In 2008, the most recent year for which figures are available, the U.S. expenditure was 696.3 billion dollars, followed by Russia’s 86 billion and China’s 83.5 billion. The U.S. defense budget is 15 times that of Japan, 47 times that of Israel, and nearly 73 times that of Iran.
Showing posts with label US. Show all posts
Showing posts with label US. Show all posts
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Sunday, May 2, 2010
shuja nawaz, crossed swords (2008)
(xxix): record of the judiciary in validating military rule
(xxx): military w/ 'hand on the tiller' since 1988
(xxxi): "Army, America, and Allah"
(xxxi): Ayub on the Mullah
(xxxvi-xxxvii): Pak as Turkey (army for the people!) or Pak as Indonesia?
(xxxviv-xxxvii): useful--development and defence spending [limited]
(xxxix): Warrant of Procedure
(xli-xliii): SUMMARY of the major themes
(12): Rejecting anyone whose hands were soft!
(15, 17): L. Curzon, and numbers of gov't vs. population
(16): 1917, Sandhurst is open to native officers
(30): the birth of a 'moth-eaten' military
(32): dependent on India for transfers, while fighting India in Kashmir! [this aside--there is good material here for a Skocpol-like narrative of literal State-construction. though not sure how far it would get me in the context of my paper]
(33): Waziristan as one of the six 'static area' commands in 1947; though Pakistan withdraws in hilariously-named Operation Curzon
(71-73): relevant--The Kashmir War as marking the beginnings of Bonapartism in Pakistan (i.e., a gap seen between Army and politicians) [but there's not much in the way of mechanisms, here--just narrative. if it marked military disaffection at the politicians, fine. but we need to ask, still, what allows the military to run roughshod over the interests of the economy at-large. need to make sure, though, not to confound the two questions: (1) relative autonomy of the State; (2) role of the military in the State (viz-a-viz politicians, of course)]
(78): Muhammad Ali on Muslim League as drawn from 'pillars of society', starting to unravel post-independence
(81-82): Ayub Khan promotion discussion (made C in C on 17th January, 1951)
(83-84): discussion of Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case (linked, here, to Kashmir conflict via Akbar Khan)
(86): Martial Law in Punjab, 8 March 1953 -- establishing Army as political force
(89): precious--Ayub on becoming army chief, says: "...keep out of politics..."
(89): important--again, here there is a narrative of political chaos, which, he is arguing, had the effect of laying the groundwork of inviting the army in. this is fine as far as history goes (not very far); a structural account of this incapacity is demanded, of course.
(94): Liaquat playing games re: his visit to Moscow/DC (helped by fact that Nehru's 1949 visit did not go too well)
(96): Korean War as 'political glue' for the new relationship
(98): important--David Bruce 1952 report to NSC warns of mullahs lying in wait. Must support these Western-oriented friendly leaders. Telling quotes re: imperialism and geo-strategic interests in the region (proximity to C. Asia/USSR)
(100-101): Ayub and Mirza courting the Dulles brothers to support Pakistan as bulwark of ME anti-communist strategy
(102): Dulles very impressed on tour to Pakistan ("best guard of honor"!)
(102-104): Ayub learning from Turkey military model
(107): US calculus in lead-up to decision to give Pakistan aid in 1954 (re: India)
(111): Nixon (as Eisenhower's VP) committed to relationship with Pakistan, lest he lose everyone to the Asian-Arab bloc of neutrals
(112): important?--Ayub citing fact that 75% of Pakistan gov't budget was going to defence, as part of his plea for American aid
(114-116): a relatively 'unsuccessful' first meeting, in 1954, thanks to one Meyers--though firm Pakistan view forced US, Nawaz is arguing, to be decisive in this regard (people in US were on both sides of fence)
(118): important--May 1954, America and Pakistan sign Mutual Defense Agreement. "Uncle Sam was now officially on Pakistan's side..."
(122): social origins of CSP--British in outlook
(125-126): US expressing that Pakistan military is most reliable institution amidst political infighting (around Ghulam Muhammad's dismissal of the Const. Assembly in 1954)
(126): memo from US ambassador confirms that the US has interest in democratic procedure/'appearance of legitimacy'
(127): Fed Court rules in favor of Ghulam Muhammad's dismissal --making a case against oligarchic power [!]
(127): One Unit proposals, towards "controlled democracy" and administrative centralization
[have to be understood in the context of political illegitimac(y--these ministers were finding it impossible to even win seats in the assemblies!]
(128): elections to Const. Assembly in1955--ML win 20 of 32 seats; US happy
(128): Islamic Republic born on 23 March 1956 [worth remembering that this was the work of the pro-West].Gives Pres. inordinate power.
(130): Suhrawardy comes to power as PM [has to work with US, of course--think about what it means, again, that the US was another 'power center,' in effect]
(131): Admiral Radford on Army as an ally 'which no other friendly power can match'
(135-136): Aid not being delivered at rate promised, infuriating Ayub. Nixon, friend of Pakistan, understands.
(136): military taking up 65% of government revenues at this point [highlights the urgent need for aid from US, for state-builders' perspective]
(138): here, wants to complement Huntington's argument about failure of political institutions, by talking about the personal characteristics of Iskander Mirza and Ayub Khan (that this is important for understanding the Coup, in other words)
(140): political 'shenanigans' in build-up to coup
(140-141): key--serious fiscal crisis in 1958, drain of foreign exchange reserves
(141): important--socialists might get elected at the polls, worries Ayub! [this connects the coup issue to issues of the autonomy of the State--you are pre-emptively worried, in effect, that the State apparatus will be put to some other use]
(141): amidst all this, Baluchistan lowers the Pakistani flag and announces its intention to secede (Mirza has hand in this, it is being alleged?)
(142): Mirza worry that "men of character" won't be returned at the polls
(143): Ayub confident about Army ability to step in at any time, if things were to "get out of hand"
(151): US wants its cake, eating and having both--wants democratic government, but the election of people favorable to its interests.
(151): general elections originally scheduled for November 1958, it seems
(153): Dulles saying that US supports democracy in principle. Exceptions can be made under limited circumstances, however.
(154): Shah proposes to Ayub that the countries merge--July 1958!
(157): important--intelligence analysts attribute coup to Mirza/Ayub's worry that general elections would see Noon-Suhrawardy come to power, E. Bengal would make serious inroads
(160): Palace intrigues culminating in Ayub expelling Mirza
(160): ZA Bhutto is commerce minister in the martial law cabinet, appointed by Mirza before Ayub's takeover
(161): the ministers re-take their oaths, after Mirza's resignation
(164): Coup sanctioned by Supreme Court (as a revolution, no less!)
(170-171): Justice Munir says constitution can be approved by public acclaim, a la the Greeks!
(171-172): Martial Law existed to carry out basic reforms that Pakistan had been unable to implement, thus far
(172-173): reform proposals--including idea of mixing Urdu and Bengali in a language; roman script, etc.
(175-176): Ayub pandering to Americans in the writing of the new constitution [again, we see them as a power center quite clearly--need to include this fact, obviously, in the theory]
(176): the farce of Ayub's thinking on BD
(178): Bhutto is on the constitution commission that helps to think through Ayub's constitution [Ayub doesn't accept their recommendations in toto]
(178): announced in March 1962 as the 'blending of democracy with discipline'[!]
(180-181): US wanted to avoid an arms race between India and Pakistan
(181): Pakistan dependent on US to finance its military [need to quantify this, really--make sense of the 'autonomy' in this way would be very helpful]
(182): January 1958--Ayub fighting with Truman over India and Communism -- when Ayub gets tanks anyway, he makes up by sending him three ducks that he had shot the previous day [!!!]
(185-186): the Badaber Base (sending U-2 spy planes, what have you), 1958-1968
(186-187): important--numbers on GDP and military budget and US aid (limited to early 60s, though)
(188): US reconsidering its goals--but realizes centrality of military and Pakistan, and the danger of the democratic process [good quote, here, about the danger of political parties emerging]
(192): Ayub tied his political fortunes to the Muslim League, which had degenerated terribly by this point (even his brother doesn't join his party!)
(193, 200): 60s as marking a shift away from the US, to an extent--as the US begins to eye India following Sino-Indian conflict in '62
(196): Ayub cables Kennedy in 1961, concerned that military aid might be going towards India
(200): Army had, by now, doubled since partition--it was threatening to become not Pakistan having army but Army having Pakistan
(201): ZA Bhutto beginning to assert himself--though this will lead to agitation around Kashmir and 1965 war
(207): no coordination with leaders of Kashmiri resistance in '65, prior to the 'uprising' that was to launch the war--the assumption was that they would rise spontaneously!
(236): Figures on gov't spending, in the context of this war -- 1.6 billion dollars on military expenditure between 1958-1965, about 50% of total gov't expenditure!
(236-237): the War heightened tensions with the US considerably (Shoaib vs. Bhutto)
(237-238): Lyndon Johnson warns Ayub, around this time, that Bhutto is "damn dangerous"
(239): Tashkent Accord, Jan 1966--Shastri dies that day; at home there are protests; the Ayub-Bhutto split takes final shape (Bhutto had been posturing as a dissenter--by that summer he had left the cabinet)
(244): Yahya takes charge, abrogating the constitution
(250): Yahya staffing his 'cabinet' with his favored officers -- including Major General Sher Ali Khan, who as minister of information will sponsor Islamists
(251): Yahya moves to control growing power of labor unions (no details given, but new labor policy was promulgated)
(252): 1962 constitution had stipulated that for the next 20 years minister of defence would be a military person
(253): policy of land allotments, begun under Ayub, as well as Fauji Foundation and Army Welfare Trust [remember that in the Siddiqa (via Zaidi), this is a policy that takes shape under Zia]
(254, 258): Nov 1969 announces elections for Oct 1970. Abolishes "One Unit", restores one-man vote (which gives E. Pakistan 169 seats in NA, vs. 144 for West)
(256): Pak economy suffering in aftermath of 1965 war (#'s)
(258-259, 260): The ISI makes its appearance in the build-up to the 1970 elections, but establishment was underestimating the strength of the PPP and Awami League
(259): Tribal chief in NWFP lamenting universal suffrage--"If they're all able to vote, it will be difficult to pay them all!"
(260): Mujib had good relations with Adamjee and the House of Haroon
(261): Flooding and cyclone coupled with Yahya's druken speech
(262): "The regime was astounded by the results..." Gul Hassan says, "Let's back Bhutto"
(263-267): important--Military was already planning an alternative to Mujib ("Operation Blitz", planned by Yaqub, who later resigns however b/c he only sees a political solution to post-election tension. Tikka Khan takes over, already known as the "Butcher of Baluchistan". Some kind of 'concealed' regime/support for Bhutto is on the cards (NA has to be postponed, because Bhutto refuses to show in early March--round table conferences are further postponed). Talks fail, aleady worry is that Mujib might use power to reduce army's influence.
(268, 270): mutiny in the ranks -- 8 East Bengal REgiment kills its West Pakistani CO
(268): Roedad Khan as hawk!
(269): Niazi and Tikka Khan, re: "scorched earth" policy in E. Bengal
(271-272): Aug 1969 is when talk begins, w/ Nixon, of using Pakistan as intermediary for US and China talks. Kissinger's visit, of course, is in 1971 (argument here is that this is distracting Yahya from issues at home).
(272-273, 287): Yahya becoming close to Nixon (Nixon also didn't like Indira Gandhi), which would pay off around '71 war, though not to the extent Yahya would have liked (a false sense of security, which made him less conciliatory)
(274): Chou En-Lai has 17 hours of talks with Kissinger--mentioning Indian 'expansionism' and support for Pakistan, over Bangladesh
(277): [shameful treatment of E. Bengal atrocities by Shuja Nawaz.]
(284-285): CIA sees writing on the wall, despite apparent military success
(285): important--India not only interested in hurting Pakistan, but also forestalling the emergence of radicals and Leftists in E. Bengal
(298): Yahya speaks of 120 million mujahids ready to defend E. Bengal from full Indian invasion [hah!]
(307): a new constitutional package, in journalists' hand, but never actually read out -- "nine months too late"
(320-321): 1971 transfer of power as a 'putsch' by junior officers, after Yahya had actually announced his intention to preside over a new constitution
(320): "the army that facilitated his direct rise to the presidency dropped him in the end."
(323): Bhutto sacks 1,300 civil servants
(323): Bhutto moves against the army (but retires the more intelligent generals, keeping many of those that supported the war)
(324, 338-339, 343): important--Bhutto's decision to constitute FSF comes in context of Army (Gul Hassan Khan) not cooperating fully with his injunctions; creation, in effect, of a parallel authority to Pakistani Army (at 18,000 people in 1976!)
