominant classes, but not so much autonomy thatit can't be tamed.

(68): absolutismtowards bureaucratic universalism?

(72): dependentcapitalist development has two unfavorable effects: attenuatesdecline of large landowners, doesn't strengthen working-class as muchas it should

(82): early vs. lateindustrialization—effects on position of bourgeoisie viz-a-viz theState

(83): argumentis that other classes were prominent in the early phases, and eventhough the working class took the lead later in the game, it neededallies. Where the large landowners were available and politicallypowerful, this was a problem for democratization.

(87): Switzerland –no opposition from bourgeoisie to full democracy, because there wasno developed labor movement. Demonstrates importance ofsmall-holders.

(87-90): France –Moore neglects the continuing influence of agrarian elite into the19^th century; key, of course, was that they weredisenfranchised and not part of the State apparatus after theRevolution.

(91): WWI effect ondemocratization

(92): Sweden—exhibitsGerman patterns, as late industrialization; but it had no largelanded upper class that lorded over the peasantry. This meant thatthe Swedish bourgeoisie didn't have the option of allying with thelanded elite, as its German counterpart did.

(96): summary ofthese cases, thus far

(96): Moore ignored theChartist movement

(98): again, workingclass as dominant force

(105): Italian Fascismwas not a mass electoral movement

(106): Keyamendment to Moore's account of Germany—the bourgeoisie and thealleged 'weak impulse' (it was in their economic interest to do whatthey did, in other words)

(108): again,comparison with Sweden

(125): Comparing the USNorth and West with Switzerland—in both places, democratizationpushed by small farmers. And the landlords, in the US—not worriedabout the political process.

(126): Tilly's criticalamendment, to the question of State and labor control—it was notnecessarily for control, it was for guaranteeing that the controlwouldn't be challenged.

2012-01-06T20:39:00.001-08:00

3/25/10

problem, again, is toadduce a structural mechanism by which the State would align itselfwith the capitalist class.

in Poulantzas, we havethe mechanism of 'atomization', via 'citizenship' (but this doesn'texplain how the capitalist class is 'organized', as acounter-tendency).

we are left with anaccount of disorganization, then, but not what we're looking for.

- - - - -

this week's readingsalso take on 'instrumental' theories, as did Poulantzas. Offe raisesan additional problem—it will have to be accompanied by a 'masking'effect (otherwise the State will run into a legitimacy problem). Offedoes not take a clear position, though; more sets the stage.

Block adduces amechanism. the need to maintain 'business confidence'--to maintain ahealthy economic climate. if policies are proposed which have theeffect of convincing firms and investors that will bring in aless-than-acceptable rate of return, the reaction will be to slowdown the pace of investment, to exit, or even to go on an investmentstrike. all this spells disaster, for the regime. States will find itin their own interests, in short, to attend to the preferences ofcapitalists.

this is a feature ofthe Capitalist state, insofar as the State doesn't possess anindependent source of surplus generation.

in the actual practiceof State reproduction, State managers internalize the imperative ofkeeping 'business confidence' alive. they know that the key to theirsuccess, is this—State managers actively solicit the cooperation ofcapitalists. You don't hazard approaching those limits (in thissense, it doesn't work so much as a 'constraint'). And thisreinforces the class-bias of the State.

To the untheoreticalobserver, this may look like 'influence'. But this is not the case.

Regardless, all thisraises a question. How do you get the New Deal? How do you get SocialDemocracy? Block's answer is class struggle.

But this needs to befilled out, a bit.

The mere existence ofclass struggle will not induce the effect of concession. It is onlywhen class struggle is able to make it cheaper to enact reforms thanto oppose them (when it imposes 'costs') that this happens. Whenmobilization gets to the point that political demands are made, it isbetter to appease workers than to risk losing power altogether.

To an extent, forpoliticians, the mobilization of the working-class counteracts thepower of the capitalists. Aggregation of the working-class cannot beignored (in other words, the worker has to overcome theconstitutional collective action problem).

At the same time, thisalso imposes two costs on politicians:

they may lose tax revenues
workers represent blocs of political power, that might threaten the politicians.

In other words, 'space'is opened up for the State. 'Autonomy' from the ruling class isincreased (the State, don't forget, is always autonomous fromlabor—the puzzle, for Marxists, is when it can be more or lessautonomous from capitalists)

The structural theoriesof the State don't mean to explain the whole gamut of State action.Argument here is that they make themselves apparent at criticaljunctures. You rarely actually 'see' them. A set of 'nestedconstraints'. [Not sure this makes sense to me]

Regardless, whenlabor's power increases, these regular constraints widen.

2012-01-06T20:38:00.003-08:00

PPIGS: EU's InternalPeriphery, Left Forum 2010

Are the Germans goingto drive the continent into recession to maintain their own fiscalhealth?

- - - - - -

Jeffery Sommers

Latvian economy gonefrom celebrated as Baltic tiger, to the poorest performing economy inEurope.

Burning up of itscurrency reserves to rescue its banks—those are not available,anymore, for rescuing its economy.

A serious demographiccrisis that verges on the euthanizing of the population (the younggeneration is streaming out of the country). The 'exit' option—some10,000 people on the streets in January, but this didn't go anywhere.

As early as the 1980s,there was great interest in Latvia—the crisis of the 70's had givenrise to a desire to acquire raw materials located in the old SovietUnion. Latvia had warm water ports to facilitate this. Anentrepreneurial class was well-positioned to take advantage of this;moreover, offshore banking/etc. saw an opportunity in this trade, aswell (the money that was being used to purchase this raw materialswas eventually being returned to the West, of course).

We see the beginnings,in short, of a highly corrupt offshore infrastructure.

With the fall of theSoviet Union, there was a need/desire to cement thisarrangement—attract FDI, etc. (turned out to be largelyspeculative)

Simultaneous to this,the EU was launching its currency project (Maastricht) – one way tomitigate the unemployment in W. Europe was to dump goods in the oldSoviet bloc (we see a reversal of trade flows, which served theinterests of Germany and France; strong currencies in this regionsserved the interests of exporters in those W. Countries).

Despite politicalchanges, there has been great consistency in the country's financepolicies for the past 20 years. They have been resolute in theirdefence of the policies that have led to today's crisis.

25 banks for 2.3million people, most of which are serving these offshore interests.

Latvia has reached apoint where the legitimacy of the neoliberal paradigm is finallyunder question. We do see the possibility of some of the politicalparties in the country demanding some change in economic policy. Notenough mobilization from below, of course.

Biggest steps that needto be taken.

Introduce industrial policy.
Tax policy revision (high on labor, low on capital thus far) – this has made Latvia uncompetitive, when coupled with its high currency
Development of the agricultural sector (Lativa historically a major producer of grains, but neglected in the neoliberal era, completely)

- - - - - -

Mark Weisbrot

Latvian Central Bankerpursuing a 'pro-cylical' policy – i.e., making the recession worseuntil wages fall enough to 'fix' the economy.

This will be a recordloss of output for a cyclical downturn (slated to be greater than USdepression in 1929-1933; comparable to destruction of Argentinianeconomy, where they tried to adjust the economy without adjusting theexchange rate. Defaulted, their currency collapsed—retracted forthree months, and then grew 63% in the ensuing years)

The IMF has a fair bitof money, again. Alas. (In Latvia, the main thing that enforces thesepolicies is the European Commission—a very powerful materialinterest, since European banks have loaned in excess of $1.4 trilliondollars to central and E. Europe. They stand to lose tremendously. Alot of money has been given to the IMF by major countries to 'save'Europe, in effect)

The economics of thiscrisis, then: when you have a situation like Latvia's (or the PIIGS),there are three macro policies

fiscal policy (as has been used, a little bit, in the US)
monetary policy (interest rate policy; 'quantitative easing')
exchange rate policy (let your currency fall in order to stimulate your exports and cut down your imports)

Latvia and Greece arein a situation where all of these policies are basically off-limits.If Greece, or Spain, could devalue their currencies, they may be onthe road to recovery. Part of this would be the trade impact, but notall. When you have a fixed, overvalued exchange rate, you are in asituation where you can't use the other two policies, either—youcan't use monetary policy, because you are afraid that when you dothat, you will get a run on the currency (and then you've lost yourprecious peg, which they're holding so they can get the Euro).

The other problem witha fixed currency, like this, is the great loss in investor confidence(they're borrowing at 6.5 percent due to the fear that the economymight collapse; Greece is facing a similar problem).

To generalize toEurope, at large, is that they're all start with an overvaluedcurrency, which prohibits them from pursuing expansionary policiesthat would be used to get out of their crisis.

So what is the ultimatelesson? Neo-liberalism has failed, yes. Economic integration is not abad notion, but it took place under a neoliberal framework. They arenot going to be able to take commonsense measures to escape therecession.

2012-01-06T20:38:00.001-08:00

on thecharacterization of authoritarian regimes in latin america, fernandocardoso

(33): puzzle is authoritarianism in 'modernizing'societies (caudillismo in haciendo/export-agriculture economies couldbe understood), contrary to expectations of modernizationtheory

(35): importance of 'bureaucratic-authoritarian',indicating the fact that military domination is institutional, andnot individual (which was 'caudillismo')

(36):authoritarianism is distinct from fascism because the former aspiresto induce apathy in the masses [perhaps, another way of putting it isthat it is not coming to terms with the arrival of masses on thepolitical stage, a la fascism, but rather pre-empting that arrival;though this is not exactly right, since 'bureaucratic-authoritarian'regimes do react to leftist movements]

(37): different'ideological' content, too -- more hierarchial/conservative content,than 'racial' nationalism

(38): thesis--a form ofregime that guarantees the continued advance of capitalist industrialdevelopment (rather than a new form of state)--in other words thebasic alliance/pact of domination that exists among social classesremains unchanged

(39): form of State in Latin America is'dependent' and 'capitalist'

(40): simple economicdetermination is clearly not useful--but we do need to think abouthow economic accumulation (which demands, in a 'dependent' and'capitalist' country, increasing inequality) is managed in apolitical regime, and how the military option addresses this sourceof tension

(41): the metastasization of the 'executive' at theexpense of the legislature [this clearly fits the Pakistan example,quite well]

(41): importance, also, of thinking throughpossible tension between the executive and military [stepan'sreminders fit here]

(44): discussion of degree of liquidiationof representative mechanisms [Ayub's BD fits here well, of course] ascorresponding to degree of distrust amongst dominant classes, formasses

(44): Thermidor in LA as a response, also, to threat ofsocialism (cold war, cuban revolution, etc.) [in Pakistan not soclear, one thinks--but E. Pakistan, clearly, as 'threat']

(47):different 'control capacity' of authoritarian regimes, re: publicopnion [Peru vs. Uruguay/Argentina]

(50): clearly not in theservice of landed elites; this is an outdated thesis, he isstressing

(50): moreover, argument, harkening back toState/regime, which is that military regimes have not pursuedpolicies particularly distinct from those pursued by democraticregimes--it is the fact that the latter cannot stem social pressuresthat accounts for the turn to repression, really [this makes eminentsense in Ayub--but Zia, Musharraf, how to think throughthis?]

(51-52): noting the autonomous economic interests ofthe State -- that, otherwise, it is difficult to suggest thatparticular social classes benefit more under authoritarian rule thanunder democratic (Mexico and Brazil). and certainly, there is noone-to-one correspondence between military regime and economic policy(Peru vs. Chile)

2012-01-06T20:30:00.001-08:00

03/11/10

the theory of thecapitalist state (poulantzas and miliband)

up until the 1960s, inpolitical science and sociology the reigning approach to the Statewas 'pluralism' (and it's still the dominant approach in themainstream). this takes the State as a neutral actor; simply a sitethat takes in pressures and demands from outside groups, and actsaccordingly (not necessarily a passive actor—but its directioncomes from 'pressure groups', fundamentally)

it does not assign, toany particular pressure group, any advantage in access or influence.the list of potential pressure groups is quite large (students,employers, religious organizations, etc. – any 'civic'organization, which is pursuing its interests in an organized way).

politics, therefore,doesn't have any ex ante direction—all groups have potentially thesame influence over state policy as any other group

around the 1960s,criticisms of this approach started to circulate.

in the US, you get C.Wright Mills ('a strange character').

it's Ralph Miliband'sbook, on the British state, which heralds this literature

primarily, this'radical' approach attacks the illusion that no one pressuregroup has an ex ante advantage. simply put, because lobbying andpressure takes resources, groups that have greater resources willhave a structural advantage in the political process.

in fact, there are fournested arguments, here:

social origins, recruitment from elite circles-- the highest echelons of State mangers, in the US, are recruited out of the corporate sector; in Britain, the civil service plays this role.
social networks—even if the social origins aren't aligned, the social networks into which these folks are cast define their buddies, allies, etc. (kids in private schools, etc.)
lobbying—in the form of think-tanks/advice, as well as the more obvious forms (in the US, any crucial legislation that's drawn up on business is drawn up by thinktanks—the simple reason for this, of course, is because lawmakers are idiots). expertise belongs to the people that run the economy.
finance—in the US, there are two elections, every four years: the less important one is the one we know—before you get the votes, there's an initial competition over funders. before politicans compete over votes, they compete over funders. cannot say anything that gives the impression they will act against the interests of their funders.

these four,taken together, have come to be known as the 'instrumentalist' theoryof the State. the State is being wielded by the State, as aninstrument (the capitalist class control the State apparatus—theirphysical proximity to the State, 'claims' over the State constitutetheir authority). this is to be contrasted to the 'structuralist'theory of the State, which we will come to.

vivek, however, isnoting that the four 'instrumentalist' claims are better understoodas a 'structuralist' theory (because the notion of unequal resourcesdemands a 'structural' understanding, most obviously).

important--atthe same time, it does share an important commonality with'pluralism', which is that the State is more-or-less neutral (thatall of these influences/pressures come from without, in a sense). itis, in some sense, a 'thing' to be wielded, even still. where theydiffer from pluralists is that they believe that certain pressuregroups have structural advantages.

this is what Poulantzasis objecting to, principally (and others, too).

important--thepolitical implications of the 'instrumentalist' view obviouslyproblematic. the notion is that the institutions of the State can bechanged, if the nature of the navigator and the maps change. theState is simply a machine, in a sense. it is a distinctionunderstood, for example, as “the State in Capitalism” vs. “theCapitalist State” [the notion, of course, is that the State has tobe smashed—that it

is intrinsically biasedtowards the interests of elites]

so what's the argument?

the challenge forstructuralist state theory has been to adduce mechanisms whichincline it toward dominant class interests. something about theState's very institutional structure that biases it towardcapitalists' intrests.

what is Poulantzas'argument?

he begins by notingthat the Capitalist State is characterized by a structural fact aboutthe capitalist economy—which is that the extraction of the surplusdoes not require the use of political power to extract the surplus.feudalism, of course, works differently. in capitalism, force is notrequired—the 'dull compulsion' of economic relations is sufficient.

what, then, is thefunction of the State, under Capitalism? it switches from being anactor in extraction—instead, it manages the 'effects' of surplusextraction. it strives to be the factor of cohesion; it is what keepsthe whole thing together. (this is compatible with the pluralistnotion, vivek is arguing—it 'manages' difference. in other words,we can't stop here)

the question of itscomplicity in elites' interests, of course, relies on Poulantzas'argument that the 'way' in which it keeps things together is crucial.

in managing andorganizing for the coherence of society, the State becomes abourgeois state by virtue of the fact that it reproduces capitalistrelations of production. this is a political function, two-fold:

disorganizes the dominated classes.
organizes the dominant classes.

how does it do this?

for the dominatedclasses, two things:

constitutes them as 'formally equal' to their exploiters—it reinforces economic atomization with political atomization (this is very different from the Feudal State, which enshrines status distinctions). abstracts away from class to found the nation (we can think of this as a separate function).
disorganizes the dominated classes by allowing for economic concessions, to them. the root of what Lenin called 'economism'

notice, though, thatthis 'atomization' of subjects applies to everybody. left to itself,then, this is a mechanism that should equally effect both classes. sothis disorganization has to be complemented by the selectiveorganization of elites. this is where the theory gets murky, vivek'sarguing.

Poulantzas argues thatthe State organizes the dominant classes by “the play of itsinstitutions”. the first claim: the action of the Stateinstitutions have to have the effect of increasing the organizationof the dominant classes. the second claim: capitalist classes existas a bloc of classes, which means that it has to organize adifferentiated mass—how is it, then, that the State organizes thedominant classes into a power bloc?

in almost everyinstance, though, in Poulantzas' book he is exceedingly vague on howthe State institutions organize the dominant classes. rather, itseems more that the dominant classes act on the State, in hisnarrative (in effect, here you have to introduce the'instrumentalist' claims to make this sensible, in a way—but thisis precisely what he is writing against).

it is not clear that itis the State which is making them cohere as a dominant power bloc.there is no sense that it is the State which is doing the work.

this is a weakness ofthe theory—but it doesn't necessarily make this theory useless.

it does show that theState disorganizes the dominated classes, as an effect of its ownreproduction. but the second dynamic is not justified, in hisaccount.

---

types of States (classcharacter) vs. forms of State (within these class categories) – ifthe effect of disorganizing dominated classes is the task of thebourgeois state itself, it is hard to see how this could be true.this is an artifact of the 20^th century state—thebourgeois State has been around for four hundred years, and it wasnot the case that workers were formally equal to capitaliststhroughout this period. what Poulantzas is really describing, here,is the 'bourgeois-democratic' state. before this, it was the'bourgeois-oligarchic' state.

---

structured totality(Althusserian conception—each part has its own integral logic) vs.expressive totality (everything is a jumble, expressing theoverwhelming influence of the 'essence')

---

functional vs.intrinsic definition of a concept

---

'contradictoriness' ofState intervention? certainly, every effect of the State is not an'intended' effect; how do you account for this? 'functional' vs.'accidental'?

---

Althusser was the firstWestern Marxist who argued that Marxism must be a 'science' (unlikethe Frankfurt School and Lukacs). Yet his actual epistemology wasfundamentally 'idealist' – 'generality 1, generality 2, generality3'. Concepts working on concepts generating theories—so you haveclaims of science, rhetorical, that don't prove to be worth anything,philosophically. People who take the rhetoric seriously and abandonthe philosophy became good Marxists. People who take the philosophyseriously become poststructuralists (Laclau/Mouffe).

---

Summary remarks:we're trying to understand whether the State, by its veryinstitutional structure, is implicated in class power. Poulantzas isone attempt. Next week we will look at three reasons that this mightbe the case: Offa, Miliband, Bloch.

2012-01-06T20:29:00.001-08:00

nicos poulantzas,political power and social classes (1973)

part 1,section 1

(37): classes as the 'effect' of certain levelsof structures

(37): 'political' vs. 'politics' -- distinctionbetween 'juridico-political superstructure of the state" (whichis the political), and 'political class practices' (political classstruggle, or 'politics)

(38): historicism--which "makessuperfluous the theoretical study of the structures of the politicaland of political practice" (Lukacs, Korsch--an'over-politicization')

(40): towards anti-historicism--thepolitical as that "crucial level in which the contradictions ofa formation are condensed" (only this, he's arguing, allows youto appreciate the anti-historicist character of the argument that thepolitical class struggle is the motive force of history)

(41):a la Lenin, the 'political class struggle' (or political practice) asthe nodal point where contradictions are condensed

(42):political structures are the 'institutionalized power of the state'[as distinct from political practice, no?]