(325): Bhutto removes Gul Hassan Khan and Rahim Khan, March 1972--for 'bonapartist' tendencies
(326): 21 April 1972 Bhutto takes oath as President/CMLA (under provisional constitution approved by NA)
(328-330): Army brief to Bhutto, before Simla negotiations -- not as if it were a defeated army, for one
(330-331): Triumph for Bhutto at Simla
(331-333): Bhutto politicking--deals with JUI and NAP re: coalition gov'ts in 1972 -- by 1975, though, he had smashed this accord and dismissed the gov'ts (sent the Army into Baluchistan--"inviting the Army back into the political process," says Nawaz)
(333-334): Ahmed Rashid, Najam Sethi, etc. gone to 'fight' in Baluchistan--Sethi kept in solitary confinement for seven months!
(335): important--"key role being played by the army in propping up civilian rule."
(335-337): key--planners of a military coup were arrested -- Bhutto chooses a 'fawning' an 'obsequious' General Zia to be head of the Attock tribunal (this is despite the fact that Brigadier Nawazish had recommended he be courtmartialed for participating in Black September operations against orders)
(337-338): Zia's promotion, over six generals (simultaneously Bhutto had lost a lot of support in the Army because of his treatment of the accused in the trial)
(339-340): Dr. IH Usmani and nuclear weapons -- balks at idea of a weapons program at a secret meeting in Multan in 1972
(342-343): The 1973 Constitution (April 1973) -- a parliamentary system, albeit with a strong centre (apparently in exchange for Islamist provisions)
(343-344): astonishing eulogy to Bhutto, from Zia, re: attention showered on Pak. Army
(344): Bhutto calling on the 'ancien regime' to shore up his rule
(345-347): Bhutto fixes 1977 elections -- himself embarassed by how lop-sided his victory was, apparently
(348): PNA begins campaign of mass agitation -- petit-bourgeois elements
(349): this is when Bhutto, in vain, bans alcohol and promises an Islamic system in order to appease them--April 22, he declares martial law
(349-350): there is rumbling discontent in the Army, especially amongst junior officers
(350-351): US-Bhutto relationship, blowing hot and cold after Nixon/Kissinger leave the White House
(352-353): July 4, 1977--Zia's coup (Bhutto had distanced himself from his core, surrounded himself with sycophants, and alienated the business/banking community) [obviously Aijaz Ahmed is superior on this score]
(359-360): here, also, Nawaz is attributing a new "Culture of Entitlement" to the Zia era--a "new crop of millionaire generals."
(359, 363): Zia promised elections within 90 days! (couldn't hold elections, obviously, as PPP would win--canceled both the proposed 1977 ones and the 1979 elections, as the writing is on the cards: re: local body elections; Bhutto is also getting huge support at rallies, don't forget)
(360): important--narrative, here, is that far from fading from political life, the Army ended the Zia decade very much on top. an empowered ISI, ethnic conflict ravaging civil society.
(362): Zia became president on 16 December 1978, deposing Faiz Ilahi Chaudry (who had been Bhutto's president)
(363): Supreme Court, of course, gave Zia legal cover, invoking the Doctrine of Necessity (making martial law superior to the Constitution, in the process); March 1981 some took oath under a PCO
(365): Bhutto hung
(366-367): Pakistan outsourced its writ to tribal leaders, in FATA
(367-378): Pakistan sheltering the radicals against whom Daud was cracking down (Hekmatyar, of course)
(370): beginning, of course, of the strategic relationship with the USA after USSR invades Afghanistan on December 24, 1979
(371): Pakistan became world's largest heroin supplier
(372): Defence spending 'jump' after invasion--up to $1.86 billion in 1981
(373): The ISI was coming into prominence, initially to the chagrin of Zia, apparently (though he took full advantage, of course)
(374): 67% of the aid was going to the fundamentalists by 1987; most to Hekmatyar
(374): another estimate is one-third to Hekmatyar, one-third to Rabbani (Massoud), and the rest to the others (these figures discount Soviet aid, don't forget)
(376): Reagan comes with a 3.2 billion dollar aid plan (return to democracy is Pakistan's "internal situation")
(380): classic -- the 1984 referendum text
(381): Junejo-Zia confrontation over cabinet posts
(382): Martial law lifted 30 December 1985
(382): B. Bhutto returns to Lahore on 10 April 1986, and one million people turn out to greet her
(384): the tensions between Zia and Junejo eventually culminate in the latter's dismissal (military is not informed of this)
(385): changes in the demographics of the Army (urbanization meant that more were lower middle-class, a la Zia)
(386): Pakistan base in Saudi (some 20,000 troops, in 1983)
(387): important--Zia's time also saw the army's deepest penetration of the civil service--about a quarter of the forty senior bureaucratic posts. Ambassadorial posts and lower level positions, as well. And martial law meant that military was in charge in the provinces, too. "He realized that his only constiutency was the Army."
(389): BCCI corruption--helping gov't get foreign exchange, and boosting reserves
(390): decline in US-Pakistan relationship under Zia, b/c of the 'nuclear programme'
(390-391): Pressler and Solarz amendments, where it has to be verified that Pakistan wasn't pursuing nuclear weapons
(396): After the Zia crash on 17 Aug 1988, army high command took the decision to pursue the constitutional path (no details here--but done in a way that confirmed rank of Army over Civil, argues Nawaz) [certainly an empty transition, if ever there was one--even still, Zia had promised elections in Nov 1988, and those would still take place]
(411, 422): important--the 'troika' (President, PM, Army Chief) would contest power for the next decade
(411-412): Hamid Gul cobbles together the IJI (Nawaz Sharif who had been finance and chief minister of Punjab after being picked by Lt. Gen., Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi who was ex-PPP)
(412-413): Beg and Ishaq Khan, separately, were both willing to have elections (even as Gul said they needed more time to build up IJI)
(413): 1988 elections: first-past-the-post helped PPP win more seats than it had popular vote; Nawaz, though, became Chief Minister of the Punjab. "Bhutto had a victory but not a real mandate."
(414-415): a 'gentleman's argeement' that there were certain things that Bhutto couldn't touch (five points)
(415): PPP makes mistake of agreeing to support Ghulam Ishaq Khan in the presidential elections
(416): Bhutto's tense relations with Beg and Khan
(423-425): differences with Hamid Gul and Beg over Afghanistan--resulting in former's dismissal
(425): Bhutto also tried to bring the ISI under control, appointing Kallue to the chagrin of Beg and the military; she was depending on advice of Imtiaz Ahmed and Naseerullah Babar, both people whom were not trusted by the army establishment
(426-427): tensions come to a head over Sirohey--though Bhutto noting that Beg didn't expect Sharif to win the ensuing elections, thought instead that he would be the matchmaker of a hung parliament, or something
(428): Altaf Hussain was rejected from the Army, for being a 'refugee'
(429): Aitzaz Ahsan as Interior Minister, at this time
(430): key--Bhutto dismissed by Beg and Khan in Aug 1990, as issues accumulate (she was grooming her own COAS), on grounds of inefficiency/corruption
(432): US and IMF, even, were warm to the Bhutto gov't, here -- it is primarily the military and civil establishment that is responsible for her fall
(433): Roedad Khan was involved in this dismissal, allegedly
(433): Beg 'takes back' the ISI after dismissing Bhutto (Kallue removed)
(434): wow--Rs. 140m were distributed to help opponents of the PPP in the 1990 elections; see the breakdown, here
(435): IJI wins Nov 1990 elections--Bhutto elected leader of the opposition
(436): apparent harmony between political leaders and Army, at this early stage of the Sharif gov't
(436): a 'pro-business' gov't--seeing to it that earlier nationalizations were undone, etc.; "has the support of the business community"
(437): US sanctions, b/c of the continued nuclear program
(438): Tensions emerging between Sharif and Beg, re: Gulf War
(439): Beg becoming increasingly loony as he becomes a 'lame duck' (western-zionist conspiracies, etc.)
(443): Asif Nawaz appointed COAS
(444): Sharif and Ijazul Haq allied on the third anniversary of Zia's death--but soon to part ways, as Ijazul Haq aligned himself with Musharraf in 1999
(445): important--Army's annual turnover was 12-14 billion rupees in 1991 -- a "huge industrial conglomerate" (twice as big as the biggest private conglomerate at the time, the Crescent Group, which had an annual turnover of six billion rupees)
(446): again, a balancing act would be necessary--the Army had hardly vanished from the political scene
(447-448): "strong" relationship between the US and Asif Nawaz' army, at this time, though nuclear issue and terrorism remained problems
(449): tensions between Sharif and Ghulam Ishaq Khan--former making moves to remove the 8th amendment, but didn't have the leverage
(450): Asif Nawaz given a BMW by Shahbaz Sharif! (they had been distributing them to other generals)
(449-452): and tensions between Sharif and Asif Nawaz
(452): Sharif made Javed Nasir, a fundoo, DG ISI (Nasir wouldn't even look at women when they entered the room)
(452): CIA giving Nawaz signals that the army ought to intervene (the abiding concern being the nuclear programme, it seems?)
(453): Hamid Gul is retired, after refusing the transfer ordered by Nawaz
(454-455): Nawaz and Sharif coming to loggerheads over policy in Sindh, as PML was backing MQM at the time. Nawaz was 'overstepping' his duty and threatening the coalition with MQM, in Sharif's eyes.
(456-457): Gen. Nawaz allegedly being asked to take power in coup, by numerous figures
(459): tension between Sharif and Khan over who was to succeed Asif Nawaz
(466-467): relations with the US are deteriorating, under Bill Clinton's time in office (again, Kashmir and nuclear program are the issues). not helped by Lt. Gen. Javed Nasir as DG ISI (replaced eventually by Qazi, on orders of Waheed)
(469): attempted repeal of 8th Amendment, by Sharif
(469): succession battle within PML, after Junejo dies in March 1993
(470): President Ishaq sacks the gov't after an inflammatory speech by Nawaz (backed by Waheed) -- but Supreme Court does not side with him
(471-472): Army as kingmaker in agreement that sees both Sharif and Ishaq resign--replaed by Qureshi, an IMF and banker's man
(473): Qureshi introduced the independence of the State Bank from the Ministry of Finance and exposed some defaulters on gov't loans from Sharif's party, with the support of the Army [here described as freeing it from the 'thicket' of politics; but obviously a profoundly anti-democratic measure, at its heart]
(473): Bhutto wins October 1993 elections--again a victory, but not a mandate
(474): Bhutto knew she had to be more careful re: the Army and Intelligence Services, the second time around
(474): Pakistan contributed 'peacekeeping' troops to Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti
(477): abortive Islamist coup--found out and snuffed out
(477-478): mistrust in the early Clinton years, again, though Bhutto did her best (very successful visit to Washington in early 1995)
(478): Mullah Omar acquired support after dealing with the rape and murder of Herati villagers by renegade Mujahideen (who had been running a tax-collection checkpoint)
(479): Taliban, in this narrative, not created by Pakistan but collaborated with very readily, of course (then, as now, needed to dislodge pro-India Tajik force)
(481-482): Karamat made COAS, after Waheed's term is up
(483-486): the issues leading up to Leghari's sacking of Bhutto in November 1996 -- have to do with corruption and the economy [but the economic issues are not at all dealt with, here--mentioned as depleting foreign exchange reserves, etc.]
(487): Sharif trounces all opposition in February 1997 elections -- PPP reduced to 18 seats!
(487): Removes 8th Amendment by passing the 13th Amendment -- Leghari and the COAS did not have objections, though
(487-489): Crisis re: Chief Justice Ali Shah--events are very hectic, Leghari ends up resigning, Chief Justice ends up sacked, and Sharif wins.
(492): India, under BJP, weighed up cost-benefit on its economy of the nuclear test--confident that it could withstand the expected shocks
(493-495): Sharif decides on retaliatory test in response, against Karamat's advice [no taking the high ground, here]. the economic consequences stood to be grave [how do you make sense of this? clearly in violation of any rational person's interests re: stability of Pakistani capitalism]
(497): Senate blocks 15th Amendment -- Sharif's "caliphate" amendment
(498-499): Sharif and Karamat fall out, allegedly over Karamat's speech re: founding of an NSC
(500): October 1998, after Karamat leaves post two months early, Sharif chooses Musharraf (picked over more senior, more suitable candidates--ostensibly b/c of lack of base in the Army)
(517-518): Sharif allegedly on board re: Kargil invasion
(520-522): re: pulling out, it was a problem of saving national face (Musharraf here is reported saying that he left this up to Sharif, who made the decision; Sharif says that Musharraf asked him to pull out)
(524): in September, Shahbaz Sharif has the US release a statement regarding opposition to an unconstitutional takeover.
(525): Touching moment with Sharif senior, where Musharraf and Sharifs are deemed brothers, apparently (one month before coup)
(526): Sharif wants to replace Musharraf with Lt. Gen. Ziauddin (who had been made DG ISI)
(527): Sharif, quite simply, didn't have the backing of the Army to remove Musharraf--instead, it sided with the ousted General.
(528): the third of Musharraf's seven goals, in coming to power, was to "revive the economy and restore investor confidence." (Nawaz noting that he made progress on this score)
(529): Supreme Court judgement of May 2000, LFO of 2002, 17th amendment all gave extraordinary legal cover to Musharraf.
(530): Supreme Court acquiescence
(531): 'successful' April 2002 referendum
(532): MMA wins 18 seats
(532): Musharraf brought some 1,000 military officers into senior positions in the civil administration, academia, etc." -- this ensured continued loyalty of the military, of course
(533): his King's party prevented the passage of a Women's Rights Bill in 2006
(533): troika had been replaced by a one-legged stool (Shaukat Aziz became PM in August 2004)
(533): Musharraf's regime continued the 'pro-business trend'--attracting investment flows from Pakistanis and the Middle East
(535): Ambassador Ayub trying to convince Omar not to blow up the statues at Bamiyan
(536): Taliban de-weaponized Kandahar
(538): Musharraf had been shunned by Clinton; but 9/11 changed everything, of course (an 'anchor of stability' -- what Nixon had called the Shah and Marcos both)
(541): the seven demands made after 9/11 attacks, to which Musharraf partly agreed (objected to some, apparently)--nonetheless, this is relayed back to US and then becomes fact as total agreement [unclear why, how, in this narrative]
(542): Pakistan had recognized Taliban after capture of Mazar-i-Sharif in 1997 -- against the advice of Karamat
(542-543): Mahmud Ahmed, Musharraf's DG ISI, was an Islamist, and removed by Musharraf soon after the US attack on Afghanistan
(546): Musharraf had given space to the Islamists in order to combat Nawaz and Bhutto--this gave the MMA a respectability it never ought to have had
(547-548): important--economic 'progress' during the Musharraf period. Saw to it that the investors were kept happy [again, here it's not a case of a coordinated project--rather it's a question of what capitalists are happy with, and when they feel compelled to organize themselves (ought to look at the disorganization of labor, too)]
(551): AQ Khan corruption and dealings with Iran, Libya, NK
(557): PEMRA and censorship
(559): Musharraf talking of a French-style presidential system
(560): sacking of Chaudry, overturned by Supreme Court
(560-561): Declaration of Emergency, Nov 2007--coup within a coup (stating elections would be held January 2008). Musharraf left position of COAS on 28 November, though, bowing to internal and external pressure.
(570-571): changing composition of Army, by ethnicity
(572): the 'Zia Bharti'
(575): miltiary's share of the budget, viz-a-viz health and education
(576): perks go only to those who make it at the higher echelons -- a steep privilege curve
(582): too much power goes to the Army Chief--need a division of power amongst regional commanders
- - - - - -
(1) key point is to make sense of institutional interests/personal interests within a context that is set by the contours of class politics. this is what i hope to add to this literature. in other words, its possible to see that some of the balancing act between military and civil plays out without interference, on the basis of competing interests--it is when structural interests are threatened, though, that it needs to be adjudicated directly. [in other words, it is a mistake to think that everything that happens within the institutions is mandated by the underlying class structure--but it is the case that larger questions cannot be resolved without consulting that class structure]
(2) must make use of the constructs of 'structural autonomy' and 'political autonomy' (and somewhere in between these two has to fit the notion of the hand of Empire)
(3): should emphasize the continuity of the 'form of state' (Bhutto as martial ruler, Zia w/ Junejo, Bhutto w/ Beg/Khan, etc.)
(4): when speaking about US role, important to note that they figure directly only really in the periods where their interest is most intense (so in the 50's and80's and 2000's, but not so much in the 90's). will have to make this more airtight, but this seems defensible at first glance.
(xxix): record of the judiciary in validating military rule
(xxx): military w/ 'hand on the tiller' since 1988
(xxxi): "Army, America, and Allah"
(xxxi): Ayub on the Mullah
(xxxvi-xxxvii): Pak as Turkey (army for the people!) or Pak as Indonesia?
(xxxviv-xxxvii): useful--development and defence spending [limited]
(xxxix): Warrant of Procedure
(xli-xliii): SUMMARY of the major themes
- army reflects pakistani society more than at any time in history
- internally weak political parties have handed army power
- army has acquired a corporate structure and acts on its own institutional interests
- role of the army has been given a boost by the US' strategic interests
- army has performed well in its primary task of defending the country (!)
- protection of its corporate image against its own leadership
- highly partial selection of successors to army chief
- pakistan remains very strategic in global geo-politics
(12): Rejecting anyone whose hands were soft!
(15, 17): L. Curzon, and numbers of gov't vs. population
(16): 1917, Sandhurst is open to native officers
(30): the birth of a 'moth-eaten' military
(32): dependent on India for transfers, while fighting India in Kashmir! [this aside--there is good material here for a Skocpol-like narrative of literal State-construction. though not sure how far it would get me in the context of my paper]
(33): Waziristan as one of the six 'static area' commands in 1947; though Pakistan withdraws in hilariously-named Operation Curzon
(71-73): relevant--The Kashmir War as marking the beginnings of Bonapartism in Pakistan (i.e., a gap seen between Army and politicians) [but there's not much in the way of mechanisms, here--just narrative. if it marked military disaffection at the politicians, fine. but we need to ask, still, what allows the military to run roughshod over the interests of the economy at-large. need to make sure, though, not to confound the two questions: (1) relative autonomy of the State; (2) role of the military in the State (viz-a-viz politicians, of course)]
(78): Muhammad Ali on Muslim League as drawn from 'pillars of society', starting to unravel post-independence
(81-82): Ayub Khan promotion discussion (made C in C on 17th January, 1951)
(83-84): discussion of Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case (linked, here, to Kashmir conflict via Akbar Khan)
(86): Martial Law in Punjab, 8 March 1953 -- establishing Army as political force
(89): precious--Ayub on becoming army chief, says: "...keep out of politics..."
(89): important--again, here there is a narrative of political chaos, which, he is arguing, had the effect of laying the groundwork of inviting the army in. this is fine as far as history goes (not very far); a structural account of this incapacity is demanded, of course.
(94): Liaquat playing games re: his visit to Moscow/DC (helped by fact that Nehru's 1949 visit did not go too well)
(96): Korean War as 'political glue' for the new relationship
(98): important--David Bruce 1952 report to NSC warns of mullahs lying in wait. Must support these Western-oriented friendly leaders. Telling quotes re: imperialism and geo-strategic interests in the region (proximity to C. Asia/USSR)
(100-101): Ayub and Mirza courting the Dulles brothers to support Pakistan as bulwark of ME anti-communist strategy
(102): Dulles very impressed on tour to Pakistan ("best guard of honor"!)
(102-104): Ayub learning from Turkey military model
(107): US calculus in lead-up to decision to give Pakistan aid in 1954 (re: India)
(111): Nixon (as Eisenhower's VP) committed to relationship with Pakistan, lest he lose everyone to the Asian-Arab bloc of neutrals
(112): important?--Ayub citing fact that 75% of Pakistan gov't budget was going to defence, as part of his plea for American aid
(114-116): a relatively 'unsuccessful' first meeting, in 1954, thanks to one Meyers--though firm Pakistan view forced US, Nawaz is arguing, to be decisive in this regard (people in US were on both sides of fence)
(118): important--May 1954, America and Pakistan sign Mutual Defense Agreement. "Uncle Sam was now officially on Pakistan's side..."
(122): social origins of CSP--British in outlook
(125-126): US expressing that Pakistan military is most reliable institution amidst political infighting (around Ghulam Muhammad's dismissal of the Const. Assembly in 1954)
(126): memo from US ambassador confirms that the US has interest in democratic procedure/'appearance of legitimacy'
(127): Fed Court rules in favor of Ghulam Muhammad's dismissal --making a case against oligarchic power [!]
(127): One Unit proposals, towards "controlled democracy" and administrative centralization
[have to be understood in the context of political illegitimac(y--these ministers were finding it impossible to even win seats in the assemblies!]
(128): elections to Const. Assembly in1955--ML win 20 of 32 seats; US happy
(128): Islamic Republic born on 23 March 1956 [worth remembering that this was the work of the pro-West].Gives Pres. inordinate power.
(130): Suhrawardy comes to power as PM [has to work with US, of course--think about what it means, again, that the US was another 'power center,' in effect]
(131): Admiral Radford on Army as an ally 'which no other friendly power can match'
(135-136): Aid not being delivered at rate promised, infuriating Ayub. Nixon, friend of Pakistan, understands.
(136): military taking up 65% of government revenues at this point [highlights the urgent need for aid from US, for state-builders' perspective]
(138): here, wants to complement Huntington's argument about failure of political institutions, by talking about the personal characteristics of Iskander Mirza and Ayub Khan (that this is important for understanding the Coup, in other words)
(140): political 'shenanigans' in build-up to coup
(140-141): key--serious fiscal crisis in 1958, drain of foreign exchange reserves
(141): important--socialists might get elected at the polls, worries Ayub! [this connects the coup issue to issues of the autonomy of the State--you are pre-emptively worried, in effect, that the State apparatus will be put to some other use]
(141): amidst all this, Baluchistan lowers the Pakistani flag and announces its intention to secede (Mirza has hand in this, it is being alleged?)
(142): Mirza worry that "men of character" won't be returned at the polls
(143): Ayub confident about Army ability to step in at any time, if things were to "get out of hand"
(151): US wants its cake, eating and having both--wants democratic government, but the election of people favorable to its interests.
(151): general elections originally scheduled for November 1958, it seems
(153): Dulles saying that US supports democracy in principle. Exceptions can be made under limited circumstances, however.
(154): Shah proposes to Ayub that the countries merge--July 1958!
(157): important--intelligence analysts attribute coup to Mirza/Ayub's worry that general elections would see Noon-Suhrawardy come to power, E. Bengal would make serious inroads
(160): Palace intrigues culminating in Ayub expelling Mirza
(160): ZA Bhutto is commerce minister in the martial law cabinet, appointed by Mirza before Ayub's takeover
(161): the ministers re-take their oaths, after Mirza's resignation
(164): Coup sanctioned by Supreme Court (as a revolution, no less!)
(170-171): Justice Munir says constitution can be approved by public acclaim, a la the Greeks!
(171-172): Martial Law existed to carry out basic reforms that Pakistan had been unable to implement, thus far
(172-173): reform proposals--including idea of mixing Urdu and Bengali in a language; roman script, etc.
(175-176): Ayub pandering to Americans in the writing of the new constitution [again, we see them as a power center quite clearly--need to include this fact, obviously, in the theory]
(176): the farce of Ayub's thinking on BD
(178): Bhutto is on the constitution commission that helps to think through Ayub's constitution [Ayub doesn't accept their recommendations in toto]
(178): announced in March 1962 as the 'blending of democracy with discipline'[!]
(180-181): US wanted to avoid an arms race between India and Pakistan
(181): Pakistan dependent on US to finance its military [need to quantify this, really--make sense of the 'autonomy' in this way would be very helpful]
(182): January 1958--Ayub fighting with Truman over India and Communism -- when Ayub gets tanks anyway, he makes up by sending him three ducks that he had shot the previous day [!!!]
(185-186): the Badaber Base (sending U-2 spy planes, what have you), 1958-1968
(186-187): important--numbers on GDP and military budget and US aid (limited to early 60s, though)
(188): US reconsidering its goals--but realizes centrality of military and Pakistan, and the danger of the democratic process [good quote, here, about the danger of political parties emerging]
(192): Ayub tied his political fortunes to the Muslim League, which had degenerated terribly by this point (even his brother doesn't join his party!)
(193, 200): 60s as marking a shift away from the US, to an extent--as the US begins to eye India following Sino-Indian conflict in '62
(196): Ayub cables Kennedy in 1961, concerned that military aid might be going towards India
(200): Army had, by now, doubled since partition--it was threatening to become not Pakistan having army but Army having Pakistan
(201): ZA Bhutto beginning to assert himself--though this will lead to agitation around Kashmir and 1965 war
(207): no coordination with leaders of Kashmiri resistance in '65, prior to the 'uprising' that was to launch the war--the assumption was that they would rise spontaneously!
(236): Figures on gov't spending, in the context of this war -- 1.6 billion dollars on military expenditure between 1958-1965, about 50% of total gov't expenditure!