(44-45): state'sspecific function is to constitute 'the factor of cohesion' in asocial formation (a 'complex unity'), with two implications:

equilibrium is not given by the economic, but has to be maintained at the level of the political
transformation can only unfold at the level of 'political practice'

(46): a key point--under capitalism, thestate acquires a 'specific autonomy', which underlies the'specificity of the political'

(47): the problem of theoverlapping of several modes of production in any concreteinstance

(48): relating the state to the political classstruggle demands relating the state to the 'ensemble of the levels ofstructures--to the articulation of instances that characterize aformation'

(49): the State as the official resume ofsociety--the condensation or fusion of contradictions

(50):following Bukharin, State as 'regulator' -- maintaining conditions ofproduction and conditions for the existence of the unity of a mode ofproduction/formation

(53): the State and a 'twinrole--corresponding to 'exploitation' and'organization-cum-supervision'

(53): economic function,ideological function, political function

(53-54): in sum, tworesults

State's 'global role' as cohesive factor unfolds in particular modalities (economic, ideological, and political'
State's functions can be grapsed only their interrelation (and their role in 'political class conflict') [i.e., not just directly political, but also generally political]

(55): State intervention in the economicvs.a 'liberal State' (non-intervention in the economic) [question of thedominant role--none of this, though, changes the general facts, he'sarguing convincingly]

part 1, section 3

(99):power is 'constituted' in the field of class practices (i.e., not atthe level of structures, but is an effect of the ensemble of theselevels')

(102): 'power' cannot be enumerated at the level ofstructure (relations of production), but only at level of politicalclass struggle

(104): rejectingclass-for-itself/class-in-itself [why? interrogate]

(104):definition--power as capacity of a class to realize itsspecific objective interests

(107): important--a classcan exist at the level of the class structure, without making itselffelt in the political arena [it seems like in this case we will wantto say they exist as a 'social force' but not politically -- thoughthis is inconsistently the case in his argument, if it is theargument. the idea is fairly clear, though]

(108): ok--"powerreveals relations not directly determined by the structure"

(111):important, needs interrogation--similarly, interests can onlybe related to the field of practices (not at the level of structures)[but in what sense can you have objective interests; this is where heintroduces the 'near-side'/'far-side' stuff]

(112): classinterests always relational

(112): 'objective', then, seems torefer to 'interests' once have abstracted away from 'ideology' andthe way in which their represented by agents. it doesn't, though,mean that we understand them at the level of 'structure'--there canbe no interests at this level, remember

(113): ok--'powerrelations' are determined 'in the last instance' by 'economicpower'

(115): the 'relative autonomy' of the state is not dueto the fact that the Stae has its own power, but because itconstitutes 'power centers' (again, this function ofunity/cohesion')

(116) state apparatus (personnel of thestate) vs. state power (the social class or fraction of a class whichholds power)

(117): not an 'instrumentalist'conception

(118): not zero-sum power--i.e., loss of power bythe bourgeoisie does not mean gaining of power by theworking-class

part 2, section 1

(124-125): weare not proceeding on the state/civil society schema, preciselybecause it abstracts from the 'class struggle' and hides realproblems in the concept of separation

(128): important--theconstituting of individuals as juridical-political individualcitizens (which has 'real' and 'ideological' components)

(129):it is the separation of the direct producer from the means ofproduction that produces the 'specific autonomy'

(130-131):at the level of the economic class struggle, the State has the effectof concealing the fact of classes from individuals (it imposesisolation, individualization). this is what makes it possible for theState to be implicated in the constitution of classes, at the levelof the political class struggle.

(133): the capitalist Staterelates to the socio-economic relations in the form in which theyappear in their isolation, insofar as socio-economic relations arealready class practices [but consider our objection,here]

(133-134): in sum, two functions

sets up agents of production so as to produce the effect of isolation
represent the unity of the isolated relations (the "unity of an isolation" which is "largely its own effect")

(135): the 'specific autonomy' of the State fromthe relations of production is reflected by the autonomy that the'political class struggle' possesses viz-a-viz the economic

(137):again, in sum [rich passage, needs some unpacking]--inconstituting class unity out of the isolation of the economic classstruggle, the State serves the interests of the dominatn classes. ithas to constitute their unity, first of all. but it also,ideologically, constitutes their particular interests as theinterests of the whole--this is made necessary by the autonomyof the political class struggle, and made possible by theisolation of the dominant classes.

(137): hegemony as basedin political practices, not structures

(138): we are not goingto use 'hegemony' in the sense of 'legitimacy' in the eyes of thedominated classes

(140-141): rather, hegemony will havea two-fold meaning applied to the political practices of thedominant classes

so, as they constitute themselves as the 'general interest'
also, though, to talk about the dominant role within the dominant classes (the leadership of the power bloc'

part 3, introduction

(187-190): usefulsummary of the claims thus far

CMP has specific autonomy of instances
state is the cohesive factor in the unity of a formation, which has several functions (economic, ideological, political) which are condensed in its strictly political function--"its function in relation to the field of the political class struggle"
the State 'determines' the class struggle, but only in the sense that it unfolds within limits set by it--additionally, the political class struggle redounds on the State, too [sense that he is trying to make sense of the Welfare State, social democracy, etc.]

(188-189): critical claim

for the dominated classes, the function of the capitalist state is to prevent their political organization which would overcome their economic isolation (an isolation which is partly produced by the state). for this the ideological role is critical, but obviously other functions have their place, too [the political-repressive, presumably].
for the dominant classes, the capitalist state is "permanently working otheir organization" by cancelling out their economic isolation (which is also the effect of the State and the 'ideological'--how so? this needs unpacking)

(189): nicely put--the State's contradiction isthat it presents itself in its institutions as a class state, rulingover a society that it says are not 'divided into calsses' -- inother words, it is as if it believes that all people are part of thebourgeois class in whose interest it rules. [on second thought, thismay be a liberal summary of his claim]

part 3, section1

(190): capitalist state represents the politicalinterests of the dominant classes, not their economic interests--itis the 'organizing agent'

(190-191): it can move against theirimmediate interests in the favor of the dominated classes, but onlyto secure the hegemony of the dominant

(191-192): crucial--thefact that the dominated classes can impose themselves, within limits,on the State, shows imply that the State presides over a societydivided into classes (and functions not, then, as the simple tool ofthe dominant classes). it respects, though, these interests only tothe extent that it can accommodate them into prolonged domination[there is an important question, then, about the institutionalizationof these gains]

(193): explicit mention of the Welfare state,in this regard--making economic sacrifices in order to safeguardpolitical power

part 3, section 4

(229): againsta 'dualist' conception of the struggle between dominated anddominant

(230): point 1--the rule of a 'power bloc' is madepossible/necessary by the nature of the capitalist state [unpackthis--it doesn't seem terribly important to the larger argument, butworth understanding all the same]

(231): point 2--insofar asCMP is characterized by a plurality of dominant classes (citinglandlords)

(232-233) point 3--the bourgeoisie appears asdivided into fractions [the question, here, is along what lines itsplits--due to competition (and thus as individuals), or due tocircuits, etc.--he seems to imply the latter, but is thisconvincing?]

(234): definition of powerbloc--contradictory unity of the politically dominant classes asrelated to the capitalist state

(237): hegemonic leadershipwithin the power bloc

(239): summary of claimshere--contradictory unity, and class struggle within powerbloc

(243): the question of the 'supporting classes', whodon't demand any real political sacrifices from the power bloc butoffer their support primarily on the basis of 'ideological illusions'and also due to the fear of the power of the working class (speciallythe petty bourgeoisie). all this depends, he reminds us, on the stateof political disorganization prevailing amongst these classes.

(247): political practice vs. political scene (parties, etc.)[which corresponds to form of state vs. form of regime, see 252--thisis not a chronological distinction, though]

(250): discussingquestion of 'staffing' of the State, dealing with England throughconcept of hegemonic leadership and power bloc

(251): we needto be able to distinguish between 'party relations' and 'classrelations', which is something that political science is not good atdoing

part 4, section 1

(255): enumeration ofthe concept of 'unity', as it is peculiar to the capitalist state(due to the 'autonomized juridico-political superstructure')

(256):important--again, against the notion of the State asinstrument--instead, a 'relative autonomy' viz-a-viz the power blocand viz-a-viz allies/supports, which is unique to the Capitaliststate.

(257): important, on two species of relativeautonomy--to try and make all this explicit: the political classstruggle has a 'relative autonomy' viz-a-viz the other instances; andthe State, has relative autonomy viz-a-viz the dominant classes inthis political class struggle (and, importantly, the latter fact'reflects' the former) [unpack this, a bit]

(258): Bonapartismas a theoretical model of the capitalists state, when we abstractaway from the historical story, there

(260): relative autonomyis not, at all, premised on some notion of equilibrium between theforces in the class struggle

part 4, section 2

(266):the 'ne0-liberal' theory of the State

(267-268): theinstitutionalist ('institutionalization of the classstruggle')

(272): state socialist and Bismarckian illusions,premised on a notion that social forces are in equilibrium (and thatthe State form is foreshadowing the future--'planning', etc.) [returnto text, if interested in his rebuttal]

(273): again, againstinstrumental theory of State monopoly capitalism

(274): again,the unique relation between the economic and political undergirdsthis theorization ('a new articulation of the economic and thepolitical')

part 4, section 3

(275-277): again,useful summary section

the autonomization of the political class struggle viz-a-viz the relations of production, owing to the unique nature of capitalism. this induces isolation in the agents of production, despite a socialization of the labor-process. the effect of this is to conceal class rleations from the agents, for all classes. this fact of the 'isolated' economic class struggle is precisely why the political class struggle is of such importance.
as well we have to consider other isolated classes in the social formation (they are overdetermined in their isolation by the state effects, in addition to what it already means to be a peasant or petty-bourgeois in the CMP)
state presents itself as the public unity of society--it represents the 'people nation', the 'poltical unity' of an 'economic isolation' which is its own effect'.
this is an ideological function, which is to occlude the class structure. (of course, this isn't the only function of the State's juridico-political superstitious--it also has 'real' effects)

(279): again, unique fact of capitalism is thatclass membership is absent from political institutions

(279):all this allows the State to function as the 'unambiguous' power ofthe dominant classes (how? follow the argument, now--this is where hebegins to justify this claim, he's saying)

(282): key--itis precisely through the relative autonomy of the State that theState upholds the political interests of the politically dominantclasses (he is noting some confusion about multiple uses of the termautonomy--both autonomy of political from economic, and of the Statefrom the political). he is saying that unity is a condition ofpossibility for this autonomy--but isn't what he's actually arguingthe other way around? that political unity is only possible if theState has relative autonomy.

(284): key--and this isthe answer to why that's the case, again, which is specific to CMP

because the bourgeoisie is incapable of raising itself to the level of internal unity
because of the bourgeoisie's struggle with the dominanted classes, against whom it finds it difficult to realize political hegemony

(285): to rule better in its name, in sum; thepolitical organizers of the dominant classes. [again, i think thequestion of dependence of the State on the bourgeoisie is less clear,in this formulation]

(287): again, we are not talking aboutthose instances of relative autonomy that arise from 'equilibrium' inthe class struggle' (this is something much more regular) [this doeselide the question of what happens at those moments to the State--butone would think he would turn to Lenin and the constitution of a'dual State', for answers]

(287-288): more summary--how doesrelative autonomy follow?

because of the isolation of the bourgeois calss, who can't raise themselves to the level of unity. the State must organize class domination
it must function to politically disorganize the working class, by presenting itself as the representative of the 'people-nation'
its important role viz-a-viz supporting classes.

(288): again, the conscious paradox of hisformulation--that the State assumes relative autonomy from dominantclasses precisely in order to serve them better.

(289): thequestion of equilibrium resulting from social forces--not much said,but just distinguishing it from the stable formulation of the conceptof autonomy

(291): aspiration to legitimacy in the State'spresentation of itself as representative of people-nation

(294): 'totalitarianism' is not actually that distinct from 'unambiguousclass power in the capitalist state'

part 4, section4

(298): again, bourgeoisie as a 'uniquely fracturedclass', which has its origins at the level of the actual relations ofproduction [here we have a quote that suggests a competition-centeredinterpretation of this fact]

(299): State as 'politicalorganizer' of the power bloc, precisely because individual partiesand its fractions are unable to do so ['only because', he issaying--worth interrogation, because of its 'functionalist'implications]

(300): the State, remember, doesn't confront apolitically unified dominant class--it is the agent of thisunification

(303): question of separation of powers

2012-01-06T20:28:00.002-08:00

alexander rabinowitch, the bolsheviks in power (2007)

prologue

(1-13): summary of the Revolution: causes and events, useful

(2): implication that the moderate socialists were interested in the survival of the Provisional Government because they believed it "was essential for Russia's military security and survival." No real mention of doctrinal commitment -- and maybe it wasn't that important, thinking back to the first book? anyway...

(2): this is useful--"Top Bolshevik leaders were divided into three groups. On the left were Lenin and Leon Trotsky, among others, for whom the establishment of revolutionary soviet power in Russia was less an end in itself than the trigger for immediate worldwide socialist revolution. In the center was a group of often quite-independent thinking leaders whose views on the development of the Russian revolution tended to flucturat... And on the right was a highly influential group of more moderate national party leaders led by Lev Kamenev and including Grigorii Zinoviev, Vladimir Miliutin, Aleksei Rykov, and Viktor Nogin (all members of the Bolshevik Central Committee), and Anatoli Lunacharskii... In Lenin's absence, this group's outlook, more than any other, shaped the Bolsheviks' public political platform."

(12-13): key--Rabinowitch's reading of the events, and his preliminary account of how the Bolsheviks arrive at authoritarianism. Hinges on the two struggles: one between the Bolsheviks and the liberal-moderate socialists; the second within the Bolsheviks (proponents of an all-socialist government, and the Left and Leninists). There is a sneaking implication that had the former succeeded, we might be elsewhere; but Rabinowitch's own book shows this to be highly unlikely. Would the moderate socialists really have pushed to take power, at any point in October or before? More likely we would have had tactical blunder, after tactical blunder--and the continuation of a thoroughly bankrupt and discredited PG. Maybe, even, a putsch would have eventually succeeded, absent the intransigence of the Left. Having said all this: clearly, there is something, still, in reading the future into these first few months, whether we decide, later, that it's illegitimate. Rabinowitch wants to emphasize the intransigence of the Mensheviks and the SRs over the new gov't, in particular. And thus, on this reading, the question of who was to blame is alive, even if its scope/importance is still limited.

PART ONE: THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY

Chapter 1, Forming a Government

(17): executive summary--"Bolshevik moderates... did not end their efforts, or those of other left socialist groups, to form a multiparty, homogeneous socialist government at the Soviet Congress and in its immediate aftermath. During these days, they sought to restore the moevement toward creation of a broad socialist coalition that had been destroyed by the violent overthrow of the Provisional Government engineered by Lenin just before the opening of the Congress of Soviets. When that failed, they strived mightily to ensure that the exclusively Bolshevik cabinet ultimately approved by the congress, the Council of People's Commissars, would be strictly accountable to the multiparty Central Executive Committee."

(18): "...Left SRs declined cabinet posts pending construction of a broadly inclusive socialist coalition...", October 26

(19): key--Lenin outlines a land program to the letter that proposed by the Left SRs; and NOT the Bolshevik program ('As a democratic government we cannot ignore the feelings of the masses even if we don't agree with them.').

(19): Kamenev names a new cabinet -- but this is to be provisional pending the Constituent Assembly.

(20): key--Avilov's "remarkably prophetic argument", arguing against the ability of an all-Bolshevik slate to govern (arguing instead for a Provisional Executive Committee which would form a broad, all-socialist gov't). The resolution did not pass, even though about half of the Bolshevik cabinet supported it, according to Rabinowitch. Trotsky takes the podium to defend the All-Bolshevik character of the new gov't--will not stand with traitors, more-or-less is his argument. [about 150 out of 600 vote for Avilov's proposal; the rest are for Lenin)

(21): wow--The All-Russian Union of Railway Workers takes an anti-Bolshevik stand, threatening to "take control of the entire Russian railway network." But then the officer/mass question is open here, as well, as evidenced by two rank-and-file workers disagreeing...

(21): A new CEC is elected, which includes some 62 Bolsheviks and 29 Left SRs, among other groups. The other groups will be permitted to enter, as well. "The potential entry into the CEC of representatives of peasant soviets was especially significant in terms of broadening the government, because most soviets were still dominated by SRs."

(22): key (note that this is linked to the worldwide revolution)--Rabinowitch arguing that most delegates anticipated a return to the pre-October demands for an all-socialist, multiparty coalition gov't. "Lenin and Trotsky, however, did not share this view. They were now concerned most of all with retaining freedom of action for themselves, so as to maximize the galvanizing effect of violent social upheaval in Russia on revolutionary workers abroad."

(23): October 26/27, shut down of opposition newspapers, which could be charged with 'incitement'. Bolshevik gov't locked in fight with Petrograd City Duma's All-Russian Committee for Salvation of the Homeland and the Revolution.

(23): October 28, large part of the bureaucracy on strike

(24): October 29, armed fighting claims 200 lives in Petrograd--more than those lost in the February or October revolutions. But suppressed.

(25): October 28, a week of streetfighting begins in Moscow, also claims hundreds of lives

(26): October 29, Bolshevik Central Committee (no Lenin, Trotsky) agree to participate in negotiations towards a ceasefire, and in efforts to broaden the government.

(27): key--though the moderates in the Bolshevik party were amenable to compromise, Rabinowitch is making the case that this encouraged the Mensheviks and SRs to take an even harder line--it "encouraged moderate socialists to bleieve that the Bolsheviks were on the brink of defeat..." [evidence is Menshevik Central Committee resolution on October 28, which prohibited negotiation; very hard stance demanding exclusion of Bolsheviks from gov't at the Vikzhel talks, to which the moderate Bolsheviks responded meekly]

(29): the view of the 'Left-moderates', embodied by Martov: "...only the formation of a government uniting the entire democracy, not just the soviets, but excluding representatives of privileged society, offered the hope of heading off a terrible civil war, the destruction of the democracy, and the imposition of a rightist dictatorship..."

(29): "...at the first two Vikzhel pleneary meetings and in the meeting of the 'Special Commission' on 30 October, the Mensheviks and SRs stymied all efforts at compromise by insiting that Bolsheviks be eliminated from the government altogether."

(31): nonetheless, approaching a compromise (excluding Lenin and Trotsky from gov't)

(33-34): key--confrontation between Lenin, Trotsky and the moderates, over the question of compromise. Rabinowitch is suggesting that "Lenin was on safe ground in arguing... that the revolutionary masses would view compromises undermining Soviet power and the gains of October as a betrayal of Bolshevik promises [the task, instead, was to take the gov't toward "All Power to the Soviets"]. On the other hand, the counter-argument seems perfectly tenable, too--"Lunacharski insisted that a homogeneous socialist government rather than an exclusively Bolshevik or even Soviet government was a necessity. In response to Lenin's categorical rejection of compromise, he argued that if the Bolsheviks did not obtain the cooperation of the existing state apparatus they 'would not be able to manage anything.' He acknowledged that the party had the option of 'restorting to terror'..." Nogin from Moscow is making this point, too--the importance of "splitting the opposition" [the danger, here, seems to be--obviously--the seductive nature of the counterfactual. against this, it is critical to reassert that these alternatives were proposing to take the Bolsheviks further away from Soviet power; at the very least, this is how the positions were argued, at the time]

(35): "...Trotsky, as much as Lenin if not more, was then obsessed with instigating immediate decisive socialist revolutions in the more advanced countries of Europe by means of a big revolutionary bang in Russia. Judging by his statements, it is no exaggeration to suggest that most of his thinking about Russian politics was shaped by this overarching concern..."

(36): November 1 meeting of Bolshevik Central Committee rejects Lenin's proposal to pull out of talks--but resolved to pursue the talks with more of an ultimatum in mind, on the basis of certain minimum demands

(37): Volodarskii (26 years old): "He was also skeptical about the likelihood of early socialist revolutions in Europe. 'We must understand that having taken power we will be forced to lower wages, to increase unemployment, to institute terror,' he had warned. 'We do not have the right to reject these methods, but there is no need to rush into them.' [!]

(38-39): November 2 Central Committee meeting rejects agreement with the moderate socialists (details of how this was passed, intervention of Petrograd Committee are here)

(39-40): important--Nonetheless, at a CEC meeting, Kamenev softens this: retains minimum demands of the earlier ultimatum (primacy of the CEC, recognition of the decrees of the Congress of Soviets, rejection of creation of a new parliamentary body), but also allows for broadening of the CEC. "The primary purpose of the proposal Kamenev presented was to continue the negotiations. For the Left SRs, these were forward steps. [Lenin's proposal, in contrast, had aimed to halt them]"

(40): November 3, the Vikzhel talks reconvene--but the agreement of the earlier meetings is now abandoned, as more radical demands are put forth by the Bolsheviks (recognition of the Congress, responsibility of gov't to the CEC)

(41): important--Lenin furious at the Bolshevik moderates for wanting to continue negotiations. "He now asked each individual member of the Central Committee not openly allied with Kamenev to sign a formal statement pledging to bring the dispute with the moderates before top party committees regionally and nationally..." [Trotsky, Sverdlov, Stalin, Uritskii, Dzerzhinskii, Sokolnikov, Bubnov, Adolf Ioffe, and Matvei Muranov signed--not clear that all of them were unsympathetic to compromise, though they agreed on party discipline]. Kamenev, Rykov, Zinoviev, Nogin, and Vladimir Miliutin resigned from Central Committee, hoping to touch off shock waves.

(42): Rabinowitch commentary, key: "By leaving the Central Committee and not responding positively to the idea of convening an emergency national party meeting, moderate Bolsheviks left one of the revolution's most important arenas of battle and helped 'ensure the victory of Lenin's whole line,' no less than did the Mensheviks and SRs in quitting the Second Congress of Soviets."

(42): important--"Unfortunately for the Mensheviks and SRs, the Bolsheviks' initialy revolutionary decrees, and their apparent toughness in dealing with the internal and external counterrevolution, had rejuvenated the revolutionary spirit of Petrograd's lower classes, a fact reflected in the expansion of support for Lenin's position at the local level."

(44): all this wrangling aside, key--"In Bolshevik Central Committee resolutions on the government question during this period, regardless of whether they were proposed by the moderates or Leninists, the CEC's primacy over the Sovnarkom was consistently reaffirmed... In practice [however], limitations on the independent power of the Sovnarkom, and the prerogatives and sensibilities of the CEC, were ignored by the Sovnarkom from the start... Similar arbitrariness characterized the behavior of the MRC, [which had become] the main command post for security in Petrograd and for expansion of Soviet rule nationally"

(45): important, precisely because it opens up into the larger questions of the revolution--Rabinowitch noting that if this temporary arbitrariness could have been justified in the last week of October, by the beginning of November, with immediate threats overcome, the persistence rule by arbitrary decree was clearly problematic.

(46): CEC meeting on November 4th: delicate tussle over Muraviev's endorsement of lynch justice, highlighting the issues [eventually rescinded by CEC a few days later]. and over Lenin's press curbs--which were repealed, at least formally.

(47): Over these struggles, Left SRs withdraw from everything but the CEC.

(47): key, for Rabinowitch's argument: "Nogin made an emotional plea for a compromise on the government issue, following it up with an announcement that was as prohpetic as it was startling. As he put it, the only alternative was a 'purely Bolshevik government maintained by political terror...'" [Rykov, Miliutin, Ivan Teodorovich, and Nogin all resign from the Sovnarkom -- all four were people's Commissars]

(47): another powerful indictment of the hardline, delivered by Lozovskii

(48): "...Nogin's announcement of resignations from the government had the effect of an exploding bomb..."

(48): key, a confidence vote on the Sovnarkom introduced--"With historical perspective, one can see that this was a critical moment in the earliest evolution of the Soviet system. The primary source of the Bolsheviks' popular authority lay in the identification of the party with the Soviets and the defense of the Soviets as the embodiment of the revolution. An open break between the Sovnarkom and the CEC at this point... might have significantly undermined the authority of the former... A roll-call vote ended up 29 to 23, with 3 abstentions. Riazanov and other leading moderate Bolsheviks... do not appear to have voted. This circumstance, coupled with the 'yes' votes of four people's commissars--Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Nikolai Krylenko--was decisive." [wow]

(49-50): Lenin has Kamenev replaced with Sverdlov as head of the CEC.

(50): merger with the Congress of Soviets of Peasants' Deputies further stregnthened Lenin's position (it had been centrist/right, but now dominated by Left SRs). Official creation of a joint CEC (including also soldiers and sailors and trade unionists) took place on November 15. [it is not satisfactorily explained, here, why the Left SRs, upset with so much else, would consent.]

(51): "...by the end of November, the Bolsheviks had a majority in the combined CEC"

(51): there was a moment here (before the inclusion of soldiers, sailors, and trade unionists in the combined CEC) where the Left SRs could have exercised authority and taken power, but did not.

(51-52): Maria Spiridonova, a Left SR leader: "'However alien their [Bolshevik] crude behavior is to us, we are maintaining close contact because the masses...follow them.' "

(52): question, again, of relationship of Sovnarkom to the CEC -- a decree is passed demanding closer collaboration. BUT, key: "It was not quite that. As time would show, the understanding depended on good faith on the part of the Bolsheviks and left extensive discretionary power in the hands of the Sovnarkom. Nonetheless, for some time, people's commissars dutifully made reports on their work to the CEC. Also, many major decrees, though by no means all, were transmitted to the CEC for confirmation after adoption by the Sovnarkom.

(53): key, and a place, here, to ask many questions--Rabinowitch is seeing the seeds of the future Russian state emerge in these dynamics; these first few days (in a sense, the effect of his earlier volume is almost slightly nullified). Regardless, the argument is that Lenin's success in these battles with, first, the moderate socialists, and especially second, the Bolshevik moderates and the Left SRs precluded the creation of a multiparty, coalition socialist gov't, and laid the foundations for continued all-Bolshevik rule. I suppose when we ask when democracy (or revolution) in Russia lost, we have to ask about the plausibility and importance of the multiparty coalition -- because other democratic, alternative arrangements did exist (what about all power to the soviets, for example, however impractical). In other words, given the bankruptcy of the socialist factions, there is no reason to make a rosy estimation of the lost opportunity wrt Menshevik/SR elements. Certainly, the pragmatic counterargument (that the Russian Revolution could have avoided a debilitating Civil War, if these early steps had been navigated more carefully) is very tempting; but it is not clear that it stands the test, empirically. Nonetheless, here is a place where counterfactuals truly flourish.

Chapter 2, Rebels into Rulers

(54): executive summary--"The collapse of efforts to broaden the Sovnarkom or even make it accountable to the multiparty CEC... meant that in the wake of the October revoltuion the Bolsheviks bore exclusive responsibility for maintaining order and provicing municipal services, and food and fuel, to Petrograd and the surrounding region... Lenin and Trotsky were not particularly concerned with the practical implications of their acts... The consequence of their stance, however, was that Bolsheviks in the city part organization, the Petrograd Soviet, and Petrograd district soviets were forced to transform themselves from rebels into rulers and to reshape or construct new local government and administrative bodies. These burdens led inexorably to the fundamental transofmraiton of the Petrograd Bolshevik party organization's composition, structure, method of operation, and relationship to its constituencies."

(55): Soviets did not assume gov't functions till late November--"Only then, more than a month after the Bolsheviks assumed formal power, did the executive organis of the Petrograd Soviet begin to play a meaningful role in governing revolutionary Russia's capital city. By virtue of being chair of the newly elected Executive Committee and Presidium, Zinoviev, who had restored himself to Lenin's good graces by abandoning the moderates, became head of the Petrograd Soviet. HE was to hold that post till the end of 1925."

(55): November 16, Petrograd City Duma officially dissolved (though elections were held November 27-28 to elect a new one, and retain expertise of the civil service; all-Bolshevik return, of course)

(56): important--as the Bolsheviks saw it at this time, Soviets were not institutions of administration--"Having devoted their lives to fomenting revolution, at the outset they perceived soviets less as organs of popular self-government than as political institutions whose task of consolidating the revolution was by no means over and which would at most define public policy, not implement it..." [the question was why they didn't simply take over the work of district dumas, which were controlled by Kadets and moderate socialists] "Not until late November and December..., in the face of strikes by civil servants partly directed by district dumas, did district soviets begin dissolving them." [often begun by the local Bolshevik party committee--evidence that the overall organization of the Party was still quite decentralized, he is arguing]

(57): "...District party committee and district soviet resolutions dissolving district dumas provided for their reelection. Prepartions for these elections were often initiated, but none were actually held..."

(57): "...work stoppages by veteran civil servants petered out in early January, not because they were smashed or replaced by freshly trained representatives of the revolutionary masses, as Trotsky advocated, but because ultimately most of them were dependent on wages for survival..."

(58-59): threat of bourgeois counterrevolution on the Don (Alekseev, Kaledin, Denikin and Kornilov regrouping) -- but a threat that was overstated by Lenin, Rabinowitch is arguing, as much of their rank-and-file was not motivated to fight.

(59): key to understanding the disintegration of the democratic life of the party, Rabinowitch is suggesting--'party work has ground to a halt' owing to the other demands on its best organizers; "The record shows that during the first year of Soviet power in Petrograd massive outflows of the most effective party workers, leading to organizational dysfunction, were the rule in all districts." ['we need to take steps to avoid being overwhelmed by 'October Bolsheviks' -- by inexperienced recruits]

(61): MRC disbanded on December 5 (it had been the effective governing authority in Petrograd (not the Soviets and not really the City Duma), up to this point--"from directing military operations and policing into such areas as the procurement, delivery, and distribution of food, fuel, and other basic necessities; transport and travel; labor relations and wages; public health; prison administration; and the allocation of housing.")

(62): to gauge popular opinion on Bolshevik rule, we can look to the Constituent Assembly elections between 12-14 November (and this opens into the question of the provinces, of course)

(64-65): the class question within the women's movement -- interesting pages

(67): discussion of the SR platform, which Rabinowitch is arguing was not very radical, save for the revolutionary agrarian program (permanent expropriation without compensation)

(68): Left SR platform was much more radical, even if it "upheld the sanctity of the Constitutent Assembly as revolutionary Russia's supreme political authority." Called, more or less, for the decrees passed at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets (including accountability of gov't to the Soviets), but also for the undoing of the political damage wrought by the premature seizure of power [of course, it's worth adding that they would have hardly have been in a position to demand this, had the premature seizure of power not taken place]

(68-69): in sum--"With preponderant strength among peasants in the countryside, nationally the SRs received the largest number of votes... In Petrograd... the results of elections to the Constituent Assembly were a strong endorsement of revolutionary Bolshevik policies and Soviet power by lower classes in the Petrograd region... [and among the Baltic Fleet and soldiers on the Northern Front]". Nonetheless, thus begins the tussle over the Constituent Assembly as alternate source of political authority in post-revolutionary Russia.

(71): important--"During these days, the Leninist Bolshevik leadership pursued the general directions developed when the outcome of the elections to the Constituent Assembly became known, namely, organizing recall elections, doing everything possible to undermine the Constituent Assembly at a popular level, and asserting control over arrangements for the assembly."

(73): important--All this being said, both Bolsheviks and Left SRs were in agreement that the Constitutent Assembly's power should be subordinated to the authority of the Soviet. Both parties were pursuing, at this time, a policy of balancing competing imperatives: broadening the revolution, and sustaining Soviet power.

(74-75): November 27/28, a 10,000-100,000 pro-Constituent Assembly march of well-dressed citizens.

(76): Pitirim Sorokin, future founder of Sociology Department at Harvard, main speaker at an SR rally!

(76-77): all this protest/occupation moves the Bolsheviks to outlaw the Kadets, which brings matter to a head for the moderate socialists (and even the Left SRs), as it seems to indicate an unwillingness to let the Constituent Assembly convene.

(78): Trotsky and Terror: 'There is nothing immoral in the proletariat finishing off a class that is collapsing... You [the Left SRs] wax indignant at the naked terror which we are applying against our class enemies. But let me assure you that in one month's time at the most, it will assume more frightful forms, modeled after the terror of the great French revolutionaries. Not the fortress but the guillotine awaits our enemies..."

(78): CEC adopts a suitably Bolshevik resolution on the Constituent Assembly and the Kadets.

(79): executive summary of the chapter, once more. He sees in this chapter the seeds, no doubt, of the "organization's increasing isolation from its social base." The question, for us, is obviously whether this was at all avoidable (were there strategic errors made, in other words?). Insofar as this has to do with the transition from rebels to rulers, it is more-or-less unavoidable--the weakening of Party work is something can be explained from the context, of course. But one senses that Rabinowitch wants to make, against Lenin and Trotsky, a stronger critique.

Chapter 3, The Defeat of the Moderates

(80): Left SRs accept posts in the Sovnarkom, despite their reservations, December 9 1917 (see 84, also)

(82-83): Rabinowitch is offering an alternative explanation for the rise of the VCheka, that has squarely to do with the "Left SR" problem--"It now appears likely that the MRC decided to disband not because it considered its role finished but because its radical Bolshevik leadership was frustrated with the Sovnarkom. It is also clear that the decisive factor dictating the Sovnarkom's approval of the MRC's self-liquidation and the creation of the VCheka was its perceived need for a temporary agency, free from meddling by the Left SRs, to deal decisively with the threatened nationwide strike of civil servants and, even more fundamental, to contend with the danger posed by supporters of the Constituent Assembly to the survival of Soviet power.. For Soviet leaders, it became clear that the presence of Left SRs [and specifically Shteinberg taking the Commissariat for Justice] made combating counterrevolution impossible..."

(87): interesting counterfactuals--considered without context, really, it seems impossible to deny the legitimacy of Shteinberg's position.

(88): Nonetheless, four Left SRs enter the VCheka in early January 1918, after much wrangling.

(89): the question of the moderate Bolsheviks (organized into the Constituent Assembly
'fraction'), yet again--based on the "principle that the Constituent Assembly should be the ultimate arbiter of Russia's political destiny."

(90): key--Lenin's Theses on the Constituent Assembly (December 12) -- Soviets as a higher form of democracy--"any form of government the Constituent Assembly might create would be an intolerable step backward from the republic of soviets..." ; broadest use of recall, therefore, and unequivocal recognition of Soviet power was imperative. Nonetheless, the Party moderates were sidelined, quite slyly but explicitly. Details here.

(93): a surprisingly Left-inspired SR program, probably to attract the support of the soviets

(94): Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets, January 1918

(97): weaknesses of the VCheka--in many workers'/soldiers' minds, much like the Okhrana

(98): assasination attempt on Lenin, January 1918--attributed to the Right SRs

(103): executive summary, leading up to tensions with the Consituent Assembly--"...the Central Committee's stance on the primacy of Soviet power over the Constituent Assembly, coupled with the reluctance of the SRs to try to provide for the Constituent Assembly's security, along with the indifference of the bulk of Russian population to its fate, all but assured its quick demise."

Chapter 4, The Fate of the Constituent Assembly

(106-107): Major clash, January 5 1918, at rally for defense of Constituent Assembly--'brutal' killings by amateur security forces deployed by the Soviet authorities, without corresponding provocation.

(111): at this point, though, still divergent positions within the party on the fate of the assembly; nonetheless, plan was to push a program so radical that the Assembly would be forced to disband.

(112): opens with a fight!

(115): key-- "[Chernov, SR] challenged the Bolsheviks to request an immediate nationwide plebiscite on attitudes toward the Constituent Assembly if they had doubts about its right to express the will of the people... Implicit in what he said was the asummption that... the era of Soviet rule was over and that of new institutions to be created by the Constituent Assembly was about to begin.."

(116): Bukharin responds, emphasizing importance of Soviets

(117): Tsereteli, from the Mensheviks, on the offensive -- 'At the present time you are fighting neither Kerensky nor Tseretel but the expressed will of the entire population.' [!] Calling for the subordination of the soviets, explicitly, to the Constituent Assembly.

(119): Sorokin presentation (on behalf but against express will of Left SRs; as peasant leader, really) also backing away, marginally, from calling for the dissolution of the assembly. Influence of moderates, and desire to distinguish themselves, argues Rabinowitch. Raises the specter of the agrarian question.

(121): "All that can be gleaned from available sources is that Lenin arrived armed for bear and, in the name of the Central Committee, demanded an immediate Bolshevik walkout and dissolution of the Constituent Assembly after the first session."

(122): Bolsheviks withdraw; Left SRs walk out at 4AM, after Assembly doesn't vote on recognition of Soviet power!

(126): A few dissenters in the CEC against dissolution of the Constituent Assembly (Riazanov and Lozovskii)

(127) executive summary--"Most important, however, Sviatitskii was probably on target when he pointed to the Russian people's fundamental indifference to the fate of the Constituent Assembly, allowing Lenin to command that they all simply go home..."

PART TWO: WAR OR PEACE ?

Chapter 5, Fighting Lenin

(131): central importance of Bolshevik demand of immediate peace--both to rank-and-file, and to Bolshevik moderates who were otherwise opposed to Lenin's radical line.

(131): Brest-Litovsk talks begun on 20 November, 1917; negotiations on 9 December, 1917

(132): but 'universal proletarian peace', or stuck with unilateral negotiations with the Central Powers?

(135): disagreements at negotiations over commitment to self-determination of all subject peoples, proposed by Ioffe as condition in his opening proposal

(136): Lenin-sponsored survey shows massive weaknesses and disaffection in Russia's capacity to resist, in event of break-down of talks

(139): even still--"In fact, with virtually no exceptions, everyone, either explicitly or implicitly, rejected compromise with the Central Powers" [this is the Petrograd Soviet]

(141): Lenin's views on peace, key--"my reading of the available evidence leads me to conclude that Lenin came to power convinced of the need for immediate peace if revolutionary Russia was to survive but that this concern did not trouble him much becasue of his absolute confidence in the immediacy of decisive socialist revolutions abroad... However, he began to have doubts... Following his sojourn in Finalnd [December 24-27], he made one of his characteristic 180-degree turns, concluding that htere was no alternative to accepting whatever peace terms the Germans offered. The stage was set for one of the most profound intraparty crisis of Lenin's years..."