(236-237): the War heightened tensions with the US considerably (Shoaib vs. Bhutto)
(237-238): Lyndon Johnson warns Ayub, around this time, that Bhutto is "damn dangerous"
(239): Tashkent Accord, Jan 1966--Shastri dies that day; at home there are protests; the Ayub-Bhutto split takes final shape (Bhutto had been posturing as a dissenter--by that summer he had left the cabinet)
(244): Yahya takes charge, abrogating the constitution
(250): Yahya staffing his 'cabinet' with his favored officers -- including Major General Sher Ali Khan, who as minister of information will sponsor Islamists
(251): Yahya moves to control growing power of labor unions (no details given, but new labor policy was promulgated)
(252): 1962 constitution had stipulated that for the next 20 years minister of defence would be a military person
(253): policy of land allotments, begun under Ayub, as well as Fauji Foundation and Army Welfare Trust [remember that in the Siddiqa (via Zaidi), this is a policy that takes shape under Zia]
(254, 258): Nov 1969 announces elections for Oct 1970. Abolishes "One Unit", restores one-man vote (which gives E. Pakistan 169 seats in NA, vs. 144 for West)
(256): Pak economy suffering in aftermath of 1965 war (#'s)
(258-259, 260): The ISI makes its appearance in the build-up to the 1970 elections, but establishment was underestimating the strength of the PPP and Awami League
(259): Tribal chief in NWFP lamenting universal suffrage--"If they're all able to vote, it will be difficult to pay them all!"
(260): Mujib had good relations with Adamjee and the House of Haroon
(261): Flooding and cyclone coupled with Yahya's druken speech
(262): "The regime was astounded by the results..." Gul Hassan says, "Let's back Bhutto"
(263-267): important--Military was already planning an alternative to Mujib ("Operation Blitz", planned by Yaqub, who later resigns however b/c he only sees a political solution to post-election tension. Tikka Khan takes over, already known as the "Butcher of Baluchistan". Some kind of 'concealed' regime/support for Bhutto is on the cards (NA has to be postponed, because Bhutto refuses to show in early March--round table conferences are further postponed). Talks fail, aleady worry is that Mujib might use power to reduce army's influence.
(268, 270): mutiny in the ranks -- 8 East Bengal REgiment kills its West Pakistani CO
(268): Roedad Khan as hawk!
(269): Niazi and Tikka Khan, re: "scorched earth" policy in E. Bengal
(271-272): Aug 1969 is when talk begins, w/ Nixon, of using Pakistan as intermediary for US and China talks. Kissinger's visit, of course, is in 1971 (argument here is that this is distracting Yahya from issues at home).
(272-273, 287): Yahya becoming close to Nixon (Nixon also didn't like Indira Gandhi), which would pay off around '71 war, though not to the extent Yahya would have liked (a false sense of security, which made him less conciliatory)
(274): Chou En-Lai has 17 hours of talks with Kissinger--mentioning Indian 'expansionism' and support for Pakistan, over Bangladesh
(277): [shameful treatment of E. Bengal atrocities by Shuja Nawaz.]
(284-285): CIA sees writing on the wall, despite apparent military success
(285): important--India not only interested in hurting Pakistan, but also forestalling the emergence of radicals and Leftists in E. Bengal
(298): Yahya speaks of 120 million mujahids ready to defend E. Bengal from full Indian invasion [hah!]
(307): a new constitutional package, in journalists' hand, but never actually read out -- "nine months too late"
(320-321): 1971 transfer of power as a 'putsch' by junior officers, after Yahya had actually announced his intention to preside over a new constitution
(320): "the army that facilitated his direct rise to the presidency dropped him in the end."
(323): Bhutto sacks 1,300 civil servants
(323): Bhutto moves against the army (but retires the more intelligent generals, keeping many of those that supported the war)
(324, 338-339, 343): important--Bhutto's decision to constitute FSF comes in context of Army (Gul Hassan Khan) not cooperating fully with his injunctions; creation, in effect, of a parallel authority to Pakistani Army (at 18,000 people in 1976!)
(325): Bhutto removes Gul Hassan Khan and Rahim Khan, March 1972--for 'bonapartist' tendencies
(326): 21 April 1972 Bhutto takes oath as President/CMLA (under provisional constitution approved by NA)
(328-330): Army brief to Bhutto, before Simla negotiations -- not as if it were a defeated army, for one
(330-331): Triumph for Bhutto at Simla
(331-333): Bhutto politicking--deals with JUI and NAP re: coalition gov'ts in 1972 -- by 1975, though, he had smashed this accord and dismissed the gov'ts (sent the Army into Baluchistan--"inviting the Army back into the political process," says Nawaz)
(333-334): Ahmed Rashid, Najam Sethi, etc. gone to 'fight' in Baluchistan--Sethi kept in solitary confinement for seven months!
(335): important--"key role being played by the army in propping up civilian rule."
(335-337): key--planners of a military coup were arrested -- Bhutto chooses a 'fawning' an 'obsequious' General Zia to be head of the Attock tribunal (this is despite the fact that Brigadier Nawazish had recommended he be courtmartialed for participating in Black September operations against orders)
(337-338): Zia's promotion, over six generals (simultaneously Bhutto had lost a lot of support in the Army because of his treatment of the accused in the trial)
(339-340): Dr. IH Usmani and nuclear weapons -- balks at idea of a weapons program at a secret meeting in Multan in 1972
(342-343): The 1973 Constitution (April 1973) -- a parliamentary system, albeit with a strong centre (apparently in exchange for Islamist provisions)
(343-344): astonishing eulogy to Bhutto, from Zia, re: attention showered on Pak. Army
(344): Bhutto calling on the 'ancien regime' to shore up his rule
(345-347): Bhutto fixes 1977 elections -- himself embarassed by how lop-sided his victory was, apparently
(348): PNA begins campaign of mass agitation -- petit-bourgeois elements
(349): this is when Bhutto, in vain, bans alcohol and promises an Islamic system in order to appease them--April 22, he declares martial law
(349-350): there is rumbling discontent in the Army, especially amongst junior officers
(350-351): US-Bhutto relationship, blowing hot and cold after Nixon/Kissinger leave the White House
(352-353): July 4, 1977--Zia's coup (Bhutto had distanced himself from his core, surrounded himself with sycophants, and alienated the business/banking community) [obviously Aijaz Ahmed is superior on this score]
(359-360): here, also, Nawaz is attributing a new "Culture of Entitlement" to the Zia era--a "new crop of millionaire generals."
(359, 363): Zia promised elections within 90 days! (couldn't hold elections, obviously, as PPP would win--canceled both the proposed 1977 ones and the 1979 elections, as the writing is on the cards: re: local body elections; Bhutto is also getting huge support at rallies, don't forget)
(360): important--narrative, here, is that far from fading from political life, the Army ended the Zia decade very much on top. an empowered ISI, ethnic conflict ravaging civil society.
(362): Zia became president on 16 December 1978, deposing Faiz Ilahi Chaudry (who had been Bhutto's president)
(363): Supreme Court, of course, gave Zia legal cover, invoking the Doctrine of Necessity (making martial law superior to the Constitution, in the process); March 1981 some took oath under a PCO
(365): Bhutto hung
(366-367): Pakistan outsourced its writ to tribal leaders, in FATA
(367-378): Pakistan sheltering the radicals against whom Daud was cracking down (Hekmatyar, of course)
(370): beginning, of course, of the strategic relationship with the USA after USSR invades Afghanistan on December 24, 1979
(371): Pakistan became world's largest heroin supplier
(372): Defence spending 'jump' after invasion--up to $1.86 billion in 1981
(373): The ISI was coming into prominence, initially to the chagrin of Zia, apparently (though he took full advantage, of course)
(374): 67% of the aid was going to the fundamentalists by 1987; most to Hekmatyar
(374): another estimate is one-third to Hekmatyar, one-third to Rabbani (Massoud), and the rest to the others (these figures discount Soviet aid, don't forget)
(376): Reagan comes with a 3.2 billion dollar aid plan (return to democracy is Pakistan's "internal situation")
(380): classic -- the 1984 referendum text
(381): Junejo-Zia confrontation over cabinet posts
(382): Martial law lifted 30 December 1985
(382): B. Bhutto returns to Lahore on 10 April 1986, and one million people turn out to greet her
(384): the tensions between Zia and Junejo eventually culminate in the latter's dismissal (military is not informed of this)
(385): changes in the demographics of the Army (urbanization meant that more were lower middle-class, a la Zia)
(386): Pakistan base in Saudi (some 20,000 troops, in 1983)
(387): important--Zia's time also saw the army's deepest penetration of the civil service--about a quarter of the forty senior bureaucratic posts. Ambassadorial posts and lower level positions, as well. And martial law meant that military was in charge in the provinces, too. "He realized that his only constiutency was the Army."
(389): BCCI corruption--helping gov't get foreign exchange, and boosting reserves
(390): decline in US-Pakistan relationship under Zia, b/c of the 'nuclear programme'
(390-391): Pressler and Solarz amendments, where it has to be verified that Pakistan wasn't pursuing nuclear weapons
(396): After the Zia crash on 17 Aug 1988, army high command took the decision to pursue the constitutional path (no details here--but done in a way that confirmed rank of Army over Civil, argues Nawaz) [certainly an empty transition, if ever there was one--even still, Zia had promised elections in Nov 1988, and those would still take place]
(411, 422): important--the 'troika' (President, PM, Army Chief) would contest power for the next decade
(411-412): Hamid Gul cobbles together the IJI (Nawaz Sharif who had been finance and chief minister of Punjab after being picked by Lt. Gen., Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi who was ex-PPP)
(412-413): Beg and Ishaq Khan, separately, were both willing to have elections (even as Gul said they needed more time to build up IJI)
(413): 1988 elections: first-past-the-post helped PPP win more seats than it had popular vote; Nawaz, though, became Chief Minister of the Punjab. "Bhutto had a victory but not a real mandate."
(414-415): a 'gentleman's argeement' that there were certain things that Bhutto couldn't touch (five points)
(415): PPP makes mistake of agreeing to support Ghulam Ishaq Khan in the presidential elections
(416): Bhutto's tense relations with Beg and Khan
(423-425): differences with Hamid Gul and Beg over Afghanistan--resulting in former's dismissal
(425): Bhutto also tried to bring the ISI under control, appointing Kallue to the chagrin of Beg and the military; she was depending on advice of Imtiaz Ahmed and Naseerullah Babar, both people whom were not trusted by the army establishment
(426-427): tensions come to a head over Sirohey--though Bhutto noting that Beg didn't expect Sharif to win the ensuing elections, thought instead that he would be the matchmaker of a hung parliament, or something
(428): Altaf Hussain was rejected from the Army, for being a 'refugee'
(429): Aitzaz Ahsan as Interior Minister, at this time
(430): key--Bhutto dismissed by Beg and Khan in Aug 1990, as issues accumulate (she was grooming her own COAS), on grounds of inefficiency/corruption
(432): US and IMF, even, were warm to the Bhutto gov't, here -- it is primarily the military and civil establishment that is responsible for her fall
(433): Roedad Khan was involved in this dismissal, allegedly
(433): Beg 'takes back' the ISI after dismissing Bhutto (Kallue removed)
(434): wow--Rs. 140m were distributed to help opponents of the PPP in the 1990 elections; see the breakdown, here
(435): IJI wins Nov 1990 elections--Bhutto elected leader of the opposition
(436): apparent harmony between political leaders and Army, at this early stage of the Sharif gov't
(436): a 'pro-business' gov't--seeing to it that earlier nationalizations were undone, etc.; "has the support of the business community"
(437): US sanctions, b/c of the continued nuclear program
(438): Tensions emerging between Sharif and Beg, re: Gulf War
(439): Beg becoming increasingly loony as he becomes a 'lame duck' (western-zionist conspiracies, etc.)
(443): Asif Nawaz appointed COAS
(444): Sharif and Ijazul Haq allied on the third anniversary of Zia's death--but soon to part ways, as Ijazul Haq aligned himself with Musharraf in 1999
(445): important--Army's annual turnover was 12-14 billion rupees in 1991 -- a "huge industrial conglomerate" (twice as big as the biggest private conglomerate at the time, the Crescent Group, which had an annual turnover of six billion rupees)
(446): again, a balancing act would be necessary--the Army had hardly vanished from the political scene
(447-448): "strong" relationship between the US and Asif Nawaz' army, at this time, though nuclear issue and terrorism remained problems
(449): tensions between Sharif and Ghulam Ishaq Khan--former making moves to remove the 8th amendment, but didn't have the leverage
(450): Asif Nawaz given a BMW by Shahbaz Sharif! (they had been distributing them to other generals)
(449-452): and tensions between Sharif and Asif Nawaz
(452): Sharif made Javed Nasir, a fundoo, DG ISI (Nasir wouldn't even look at women when they entered the room)
(452): CIA giving Nawaz signals that the army ought to intervene (the abiding concern being the nuclear programme, it seems?)