(142): Left Communist opposition, advocacy of "revolutionary war"--particularly heated owing to proximity of upheaval in Germany, belief that German soldiers would not fight Russian troops.

(143): and Trotsky's middle position--"simply to declare the war was over, that the army was being demobilized, and that it was going thome to build a socialist Russia."

(143): On 8 January, at ad hoc conference on this issue, the Left Communists won handily (32 for them, 16 for Trotsky, 15 for Lenin).

(144): 11 January, this was brought up at Central Committee meeting--Trotsky's position wins 9 to 7 (Lenin's was considered so weak, not even voted on!)

(149): here, and elsewhere, it is Bukharin's and the Left Communist position that subordinates everything to the objective of international revolution.

(151-152): Trotsky presents his position at Brest; General Max Hoffman calls off the truce. But the Russian delegation, at this point, is still confident that the Great War is over; that the Germans won't carry out an offensive.

(153-154): executive summary

Chapter 6, "The Socialist Fatherland Is in Danger"

(158): "For [Trotsky], the aim of immediate, open, and comprehensive demobilization was to demonstrate to the entire world Soviet Russia's unequivocal determination to end its participation in the war and to put the burdent of protecting the Russian revolution, if that became necessary, squarely on Europe's revolutionary masses..."

(158): "Trotsky's final statement at Brest had flowed naturally from the conundrum [that it was necessary to demand more than simply a return to status quo--in line with peace without annexations, the right of self-determination, etc.]

(160): On February 13 (new calendar), Germans had in fact taken a decision, against Trotsky's expectation, to launch a limited offensive, to 'put the Bolsheviks in their place' (on February 18)

(161): the debate re: a separate peace is re-opened with haste

(162-165): key, for two reasons--Lenin continually demanding immediate capitluation; but in battle with Bukharin, who "suggested that Lenin and those who favored peace at virtually any price were succumbing to panic..." But eventually Lenin (and Trotsky) triumphant, within the party and at the Soviet. Further controversy, though, because this decision was fundamentally made by the Sovnarkom, without consultation with CEC (and by a one-vote margin).

(166): Rank-and-file (as expressed by district soviets) in Petrograd opposed, by and large, to surrender? Most were Left Communists (see 167)

(167): key, different point--at this time, the Petrograd party organization was re-shaped, which "appears in retrospect to have been a major step in the destruction of the relative internal democracy..."

(167): serious dissent within the Central Committee (Bukharin, Uritskii, Lomov, Bubnov)

(168): in sum, despite peace proposal from Lenin/Trotsky, increasing militancy in both the Bolshevik and Left SR camps, including at lower, district levels, it seems. [though not, at all, among soldiers]

(171-172): CEC meeting chaired by "tactically astute" Sverdlov, who recognized possibility that peace issue could bring down the gov't (Left SRs were with the Left Communists) -- prepared instead, essentially, for the imminent defense of Petrograd.

(173): important, new German peace conditions arrive--"Could [Lenin] have been revealed that they were not harsher? ... ON the other hand, the intervening days had revealed the depth and scope of aversion to bowing before German imperialism on the party of many if not most of Lenin's closest comrades-in-arms. Surely there are few better examples of Lenin's legendary tenacity and strength of will than his fierce determination to overcome his opponents at this critical juncture..."

(174): Lenin's threat to resign hangs over the meeting to consider the terms. Vote is 7 to 4, with 4 abstentions, in favor of accepting the terms.

(178): And, after much intense discussion, a tense vote at the CEC meeting in favor of acceptance. 112 to 86, with 22 abstentions.

(178-180): executive summary

Chapter 7, An Obscene Peace

(181-182): With capture of Pskov, an apparent German advance to Petrograd, despite acceptance [though they had actually planned to stop short]. Thus talk of evacuating the capital to Moscow.

(183): key -- "The relationship between the Petrograd proletariat and the Bolsheviks, in February and March 1918, had already cooled compared to what it had been when Kerensky advanced on the capital in late October 1917, and this hampered recruitment efforts. This change was partly a result of popular disenchantment with the economic consequences of the October revolution, above all food shortages and spiraling unemployment. Other factors impeding the recruitment of workers for defense at the end of February and in March 1918 included general demoralization; the large number of party members... already transferred from their jobs to serve with Red Guard detachments supporting consolidation of the revolution around the country...; the startling suddenness of the resumption of German military operation; and the utterly confused military and political situation."

(187): tracking the degeneration--in this atmosphere, VCheka given right to summarily execute 'counterrevolutionaries' and common criminals [Left SRs opposed, importantly]

(188-189): order to shoot people putting up posters saying 'Russia Has Been Sold to the Germans'[!]. District soviets opposed, importantly.

(191-192): worker activists committed to defense of revolution; rank-and-file, much less so.

(192-193): key--and gradually (early to mid-March), a shift in the wishes of district Soviets and trade unions, too, who had been initially opposed to peace: "...a major grassroots shift in favor of ratificationh and against the Left Communists..."

(196-198): important, Seventh All-Russian Bolshevik Party Congress, March 1918 (focus on ratifying the Brest treaty, for Party-wide legitimacy) [Lenin here criticizes the Left Communists, AND Trotsky] "[Bukharin] reminded Lenin that, to the contrary, the Left Communists had consistently held to the principle that the Russian revolution would either be saved by revolutions abroad or would be crusehd by the capitalist powers... To Bukharin, the fundamental difference between the two sides was that the Left Communists believed in the imminence of an international workers' revolution." Debate lasts 12 hours; final vote is 30 in favor, 12 against, 4 abstentions. Riazanov resigns. AND Trotsky resigns, taking umbrage at implication that he is to blame [when majority of Party had backed his line]; but takes it back, for reasons that are unclear/undocumented.

(200-202): the move to Moscow, early March

(203): Kronstadt Soviet still radical beyond belief--"'Did we overthrow Russian tsarism and the bourgeoisie to bow before German stranglers without a fight?'" Represented, also, by increasing gains made by Left SRs in the soviet, at expense of Bolsheviks, in early months of 1918.

(203): Fourth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, March 1918 [814 of the 1172 delegates were Bolsheviks; 238 Left SRs; 114 unaffiliated]

(204-205): important--despite "...overwhelming support for ratification among Bolshevik delegates...", Congress hears arguments against ratification, by Left SRs--focusing on ongoing resistance in areas occupied by Germany, prospect of partisan warfare, and the danger of betraying international revolution. Left SRs (and Left Communists) threaten to leave Sovnarkom if peace is ratified, in order to fight German imperialism on the ground--which they do upon the ending of the Congress.

(208-209): executive summary

PART THREE, SOVIET POWER ON THE BRINK

Chapter 8, A Turbulent Spring

(213): amid crises, "Bolshevik leaders staying in Petrograd were also faced with the emerging opposition of Petrograd workers... In the late spring and early summer of 1918, these problems worsened and new ones emerged [i.e., outbreak of civil war]"

(214): creation of Petrograd Labor Commune (SK PTK), after gov't retreat to Moscow

(216): key--"...This was still a fluid time in the relationship between soviet and party agencies in Petrograd. Local party bodies, striped of many of their most experienced members, were now beginning to consider broader political and economic issues. However, they still shied away from direct involvement in government..." [relationship between 'party work' and 'soviet work'; two different attitudes prevailed within the Party]

(220): chaotic, tense relations between Petrograd, ravaged by crises at this time, and Moscow

(221): SK PTK pursuing line of moderation on counterrevolution and crime (not shooting)

(223): terrible food supply situation in Petrograd

(224): 46% of Petrograd's labor force was unemployed, by April 1918; breakdown of industry

(223-225): key--the EAD had been formed (opposition movement of moderate socialists and unaffiliated factory workers), "stimulated by the widespread view that trade unions, factory committees, and soviets, perhaps especially district soviets, were no longer representative, democratcially run working-class institutions; instead, they had been transformed into arbitrary, bureaucratic, government agencies. There was ample reason for this concern..." [and key seems to be the food supply problem; exacerbated as it was by the separate negotiations with the Ukraine, pursued by the Germans at Brest]

(225): key, tracking the disintegration of distric soviets and local party committees--"As in the case of Bolshevik district committees, links between local soviets and factory workers, critical for leftist success in 1917, were broken. Who had time for meetings and agitation among constituents with the Germans at the gates?"

(228): optimists vs. pessimists in the EAD, around the question of worker support vs. Bolsheviks. "Turning point in their strategic orientation" is mid-May, when all issues come to a head.

(231-232): "The growing disenchantment of Petrograd workers with economic conditions and the evolving structure and operation of Soviet political institutions... naturally worried Bolshevik authorities in Petrograd..." [This is when Zinoviev declares that Soviets had become 'Houses of Lords,' and proposes nonparty worker conferences as remedy--as an institution to legitimize the district soviet's work...]

(234): First City District Workers Conference, May-June 1918

Chapter 9, Continuing Crises

(237): Danger of military advance of Germans, allied with Finland whites--jeopardizing the Baltic Fleet [leading to the 'Ice March' of the Baltic Fleet]

(242): "The determination of Lenin and Trotsky to avoid a renewal of war with Germany in May 1918 was not only a consequence of their enduring assumptions about the hopelessness of sucessfully defending Petrograd..."

(243): dark act by Trotsky, according to Rabinowitch--the execution of Shcastny (commander of Baltic fleet), on trumped-up charges of trying to overthrow the Petrograd Commune, 21/22 June 1918 [and this enraged the Baltic Fleet, with whom he was quite popular]

(244-245): antigovernment revolts, also, at Obhukov--"one of Russia's largest producers of [military goods]", and thus hit hard by demobilization in December 1917.

(246): assasination of Volodarskii, June 20 1918.

(248): June 1918, membership numbers at 13,472 (36,000 in February; 60,000 in October 1917).

(248-249): key--new elections to the Petrograd Soviet, announced on 13 June--goal to purge moderate socialists, to counteract the right of the EAD to represent workers, etc. [Rabinowitch looking at the electoral rules, and saying this was fixed to assist the Bolsheviks in various ways]

(251): and election results in June 1918: "the governing parties receieved a 3 to 1 majority among workers." [badly amongst women]. "One is still left, however, with the nagging question of how many Bolshevik deputies from factories were elected instead of the oppostion because of press restrictions, voter intimidation, vote fraud..." [in sum, a highly suspect victory]

(254): repression of the EAD, and the thwarting of the general strike they had called for July 2. not pretty.

(256-257): a cholera outbreak compounding all issues, in July-September 1918 [4,305 deaths]

(258-259): executive summary

Chapter 10, The Northern Commune and the Bolshevik-Left SR Alliance

(261): purpose of this chapter is to discuss run-up, foundation of soviets in the Northern Oblast, whose "primary historical interest lies in the revealing arguments that broke out... over Left SR participation in the new government and over the government's structure..."

(262): Zinoviev vs. Fishman at the First Northern Oblast Congress (over Brest, primarily)

(263): critical--Left SR challenge: "the main social base of revolutionary government [b/c of decomposition of the proletariat] would have to be Russia's still enormous, healthy, and politically able class of laboring peasants...a diktat of party officials was being substituted for class-based democracy exercised through freely elected, representative soviets" [right on]. Goes on to present a proposal to involve the masses, once again, in gov't, in his words.

(265): responsive in their counterproposals--but "in practice, it quickly fell by the wayside; as in the central government, the Central Executive Committee of the Northern Oblast was subordinate to the SK SO..."

(265-266): key--"The debate... graphically illustrated the ties that bound the Bolsheviks and Left SRs, as well as the profound differences... For the Petrograd Bolsheviks, starved for cadres, the Left SRs were a source of energetic, competent personel... [To Left SRs], the Bolsheviks were still the heroic architects of 'October.' They still had a healthy core--the Left Communists--with whom Left SRs felt an especially strong kinship" [these are good pages to look at in more depth, for Bolshevik-Left SR question; though his treatment of this is marred by a slight utopianism, one suspects, insofar as it seems obvious that the Party in opposition is always more capable of demanding democratic reforms, what have you, than the one in power. But this defense, too, can go too far--that is where one must tread carefully.]

(267): key conjuncture--Lenin's 'Immediate Tasks of Soviet Power', on April 29, 1918 ["unquestioning implementation of government directives, obedience to commissars, utilization of 'bourgeois specialists', re-imposition of one-man managerial authority..., and other 'capitalist' measures such as restoration of wage incentives..."]. This deeply, deeply troubled the Left SRs.

(268): key--Another significant source of Left SR anger at Bolsheviks was Lenin's "use of armed force to solve the ever more urgent problem of urban hunger."

(268): March 1918 ration for workers in Petrograd was 1,082 calories! June 1918 was 714! And it was typically worse than this, Rabinowitch notes.

(269): key conjuncture, beginnings of Town-Country--Thus, Sovnarkom (approved by CEC) decree of 13 May 1918 declares all peasants with "grain surpluses" "enemies of the people." [objections raised by Left SRs]. "Lenin's policy of squeezing the peasntry to feed starving workers, and the resulting creation of a virtual state of war between town and country, was implemented on a large scale in the late spring and summer."

(274): Left SR role in moderating (or, at least postponing) 'Red Terror'

(278-281): more useful examples of significant co-operation and importance of Left SR collaboration with Bolsheviks in the gov't, up until the summer of 1918 at the very least.

(281-282): executive summary: "For Soviet power in the region, the period between mid March and July 1918 was a time of continuing crises. That it survived without resort to terror was due in no small part to effective collaboration between Petrograd Bolsheviks and Left SRs, and their mutual restraint in dealing with each other. However, the collaboration was not to last. The breakdown of the Bolshevik-Left SR bond in Petrograd and in the Northern Commune was soon to be triggered by events and directives from Moscow..."

Chapter 11, The Suicide of the Left SRs

(283): tracking decline in relationship, begun in March with ratification of Brest treaty (and continued through food procurement decision, spetsy in management of workplace and army, and authoritarian domestic policies, etc., etc.)

(283): Rabinowitch noting "sharply increasing support for the Left SRs, especially among peasants in the provinces..."

(283): "Thus, as spring turned to summer, Left SR and Bolshevik national leaders were on a collision course that would have serious implications for Bolshevik-Left SR collaboration in Petrograd..."

(284): key--an "especially adverse impact" on the CEC Peasant Section, which was a Left SR Bastion headed by 'legendary' Spiridonova--and had been key in extending Bolshevik power into the countryside from January to April 1918

(285): after mid-March, though, the Peasant Section had sent agitators to organize resistance to the Germans, in contravention of national leadership's decision, of course. Charges of 'separatism', therefore, were somewhat justified.

(287): Fifth All-Russia Congress of Soviets, 28 June 1918 [demanded by Left SRs in face of growing tensions, Rabinowitch suggests]

(287): by this time, though, internal dissent within the Bolshevik Party had died down; little prospect of a Left Communist-Left SR alliance.

(287-288): key-- Mensheviks and SRs were expelled June 14, probably to tip the numbers more favorably in the Bolsheviks' favor--final delegates numbered 678 for the Bolsheviks, and 269 for the Left SRs. Rabinowitch arguing that "there is, in fact, substantial circumstantial evidence that the huge Bolshevik majority in the congress was fabricated, and that the number of legitimately elected Left SR delegates was roughly equal to that of the Bolsheviks..."

(288-289): deeply unsavory picture of the Bolsheviks emerging in these pages.

(290): nonetheless--and this is the "suicide"--Left SR Central Committee authorized, in July 1918, the assasination the German Ambassador, Count Mirbach, in a hope to re-open the war.

(292-293): "...still convinced that all-out war with Germany would be an unmitigated disaster for the revolutionary cause, Lenin quickly recovered and focused on showing the Germans that the Bolsheviks were quite capable of easily handling the Left SRs. The catch was that it was by no means clear that the organized military forces immediately available to him were a match for those at the disposal of the Left SRs..."

(294): key--Rabinowith arguing, quite fairly, that it was not an uprising against 'Soviet power', as Lenin accused it of being, as much as it was "consistent with the objective of reshaping the policies of the Leninist Sovnarkom..."

(294): "more than four hundred Left SRs, mostly rank-and-file members, were caught and an uncertain number were summarily shot..." [!] [Others were detained and arrested--Spiridonova, for example, held in prison until November 1918]. All Left SRs expelled from responsible positions in gov't (though not membership, it seems); Peasant Section was gutted.

(295): absolutely key, tracking the degeneration--Soviet constitution passed at the Fifth Congress (July 1918). "...The constitution perpetuated the fiction that the elective All-Russian Congress of Soviets was the highest organ of state authority, and that between its convocations, except in dire emergencies, the Sovnarkom was subordinate to the CECE, which was the supreme legislative, administrative, and controlling organ of government; in practice, however, the opposite prevailed. Between the Fifth Congress in July 1918 and the Sixth Congress the following November, the CEC assembled only eight times (as a rule, the Sovnarkom met daily), and, with the Mensheviks, SRs, and Left SRs effectively excluded, its meetings were largely ceremonial..."

(295-296): The first constitution legislated dominance of City over Town, with differential rates of representation (1 deputy for 25,000 electors in city soviets; 1 deputy for 125,000 electors in provincial soviets)

(297): Bolshevik authorities in Petrograd heard about the assasination before Petrograd Left SRs!

(302): interesting--by the time of the Fifth Congress, the Left SRs have a majority in the Kronstadt Soviet--"adopted a resolution [there] expressing aversion to centralized dictatorial government as a violation of the principle 'All Power to the Soviets' and a throwback to bourgeois systems of government." Kronstandt Soviet dissolved, and their newspaper (in operation since March 1917) shut down, on July 9, 1918.

(302-305): nonetheless, Petrograd Left SRs defiant, since obvoiusly the Bolshevik story of an 'attack on Soviet power' they knew to be untrue--most stood by their Central Committee's decision to assasinate Count Mirbach.

(306): key--none of this marks the complete exist of Left SRs from gov't, partly because of the severe shortage of cadres; but it does mark the end of them as a collective force in revolutionary politics, it seems. "The end of the Bolshevik-Left SR alliance marked the decisive turn to one-party government in Soviet Russia. Around the same time, government centralization in Petrograd was advanced by the abrogation of the taxing powers of district soviets..."

(307-309): executive summary

(309): "Despite their skyrocketing stregnth in the countryisde before Mirbach's assassination, the Left SRs never recovered from the battering they received at the hands of the Bolsheviks following their impetuous act." [ah, the counterfactuals!]

PART FOUR: CELEBRATION AMID TERROR

Chapter 12, The Road to 'Red Terror'

(313): key--"The summer of 1918 saw a hardening of policies toward real and potential counterrevolution in Petrograd... These threats grew with astounding speed... The drift to Red Terror in Petrograd and other Russian cities during the late summer of 1918 grew out of the insecurity caused by these ominous developments. Factors often cited for causing the Terror, such as pressure from Lenin, the assassinations of Volodarskii and Uritskii, and the unsuccessful attempt to kill Lenin, played a less significant role..."

(318): mid summer 1918, "...Uritskii still resisted the extremist tide at a time when the Cheka in Moscow was already arbitrarily shooting class enemies and when, for practical purposes, unofficial Red Terror was in full sway there and in other Russian cities..."