(453): Hamid Gul is retired, after refusing the transfer ordered by Nawaz
(454-455): Nawaz and Sharif coming to loggerheads over policy in Sindh, as PML was backing MQM at the time. Nawaz was 'overstepping' his duty and threatening the coalition with MQM, in Sharif's eyes.
(456-457): Gen. Nawaz allegedly being asked to take power in coup, by numerous figures
(459): tension between Sharif and Khan over who was to succeed Asif Nawaz
(466-467): relations with the US are deteriorating, under Bill Clinton's time in office (again, Kashmir and nuclear program are the issues). not helped by Lt. Gen. Javed Nasir as DG ISI (replaced eventually by Qazi, on orders of Waheed)
(469): attempted repeal of 8th Amendment, by Sharif
(469): succession battle within PML, after Junejo dies in March 1993
(470): President Ishaq sacks the gov't after an inflammatory speech by Nawaz (backed by Waheed) -- but Supreme Court does not side with him
(471-472): Army as kingmaker in agreement that sees both Sharif and Ishaq resign--replaed by Qureshi, an IMF and banker's man
(473): Qureshi introduced the independence of the State Bank from the Ministry of Finance and exposed some defaulters on gov't loans from Sharif's party, with the support of the Army [here described as freeing it from the 'thicket' of politics; but obviously a profoundly anti-democratic measure, at its heart]
(473): Bhutto wins October 1993 elections--again a victory, but not a mandate
(474): Bhutto knew she had to be more careful re: the Army and Intelligence Services, the second time around
(474): Pakistan contributed 'peacekeeping' troops to Somalia, Bosnia, and Haiti
(477): abortive Islamist coup--found out and snuffed out
(477-478): mistrust in the early Clinton years, again, though Bhutto did her best (very successful visit to Washington in early 1995)
(478): Mullah Omar acquired support after dealing with the rape and murder of Herati villagers by renegade Mujahideen (who had been running a tax-collection checkpoint)
(479): Taliban, in this narrative, not created by Pakistan but collaborated with very readily, of course (then, as now, needed to dislodge pro-India Tajik force)
(481-482): Karamat made COAS, after Waheed's term is up
(483-486): the issues leading up to Leghari's sacking of Bhutto in November 1996 -- have to do with corruption and the economy [but the economic issues are not at all dealt with, here--mentioned as depleting foreign exchange reserves, etc.]
(487): Sharif trounces all opposition in February 1997 elections -- PPP reduced to 18 seats!
(487): Removes 8th Amendment by passing the 13th Amendment -- Leghari and the COAS did not have objections, though
(487-489): Crisis re: Chief Justice Ali Shah--events are very hectic, Leghari ends up resigning, Chief Justice ends up sacked, and Sharif wins.
(492): India, under BJP, weighed up cost-benefit on its economy of the nuclear test--confident that it could withstand the expected shocks
(493-495): Sharif decides on retaliatory test in response, against Karamat's advice [no taking the high ground, here]. the economic consequences stood to be grave [how do you make sense of this? clearly in violation of any rational person's interests re: stability of Pakistani capitalism]
(497): Senate blocks 15th Amendment -- Sharif's "caliphate" amendment
(498-499): Sharif and Karamat fall out, allegedly over Karamat's speech re: founding of an NSC
(500): October 1998, after Karamat leaves post two months early, Sharif chooses Musharraf (picked over more senior, more suitable candidates--ostensibly b/c of lack of base in the Army)
(517-518): Sharif allegedly on board re: Kargil invasion
(520-522): re: pulling out, it was a problem of saving national face (Musharraf here is reported saying that he left this up to Sharif, who made the decision; Sharif says that Musharraf asked him to pull out)
(524): in September, Shahbaz Sharif has the US release a statement regarding opposition to an unconstitutional takeover.
(525): Touching moment with Sharif senior, where Musharraf and Sharifs are deemed brothers, apparently (one month before coup)
(526): Sharif wants to replace Musharraf with Lt. Gen. Ziauddin (who had been made DG ISI)
(527): Sharif, quite simply, didn't have the backing of the Army to remove Musharraf--instead, it sided with the ousted General.
(528): the third of Musharraf's seven goals, in coming to power, was to "revive the economy and restore investor confidence." (Nawaz noting that he made progress on this score)
(529): Supreme Court judgement of May 2000, LFO of 2002, 17th amendment all gave extraordinary legal cover to Musharraf.
(530): Supreme Court acquiescence
(531): 'successful' April 2002 referendum
(532): MMA wins 18 seats
(532): Musharraf brought some 1,000 military officers into senior positions in the civil administration, academia, etc." -- this ensured continued loyalty of the military, of course
(533): his King's party prevented the passage of a Women's Rights Bill in 2006
(533): troika had been replaced by a one-legged stool (Shaukat Aziz became PM in August 2004)
(533): Musharraf's regime continued the 'pro-business trend'--attracting investment flows from Pakistanis and the Middle East
(535): Ambassador Ayub trying to convince Omar not to blow up the statues at Bamiyan
(536): Taliban de-weaponized Kandahar
(538): Musharraf had been shunned by Clinton; but 9/11 changed everything, of course (an 'anchor of stability' -- what Nixon had called the Shah and Marcos both)
(541): the seven demands made after 9/11 attacks, to which Musharraf partly agreed (objected to some, apparently)--nonetheless, this is relayed back to US and then becomes fact as total agreement [unclear why, how, in this narrative]
(542): Pakistan had recognized Taliban after capture of Mazar-i-Sharif in 1997 -- against the advice of Karamat
(542-543): Mahmud Ahmed, Musharraf's DG ISI, was an Islamist, and removed by Musharraf soon after the US attack on Afghanistan
(546): Musharraf had given space to the Islamists in order to combat Nawaz and Bhutto--this gave the MMA a respectability it never ought to have had
(547-548): important--economic 'progress' during the Musharraf period. Saw to it that the investors were kept happy [again, here it's not a case of a coordinated project--rather it's a question of what capitalists are happy with, and when they feel compelled to organize themselves (ought to look at the disorganization of labor, too)]
(551): AQ Khan corruption and dealings with Iran, Libya, NK
(557): PEMRA and censorship
(559): Musharraf talking of a French-style presidential system
(560): sacking of Chaudry, overturned by Supreme Court
(560-561): Declaration of Emergency, Nov 2007--coup within a coup (stating elections would be held January 2008). Musharraf left position of COAS on 28 November, though, bowing to internal and external pressure.
(570-571): changing composition of Army, by ethnicity
(572): the 'Zia Bharti'
(575): miltiary's share of the budget, viz-a-viz health and education
(576): perks go only to those who make it at the higher echelons -- a steep privilege curve
(582): too much power goes to the Army Chief--need a division of power amongst regional commanders
- - - - - -
(1) key point is to make sense of institutional interests/personal interests within a context that is set by the contours of class politics. this is what i hope to add to this literature. in other words, its possible to see that some of the balancing act between military and civil plays out without interference, on the basis of competing interests--it is when structural interests are threatened, though, that it needs to be adjudicated directly. [in other words, it is a mistake to think that everything that happens within the institutions is mandated by the underlying class structure--but it is the case that larger questions cannot be resolved without consulting that class structure]
(2) must make use of the constructs of 'structural autonomy' and 'political autonomy' (and somewhere in between these two has to fit the notion of the hand of Empire)
(3): should emphasize the continuity of the 'form of state' (Bhutto as martial ruler, Zia w/ Junejo, Bhutto w/ Beg/Khan, etc.)
(4): when speaking about US role, important to note that they figure directly only really in the periods where their interest is most intense (so in the 50's and80's and 2000's, but not so much in the 90's). will have to make this more airtight, but this seems defensible at first glance.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
larry bartels, unequal democracy (2008)
chapter 1
(2): economic inequality shapes politics is half of this book. other half is that politics profoundly shapes economics.
(3, 30, 60): claim #1--partisan politics have had a substantial impact on the economic fortunes of the middle class and the poor. real incomes of working poor families have grown six times as fast under democrats, real incomes of the middle class have grown twice as fast. a great deal of economic inequality is attributable to republican policies and priorities. (chapter 2) [there is an acknolwedgement on pg. 30 that some of these differences have been 'muted'--this begs explanation]
(3-4): claim #2--party image of white conservative working-class is largely mythical. this group has become more democratic. (chapter 3)
(4): claim #3--there are three reasons that republicans have fared so well over the past half-century, despite this (chapter 4)
(5): claim #6--puzzle of the federal estate tax--which would have been repealed much earlier, had the political system been responsive to peoples' preferences. (chapter 7)
(5): claim #7--a 40% decline in the real value of the minimum wage since the late 1960s, despite consistent and strong public support for it. (chapter 8)
(5): claim #8--US Senators views are explained much better by their own partisan preferences than by the preferences of their constituents. where their constituents do matter, it is their affluent and middle-class constituents (the views of ordinary citizens have no discernible impact) (chapter 9).
(6): this book provides strong evidence that economic inequality has a profound impact on the political process.
(7): massive cumulative influence in divergent real income growth over the past half-century (real incomes of 20th percentile increased by less than 15,000 dollars; at the 9th percentile, 130,000 dollars) [see the charts on pages 8 and 9]
(9): much of the income growth that did appear was attributable to increases in working hours.
(13): the dramatic economic gains of the past 30 years have, in fact, been concentrated among the extremely rich
(14): [very deceptive use of polling data here -- 'many americans', when really the figure is quite low, and less than those who disagree that income differentials are necessary]
(15): 255 of the 400 richest people were 'self-made' -- interesting...
(17): citing Krugman to make clear that income stagnation is not explained by technological/sectoral change (how do you explain stagnation of mathemeticians and computer scientists; while CEO salaries jump by 100%?)
(19-20): tendency to totally ignore the 'political dimension' [again, this is important -- but it needs to be tempered. welfare cuts? glass-steagall?]
(22-23): interesting bit about media and inequality (how can you have ads for vacations to the caymans interspersed with analyses of inequality?)
(24-25): importance of government fiscal policy, taxation, central bank operations, debt management, banking, trade and tariffs, bailouts -- all this is agreed, no doubt. but needs, again, tempering [can we think about the 'autonomy' of the State, as it relates to this discussion? in other words, we might have a proxy for partisan effects in strength of labor movement, or even something else?]
chapter 2
(29): key--you need a response to this book's emphasis on political facts that can accomodate both
(35): and a nice chart, also, to problematize the question of Democrats in the neoliberal age [under carter inequality jumps (volcker shock, anyone?); under clinton it's steady, though if there hadn't been a decline in the first year there would have been an increase (what explains this blip?). this is quite strong evidence for point 2, above. part of the problem is the 'blackboxing' of social and technological trends, which allows him to talk about the long-term trends without any notion of partisan complicity. we need to respond to this point, as well]
(41): income growth for the 95th percentile has been remarkably stable, across regimes and across time.
(44): example of richard nixon, certainly, is illustrative--he pursues a contractionary policy before pursuing an inflationary policy confronted with the election campaign. here, certainly, we can agree that partisan effects mattered.
(45): same with gerald ford -- launches the whip inflation now policy, before calling for a one-year tax rebate in 1976
(46): the portrayal of Carter is deceptive -- where is the Volcker shock? the shock to the economy is presented as exogenous.
(50): unemployment and GNP growth preferable under democrats; inflation roughly equal.
(53): the 'honeymoon' effect -- first-year of their terms is when presidents have their most significant effects
(58): important--noting that it has become more difficult for presidents to influence pre-tax income. this is an important point about the neoliberal age, which is left implicit in the rest of the argument, i think. but obviously the other point, about taxes and the partisan policies, is important and shouldn't be neglected.
chapter 3
(66): argument--three questions, answer to all is no.
(72-74): to the first question, no--it has not, the opposite trend is observed when you split the data up the way Bartels has. Republicans, in fact, win by 18 percentage points amongst high-income whites.
(77-78): what we have seen has everything to do with an erosion of Democratic support in the South, where the party's stance on civil rights and Jim Crow cost it the white vote. this is quite stark, actually.
(78-83): to the second question, no--hese are his attempt to assess views on gov't spending, etc., and he sees little evidence on the core issues [would have been preferable to use a cumulative measure, here]
(84, 86, 89): to the third question, no--combined weight attached to the economic issues exceeds the importance given to cultural issues by voters. he does find that american politics is increasingly about cultural issues, but still primarily about economic issues. evidence that higher-income voters attach more importance to cultural issues, than lower-income voters.