(319): By late spring, Western allies (especially Britain and France) had started to support various anti-Bolshevik movements "friendly to the cause of pursuing the war against Germany to victory, at first primarily with large infusions of money." [real intervention beginst August 2]

(320): conscription into Red Army begins at the end of June, 1918 [further compromises Party work]

(323): Lockhart "conceded that the Allied intervention was an indirect cause of the Red Terror. There is a kernel of truth in that, at least insofar as Petrograd is concerned..."

(324): By August, Uritskii was "losing ground to advocates of 'Red Terror' in the SK SO..." [19 August seems to mark the start date, as regards the PCheka; first mass shooting was on the 21 of August--quite chilling, but they all are, aren't they?]

(326): Uritskii assasination, on August 30, 1918

(329): attempted assasination of Lenin on same day, at speech to factory workers.

Chapter 13, The Red Terror in Petrograd

(330): "The fundamental aim of the Red Terror in Petrograd, in the fall of 1918, was to ensure political stability at a time when the city was being stripped of its security forces..."

(333): About 800 were shot in Petrograd in the fall of 1918, in total; and 500 by the Kronstadt Cheka [but probably more, Rabinowitch is noting, since this doesn't include 'lynch justice']

(340): some alarm, at local levels (Trade Union Council), at the "indiscriminate character of the Red Terror" (September 1918). [errors were made, Bolsheviks shot]

(342): Zinoviev on the Red Terror, at the Seventh City Conference

(342): Riazanov objections to blood-stained red banners

(343-344): key--all this, of course, exacerbated the dire straits the Bolsheviks found themselves in--by September 1918, membership stood at around 6,000 (according to Fitzpatrick, remember, a year earlier it had been 60,000).
And 40% of the members had joined after October! "Clearly, then, mobilization of experienced Bolsheviks for positions in the Red Army and food procurement detachments... had drastically altered the proportion of party veterans to newcomers to the detriment of the party organization." [additionally, only 10% were women; a tiny, tiny fraction were educated]

(349): key--in late 1918, 'failed rebellion' of Left SR-led Second Baltic Fleet Detachment [owing, in large part, to 'conscription'--additionally, "many of the mobilized sailors came from rural villages where Left SR influence still predominated"], in a pattern of events that "foreshadowed the Kronstadt revolt of March 1921." Horrific conditions--more than half did not have shoes! Demanding a return to the gov't of the soviets, nullification of Brest, etc.

(355): important--Eleven of the leaders of the rebellion were shot. Goodness. Crew of another battleship "boldly protested what it termed the 'brutal massacre of genuine proletarians who, because of genuine, truly terrible hunger, participated in nothing more than a hunger riot which was later dubbed an anti-Soviet insurrection.'"

(355): executive summary

Chapter 14, Celebrating 'The Greatest Event in the History of the World'

(357): In the fall of 1918, euphoria over the C. European upheavals.

(371): Moscow-Petrograd rivalry, in part over the autonomy of the Northern Commune as an institution of gov't.

(371): Sixth All-Russian Congress called for 6 November, 1918--primarily to discuss changed international situation, after WWI

(376-377): Zinoviev predicting a Socialist Europe within a few years.

(378-382): large turnout to the anniversary celebrations. "By all accounts, it was a mass festival unlike any Petrograd had ever witnessed."

(380-381): Zinoviev keynote speaker; never mind his position, a year ago!

(382): 100,000 workers marching (only 6,000 members or so, remember)!

(386): In a celebration in a surrounding village: "the crowd gatehred around a 'bonfire of the revolution' to witness the burning of efficies of tormentors and servatns of the old regime... To the author of this acount, an unforgettable sight was the gray-bearded men who had learned about the torment of serfs imposed by landowners fom their fathers and grandfathers dancing in childlike merriment around the bonfire..."

(387-388): executive summary--increasing power of Central Bureau (and governmental agencies, more generally) over district Soviets

Chapter 15, Price of Survival

(389-401): executive summary of entire argument

(390): "In retrpospect, their [the Bolshevik moderates] thinking about the longer-term dangers of an exclusively Bolshevik assumption of power in backward Russia appears very wise..."

(390): key--"Neither revolutionary ideology nor an established pattern of dictatorial behavior are of much help to explain fundametnal changes in the character and political role of the Bolshevik party..., although the impact of both cannot be entirely discounted. The fact is that the Petrograd Bolsheviks had to transform themselves from rebels into rulers without benefit of an advance plan... Most significant in shaping the earliest evolution of party and soviet bodies, their relationship to each other, and the Soviet political system generally, were the realiteis the Bolsheviks faced in their often seemingly hopeless struggle for survival."

(391-393): absolutely key, in sum--"Three factors explain the relatively weak leadership role of the Petrograd Bolshevik party organizatoin during the first months of Soviet rule. Initially, the most important of these was the lack of any special concern.. with the institutionalization of an authoritative and exlusive directing role for party organs in government. Most historians of Soviet Russia have assumed [this]... However, the large body of relevant sources... leaves no room for doubt that for some time the need for a highly structured, all-powerful, centralized party dictatorship was by no means apparent to most Petrograd Bolsheviks... A second factor that helps explain the weak leaderhip... was that, between January and April 1918, it was a participant in... the bitter intraparty conflict over ratificatoin of the Brest treaty... The debilitating effects of the controversy on the party... were not eased until late March... at the emergency Fifth Conference... when the Left Communists were defeated... A final factor contributing to the ineffectiveness of the Petrograd Bolshevik organizatoin at this juncture was the colossal attrition of its most reliable and qualified personnel... The close, interactive linkages between the Petrograd party organization and factory workers, soldiers, and sailors that had been key to the development of popular political programs... were shattered."

(396): key--"The Left SRs provided Soviet power with a critically important link to the countryside. Had the Bolshevik-Left SR alliance survived, it seems likely that the Russian civil war would have been significantly less torturous..."

(397): changing relationship between the Petrograd Soviet and district soviets is dated to fall of 1918, when the latter start to surrender their independence and start to fall in line with directives from above.

(398): "The burden of existing evidence indicates that these events can best be understood as the culmination of a gradual process during which the moderating influence of such key individuals as Uritskii, Krestinksii, and Proshian was replaced by pressure for systematic Red Terror, in part 'from below.'"

(401): ends with dismissiveness towards the German Revolution, in the sense that it is never implied--in his account--that it could have gone past the moderate phase. in fact, as he argues, it was self-consciously repudiating Bolshevik extremism (the important questions, though, and counterfactuals, are left unaddressed.)

---

(1) surely the most important question to ask is the role of the international justification--is it ever anything but utopian? and what then could have been done [/ought to have been done], best, absent this hope? although remember, the deployment of this justification changes across issues, over time, and with its purveyors (it is the Left Communists' justification for revolutionary war in February 1918, for example; and always, also, the Left SRs justification for much of policy pursued in the first half of 1918)

(2) the Left SR position on dissent and terror often seems decidedly more principled than the Bolsheviks--and doesn't, unlike the Mensheviks/SRs, seem to sacrifice the revolution. surely questions are raised here, then? alternatives, though?

(3) as he comes closer and closer to tracking the degeneration, it's quite clear that the Bolsheviks are less and less to be absolved (particularly in the way in which the composition of the Fourth and Fifth Congress of Soviets was tinkered with). But condemnation has to be historical, and comradely--where, again, are the strategic errors that could have been realistically avoided? On the part of the Bolsheviks, since the Left SR blunder is obvious.

(4) question of the peasantry--would it be possible to argue that the gutting of the Peasant Section, with the demise of the Left SRs, sowed the seeds for much of what would come to pass in the Civil War and after? Or is that simply utopian, and too easy?

2012-01-06T20:28:00.000-08:00

Plenary,HM 2010

Duncan Foley

ThreeQuestions

economic, relation between profitability of investment and the current crisis. Long-standing understanding of tendency of rate of profit to fall, but there is not much evidence that a dramatic fall in basic profitability preceded this crisis (controversial point—this is a question, however, not a claim). Most patterns show a definite fall from the high in the 60's to the 70's, which ushered in the period of neoliberalism. But neoliberalism succeeded in raising the rate of profit (capital productivity through technological change), and also because of raising the rate of exploitation in advanced capitalist countries (suppression of wage growth, but continued increase in productivity of labor). So is this a crisis of too little surplus value? Or is this a crisis of too much surplus value—and the inability of the financial system to recycle that surplus value into effective demand?
economic, relation between real GDP and unemployment. Over a very long period of time, there's been established a fairly regular relationship between unemployment and economic growth; but this has been absent from the current data. Why?
political, what is the ruling elite's plan? What we see I the media is very sanitized understanding--'green shoots', etc. They're buying time; but I can't believe, given the federal deficit, that there isn't very serious discussion going on about substantial change.

Response: Verysympathetic to Joel Kovel's call to rethink “the growth paradigm,”in a long-term perspective; but would urge us to recognize that theLeft has not come to this question with entirely clean hands (alittle self-criticism would be nice, in other words).

Not enthusiastic about'chaos', etc., in lubricating the path towards something more just.We need, in fact, a 'compelling vision', not 'class struggle'[classically bad academic intervention!]

Sylvia Federici

Present crisis as asystemic crisis; not as a crisis of the financial sector, etc., etc.

Joel Kovel

A dimension to thecrisis that is so rarely discussed, amongst Leftists – the crisis,broadly-speaking, has a two-fold character: a crisis ofaccumulation, yes, but also of degradation of the conditions ofproduction.

Perhaps it's becauseit's so troubling, novel, and requires a reorientation of our notionsof value, that it's so difficult to assimilate.

Both are crises ofcapitalism, which allows us to focus on the problem at-hand.

Furthermore, the meansof resolving the overaccumulation crisis is destructive, inecological terms.

Not talking only aboutclimate change—but species extinction,, for example (50% by theend of the century, if present-trends continue). We have to thinkbeyond the economy; we're slaves of economic logic.

'Exciting' – 10,000years, and we've come to this—destroying the conditions of our ownexistence.

Anticipating permanentcontraction—what are the terms of your departure from this planet?Towards ecological rationality. Not producing commodities, butecosystems.

Ecosocialism orbarbarism!

Response: Lefthas duty to chip away at the edifice, and dissolve illusions (Obama,etc.). The ideological ramparts are no longer intact in the way theyonce were (referencing Copenhagen).

Aaron Benanav

Crisis,ok—but 40 years of the same: precarity, informality, etc.Disturbingly similar conditions confronting working people across theworld.

Weneed to work in order to live – but work is getting harder andharder to find, as society gets richer and richer. Referencing thegeneral law of capital accumulation (1867); the thesis of'immiseration' as applying to the neoliberal period.

(1)The first decade of the 21^st century demonstrated zeroemployment growth, involving periodic explosions and resistance.

(2)Proliferation, also, of ecological disasters.

MikeDavis question: In this country, we no longer see theworking-class as the agent of social change (as all around them, asea of superfluous humanity)--so, my question is: what will happenwhen this dissolution of working-class identity look like amidst thissuperfluity? What kind of subjective revolt is this going to throwup? And how are we going to adapt? [but if implication is thatMarxist thesis requires a majority that is the industrialworking-class, or anything like this, it is simply untrue—more thanthis, it has not panned out this way, in history]

Response:the fallacy of the Statist—Neoliberal--Statist vision; calling fora return to an anti-productivist Communism, what have you. There'snot going to be a long stage of a development of heavy industry, whathave you [the global South, though?]. Moreover, there's no pretextfor the same kind of return (total war, etc.). But we're stuck, moreand more, with precarity, informality, etc. We ought to think, also,of the anti-globalization, alter-globalization movement, etc.“Summits of struggle”.

Anna Agathangelou

Thecompromising of our crevices – control over bodies, etc., etc.

2011-12-24T18:31:00.000-08:00

david garland, the culture of control (2001)

(viii, x): story centers on late modernity, and the collective, politically-shaped experience produces the penal turn

(75): again, argument is that changes produced by 'late modernity' plus 'politics of post-welfarism'

(77-78): summary of concept late modernity

(84): changes in social ecology

(85): extraordinary boost in TV ownership in 1950s

(88): weakening of moral regulation, moral absolutes [hmm--not only goes unexplained, but also dubious affinities to the neo-con explanation for rising crime. evidence?]

(90): summary of late modernity impact on crime rates: (1) increased opportunities (consumer boom, etc.); (2) reduction in situational controls, suburban liiving and tower blocks, etc.; (3) arrival of large cohort of teenage males; (4) relaxation of norms governing conduct [hmm, again]

(93): welfare state as self-undermining [slightly mistaken assessment of relationship of fiscal to economic crisis]

(97): not just economic crisis, but also the social crisis, that led to W. State rollback [hmm]

(99): success of neo-con framing of crisis as result of 'poor people's conduct'

(101): property crimes peak in 1982, homicides and violent crimes peak in late 80s

(106): high crime rates were a fact of 1960s to late 1990s

(108): President's Crime Comission Report of 1967 responded to rising crime rates by demanding expansion of War on Poverty

(122): policies like neighbourhood watch popular not because they were successful, but because they assuaged public

(136): types of criminals that were highlighted in this period were not selected for the proportion of harm for which they were responsible, but for their usefulness as a 'suitable enemy' for conservative politics

(136): Wilson and Herrnstein attributed rising crime rates to dependency culture of underclass

(139): aside from the political project, there were a series of extra-political conditions that made the political project intelligible/sensible

(146): peak of penal reaction was mid- to late-1990s, which lagged behind the peaks of criminal victimization in both US and UK

(152): argument about professional middle class being bulwark of welfarist-penal consensus; but failed to oppose punitive turn, because of their new experience with rising crime rates, etc. [bizarre--extremely amorphous constituency]

2011-12-04T16:50:00.001-08:00

caught in the whirlwind: working-class families face the economic crisis, johanna brenner

take-home: impact of economic crisis is being managed through family networks, but this is symptom of private nature of provision of most care. this fact--that so much is privately provided--means that it is working-class families that have borne the brunt, unable to solve their problems through the market provision of care due to unaffordability (see 72, 74, 76, 77)

(67): woman's earnings became more important to family incomes, but this was particularly true of working-class families. they explain much or all of the income growth in the last three decades, in families in the lower rungs of economic order

(69): 90% of bankruptcies were due to an event shock, very few tdue to overspending

2011-12-04T16:46:00.001-08:00

anwar shaikh, the first great depression of the 21st century (2011)

(54): useful account of how debt-to-income ratios grew steadily post 80s, but debt-to-service ratios only started to climb later, cresting aroundt he time of the crisis. in other words, declining interest rates did maintain the path of their standard of living despite a slowdown, at least until it came crashing down

(57): distinction between two modes of State intervention: (1) giving money to business, hoping they invest and benefits 'trickle-down'; (2) investing directly in employment-generation plans, where benefits 'rise-up' to businesses and banks

2011-11-07T13:12:00.000-08:00

social democracy as a historical phenomenon, adam przeworski

(28): goal is to chart a course btw the two 'reefs', Rosa Luxemburg--abandoning the 'mass character ' of the movement, or abandoning the final goals of the movement

(29): three 'effects' of the bourgeois State on the workers' movement

individualization--each person is a citizen, not a worker
representation--relations within a class become relations of representation [how is this specific to the bourgeois State?]
organization and embourgeoisement (i.e., Robert Michels)

(30): universal suffrage changes the context--now, parties have to decide between a 'legal' road, and an 'extra-parliamentary one' [this has to be rough, of course--SPD chose legal road before full universal suffrage, no?]

(31): key--the normal conditions in which you build socialist organizations doesn't prepare you to be the kind of movement that is likely to seize power (SPD is case in point)

(33): for a long time, Social Democracy understood universal suffrage as the means to the final goal--"seemed to guarantee socialist victory"

(36): Bebel at Erfurt--'most in the room will live to see the day' [!]

(38): illusory myth of the proletarian majority

(39): and, what follows, the impossibility of winning elections if you're a party endeavouring to represent the interests of one clas,s as class

(39): most starkly--"socialists must choose between a party homogenous in its class appeal, but sentenced to perpetual electoral defeats, and a party that struggles for electoral success at the cost of diluting its class character."

(40): thus, to participate in elections means that the task of emancipating the working-class can no longer be the task of workers themselves.

(40): cf. Engels advice to recruit the small peasantry

(42): moreover, social democratic parties have never obtained the votes even of those they've claimed to represent (significant fractions of workers have gone elsewhere).

(43): SD parties have found it necessary to appeal to workers as individuals, not as class (as the poor, etc.)

(47-48): imp--when they found themselves in power in the interwar period, they were unable to make inroads--private property was intact [he gives two reasons: (a) lack of a coherent program; (b) didn't have the parliamentary support sufficient to do this

(50): maximalist vs. minimalist debate--be revolutionary, and people will flock (Norway in 1928, people fled government fell) vs. protect welfare, set the stage for later transformation (but no economic program of their own, until the depression, when they became adept at 'administering' capitalist economies) [the causal argument is a bit confused here, let's sort it out--what is the source of their degeneration? ideas? lack of balance of forces in favour? lack of parliamentary support?]

(52): Keynesianism didn't need nationalization

(54): and soon, Social Democracy ceased to be a 'reformist' movement, in the classical sense. this "is a direct consequence of those reforms that have been accomplished

(55-56): pithy version of theory of the State--unless you nationalize, you can't escape the dependence of your economy on the profitability of private intereprise ('business confidence')

(56): ultimately, key claim is that this is the source of SD treachery--"nationalization of the means of production has turned out to be electorally unfeasible; radical redistributive policies result in economic crises... and general affluence can be increased only if capitalists are made to cooperate..."

(58): within capitalism, you cannot have a socio-economic revolution without precipitating an economic crisis (sorry Leon Blum)

2011-09-22T11:40:00.000-07:00

paul pierson, new politics of the welfare state

(348): retrenchment process does not follow same process as reform

(350): welfare state generates constituencies

(351): little evidence of cutbacks (covering '75 to '90)

(355): radical reform difficult where power is well-distributed, and there are lots of veto-points (Germany, USA); but even where there are less, it is difficult

1. danger of pluralist faith--Pierson is not alive enough to the fact that, even where populations stick to welfare state, if powerful interests want its abolition, one can expect to see it [this is aside from the question of whether we've seen it or not]

neil gilbert, transformation of the welfare state

(32): four factors

structural changes
globalization of economy
changing ideas
changing socio-political processes

(46): in the enabling State, a move towards Durkheimian vision of social cohesion (not the State/public leading it, but private actors in civil society)

(51): sees convergence, when you look at total social transfers, but include everything from tax breaks to private contributions.data is from 1999.

1. no theory, here--just description. and if there is a causal argument about which of the factors come first, it seems confused.

2. implications of 'convergence' are, partly, that welfare is as American as apple pie, but also, that the Scandinavian model is less generous and certainly less different than one might think

walter korpi, the power resources model

(78): parity amongst labour and capital is not possible, as capital is superior on all of the dimensions laid out

(82):political democracy can be conceptualized as the effective use of increasing power resources (a la Vanhanen)

esping-anderson, three worlds of welfare capitalism

(161): focus on spending is misplaced (we need to focus on decommodification, in the spirit of Marshall)

(163): self-reinforcing, in the sense that de-commodification (which is when a person can maintain a livelihood w/o selling labour-power) often increases the ability of labour to organize (tighter labour markets, etc.)

(164): needs-testing, targeted benefits serve to curtail the de-commodifying effect

(166): universalism was only possible in a historically peculiar class structure (where vast majority of people aer 'little people); but once you get the 'new middle-classes,' dualism is inevitable [hmm]

(167): and somewhat unlike Pierson, the emergence of dualism is likely to make m-class less supportive of a universalistic transfer system

(170): need to move away from simple causality, to a constellation of effects that interact (class movilization, class-political coalitions, regime structures)

(171): historically, before WWII, the attitude of farmers were critical--rural class politics determined political dominance. afterwards, the rising white-collar strata becomes the linchpin for political majorities

(172): it's the political leanings of these new middle-calsses that determines what the w. state will look like -- either they'll be integrated into a universal system, part of a dualist system, or part of a system that's more generous but segregated

1. obviously, total independence from the market is a sham--this would be the end of wage-labour

2011-09-15T10:10:00.000-07:00

yergin and stanislaw, the commanding heights

(14, 124): "underlying all this has been a fundamental shift in ideas"

(15): "importance of leaders and leadership"

(20): Atlee was a social worker

(21, 26-27): insofar as they have a concept of crisis, it's "war"/devastation [the politics of that crisis, w/ the Left in ascendancy, etc., is all obscured.]

(29): "nationalization as a capitalist weapon" [there is a great deal of truth to this--nationalization can be a great boon for capitalists]

(34): the 'chicken feed' argument!

(51): FDR and the New Deal [no mention of Labor/Left role, strife, uncertainty, etc.]

(64): more regulation under Nixon [and Dem Congress, of course] than under any president since New Deal [is it coincidental that this post-dated second significant wave of struggle? yet no mention of this.]

(74): 'Permit Raj,' but of course

(81, 91): no acknowledgment of the successes of ISI [this framing permits 'idealism'--because then it really is the failing of ideas, and the superiority of alternative ideas, that explains historical change. interests/power be damned! must look at centrality of profits and class power, rather than the question of whether one or the other policy is 'better' for society]

(87, 91): corruption, also, is un-explained

(93): Keith Joseph as catalyst

(96): Edward Heath was UK's Richard Nixon--an unfortunate Keynesian

(107): in 1974, Thatcher and Joseph break with Heath and the Tory mainstream

(108): the first three years were a 'non-event'--only after Falklands

(113): confrontation with NUM and Scarrgill, in 1984

(115): State companies were inefficient, found it difficult to compete--in this, of course, there's always an element of truth. [on the other hand, we're confronted with the track record of neoliberalism]

(123): in total, only 46 privatizations

(124, 140, 145): again, "beliefs" as driving change [there are always all sorts of ideas around. the question is why certain ideas get selected for]

(139): getting literature on E. Asian miracle backwards--consensus is different

(142): LSE in the 1930s became redoubt of liberalism

Harvey, Neoliberalism

(19): centrally--it's a political project, not a utopian project

(31-33): difficulties w/ class--resolved by pointing to finance

Williams, Keynes

(74): Keynes actually didn't write much about social policy/welfare

(76): engaged welfare State through obsession w/ unemployment

2011-09-12T15:25:00.000-07:00

kohli, the indian media business

(19): Indian TV mkt, unlike US, yet to move to pay-based--still ad-subsidised (this means heightened influence of advertisers)

(28-29): circulation-advertising split, for newspapers, was 60:40; but in English more adverse.

(29): ownership of a media house is sometimes more effective than lobbying [hmm]

(33): in 1980, 80% of ad spending went to print

(35): TOI is only national newspaper--circulation of 2 million

(38): English newspapers charge more for ads, because advertisers are interested in their base

(38, 46): key--one factor setting India apart is its 'overdependence on advertising'. "newspapers at mercy of advertisers--circulation only brings in 20% in English-language"

(43): allegedly, though, not significant media concentration--no real pan-India publishers

(44, 56): allowing foreign stakes in media, starting 2002

(83): imp--in TV, too, Indian operators earn 80% from advertising, and only 20% from subscription--sign of market 'immaturity' [confusion over figures, see p. 86)

(204): 40 million internet users

2011-09-08T11:36:00.000-07:00

goodin and mitchell, foundations of the welfare state

(x): geographical mobility undermined earlier forms of poor relief, which were localized/parish-based

(xii): breadwinner's welfare state vs. univeralized benefits

(xiii): regime types--'liberal', 'social democratic,' 'corporatist'

(xiv): nowadays, a return to 1601 and localism -- importantly, 'in an era of declining public budgets'

(xv): imp--here, the shift to neoliberalism/decline is seen as a response to changing economic circumstances. [is this not mediated by politics!? come on]

(xvi): other reasons for its decline [but, again, all these sidestep the question of shifts in the balance of forces. it's not an objective fact that SS is unpayable, for example, etc.]

changing nature of work
women's increasing participation in the labour force

marshall, citizenship and social class

(149): three sorts of rights--civil (property rights, negative rights), political, and social (welfarish)

(150): civil rights, of course, were entirely functional for a market economy (from Status to Contract)

(151, 154): good--civil rights run up against social rights. the welfare state has to fight the effects of free operation of mkts [acknowledged in the others, but clearest here]

[1] In the sense of the last argument, the Welfare State is one thing and NOT many. Reforms that attenuate the ravages of the market. It may be true that this takes different forms at different times and in different places, but the fact that, at heart, its a question of redistributing resources ought to alert us to the importance of a structural theory of its implementation. The wealthy don't just give up resources because (1) changing philosophical fashions; (2) moral concerns.

pierson and leimgruber, intellectual roots

(32): though it's been identified with the historical project of SD, its origins "more usually" lie in liberal/conservative thought [!]

(34): [BUT] acknowledging that motivated by an attempt to answer the 'social question'. [well, who was posing the social question, for god's sake? is the idea that it was posed purely passively, because there was increasing misery, etc.? of course not!]

(37-38): idealism--the forward role of the ideas of the 'new' or 'social' liberalism. [let us clarify the claim--at its strongest, its explanatory! nutty]

(39): the New Deal bringing through earlier ideas and concepts [but come on, this makes it difficult to (a) explain the ND; (b) understand how transformative of a break it was w/ past policy, no?]

[1] There's a real need to clarify exactly what we're doing, here. A genealogy of the welfare state, ok. But none of this can suffice as an explanation of its origins, which is what Pierson and Co. lapse into, routinely.

asa briggs, on the welfare state

(222): what once seemed fixed (the fact of welfare), obviously is not

(223): not one 'movement', but remedies for specific problems [I'm sure this is true--but let's not obscure the important point, which is that these are all part of a single effort to attenuate the effects of the free operation of mkts]

(225): 'it was increasingly regarded as an obligation of government to ward of distress...' [OK, but why? Need to think systematically about this. State actors can change their minds--though surely in response to things happening around them, not arbitrariliy--but they also have certain imperatives to which they have to hew. So what determines policy? At the very least, not their preferences alone...]

(227): 'consensus' years of 1945 to 1950, in the UK [why?!?]

(228): definition of Welfare State: (1) minimum income; (2) meeting social contingencies; (3) range of services to all citizens

(232): Fabians kept the 'masses' in the background, only later discovered the trade unions.

(241): Oastler and the 'feudal Welfare State'

(249): Bismarck worried about SDem

(251): complexity of lineage of 19th century welfare state [but at least part of the reason that this is less relevant is because these were not nearly as significant, in terms of impact/scope, as 20th century welfare States]

(253): implicitly, the explanation is a moral one--State actors couldn't avoid the moral pressure of reformers [this just can't explain very much]

(256-257): US is different. [but no attempt to explain this!?]

2011-09-03T08:07:00.000-07:00

ruth berins collier, paths toward democracy (1999)

(20): key point: literature is 'overstylized' -- neither w-class-led nor elite-led images capture the democratization process, in its first or second phases. there are several corners to the cube.

(28-32): difficulties in classifying democratization (UK, Chile, etc.)

(34): M-Sec Democratizatoin -- led by m-class groups, in the main

(54): Electoral Support Mobilization -- attempt to garner support of an existing movement

2011-08-23T13:51:00.000-07:00

stanley kochanek, business and politics in India (1974)

(x): relative to other groups, business associations are 'relatively well-developed'

(x): unlike other groups, have developed as interest group autonomous from political parties

(xi): not quite the 'modern functional representation', though--b/c of importance of 'primordial identities'

(198): alleging 'low prestige of private sector' in the public eye, which makes it difficult to exert influence

(208): traditionally business associations have taken defensive stands; as grievance bodies. but slowly becoming more pro-active.

(211): "major Indian business houses already own almost all the important metropolitan newspapers..."

(214): most consistent political dilemma, for business, has related to strategy it should pursue, re: Congress--from "qualified support" to "partial alienation"

(216): Marwari (Birla) attitude to Congress very different from Tata (Bombay attitude). former conciliatory, latter behind efforts to go elsewhere (Swatantra party)

(216): 1947 to 1953 was a period of uncertainty; accomodation from 1954 to 1963

(220): but 1963 to 1967 brought reversal

(220): Nehru had been well-regarded amongst Marwaris, but never liked by those who weren't pro-Congress.

(220): though, "as one industrialist put it, '...Nehru never did anything to really affect business interests.'"

(220): again, 'old Bombay industrial elite' that was most strongly provoked

(222): business sought to intervene, against Congress, in 1967 elections--designed to humble Congress and make it more amenable to business pressure

(224): Left perceived business influence in '67 election very unfavourably

(225): a section of the Marwari houses did support Indira Gandhi, though; but opposition was well-financed, as well

(225): after interlude, there was another phase of accomodation, mirroring that under Nehru (post 1971, Kochanek is dating it)

(226): an old generation was uninterested in politics; a new generation, though, is taking active interest

(229): Business played an increasing role in '67 and '71 elections

(232): estimated that business provides about 90 % of election funds [but no citation]

(233): from 1962 to 1968, companies contributed 26 million Rs--Congress recieved Rs 20 million

(234-235): issue of 'company contributions' [i.e., direct donations] has been politically explosive for a while (since '67 elections), but estimated at no more than 20% of total money

(236): by and large, donations coming from business have been individual, not collective

(237): most funding goes to Congress mainly because there is no viable opposition [this has changed, obviously]

(240): during Nehru era, business activity in parliament was limited (no functional representation for business, no businessmen really contesting)

(256): noting the existence of some lobbying, but 'primitive by American standards'

(257, see also Chp XII): and Parliamentary lobbying is much less important than lobbying ministers and/or the bureaucracy

(258): most effective way is direct personal contact, rather than written communication

(258): and mainly concerned with short-term problems rather than long-term policy [part of Kochanek's general theme that business has been short-sighted, though increasingly less so as India develops--a lovely story]

(263): effectiveness of lobbying has been on the increase since the early 1960s (citing death of Nehru, growth of self-confidence in business community, and growing importance of Parliament)

(265, 267): imp--vast bulk of business energy and resources are concentrated on prime minister, cabinet, and the higher echelons of the bureaucracy. Parliament is less important, for the reason that it has less clout.

(266): Nehru refrained from extensive nationalizations, he heavily protected industry, and he laid the foundation for expansion of private sector [no indication, though, that this would affect Kochanek's very traditional judgement of the nature of the 'license raj']

(292): some hint at a 'revolving door', between business and politics. record of businesses hiring retired bureaucrats.

(297): Gandhi lived at Birla house during New Dehli summers, but of course. Scene of his assassination.

(302): again, the problem in Gov't-Business relations [for Kochanek] is that the 'political culture' is hostile to business. too much socialism in the air.

(321): extent of business influence is 'exaggerated by its enemies, understated by its friends'

(322): citing Birla to suggest that business has a 'limited influence', but can have an effect where well-organized and its resources are correctly utilized

(332): business has been most effective in gaining access to exective and bureaucracy, insofar as (a) they're powerful; and (b) out of the public eye

(333): as party politics splintered in '63 to '71 period, it gave business some leverage--but when Congress hegemony returned in 1971, this was lost

(337): under the forces of 'internal and systemic change,' business is becoming more sophisticated, moving toward 'new lobbying' and things like this

---

[1] Kochanek is working, more-or-less, with the classic picture of the 'license raj', where much of the initiative regarding long-term policy questions comes from bureaucrats and politicians, and business responds defensively. This ignores, of course, the structural power they wield (the 'investment strike' chronicled by Vivek).

[2] The book is pluralist, through-and-through, which makes it difficult to assess exactly what is being argued. Sometimes it's admitted that the resources wielded by business matter (or must matter) tremendously, and that they have greatest influence where it counts the most (in the executive arm and bureaucracy)--90% of all election funds are supplied by business, for example. But otherwise the picture is of an aggrieved business class, held hostage to politicians who have to toe a populist line in order to appease restless masses. This is misplaced, for obvious reasons.

[3] There is, though, throughout the book, a sense that business is getting better at precisely the things it needs to do to wield influence. There is a prediction, running through the book, that fits well with what seems to have happened in India. He attributes this to systemic/internal change, but it's unclear whether this is meant to be a natural consequence (in his argument) of industrialization, or whether he agrees that it must have something to do with shifting balance of class forces.

2011-08-17T12:51:00.000-07:00

An op-ed that tracks the history of legislation, re: corporate donations. And then ends with some information, unsourced, re: donations. The refrain in this and other pieces is, funnily-enough, that corporations in the US have less influence over political results because direct donations are prohibited there (i.e., donors make them as individuals, not as companies), but not in India. There are also several pieces calling for the donations to be made transparent, which suggests to me that information on donations is just not widely available.

It is beyond doubt that contribution by companies is given not because of any ideological reason but really as a device to be in the good books of the ruling party. Thus between 1966 to 1969, 75 companies paid down Rs 1.87 crore out of which Rs. 144 lakhs were given to the ruling party; the ruling Congress party in 1967 alone received Rs 87 lakhs.The perception and reality have not changed—thus we find that in 2003-04, the BJP got Rs 90 crores as against the Congress’ Rs 65 crores. The peak of the BJP was Rs 155 crores in 2004-05 and it went down to Rs 137 crores in 2007-08. The rise in the share of the Congress party during this period was phenomenal, starting from 2002-03 at Rs 53 crores, to Rs 265 crores in 2007-08. More significant, the corporate-political nexus is illustrated by corporate donation to the BSP of Mayawati rising in 2002-03 from Rs 10.9 crores to Rs 55.6 crores in 2007-08. Does one need more proof of the invidious entry of the corporate sector in our body politic and of the dangerous consequences?

- - -

Here, allegedly, is some information on party donations and assets, showing the BJP has more funding than all other parties combined. But the source is sketchy--some student, Afroze Alam, put in a 'right-to-information' request.

http://www.travelindia-guide.com/elections-indian-lok-sabha/political-funding.php

- - -

This website tracks assets and spending of candidates. As summarized by Sainath, in the 2009 elections the impact of money was of course considerable. The downside is that there's no indication, that I can find, on who constitutes the main sources of funding.

"...There were 3,437 candidates in the polls with assets of less than Rs.1 million, says the report. Of these, just 15 (0.44 per cent) made it past the post. But your chances soar with your assets. Of the 1,785 candidates in the Rs.1 million-Rs.5 million group, 116 (6 per cent) won. This win-ratio goes up to 19 per cent of candidates for the Rs.5 million-Rs.50 million segment. And of 322 candidates in the Rs.50 million-plus or platinum tier, 106 (33 per cent) romped home.The higher you climb the ladder of lucre, the better your chances. That is obvious. But what is striking is how bleak things are for non-millionaires. Even a modest improvement in your wealth helps. Say, you move from the below Rs.1 million group to the Rs.1-5 million group - your chances immediately improve at a higher rate than your wealth. (Of course, that works only if you are already close to the Rs.1 million mark.) So it's not just that wealth has some impact on election outcomes - it influences them heavily and disproportionately as you go up the scale..."

- - -

2011-08-09T15:43:00.000-07:00

democracy and development in india, atul kohli (2009)

(5, 111): Congress built its political network on back of landowning upper castes, for the most part

(6): 'low levels of mobilization' characterizing India's polity [hmm]

(7): old Congress was destroyed in Indira Gandhi's populist interlude

(11): India's leaders now more concerned with economic growth [terribly bizarre, and anti-structural understanding of State managers' priorities]

(15): variation in State-level performance, means that political factors (CPI-M, i.e.) are important

(108): classic Kohli--India's problem was that State was not cohesive enough to push State-led development

(110): Congress virtue was to establish links between elites and masses

(115): B. Moore described Nehru as the 'gentle betrayer of the masses'

(116): agricultural growth in Nehru period was extensive, not intensive

(117): implication that business was 'too regulated' in 'license raj' period

(120): India vs. Brazil--Brazil did better, relatively, b/c it's regime was less 'open'; less worried about redistribution/nationalism

(121): Indira's popularity was not institutionalized, unlike her father; opposed by entrenched Congress elite

(126): Indira's populism: 'throw money at the classes she sought to mobilize'

(126): resulting industrial deceleration in Indira period was effect of disincentives, for corporations, to invest

(132): policy shift in india is not 'economic liberalization,' but rather a 'pro-business drift

(133): Indira Gandhi's second term was more pro-business; see Industrial Policy Resolution in 1982

(134): this policy shift did lead to improved rates of economic growth

(135): debt was managed by decreasing public sector investments, which has deleterious welfare effects, of course

(138-139): India vs. Korea/Brazil, classic Kohli

(141): economic growth in India started accelerating prior to liberalization in 1991

(144, 147): pro-business strategy is not necessarily a pro-market strategy; from 'socialist India' to 'India incorporated'

(153): no structural theory of the State--Indira is following her own whims, etc., though responding to constituencies there's no real sense, here, of the power business wields

(155): Indian business wanted an 'activist' State, but one which was activist in defense of their ends

(157): IMF package was relevant, but not very important in determining reform trajectory--India had already begun

(159): Singh and Ahluwalia were important players in the policy shift, of course

(163): narrowing of the ruling alliance made space for the BJP

(164): growth rate of manufacturing was not all that affected by reforms

(165): composition of investment greatly changed after 1980--much bigger share was made up by private investors

(167): collapse of USSR and rise of WTO changed terrain on which bureaucrats made their decision, re: reforms

(168): CII came to represent 'modern' industries, who were interested in exports. there was a split, with CII more open to 'opening,' and FICCI and ASSOCHAM more circumspect

(170): Bombay Club opposition--'lowering tarrifs will destroy India's competitiveness'

(172): growth in TFP lower in post-reform period, industrial growth did not improve over 1980s

(173): reform policies helped big business more than small business; and big business was comfortable with the slow pace of external opening

(174): concentration in private industry--market capitalization of top 10 companies to GDP ratio going way up, in post-reform period

(189): push behind liberalization came from 'technocratically inclined leaders'

(195): after 1980 Gandhi shifted to Hindu chauvinism and pro-business approach, to try and compensate for the deficiences of her base in the earlier period

(200): Rajiv broke hard with Nehru and Gandhi rhetoric--but he intended the changes to go farther than they actually ended up going

(202): the '85-86 budge was very pro-elite

(207): but, w/ popular opposition, some of this had to be tempered. the Kohli argument--democracy made things difficult

(209): business groups were very supportive of Rajiv

(211): but, again, Kohli seeing business' power as one of 'veto, rather than agenda setting'

2011-08-09T15:32:00.000-07:00

liberalization and business lobbying in india, stanley kochanek (1996)

(157): ability of business associations to influence the regulatory regime was severely limited due to relative autonomy of the State [in other words, more-or-less the opposite of the explanation given by Vivek for problems of 'license raj']

(158): business not particularly involved in the process of liberalization ('invluence very limited')--not their lobbying that explains it, but external and internal crises.