(90): to a fourth question, also more-or-less no--churchgoers might attach more importance to cultural issues, but this obscures differences amongst churchgoers.
(95): class politics are alive and well in the US--in fact, citing a huber and stanig study that shows that the gap in right-wing electoral suport is larger in the US, than Europe.
chapter 4
(98-99): argument--the puzzle of republican success despite their terrible performance is explained by three forms of myopia that characterizes voters:
(107): in a FN he says that Nixon presided over a booming economy--really?
(111, 125): a special kind of false-consciousness--american voters most sensitive to the fortunes of high-income voters
chapter 5
(129): argument-- two important conclusions from this chapter
(164): argument--example of the Bush tax cuts is an excellent example of disconnect between egalitarian sentiments and policy preferences (most people, in fact, hadn't thought about the cuts--page 188). there is considerable latitude given to the political system, he's arguing [this is the wrong way of interpreting this, i would argue]
chapter 7
(198): argument--perplexing story of the estate tax repeal. most people in favor of repeal, though it would benefit only the super-rich. in fact it proves the stubbornness of the political system.
chapter 8
(226-227): argument--paradox of why minimum wage hasn't been raised. explanations include:
(248): he notes the critical importance of lobbying and corporate interests [strange that this doesn't figure in the explanation, directly.]
(251): demonstrates the unresponsiveness of political institutions in the US
chapter 9
(253): the premise of this presentation is emphatically pluralist--it is the miliband-style critique, of the sort that poulantzas scorned.
(253-254): argument--senators in this period (late 80's, early 90's) were vastly more responsive to the their affluent constituents, than to their constituents of modest means. (see the stark graphs on pg. 261 and pg. 270)
(262): "equal representation of incomes" not "equal representation of citizens"
(277): divergent knowledge levels is not an explanation
(280): important--if senators responded only to campaign contributions, they would respond in a way that accords with the data seen in this chapter.
chapter 10
(285): preferences of low-income people have no discernible impact on the political process.
(287): schumpeter quote
(288-289): bright spots--there are many affluent people with egalitarian views
(290): speaking of 'ideological polarization' -- but this is fundamentally not helpful. all he is saying is that party unity has hardened. push back here.
(292): push back here, too--Democrats have pursued policies for the have-nots(!), Republicans for the haves -- again, this is a clear case where he is not being nuanced in the conclusions drawn from his data.
chapter 1
(2): economic inequality shapes politics is half of this book. other half is that politics profoundly shapes economics.
(3, 30, 60): claim #1--partisan politics have had a substantial impact on the economic fortunes of the middle class and the poor. real incomes of working poor families have grown six times as fast under democrats, real incomes of the middle class have grown twice as fast. a great deal of economic inequality is attributable to republican policies and priorities. (chapter 2) [there is an acknolwedgement on pg. 30 that some of these differences have been 'muted'--this begs explanation]
(3-4): claim #2--party image of white conservative working-class is largely mythical. this group has become more democratic. (chapter 3)
(4): claim #3--there are three reasons that republicans have fared so well over the past half-century, despite this (chapter 4)
- myopic focus of voters on recent economic performance
- high sensitivity to income-growth, which means that Republican's success in generating election-year income growth helps them
- responsiveness of voters to campaign spending rewards Republicans' advantage in campaign fund-raising
(5): claim #6--puzzle of the federal estate tax--which would have been repealed much earlier, had the political system been responsive to peoples' preferences. (chapter 7)
(5): claim #7--a 40% decline in the real value of the minimum wage since the late 1960s, despite consistent and strong public support for it. (chapter 8)
(5): claim #8--US Senators views are explained much better by their own partisan preferences than by the preferences of their constituents. where their constituents do matter, it is their affluent and middle-class constituents (the views of ordinary citizens have no discernible impact) (chapter 9).
(6): this book provides strong evidence that economic inequality has a profound impact on the political process.
(7): massive cumulative influence in divergent real income growth over the past half-century (real incomes of 20th percentile increased by less than 15,000 dollars; at the 9th percentile, 130,000 dollars) [see the charts on pages 8 and 9]
(9): much of the income growth that did appear was attributable to increases in working hours.
(13): the dramatic economic gains of the past 30 years have, in fact, been concentrated among the extremely rich
(14): [very deceptive use of polling data here -- 'many americans', when really the figure is quite low, and less than those who disagree that income differentials are necessary]
(15): 255 of the 400 richest people were 'self-made' -- interesting...
(17): citing Krugman to make clear that income stagnation is not explained by technological/sectoral change (how do you explain stagnation of mathemeticians and computer scientists; while CEO salaries jump by 100%?)
(19-20): tendency to totally ignore the 'political dimension' [again, this is important -- but it needs to be tempered. welfare cuts? glass-steagall?]
(22-23): interesting bit about media and inequality (how can you have ads for vacations to the caymans interspersed with analyses of inequality?)
(24-25): importance of government fiscal policy, taxation, central bank operations, debt management, banking, trade and tariffs, bailouts -- all this is agreed, no doubt. but needs, again, tempering [can we think about the 'autonomy' of the State, as it relates to this discussion? in other words, we might have a proxy for partisan effects in strength of labor movement, or even something else?]
chapter 2
(29): key--you need a response to this book's emphasis on political facts that can accomodate both
- the limits of those partisan effects (and here can enter talk of state 'autonomy')
- the underlying structural 'facts' (and here can enter some assessment of the narrowness of the regimes he's talking about -- really, the only Democrat that enters this analysis is Clinton. differences may be important (the EITC, for example), but the similarities are critical too (failed health reform, welfare reform, etc.)
(35): and a nice chart, also, to problematize the question of Democrats in the neoliberal age [under carter inequality jumps (volcker shock, anyone?); under clinton it's steady, though if there hadn't been a decline in the first year there would have been an increase (what explains this blip?). this is quite strong evidence for point 2, above. part of the problem is the 'blackboxing' of social and technological trends, which allows him to talk about the long-term trends without any notion of partisan complicity. we need to respond to this point, as well]
(41): income growth for the 95th percentile has been remarkably stable, across regimes and across time.
(44): example of richard nixon, certainly, is illustrative--he pursues a contractionary policy before pursuing an inflationary policy confronted with the election campaign. here, certainly, we can agree that partisan effects mattered.
(45): same with gerald ford -- launches the whip inflation now policy, before calling for a one-year tax rebate in 1976
(46): the portrayal of Carter is deceptive -- where is the Volcker shock? the shock to the economy is presented as exogenous.
(50): unemployment and GNP growth preferable under democrats; inflation roughly equal.
(53): the 'honeymoon' effect -- first-year of their terms is when presidents have their most significant effects
(58): important--noting that it has become more difficult for presidents to influence pre-tax income. this is an important point about the neoliberal age, which is left implicit in the rest of the argument, i think. but obviously the other point, about taxes and the partisan policies, is important and shouldn't be neglected.
chapter 3
(66): argument--three questions, answer to all is no.
- has the white working-class abandoned the democratic party?
- has the white working class become more conservative?
- do moral values trump economics as a basis of working-class?
(72-74): to the first question, no--it has not, the opposite trend is observed when you split the data up the way Bartels has. Republicans, in fact, win by 18 percentage points amongst high-income whites.
(77-78): what we have seen has everything to do with an erosion of Democratic support in the South, where the party's stance on civil rights and Jim Crow cost it the white vote. this is quite stark, actually.
(78-83): to the second question, no--hese are his attempt to assess views on gov't spending, etc., and he sees little evidence on the core issues [would have been preferable to use a cumulative measure, here]
(84, 86, 89): to the third question, no--combined weight attached to the economic issues exceeds the importance given to cultural issues by voters. he does find that american politics is increasingly about cultural issues, but still primarily about economic issues. evidence that higher-income voters attach more importance to cultural issues, than lower-income voters.
(90): to a fourth question, also more-or-less no--churchgoers might attach more importance to cultural issues, but this obscures differences amongst churchgoers.
(95): class politics are alive and well in the US--in fact, citing a huber and stanig study that shows that the gap in right-wing electoral suport is larger in the US, than Europe.
chapter 4
(98-99): argument--the puzzle of republican success despite their terrible performance is explained by three forms of myopia that characterizes voters:
- voters responds most to income growth in election years
- election-year income growth is more consequential for affluent families--much more so than for middle-class and poor families. part of this is the special kind of false-consciousness he adduces, it would seem (see graph on 105)
- voters are swayed by campaign-spending (pg. 120)
(107): in a FN he says that Nixon presided over a booming economy--really?
(111, 125): a special kind of false-consciousness--american voters most sensitive to the fortunes of high-income voters
chapter 5
(129): argument-- two important conclusions from this chapter
- strong evidence of the importance of egalitarian values in American political culture
- at the same time, the increasing inequality of the last three decades hasn't had a marked effect on public perceptions (this is a place to talk more about false-consciousness, ideology, etc.)
(164): argument--example of the Bush tax cuts is an excellent example of disconnect between egalitarian sentiments and policy preferences (most people, in fact, hadn't thought about the cuts--page 188). there is considerable latitude given to the political system, he's arguing [this is the wrong way of interpreting this, i would argue]
chapter 7
(198): argument--perplexing story of the estate tax repeal. most people in favor of repeal, though it would benefit only the super-rich. in fact it proves the stubbornness of the political system.
chapter 8
(226-227): argument--paradox of why minimum wage hasn't been raised. explanations include:
- declining stregnth of labor unions (pg. 240)
- partisan politics--republican presidents and republican congresses (pg. 243)
- alternative policy, like the earned income tax credit (pg. 246)
(248): he notes the critical importance of lobbying and corporate interests [strange that this doesn't figure in the explanation, directly.]
(251): demonstrates the unresponsiveness of political institutions in the US
chapter 9
(253): the premise of this presentation is emphatically pluralist--it is the miliband-style critique, of the sort that poulantzas scorned.
(253-254): argument--senators in this period (late 80's, early 90's) were vastly more responsive to the their affluent constituents, than to their constituents of modest means. (see the stark graphs on pg. 261 and pg. 270)
(262): "equal representation of incomes" not "equal representation of citizens"
(277): divergent knowledge levels is not an explanation
(280): important--if senators responded only to campaign contributions, they would respond in a way that accords with the data seen in this chapter.
chapter 10
(285): preferences of low-income people have no discernible impact on the political process.
(287): schumpeter quote
(288-289): bright spots--there are many affluent people with egalitarian views
(290): speaking of 'ideological polarization' -- but this is fundamentally not helpful. all he is saying is that party unity has hardened. push back here.
(292): push back here, too--Democrats have pursued policies for the have-nots(!), Republicans for the haves -- again, this is a clear case where he is not being nuanced in the conclusions drawn from his data.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Jason stanley, "comrades or competitors?"
(12): challenges to solidarity in global market, for three reasons
(30-31): since cabotage routes were not part of the liberalization agreement and since freight was a small part of the IBT for american workers, there was muted response, on their part. canadians were more up-in-arms after liberalization of their half in the late 80's--in '86, a nationalist proposal was defeated; but in '89, it passed. importance of political economy ftw!
(12): challenges to solidarity in global market, for three reasons
- inequality is greater in global market
- cross-border immobility--capital mobility increases price elasticity for labor, from perspective of capital [but would they not still be competing, for jobs, even if there were mobility?]
- an appreciating currency increases the price of labor; workers have no control over appreciation/depreciation, yet it will provoke cross-border hostility
(30-31): since cabotage routes were not part of the liberalization agreement and since freight was a small part of the IBT for american workers, there was muted response, on their part. canadians were more up-in-arms after liberalization of their half in the late 80's--in '86, a nationalist proposal was defeated; but in '89, it passed. importance of political economy ftw!
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
sharon smith, "the 1930s"
(...) By 1932 it was estimated that 75 percent of the population was living in poverty, and fully one-third was unemployed. And in many places, Black unemployment rates were two, three, or even four times those of white workers.
(...) In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt granted workers the right to organize into unions in Section 7(a) of the National Recovery Act, and workers rushed to join unions.
(...) By the 1930s, objective conditions were overripe for mass industrial unionism in the United States. Industrial productivity had risen by less than 10 percent between 1899 and 1914, but between 1920 and 1930 productivity increased by 7 percent each year. By 1926, the Ford Motor Company announced that 43 percent of its jobs required only one day’s training. Most importantly, the working class was no longer segregated along racial lines. The slowdown in immigration after 1914 brought with it a corresponding increase in internal migration. A half-million Southern Blacks moved north during World War I. By 1930, more than 25 percent of Black men were employed in industrial jobs, compared with only 7 percent in 1890. By the mid—1930s, Black workers made up 20 percent of the laborers and 6 percent of the operatives in the steel industry nationally. And one-fifth of the workforce in Chicago’s slaughterhouses was Black. White workers couldn’t hope to win unless they united with Black workers–and that wouldn’t happen unless they organized on the basis of equality.