(160): Indira Gandhi's rise to power in 1969 was a 'shift to the Left', ruining long-standing relationship between Congress establishment and elite business families

(168): Bombay Club, in 1993, emerged as industrialists opposed to reform process--unwilling to be opened up to international competition

(169): interesting--FICCI strongly endorsed Bombay Club's critique of reforms, CII's approach was more subtle (even though many of its members were in Bombay Club)

(169): imp--again, reforms were the work of a "small technocratic elite"

(170): no constituency behind Rao reforms

(171): like Kohli, reforms are understood not as dramatic, but halting and responsive to resistance of powerful sectors

2011-08-09T15:26:00.000-07:00

the transformation of interest politics in india, stanley kochanek (1995-1996)

(530-531): FICCI ('older, more traditional, indigenous), Assocham (both indigenous and foreign), CII (new regions and sunrise industries)

(532-538): FICCI historically 'economic arm' of Congress, though not without issues internally; regional strains (Calcutta vs. Bombay) led, eventually, to split in 80s, and subsequent revitalization of Assocham

(540): Assocham became mirror image of FICCI, though they had diffferent regional bases (Western for former, North and East for latter)

(541): useful table of top business houses, affiliation, and capitalization

(542): FICCI was quantitatively superior, but Assocham had qualitatively better/more endowed membership

(543-545): CII emerged in context of political/economic instability ('89-'91)--representing younger managers, new manufacturing sectors, and the South. more modern forms of lobbying, etc.

(547): imp--in the post-reforms period, CII became proactive [claim, running through Kochanek, is that reforms were engineered by bureaucracy, and business houses were almost uniformly reactive throughout]

2011-07-29T08:17:00.000-07:00

beatrice hibou, the force of obedience

(xiii): real transformation is disappearence of fear--too early to talk about anything else [hmm--a polite way of saying nothing has changed, yet]

(xiv): obedience was result of repression, yes, but also of inclusion -- the 'security pact,' is her term. and the movement, of course, made possible by decline of 'security pact'

(xv-xvi): decline partly consequence of objective grievances--job, bread [not enough--present in negative cases aplenty]

(xvi): elements of 'contingency' [come on...]

(xvii): business and m-class also alienated

(xviii): 'democratization' will depend on what happens with the RCD, since RCD is base of the 'security pact' -- it isn't simply a repressive institution, but also a network of clients/benefits

(xx, 278): corruption that concerned tunisian people was the 'daily' corruption; not the corruption of the ruling family

(xxi, 14-16): construction of 'economic fiction' was a mode of normalization [ah god]

(xxi-xxii): the 'economic is political,' and vice-versa

(xxii): the field is 'entirely open' , as regards the future[hmm]

(1-2): "analysis aims to restore ambiguity" [wtf? this way of writing is profoundly unhelpful]

(3): people are 'free' to manuever/negotiate, even when they seem thoroughly repressed.

(6-7): pervasive punishment of those who refuse to be 'politically normalized'

(9): these practices, though, happen to a small minority--the 'politically active'

(10): linz/stepan and 'economic society' [part of the critique here seems interesting; part seems absurd--b/c they use numbers, percentages!]

(12): distancing herself from the literature [but, in the process, plumping for something that seems pure verbiage]

(13): "domination is ambivalent' [sigh...]

(17): 'statistics is state knowledge" [astonishing]

(267): not simply authoritarian--people negotiate everyday life [of course, if you look at everyday life, people will do this in any authoritarian society]

(269-270): hyper-centralization

(272): 'legacies of colonialism'--the 'strong state', etc., citing Timothy Mitchell

(280): imp--policing state as an 'engineering' state, hostile to liberalism. liberalization didn't change this, insofar as it wasn't a 'real' withdrawal from the market [hmm--what exactly does this mean? it opens up space for the argument to be reactionary, though it probably isn't. it also isn't clear that the intervention of the state disproves liberalization, since that is common to all liberalizers. odd claim against Left--State hasn't ignored redistribution, look at all the other modes of regulation (consumption!?)]

(288): hey Hitchens--between 1989 to 1992, Ben Ali launched an attack on the headscarf

2011-07-17T15:38:00.000-07:00

JPS October 1973, Vol 1 Number 1

Eric Hobsbawm, Peasants and Politics

(4): differentiating between the 'peasant' problem and the 'agrarian' problem (landless labourers or commercial farmers, he's arguing, belong to the latter)

(4): peasants on a continuum--the 'sack of potatoes' (i.e. 18th Brumaire) variety to more collective forms (i.e., 19th century Central Russia). most tending towards latter, though this doesn't imply egalitarianism, even if it does imply prohibition of unrestricted accumulation.

(5): peasant question is question of traditional group involved in 'modern' politics

(5): citing Shanin, 'peasantry' is characterized by 'low classness'--not much about its politics can be read off its relation to the MoP

(7): allowing for a vague consciousness of 'peasantness', as a distinct category of subalternity

(8): but stressing underdeveloped sense of the world beyond ('Cuba as another department of Peru,' etc.) [unique to the peasantry?]

(9, 11): imp, no such thing as a 'national peasant movement' -- only becomes wider by external force (and even then more likely to be regional) [hmm] (Mexico as his example--bulk of peasantry not involved, but key regions were: Pancho Villa's North (the equivalent of the Cossacks), and Zapata in Morelos, situated next to the capital)

(11): 1905-1907 in Russia, 80-100% of peasant population in action

(11): at the same time, such 'congolemerate' movements can be very important to the success/failure of revolutions, of course

(11-12): Peru 1962-1964 was impressive, but had limitations--took five years and a coup to win agrarian reform

(12): imp, major reason peasantry is weak is because of a pervasive sense of inferiority [hmm]. this has something (?) to do with the nature of the peasant economy, since unrest must stop for the harvest (hypothesis that the little labour required by the potato economy in Ireland made possible frequent unrest)

(13): peasant 'passivity' as a form of class struggle--since 'no change' suits them best [hmm]

(14-16) [becoming a bit too speculative, all this; Hobsbawm's writing doesn't really lend itself to journal articles]

(17): traditionally, peasants integrated into political apparatus by three ideological devices: King (precisely because he isn't their 'real' ruler, but wields power over their overlords), Church, proto-nationalism. all this lends them to right-wing politics, albeit of a revolutionary tenor

(17) int, so why do peasants come under the political Left? economic changes, urbanization, migration, etc. (Narodniks vs. early 20th C. revolutionaries in Russia). (but S. Italy and Garibaldi? no answers)

(18-20): three propositions about peasants in modern political situations

the 'peasantry' as a political concept disappears, because conflicts within rural sector eliminate what peasants have in common against outside (Bolsheviks were over-eager in anticipating this, of course--but this often redounds to the disadvantage of revolutionaries, since it antagonizes some groups [hmm])
democratic electoral politics do not work for the peasantry as a class ('peasant party' is a freak phenomenon, no one-to-one attitude; peasantry as 'electoral fodder')
citing Marx, peasantry are incapable of representing their own interests; they need a master over them

(20): rise of Nazis 1928-1933 was last genuine 'mass movement' of peasants

2011-07-15T17:55:00.001-07:00

This is simply a mathematical canard. According to the USAID Green Book, in 2009, total economic assistance to Pakistan came to $1.35 billion and military assistance totaled $0.429 (for a grand sum of $1.78 billion). In 2009, Pakistan's gross domestic product was $162 billion. Calling this is a dependency is an obvious stretch. (In fairness, I too have been guilty of lapsing into this idiom until I crunched the numbers.)

By way of contrast, the United States gave Israel $2.43 billion in total economic and military assistance in 2009. Israel's GDP was $204 billion. As a percentage of GDP, U.S. total assistance to both countries are nearly the same (around 1 percent). Between 1962 and 2009, total economic and military assistance to Israel totaled $178 billion in constant 2009 U.S. dollars. In the same period, U.S. military and economic aid to Pakistan comes to $37 billion in constant 2009 U.S. dollars. But would Mr. Hitchens describe Israel as being dependent upon Washington? By his own argumentation, he would have to answer in the affirmative.

2011-07-14T16:38:00.000-07:00

origin of capitalism, EM Wood

(14): confusion of bourgeois with capitalist is a legacy of the historiography

(17): Weber as 'Smithian'

(19): for both old commercialization and w-systems models, the extent of trade is the index of capitalist development

(20-21): M. Mann, too

(21): Polanyi as (partial) exception--distinction between society w/ markets, and 'market society' (recognition that most early markets were not 'competitive', and that competitive markets were resisted by merchants,etc.)

(26): key--points is, of course, that advance of PF presupposed transformation of property relations. normal "order of causation suggests a failure to treat the capitalist market itself as a specific social form."

(27-32): nice critique of supposed anti-Eurocentrism--odd to challenge the argument by further naturalizing capitalism, saying it actually had advanced quite far in TW, etc. within this view, the absence of capitalism still constitutes a 'historic failure'

(35): two narratives in Marx: the old one, in GI and CM; suggestions of a different one, in Grundrisse and Capital [she's exaggerating the latter for effect, one thinks. but no mind]

(37-40): brief summary of Dobb-Sweezy--Dobb, drawing on Hilton, calling into question assumption that capitalism was a 'quantitative expansion of commerce', and that it was to be found in towns/trade. debate hinged on 'prime mover'--was it endogenous? or exogenous (trade)? Dobb/Hilton showed that latter was unsustainable. Hilton demolishing Pirenne. Dobb's argument was about differentiation in the petty mode of production, which was freed from feudal strictures after 'class struggle'.

(41-42): imp, Dobb/Hilton--despite the importance of their argument, the commercialization model is not dead, with them. once feudal fetters are removed, capitalist logic soon metastasizes (some of Sweezy's questions, in his c-argument, show this--why does petty commodity production generate capitalists and wage-labourers?)

(44-46): for Perry Anderson, 'Absolutist State' emerges in context of feudal bonds weakening (b/c of emergence of money rents), as lordly response to that challenge. Absolutist State as 're-charged' apparatus of feudal domination. BUT, though Anderson still understands it as feudal, he believes it liberates 'economy' because coercive powers are transferred upward, and de-coupled from point of economic extraction (this is why it's transitional); Wood making point that economic and political are still fused, but now through central State appropriating surplus through rents

(47): empirical problems with Anderson arg--English capitalism didn't need absolutism, and French absolutism didn't produce capitalism. and theoretically, still a 'fetters' model.

(48): PA review of Brenner--a 'value-added', commercialization account

(48): importance of capitalist agriculture in England is that it produces an 'internal market'--this sustains demand in the context of declining overseas markets

(49): English farmers can need Flemish market for wool--but opportunity for commerce does not produce capitalism; can simply entrench old relations of production. question is still begged, by Anderson and commercialization account.

(51): starting point of Brenner critique of both Malthusianism and commercialization--basic demographic patterns and insertion in network of trade produced different results in different places. this is a function, of course, of the character of SP relations

(54): why tenant farmers were, uniquely, capitalist--not b/c of wage labour (non-capitalist farmers in past had hired wage-labour), but because access to the means of reproducing themselves was mediated by the market and its imperatives

(57-58): one critique of Brenner--was 1600s or 1700s England distinct enough to be called agrarian capitalism (either b/c France was not that far behind, or b/c wage labour was not general)? but the first confuses land productivity with labour productivity; and the second leaves the origins of wage-labour mystified, unless it agrees to the Brenner thesis, which explains them (after all, proletarianization will not be the inevitable consequence of differentiation--in other words, differentiation was not the cause but the effect of the change in s-p relations)

(61-62): PA critique of Brenner--alleged contradiction between his transition argument, and his BR argument (i.e,. in Merchants and Revolution): said to have demonstrated the revolutionary role of merchants, in Eng Rev. actually, Brenner's position on BR is clear: he thinks it is a concept inherited from the commercialization model (mechanical materialism, etc.), in which PF increase (b/c of increasing division of labour--capitalist laws of motion are being generalized), merchant class grows, soon throws off feudal fetters.the key point, re: Merchants and Revolution, is that in France the revolutionary bourgeois need not be identified with capitalism; and in England, if they are to be identified, it is because the key transitions (in agriculture) have already taken place [EM Wood acknowledging that there is not enough, here, about links to international trade]

(66-67): EP Thompson offering a Brenner-like account, in Making of the English Working Class, b/c of his attentiveness to new forms of work discipline--new imperatives of productivity and profit mark capitalism as distinct, for him. this is why he focuses on 1700s, rather than later industrialization--b/c this is when specifically capitalist forms were taking shape

(74): identification of capitalism with towns is hegemonic (here discussing city-states). but incorrect.

(75): this becomes explanation of why West? b/c of unique autonomy of cities and the burghers.

(75): key--but, of course, historically this is absurd. lots of urban settlements that, while making use of market opportunities, never were systematically subject to market imperatives (and no tendency to develop from former to latter)

(77): early commercial rivalries had to do with competition over extra-economic privileges (shipping routes, etc.)

(78): dominant principle of trade was 'profit upon alienation'

(81): extensive commerce in food production is associated, of course, w/ rise of cities. but this does not mean that food production was subject to market imperatives (and its consequences--dev of PF, etc.)

(82): the trade in grain, also, was a function of the wealth of prosperous consumers (and, of course, their dependents).

(82): landed aristocracy was 'principal market for a range of products' at this time (Hilton)

(85-86): key-- urban wealth in medieval and early modern Europe was still 'politically constituted' -- it was a consequence of status, privileges ('collective lordships'). in short, this kind of 'economic development' was extra-economic in source, and thus self-limiting.

(88-89): int discussion of Dutch Republic, as paradigmatic failed transition--EM Wood arguing dominated by merchants whose chief vocation was circulation rather than production (even though direct producers start to depend on market for subsistence, etc.). in short, urban population was sustained by dominance in international trade, not by superior labour productivity in agriculture, as in Britain [hmm. more reading needed, here--how can you have such systematic market dependence, of direct producers?]

(91-93): in crisis of 17th century, Dutch came up against limits of pre-capitalist economic system. response to crisis was disinvestment from agriculture, unlike GB, and attempt to undergird commercial privilege (this was behind backing of William the Orange in England, against France)

(95-97): useful pithy description of SP relations, and difference between pre-capitalist rel. and capitalist rel.

(98): imp, England--none of the monarchical States were (1) as effectively unified as England (particularly true after 16th century). also, (2) no economy as characterized by as much land concentration--what landlords lacked in extra-economic autonomy, they made up for in economic power. this was to impel them towards a strategy of farming out to tenants, forcing productivity increases; they couldn't depend on extra-economic coercion, as in France [all this seems a rather roundabout way of explaining what happened in England]

(102): good point re: 'dissolving' effect of monetization of rents--whether or not this actually dissolves pre-capitalist relations of production depends on relations of production

(104): in France, crisis of 17th century was 'met' by a doubling-down of absolutism--vast new powers of extra-economic coercion over a peasantry with access to means of subsistence

(104): contrast between English and French surveyors--former searching for mkt values, latter for seigneurial rights

(105): a national market arose only as a corollary of capitalism/mkt society (Napoleonic State's efforts, in France); it was not a cause.

(107): early improvements were not revolutionary technological innovations--more application of accumulated knowledge, refinement in techniques (here, 16th and 17th century being discussed), and, crucially, elimination of old customs/practices (usufruct rights for non-owners, etc.)

(109): enclosures checked by monarchy, until 1688 rev. 18th C. as century of 'parliamentary enclosures'

(110-113): imp, Locke embodies this era--his theory of property is premised on 'improvement (i.e, this is how you prove your right to land). and, in case we need reminding, labour of servant is understood as counting towards 'productive use' by landlord. this, EM Wood adding, is a feature of capitalist ideology--would never have made sense under pre-capitalist MoP

(116-117): imp, the SRoP set the stage for class struggle--in France, over politically constituted property (aristocracy vs. monarchy, bourgeois vs. nobility and church, etc., peasants vs. all); in England, politically constituted property was not the issue, but more the economic powers of appropriation (right of enclosure, conflicts over use rights)

(118): class struggle set stage for capitalism, in England, by asserting landlords' rights over peasants' customary rights [not a very 'unintended' consequence, but this is weakness of summary]

(118-119): attack on concept of BR, even where it is rehabilitated to simply be 'outcome'-based--more 'effect than cause' where capitalism pre-exists it (can be a factor in its future development, but isn't key). BUT can't use the same concept to describe England AND France.

(120): imp, the popular elements in the English revolution were actually fighting against the forms of property most conducive to capitalism. theirs is an anti-capitalist legacy (this is further developed in 'Democracy Against Capitailsm,' one imagines)

(120): FR tensions were old-regime ones; conflict over State apparatus.

(121): and outcome-wise, difficult to argue that it facilitated rise of capitalism (even if it did unify State, etc.)

(122): again, ER did more to promote capitalism--but it didn't occur in context of feudalism.

(128): the 'idyllic' English countryside (image of) rests on disposession of peasantry, elimination of their villages and hegemony of territorial aristocrats

(130): imp, where does wage-labour fit in SRoP? new economic pressures produced wage-labour, but they don't presuppose wage-labour (even though wage-labour is part of the triad, it was a minority in seventeenth century England--restricted to parts of S and SE). you can be market-dependent w/o employing wage-labour, w/o being a wage-labourer. it requires only loss of non-market access to means of self-reproduction.

(131): by end of 1600s, English capitalism confirmed in productivity dominance

(132): urban population in 1850: 40% in England and Wales, 14% in France, 10% in Germany

(134): 'British capitalism depended on a highly developed domestic market'

(135): new banking system rooted in domestic transformations, in London

(136): similarly, naval and military power rooted in exceptional wealth, which was a property of domestic transformations

(137): competitive rents take off in 16th century

(137): EM Wood position on Dutch vs. English [interesting to compare w/ Brenner, of course]

(140): b/c of nature of mass mkt, extra pressure to produce cheaply [seems wrong]

(141-143): imp, the agrarian transition lay the groundwork for the industrial revolution--(1) created a proletariat; (2) with that, created a mass market. (Wood also adding that w/o agrarian transition, capitalism would not ever have developed! cf. demonstration effect, etc.). it was not technology (contra Polayni)--in fact, innovations in the first IR were quite minimal [hmm, worth interrogating, since this is what invites the ire of the PF school]

(144): nice sum--"industrialization was, then, the result not the cause of mkt society, and capitalist laws of motion were the cause not the result of mass proletarianization"

(148): the int market then transmitted the imperatives of efficient production, elsewhere (i.e., so it's not just via the 'demonstration effect,' and the State) [but hang on--why would other producers be forced to produce efficiently?]

(147): key--development of distinctive social property relations in England was well on its way by the time it became a major imperial power. the others that dominated were, of course, characterized by non-capitalist 'laws of motion'

(147-148): imp--lay 'Left' accounts of importance of imperialism, to capitalist take-off, are built on a 'commercialization model'. moreover, they fail to recognize that other powers were more important imperialists (Spain as best example)

(148-149): and slavery? other non-capitalist powers equally engaged in plantation slavery.

(149): in short, imperialism may have helped England on its way--but no amount of colonial wealth would have done anything to further capitalism in England, without prior transformation of social-property relations

(150): imperial expansion of pre-capitalist societies followed pre-capitalist logic: extra-economic coercion in extraction of surplus, extensive expansion, profits on alienation in trade

(153, see also 175): imp, English in Ireland, as emerging case of capitalist imperialism (late 1500s under Tudor colonization, to 1600s under Cromwell). imposition of a new economic system, via settlers--an 'English-style commercial order' was to be implanted [there is a danger, here, of identifying capitalist imperialism as an imperialism that brings capitalism--rather than as an imperialism impelled by distinctively capitalist imperatives. Wood isn't doing much to clarify this latter question. in fact, she's confounding the two questions].

(155): argument that capitalism has tendency to 'universalize its imperatives' [hmm], counter-balanced by attempt to manage effects [so this, in her argument, is why England retreats from capitalist development in Ireland; but it seems better to locate the tension in policy-makers, and question of what might be functional for English capital. maybe just a subtle distinction, though I think not]

(157): Locke on Indians and 'improvement'

(168): the question of the State, under feudalism--localized/territorialized parcels of sovereignty; modern nation-state was born with centralization

(169): again, contra Perry Anderson, for Wood 'absolutism' reproduces a pre-capitalist unity of political and economic power, but at a higher level (France as paradigmatic case). moreover, territorialized sovereignty never fully dissolved, under absolutism, of course.

(171): in England, story is a bit different. the social transformation that brought about capitalism is the same one that brought about the nation state

(172-173): imp, England's unification was far advanced, viz-a-viz France--this went hand in hand with 'economic unification, though it doesn't require it since the general process of centralization was rooted in tension between monarchies and parcellized sovereignties [she's being evasive re: exact nature of causation (b/c the same thing happens in France), but it clearly has its roots in underlying social transformations. the position seems to be that capitalism brings this to its fruition, but doesn't kickstart it.]

(177): no evidence that capitalism today is less in need of 'nation states' than it was before, despite rhetoric to the contrary

(177): useful, disjuncture in capitalism between boundaries of economic appropriation and extra-economic coercion--the former can transcend the boundaries of the latter. this makes possible its unique expansiveness, also. BUT it also invites a contradiction, which is that capitalism does still need extra-economic coercion.

(182): nice, 'modernity' has been identified with 'capitalism,' as part of the 'commercialization' model that associates bourgeois and capitalist. rethinking this identity invites a re-thinking of the relationship between modernity and capitalism. and opens us up to an anti-capitalist modernity.

(183-184): much of the Enlightenment belongs to a 'non-capitalist' society--in France, for example, the absolutist State. an overwhelmingly rural society, limited internal market in the 1700s.

(185): imp, the 'revolutionary' program of the bourgeoisie consisted in demanding 'equal access' to the tax-office State. 'universalism,' in the language of the bourgeoisie, had a more limited meaning (anti- aristocratic privilege) than it has been given in theories of history. and their attitude to the absolutist State was equivocal.

(187): Berman/Harvey reading 'capitalism' into early accounts about 'confusion'/'flux' that are really being written about cities, not capitalism

(188): the de-coupling of Enlightenment from capitalism is clearer, still, when you look at England--'rationalism' is replaced by 'invisible hand,' etc [hmm]

(189-190): nice, much of what the Enlightenment is indicted for is actually the ideology of improvement we see in capitalist Britain (not a consequence of commitment to rational analysis, etc., but disconnected from it)

(191-192): pithy definition of postmodernism, and its idiotic rejection of 'totalizing narratives'

(193): in sum:

capitalism is not a natural/inevitable consequence of human nature
a deeply contradictory force--self-sustaining growth, but not incompatible with regular stagnation (important, re: thinking about development of PF)

(197): Continental Europe has better public services b/c of 'legacy of absolutism'[!!?]

2011-07-09T21:57:00.001-07:00

ahmed shawki and sebastien budgen, HM 2010 (european far Left)

SEBASTIEN BUDGENS

The Historical Context

(1) Crisis of ideological legitimacy(dating to 1995, and the French strikes, but onwards since then)

(2) Crisis of social democracy

membership
programmatic crisis
moral crisis (corruption, political entropy)

(3) The stirrings of social resistance(students in Austria, Greece; strike activity in Germany).

New Elements

(4) Opening of political opportunities

(5) Crisis and austerity

(6) Crisis of confidence re: democraticcentralism and vanguard parties

Three Different Models

(1) Coming-together of remnants of masscommunist parties with other strands (including far-left, tradeunionists, etc.). The obvious example is Die Linke, in Germany (EastCommunist party, splits from the SDP, sections of the trade unionmovement, Trotskyists, etc.) The party of Communist Re-Foudnation inItaly had similar origins. In Greece, the coalition aroud the formerEurocommunist Party resembles this.

(2) re-foundation of a Left partyaround many far-left group. The best example is the Left Bloc inPortugal; a more-or-less balanced coming-together of the far-left, tocreate a new force.

(3) the new anti-capitalist party, are-making of the defunct Revolutionary Communist League.

We have to bear in mind, always, thedisasters of England and Italy, as controls, so to speak.

Why are these worth considering?

(1) They have had electoral success,for one. In the last European elections, the New Anti-CapitalistParty got 5%; Die Linke 7.3%; Left Bloc 10%. In the federalelections, there was a substantial breakthrough for Die Linke (whichwon 11.9% of the vote; five million votes). In Portugal, the LeftBloc got 9.8%; doubled its parliamentary representation (becoming thefourth-largest in Portugal)

(2) They have a significant presence onthe national scene, aside from this.

(3) A coming-together of differenttrends on the left (autonomists, trotskyists, etc.).

(4) Mixing of generations.

(5) Marks the end of period ofbunkering down and ghettoization for the European left.

(6) Portends something on a Europeanscale, perhaps.

General Obstacles

(1) The question of alliances,electorally or otherwise; the question of alliances to the right (andsometimes to the Left). In Germany the question is the possiblealliance with the SPD (in Berlin has led to massive disagreementswithin the party); in France with the French Communist Party; InPortugal with the Portuguese Socialist Party. The question can't bedodged; there is significant pressure from below. Italy though givesus an example of how cooperation can destroy this kind of party (theparty of Re-Foundation). It doesn't always have to be this stark—thequestion of the Left Front in France (for the first time, theCommunist Party has decided not to stand with the Socialists in thefirst round of the elections). At the same time, the NewAnti-Capitalist Party has certain conditions, which the Communistparty is likely to refuse (no regional executives in alliance withthe Socialist party).

(2) Their own programmaticweaknesses—how to articulate a defensist program, protecting thewelfare state and whatnot, as part of a larger, more radical program?

(3) How do you translate electoralsupport into activist support? How do you turn millions of votersinto thousands of activists?

(4) The question of internalorganization—how do you balance plurality, with leadership? How doyou relate to those within your organization who are more skepticalof party membership?

(5) A missing generation of cadre; manyof these organizations involve a whole host of people in their 60s,or people in their 20s.

(6) The relationship to the media, andthe question of the personalization of politics. You have effective,eloquent spokespeople; but how do you handle overexposure to themedia? It makes parties very dependent on these personalities (ifOlivier Betanscout was to give up his job tomorrow, the NPA would bein dire straits)

(7) Underdevelopment of theoreticalconsensus within the parties—often many strands coexisting, ratherthan constructive debate.

(8) The articulation of electoralmovements, to movement-building; how do you relate to trade unionleadership? Big problem in France where there's a tradition ofresisting political influence over the decision of striking, etc. Orin Germany, may of the trade union bureaucrats are in Die Linke—makesa critique, complicated.

(9) Relate the national, to theinternational.

(10) How do relate to nationalminorities? NPA has very few roots amongst youth of color, etc.

(11) The biggest problem, whichoverdetermines all of this—the absence of mass struggle in thesecountries.

What are honest expectations?

It is clear that this will bedetermined by the outbreak of mass forms of struggle—and by theability of these formations to relate to that struggle in a flexible,creative way.

But things to do in the interim, isquite clear—the creation of a liberated electoral zone, that SocialDemocracy has evacuated. The danger is the Americanization ofEuropean politics, where Left and Right are more-or-less meaningless.

The re-popularization of Socialistvalues and principles.

The engagement and unification ofsocial movements; having a voice in the national media defendingfactory occupations, etc.

AHMED SHAWKI

These representformations that we must learn more about in the US—their importanceis obviously connected to our own ambitions and plans, here.

On a broaderscale, the reference to the question of the return to the 19^thCentury is worth taking up. We're in a new period. In theFirst International, you had many different currents coming together;then you had a dominant model, in the time of the SecondInternational (which saw a split, then, at the time of the SecondWorld War)--since that period, the main form of expression in theworkers' movement was the Communist Parties, which entered a periodof crisis, themselves. And they shared, at that time, an industrialorganization. The other wing of the workers' movement, of course, wasthe parties of social democracy. The late 60's, then, saw an attemptto reclaim the revolutionary tradition.

That period, veryschematically, has come to a close. It's in this context that the newparties have emerged.

Shared Characteristics

In the main, theseparties have an electoral orientation—emerging from a period in the1980s/1990s when struggles were not politicized in the same way.

The weakness ofthese parties and general discontent in society at-large, Shawki'sarguing, is what explains the disconnect between their social baseand their electoral success (so you see people's aspirations anddesires reflected in electoral success, but no real social base andlocal cadre). Analagous to the Party of Socialist Liberation inBrazil, where the leader is well-known around the country, but thecadre is similarly absent.

In the US—themajority of activists want the creation of a revolutionary party, nodoubt. The problem, of course, is what steps would this kind ofpolitical development take. At the very least:

A serious orientation toward elections and social struggles.
Decision by the constituent elements to accept other traditions. The problem here is that we don't have the background, the experience; we don't have a social democratic workers' movement that feels betrayal, etc.

Ways Forward

Need to cometogether in action and collaboration, much more so than the creationof a new party for the sake of having a party (Greece is a goodmodel; painful years before the coalition was formed).

Comment and Questions

(1) The CommunistParties—niche parties; popularity perhaps partly explained by ahistory of struggle against dictatorship and fascism; element offamilial reproduction; contradictory, tactical flexibility, whichappeals to a traditional working-class elite which is tied to hardrhetoric but right-wing practice (Greek Communist Party published afavorable account from the perspective of a policeman!). Haven'tmanaged to take it to a new generation. (Argument also that, with thedefeat of these parties, Marxism has been liberated from being theproperty of these organizations; and thus, these new formations havecomplicated, interesting relationships to there-formation/re-composition of Marxism. But this is where, obviously,the indeterminateness is interesting/problematic).

(2) Charliearguing that much of what explains the formation of these parties andtheir absence in the US is, also, the differential levels of classstruggle. (Paul LeBlanc making same point)

(3) How can wetalk of the parties of social democracy as bourgeois workers'parties? Or are they capitalist capitalist parties, so to speak?(Paul Blackledge responding that it is the former, which is both apositive and a negative) (Sebastien saying that this is complicated,even metaphysical—how degenerate is the degenerate workers' party?And how degenerate does it get before...? But crux of response thatthis can only be debated in the context of different nationalrealities. And we have to discuss what we mean by organic links tothe workers' movement.) (Ahmed tracing it to its specific roots; aterm deployed by the Third International to refer to movements thatthey had once belonged to; but crux of response seems to have to dowith specifics of each situation. We require a willingness tounderstand the particularity of the situations that confront us).

(4) How to build amass social movement? Point about Obama's electorate, hopes beingaroused and then dashed—so we have 'new openings'. How to push thisforward, as revolutionary Marxists? (Ahmed re-emphasizing that it'sentirely false to think that there hasn't been a change inreality/consciousness, owing to crisis and Obama—and it may not allbe positive, at all. But it's silly to deny that we're in a differentcontext. Fair enough, but there is an enormous question about howthis translates into organization ('infrastructures of resistance,'what have you.))

(5) “CulturalPolitics”—not in the Eurocommunist aspiration for culturalhegemony; but rather the question of how to reach out to people whohave no institutional links to the workers' movement. Film showings;work in mosques; etc. This is a useful term for something that couldbe critical to work in Pakistan, of course. (Ahmed mentioning that ifyou have a 'knee-jerk' stupid position on religion, you won't getanywhere in this country).

(6) Die Linke notas a revolutionary party with reformist tendencies; rather, areformist party with revolutionary tendencies (has much to do withlow-level of political consciousness, as much as it does has to dowith bureaucratic structures; “I didn't leave the SPD, the SPD leftme”). Similarly, on the question of entryism—you cannot simply bea critic from within, you have to be an organizer from within.

2011-07-09T21:56:00.001-07:00

ahmed shawki, comintern

an ambiguity in the comintern's formulation of the national question, beginning with the second congress in 1920, which has led to the confounding of 'marxism' with a kind of 'radical nationalism'.
for marx, socialism meant international working-class revolution--not out of a moral duty, necessarily, but because of the nature of capitalism as a 'global' system. the possibility of victory in one country is premised on success in all countries.

marx also believed that capitalism would be reproduced in less developed countries in the way it appeared in advanced countries (his empirical material was limited). the spread of capitalist relations in these countries would be 'progressive' (this doesn't need to be the caricatured stagism that said and co. think it is--there were no sanguine descriptions of what it did, remember). the problem is, of course, is that he was wrong. he had concluded that national differences would tend to disappear as there is created a world-class; he was wrong about the pace, and the speed at which it would develop. revolutionary socialists face an entirely different problem, really--you had the development of imperialism, which is a fundamental obstacle to the disappearance of 'national antagonisms'.

the organizations of the socialist movement around WWI, of course, collapsed.

lenin's argument, at this time, was very different: in marx's time, capitalism was still contained within a few nation states. now, of course, we are talking about the uneven expansion of the world-system (you don't get many manchesters, but england and india). imperialism, furthermore, appears here; defined as the ferocious rivalry between advanced capitalist countries (not so much about the advanced countries and the less developed). this is why, of course, marxists reject variants of third-worldism; they are unable to accomodate the rivalries that ravage the 'advanced blocks'. this is the key to the collapse of the second international (here shawki is disagreeing--the question of the 'labor aristocracy,' etc.), in lenin's argument.

the most important thing about lenin, here, is that he is insisting that we begin not by ceding to the politics of nationalism, but by supporting the right to self-determination of those who are fighing colonial occupation (not necessarily secession, but if it comes to that, yes). this is the period of world war one.
this is really when Marxism starts to look beyond Europe, shawki is arguing.

comintern in 1919, in baku -- emancipation of workers in less advanced countries requires revolution in the advanced countries. if capitalist europe pillaged them, socialist europe will liberate them.

CRITICAL--what is important about this statement, shawki is noting, is that within a year, almost, or by the mid-1920s, this changes quite dramatically. their attitude changes. instead of seeing the emancipation of the third world as dependent on the workers of the advanced world, with the decline of revolutionary possibilities in europe, they began to see the struggles in the third world as the spark that would light the fire.
the comintern at this time is trying to clarify what their position should be, with respect to these countries, around this time (1920-1922, it seems). three central conclusions.

first and foremost, the precondition for socialism was the development of the economy and the development of a working-class. did that mean that socialism elsewhere was an impossibility? support for nationailst countries?
the comintern says no. capitalism is not inevitable--if the victorious proletariat in these countries conduct aggressive propaganda (and USSR come to their aid, note), capitalist development might be bypassed.

second, soviets are possible amongst the peasantry, etc.

thirdly, the nationalist movements in the third world would be the allies of the Soviet State, in that they fought against the domination of the imperialist countries.

this is where MN Roy steps in, of course. it was already raised, here, that class differentiation in the less developed countries had come to a degree that you already find movements that are 'bourgeois' in character--and more fearful of the proletariat than they will be brave in the face of imperialist oppression. he objected to blanket support to national liberation movements (he was saying, in effect, what Lenin had said in Tsarist Russia--the 'bourgeois-democratic' revolution, and then the 'national revolution')

this ambiguity in the formulation, then--how you assess national liberation movements?--was actually avoided at the congress of the comintern, and was left for the future. basically, Roy's amendments were spliced onto Lenin's original theses. an agreement, of course, to not obscure the nature of bourgeois movements--we will support the nationalist movements only when they are genuinely revolutionary, and when they will not block independent communist organizing.

KEY--of course, even this leaves many of the questions to be resolved, in practice. and leaves a contradiction in place. the stronger the communist party, the weaker and more conciliatory the natonialist movement. the weaker the communist party, the more revolutionary the nationalist movement. so confusion, he's arguing.
this said--there certainly is room, here, for tactical flexibility. moreover, practically, they never here compromised the politics of the international revolution, he's arguing. "a resolute struggle must be waged against coating the non-revolutionary movements in the colonies in the colors of revolution. comintern should collaborate with the revolutionary movement, yes, but it must unconditionally maintain the independence of the proletarian movement."

in practice, what did this mean?

well, there was a tension--in part to do with the ambiguity of the formulation. but also--KEY--because you have two contradictory aims, of course: the defense of the Soviets, and the advance of the international working class.

one example--in 1921, the principal threat to the Soviet Union was Britain and France (third congress in 1921), acknowledging that revolution was no longer on the cards in the West. they looked, then, for allies who would assist them in their struggle against Britain and France, which leads, shawki's arguing, to a whole series of contradictions--signing of a treaty between Ataturk and the Russian State, for example. Ataturk took the support, of course, and this had disastrous consequences for the Turkish Communist Party, which was promptly slaughtered.

there is an objective difference, Shawki is arguing, between this and the comintern under Stalin. not a question of justifying anything, just understanding the context.
Bukharin, for example, to Turkish communists--"even now, with the persecutions, do not let yourself be blinded. you still have far to go." what is important here, he's arguing, is the beginnings of the development of a 'theory of stages'. in all of what has been given thus far, shawki's noting, there has been no hint of a 'theory of stages' in the backward countries.

KEY--theoretically, shawki is saying, this has to do with the arrival of socialism in one country. the european revolutions had failed; but the russian state survived, as a result of the smychka. bukharin, following some of his earlier analysis, adopted that as the theory of the world--in today's present circumstances, the struggle internationally was not about working-class revolution, but about 'the cities of the world' vs. the 'countryside' (modern-day third worldism). therefore we're not talking so much about international alliances, but instead a kind of 'nationalisms' (this has also to do with bukharin's belief that the working-classes in the advanced countries were vanishing).

it now becomes a question, then, of supporting nationalist movements against imperialism which is with us (where as we do not support those who aren't with us). a question of the defence of the russian state above all else. clearest illustration of this is the chinese revolution of 1925-1927. bukharin/stalin here are entirely different from what came previously; they were never unclear on the question of independent organization, and not dressing up the nationalists in communist colors (in china, the nationalist movement was literally constituted by the comintern (by Borodin)--it physically did not exist as an organization).

borodin is known for one famous quote in 1927--this is not our time, this is the time to do coolie service for the KMT. here's a quote from the central committee in 1926, in the midst of an enormous strike wave: "the greatest danger is that the mass movement is developing toward the left, while the KMT is seized with panic, and beginning to incline toward the right. should these tendencies continue, the cleavage will deepen... the red united front will be demolished..."

CONCLUSION--the practical consequence of this is that the comintern collapsed the struggle for socialism into the struggle for nationalism, and into the defence of the Soviet Union. it began to blur the very important distinction between the class position in society--it's not a question of ignoring the peasantry, but a question of understanding divergent class interests.