(...) Moreover, Lewis had supported Republican Herbert Hoover in the 1932 presidential election. He was woven of the same cloth as the rest of the AFL leadership. But unlike the others, he recognized that if the AFL didn’t open its doors to the unskilled, another rival union organization would develop and grow from the mass organizing drives which were already taking place. As Lewis’ biographer, Saul Alinsky, concluded, Lewis merely "read the revolutionary handwriting on the walls of American industry," when he pushed to organize an industrial union federation.
(...) When the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) formally opened its doors as a section of the AFL in 1935, industrial workers flooded in. And those groups of workers who were already at the forefront of struggle, such as the auto and rubber workers, quickly affiliated their unions with the CIO. In 1938, when the AFL finally expelled the CIO and its million members, the CIO changed its name to the Congress of Industrial Organizations and emerged as a rival union federation.
(...) As the level of working-class struggle grew, and the economy began to stabilize, big business began to desert Roosevelt. As Mike Davis argues, "It was this mass desertion of business from the administration in 1935 that drove a reluctant Roosevelt temporarily into the arms of Lewis and the CIO insurgents."27 Roosevelt needed the working class vote in order to win the 1936 election, and he shrewdly tailored his campaign to win the hearts and minds of workers. He put on quite a convincing show, declaring at one point during the campaign that if big business hated him, "I welcome their hatred," and if he were given the chance to serve a second term they will have "met their master." It was toward this end that in 1935 Roosevelt made two far-reaching concessions to workers.
(...) He pushed through the National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act), which finally made it illegal for employers to refuse to bargain with unions. And he secured passage of a Social Security program, by which the U.S. government agreed to provide a minimal standard of living for the poorest families in society and for the elderly. These two concessions proved to be the biggest gains workers won from the government during the Depression decade–gains which earned Roosevelt his legendary status as a friend to the working class. But although Roosevelt promised workers that "we have only begun to fight," these were to be the last significant reforms he would grant to working class people.
(...) Although Roosevelt remained popular, many workers–especially those who were most active in building the new industrial unions–began to turn away from the Democratic Party as the Depression decade wore on. Indeed, Democratic politicians were proving in practice that they stood firmly on the side of the bosses, while the compassionate New Deal rhetoric went out the window as soon as the class struggle intensified. In 1935 alone, 20 state militias–most controlled by Democratic governors–were called out against strikers in 73 disputes. A 1937 Gallup poll showed that at least 21 percent of the population supported the formation of a national farmer-labor party as an alternative to the Democrats and Republicans.
(...) [UAW 1935 Congress -- first no support for Roosevelt, then threat from leadership]
(...) Thus, despite the significant shift leftward in working class consciousness by the mid—1930s, the pressure to support Roosevelt was tremendous, even among many socialists. The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party fell into step behind the New Deal coalition, its politics virtually indistinguishable from Roosevelt’s by that time. Many long-standing members of the Socialist Party as well succumbed to the pressure to campaign for Roosevelt in 1936.
(...) The Great Depression was the most significant period of class struggle that has ever taken place in the United States. The sheer intensity of the struggle led ever broader sections of the working class to become radicalized and to begin to generalize politically. For a very short period of time as the working class movement advanced–between 1935 and 1937–the level of radicalization was such that on a fairly large scale workers began to realize that if they were to have a chance at winning, they had to confront all the bosses’ attempts to divide and weaken the working-class movement. Workers had to break down racial barriers and build genuine unity and solidarity; they had to prepare themselves to confront the violence of the bosses, which grew in ferocity during this period; they had to fight against anti-communism; and they had to break with the Democrats and the Republicans and form an independent working-class party. Thus, the Depression decade marked the key turning point for the working class movement in the United States: For the first time, the potential existed to build a genuine mass revolutionary workers party. But such a revolutionary alternative would have required a forceful revolutionary leadership inside the working class movement. Instead, there was the Communist Party.
(...) There was one reason in particular why the Communist Party was the organization which played the decisive role in the labor movement of the 1930s: its comparatively large size. Even at the very beginning of the Depression, the Communist Party claimed a membership of 7,500, compared with the Communist League of America’s 131 members in 1931. At the end of 1938, the CP had grown to 82,000, while the membership of the Trotskyists, by then in the Socialist Workers Party, peaked at 2,500. Meanwhile, the Socialist Party continued its process of decline. Subsumed by inner turmoil as its right and left wings continued to do battle, SP membership actually declined in 1935–a pivotal year of growth for the class struggle. [oh but come on! this is not an 'exogenous' factor!!!]
(...) As American CP leader Earl Browder argued in the mid—1930s, "If one is not interested in directives from Moscow, that only means he is not interested in building socialism at all."
(...) But for all the weaknesses of the American Communist Party, its commitment to fighting racism was exemplary. In fact, the CP in the 1930s provides an extraordinary example for socialists on how to go about building a working-class movement that makes fighting racism an integral part of the class struggle. This was true despite the CP’s bizarre "Black Belt" theory. As part of Stalin’s left turn during the Third Period, he argued that the American CP should advocate "self-determination for the Black Belt." This meant calling for a separate Black republic in the Southern states, where a majority of Blacks still lived–even though no demand for such a republic had ever been raised by Blacks themselves. Perhaps for this reason, the Black Belt theory’s call for a Black republic had virtually no influence on the party’s practice, and was rarely even mentioned in its literature.
(...) All literature, whether communist or union, had to be secretly distributed–smuggled inside baskets of laundry by Black women posing as laundresses or at the local barbershop, where communists would drop in for a "trim" and pick up their leaflets. The communists issued their own leaflet in response to the Klan, which read, "KKK! The workers are watching you!" And in 1933, the CP held a demonstration in front of the Birmingham courthouse, which demanded that the KKK and other white supremacists be outlawed, and the right to vote without the racist restrictions that prevented a majority of Blacks from voting throughout the South.
(...) All over the U.S., communist youth circulated petitions against segregation in baseball and other sports, in a campaign which featured white and Black ball players calling for integration in sports. When communists traveled to Washington, D.C. for a demonstration to free the Scottsboro Boys, they stopped off on the way and sat in at restaurants that refused to serve Blacks–a tactic adopted decades later by the civil rights movement.
(...) By 1934 the party claimed 1,000 members in Birmingham, mostly Black. After three members of the Sharecroppers Union were shot and killed by police in 1932, 3,000 people marched in a funeral procession for six miles, following caskets that were draped in banners with the communist hammer and sickle, while 1,000 stood along the route in tribute.
(...) This meant that, after spending the previous seven years denouncing as social fascists not just Roosevelt and the Democrats, but also liberals and reform socialists, the CP was instructed to become virtually indistinguishable from them. And as the 1936 presidential election approached, the Popular Front meant that the CP was instructed to do everything in its power to help ensure Roosevelt’s victory. Communists were to become loyal–if uninvited–members of Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. [this is distinct, really, from Davis' explanation -- important, then, to think through the argument more carefully]
(...) As late as January 1935, the Daily Worker described Roosevelt as "the leading organizer and inspirer of fascism in this country." But by the end of 1936, the CP formally entered the Democratic Party. While it didn’t formally support Roosevelt in the election (voicing fear that open communist support might hurt his campaign), the CP made it clear that it hoped he would win.
(...) Some left-wing historians–those who wish to downplay the problems of Stalinism, along with those who wish to apologize for reformism–argue that the Popular Front was a major step forward for the CP, because it ended its self-imposed isolation of the Third Period. They point to the fact that the party more than tripled in size during the Popular Front period, from 26,000 members in 1934 to 82,000 members in 1938, as evidence of success. But that line of reasoning ignores the fact that the CP’s membership also tripled in size during the Third Period years between 1930 and 1934, when it grew from 7,500 to 26,000.
(...) The fact remains that from 1928 on, the CP never decided its strategy based upon what was needed to move the labor movement forward. Because it was tied to Stalin’s coattails, the American CP could not aim to build an independent revolutionary movement inside the working class–either during the Third Period or the Popular Front. In shifting from the Third Period to the Popular Front, the Party merely traded one disastrous policy for another, shifting from outlandish sectarianism to the adoption of equally outlandish patriotism.
(...) Because of the Popular Front, the communist shop floor leaders were instructed to help the CIO leadership in delivering the working-class vote to the Democrats. Despite the fact that many of the most militant workers were already willing to break with the Democratic Party in 1936, Roosevelt was reelected in one of the biggest landslides in U.S. history. [if only -- not sure if this claim is tenable, though]
(...) During the course of the Flint sit-down strike, which began on December 30, 1936 and lasted until February 11, 1937, 140,000 out of a total of GM’s 150,000 production workers either sat down or went out on strike. But the strike’s importance was more than just economic. The attention of the entire nation was riveted on the Flint auto workers, as they took matters into their own hands and stood up to the bosses, the CIO leaders, the National Guard, and even Roosevelt–and won.
(...) The Flint victory had an impact nationally, raising working-class confidence still higher. By the end of 1937, nearly a half-million workers all over the U.S. had taken part in a sit-down strike. The number of all strikes more than doubled between 1936 and 1937, from 2,172 to 4,740, involving nearly two million workers overall.
(...) Outwardly, Lewis appeared to defend the communists from conservatives within the CIO. "I do not turn my organizers or CIO members upside down and shake them to see what kind of literature falls out of their pockets," he told red-baiters. But privately Lewis made it quite clear that he was merely using the communists. He argued, "Who gets the bird, the hunter or the dog?" And later, once the union had finally gained a foothold in the steel industry and he no longer needed them, he fired all the communists from the union’s payroll.
(...) But the CP leaders’ newfound aversion to wildcat strikes did not immediately filter down to communists on the shop floor–many of whom continued to lead the wildcats and sitdowns which erupted during the course of 1937. Not only was confidence still rising among the rank and file, but that confidence enabled workers to begin to try and assert some control over the pace of production and other working conditions. [this is critical]
(...) [November Pontiac strike] The Communist Party finally broke the stalemate–by condemning a strike led by its own members, which it had publicly supported only days earlier. After an article appeared in the New York Times blaming the strike on the Communist Party, the CP leadership immediately switched sides, fearing it might alienate its New Deal allies. Earl Browder personally ordered the party’s Pontiac auto workers fraction to end the occupation.
(...) The Pontiac strike effectively marked the end of the CIO strike wave of the 1930s. The dynamic of class struggle is such that, if it does not continue to move forward, it very quickly begins to backslide. The monthly average of strikes fell by more than half between 1937—39, while the CIO added only 400,000 new members–compared with nearly 4 million in its first two years. By late 1937, recession had once again set in. Between August and November of 1937, the industrial production index dropped by 27 percent, once again throwing millions of workers into unemployment. Between November 1937 and January 1938, U.S. car production fell from 295,000 to 155,000. Employment in the auto industry dropped from 517,000 in 1937 to 305,000 in 1938.
(...) Once the 1936 presidential election was out of the way, Roosevelt was free to show his true class loyalties. Moreover, with a new war on the horizon, as Mike Davis argues, "FDR’s overriding desire to win support for an increasingly interventionist foreign policy, pre-empted further reform initiatives or new concessions to labor."93 As Roosevelt began his war buildup, he looked to reestablish his ties with big business. Thus, Roosevelt slashed relief and works programs for the poor and unemployed in 1938 and again in 1939, even though unemployment was rising sharply. And he made a pronounced turn against the labor movement, beginning in 1937.
(...) [thesis:] It was to be expected that Roosevelt would turn his back on workers, and that the CIO leadership would not lead a fight against Roosevelt. But by the time workers learned this bitter lesson, the greatest upsurge in U.S. working-class history was over. And the Communist Party had played a decisive role. The CP had an impact inside the labor movement which reached far beyond its own membership. Not only did the Communist Party have a substantial base among industrial workers, but by 1937, CP members held top leadership posts in 40 percent of CIO unions. There was a decisive missing element in the working-class movement of the 1930s: an organization of revolutionaries that was large enough to influence the course of the struggle. The Communist Party was large enough, but it had long ceased to be a revolutionary organization. So instead of leading workers toward revolution, the CP left thousands of workers without a way forward. Most workers who’d joined the CP during the course of the 1930s left by the end of the decade, undoubtedly confused and demoralized by the experience, with a grossly distorted vision of socialism. In the eyes of the most militant workers, the Communist Party discredited itself when it turned its back on the class struggle at its turning point in 1937. [too easy, one thinks]
(...) By 1932 it was estimated that 75 percent of the population was living in poverty, and fully one-third was unemployed. And in many places, Black unemployment rates were two, three, or even four times those of white workers.
(...) In 1933, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt granted workers the right to organize into unions in Section 7(a) of the National Recovery Act, and workers rushed to join unions.
(...) By the 1930s, objective conditions were overripe for mass industrial unionism in the United States. Industrial productivity had risen by less than 10 percent between 1899 and 1914, but between 1920 and 1930 productivity increased by 7 percent each year. By 1926, the Ford Motor Company announced that 43 percent of its jobs required only one day’s training. Most importantly, the working class was no longer segregated along racial lines. The slowdown in immigration after 1914 brought with it a corresponding increase in internal migration. A half-million Southern Blacks moved north during World War I. By 1930, more than 25 percent of Black men were employed in industrial jobs, compared with only 7 percent in 1890. By the mid—1930s, Black workers made up 20 percent of the laborers and 6 percent of the operatives in the steel industry nationally. And one-fifth of the workforce in Chicago’s slaughterhouses was Black. White workers couldn’t hope to win unless they united with Black workers–and that wouldn’t happen unless they organized on the basis of equality.
(...) Moreover, Lewis had supported Republican Herbert Hoover in the 1932 presidential election. He was woven of the same cloth as the rest of the AFL leadership. But unlike the others, he recognized that if the AFL didn’t open its doors to the unskilled, another rival union organization would develop and grow from the mass organizing drives which were already taking place. As Lewis’ biographer, Saul Alinsky, concluded, Lewis merely "read the revolutionary handwriting on the walls of American industry," when he pushed to organize an industrial union federation.
(...) When the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) formally opened its doors as a section of the AFL in 1935, industrial workers flooded in. And those groups of workers who were already at the forefront of struggle, such as the auto and rubber workers, quickly affiliated their unions with the CIO. In 1938, when the AFL finally expelled the CIO and its million members, the CIO changed its name to the Congress of Industrial Organizations and emerged as a rival union federation.
(...) As the level of working-class struggle grew, and the economy began to stabilize, big business began to desert Roosevelt. As Mike Davis argues, "It was this mass desertion of business from the administration in 1935 that drove a reluctant Roosevelt temporarily into the arms of Lewis and the CIO insurgents."27 Roosevelt needed the working class vote in order to win the 1936 election, and he shrewdly tailored his campaign to win the hearts and minds of workers. He put on quite a convincing show, declaring at one point during the campaign that if big business hated him, "I welcome their hatred," and if he were given the chance to serve a second term they will have "met their master." It was toward this end that in 1935 Roosevelt made two far-reaching concessions to workers.
(...) He pushed through the National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act), which finally made it illegal for employers to refuse to bargain with unions. And he secured passage of a Social Security program, by which the U.S. government agreed to provide a minimal standard of living for the poorest families in society and for the elderly. These two concessions proved to be the biggest gains workers won from the government during the Depression decade–gains which earned Roosevelt his legendary status as a friend to the working class. But although Roosevelt promised workers that "we have only begun to fight," these were to be the last significant reforms he would grant to working class people.
(...) Although Roosevelt remained popular, many workers–especially those who were most active in building the new industrial unions–began to turn away from the Democratic Party as the Depression decade wore on. Indeed, Democratic politicians were proving in practice that they stood firmly on the side of the bosses, while the compassionate New Deal rhetoric went out the window as soon as the class struggle intensified. In 1935 alone, 20 state militias–most controlled by Democratic governors–were called out against strikers in 73 disputes. A 1937 Gallup poll showed that at least 21 percent of the population supported the formation of a national farmer-labor party as an alternative to the Democrats and Republicans.
(...) [UAW 1935 Congress -- first no support for Roosevelt, then threat from leadership]
(...) Thus, despite the significant shift leftward in working class consciousness by the mid—1930s, the pressure to support Roosevelt was tremendous, even among many socialists. The Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party fell into step behind the New Deal coalition, its politics virtually indistinguishable from Roosevelt’s by that time. Many long-standing members of the Socialist Party as well succumbed to the pressure to campaign for Roosevelt in 1936.
(...) The Great Depression was the most significant period of class struggle that has ever taken place in the United States. The sheer intensity of the struggle led ever broader sections of the working class to become radicalized and to begin to generalize politically. For a very short period of time as the working class movement advanced–between 1935 and 1937–the level of radicalization was such that on a fairly large scale workers began to realize that if they were to have a chance at winning, they had to confront all the bosses’ attempts to divide and weaken the working-class movement. Workers had to break down racial barriers and build genuine unity and solidarity; they had to prepare themselves to confront the violence of the bosses, which grew in ferocity during this period; they had to fight against anti-communism; and they had to break with the Democrats and the Republicans and form an independent working-class party. Thus, the Depression decade marked the key turning point for the working class movement in the United States: For the first time, the potential existed to build a genuine mass revolutionary workers party. But such a revolutionary alternative would have required a forceful revolutionary leadership inside the working class movement. Instead, there was the Communist Party.
(...) There was one reason in particular why the Communist Party was the organization which played the decisive role in the labor movement of the 1930s: its comparatively large size. Even at the very beginning of the Depression, the Communist Party claimed a membership of 7,500, compared with the Communist League of America’s 131 members in 1931. At the end of 1938, the CP had grown to 82,000, while the membership of the Trotskyists, by then in the Socialist Workers Party, peaked at 2,500. Meanwhile, the Socialist Party continued its process of decline. Subsumed by inner turmoil as its right and left wings continued to do battle, SP membership actually declined in 1935–a pivotal year of growth for the class struggle. [oh but come on! this is not an 'exogenous' factor!!!]
(...) As American CP leader Earl Browder argued in the mid—1930s, "If one is not interested in directives from Moscow, that only means he is not interested in building socialism at all."
(...) But for all the weaknesses of the American Communist Party, its commitment to fighting racism was exemplary. In fact, the CP in the 1930s provides an extraordinary example for socialists on how to go about building a working-class movement that makes fighting racism an integral part of the class struggle. This was true despite the CP’s bizarre "Black Belt" theory. As part of Stalin’s left turn during the Third Period, he argued that the American CP should advocate "self-determination for the Black Belt." This meant calling for a separate Black republic in the Southern states, where a majority of Blacks still lived–even though no demand for such a republic had ever been raised by Blacks themselves. Perhaps for this reason, the Black Belt theory’s call for a Black republic had virtually no influence on the party’s practice, and was rarely even mentioned in its literature.
(...) All literature, whether communist or union, had to be secretly distributed–smuggled inside baskets of laundry by Black women posing as laundresses or at the local barbershop, where communists would drop in for a "trim" and pick up their leaflets. The communists issued their own leaflet in response to the Klan, which read, "KKK! The workers are watching you!" And in 1933, the CP held a demonstration in front of the Birmingham courthouse, which demanded that the KKK and other white supremacists be outlawed, and the right to vote without the racist restrictions that prevented a majority of Blacks from voting throughout the South.
(...) All over the U.S., communist youth circulated petitions against segregation in baseball and other sports, in a campaign which featured white and Black ball players calling for integration in sports. When communists traveled to Washington, D.C. for a demonstration to free the Scottsboro Boys, they stopped off on the way and sat in at restaurants that refused to serve Blacks–a tactic adopted decades later by the civil rights movement.
(...) By 1934 the party claimed 1,000 members in Birmingham, mostly Black. After three members of the Sharecroppers Union were shot and killed by police in 1932, 3,000 people marched in a funeral procession for six miles, following caskets that were draped in banners with the communist hammer and sickle, while 1,000 stood along the route in tribute.
(...) This meant that, after spending the previous seven years denouncing as social fascists not just Roosevelt and the Democrats, but also liberals and reform socialists, the CP was instructed to become virtually indistinguishable from them. And as the 1936 presidential election approached, the Popular Front meant that the CP was instructed to do everything in its power to help ensure Roosevelt’s victory. Communists were to become loyal–if uninvited–members of Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition. [this is distinct, really, from Davis' explanation -- important, then, to think through the argument more carefully]
(...) As late as January 1935, the Daily Worker described Roosevelt as "the leading organizer and inspirer of fascism in this country." But by the end of 1936, the CP formally entered the Democratic Party. While it didn’t formally support Roosevelt in the election (voicing fear that open communist support might hurt his campaign), the CP made it clear that it hoped he would win.
(...) Some left-wing historians–those who wish to downplay the problems of Stalinism, along with those who wish to apologize for reformism–argue that the Popular Front was a major step forward for the CP, because it ended its self-imposed isolation of the Third Period. They point to the fact that the party more than tripled in size during the Popular Front period, from 26,000 members in 1934 to 82,000 members in 1938, as evidence of success. But that line of reasoning ignores the fact that the CP’s membership also tripled in size during the Third Period years between 1930 and 1934, when it grew from 7,500 to 26,000.
(...) The fact remains that from 1928 on, the CP never decided its strategy based upon what was needed to move the labor movement forward. Because it was tied to Stalin’s coattails, the American CP could not aim to build an independent revolutionary movement inside the working class–either during the Third Period or the Popular Front. In shifting from the Third Period to the Popular Front, the Party merely traded one disastrous policy for another, shifting from outlandish sectarianism to the adoption of equally outlandish patriotism.
(...) Because of the Popular Front, the communist shop floor leaders were instructed to help the CIO leadership in delivering the working-class vote to the Democrats. Despite the fact that many of the most militant workers were already willing to break with the Democratic Party in 1936, Roosevelt was reelected in one of the biggest landslides in U.S. history. [if only -- not sure if this claim is tenable, though]
(...) During the course of the Flint sit-down strike, which began on December 30, 1936 and lasted until February 11, 1937, 140,000 out of a total of GM’s 150,000 production workers either sat down or went out on strike. But the strike’s importance was more than just economic. The attention of the entire nation was riveted on the Flint auto workers, as they took matters into their own hands and stood up to the bosses, the CIO leaders, the National Guard, and even Roosevelt–and won.
(...) The Flint victory had an impact nationally, raising working-class confidence still higher. By the end of 1937, nearly a half-million workers all over the U.S. had taken part in a sit-down strike. The number of all strikes more than doubled between 1936 and 1937, from 2,172 to 4,740, involving nearly two million workers overall.
(...) Outwardly, Lewis appeared to defend the communists from conservatives within the CIO. "I do not turn my organizers or CIO members upside down and shake them to see what kind of literature falls out of their pockets," he told red-baiters. But privately Lewis made it quite clear that he was merely using the communists. He argued, "Who gets the bird, the hunter or the dog?" And later, once the union had finally gained a foothold in the steel industry and he no longer needed them, he fired all the communists from the union’s payroll.
(...) But the CP leaders’ newfound aversion to wildcat strikes did not immediately filter down to communists on the shop floor–many of whom continued to lead the wildcats and sitdowns which erupted during the course of 1937. Not only was confidence still rising among the rank and file, but that confidence enabled workers to begin to try and assert some control over the pace of production and other working conditions. [this is critical]
(...) [November Pontiac strike] The Communist Party finally broke the stalemate–by condemning a strike led by its own members, which it had publicly supported only days earlier. After an article appeared in the New York Times blaming the strike on the Communist Party, the CP leadership immediately switched sides, fearing it might alienate its New Deal allies. Earl Browder personally ordered the party’s Pontiac auto workers fraction to end the occupation.
(...) The Pontiac strike effectively marked the end of the CIO strike wave of the 1930s. The dynamic of class struggle is such that, if it does not continue to move forward, it very quickly begins to backslide. The monthly average of strikes fell by more than half between 1937—39, while the CIO added only 400,000 new members–compared with nearly 4 million in its first two years. By late 1937, recession had once again set in. Between August and November of 1937, the industrial production index dropped by 27 percent, once again throwing millions of workers into unemployment. Between November 1937 and January 1938, U.S. car production fell from 295,000 to 155,000. Employment in the auto industry dropped from 517,000 in 1937 to 305,000 in 1938.
(...) Once the 1936 presidential election was out of the way, Roosevelt was free to show his true class loyalties. Moreover, with a new war on the horizon, as Mike Davis argues, "FDR’s overriding desire to win support for an increasingly interventionist foreign policy, pre-empted further reform initiatives or new concessions to labor."93 As Roosevelt began his war buildup, he looked to reestablish his ties with big business. Thus, Roosevelt slashed relief and works programs for the poor and unemployed in 1938 and again in 1939, even though unemployment was rising sharply. And he made a pronounced turn against the labor movement, beginning in 1937.
(...) [thesis:] It was to be expected that Roosevelt would turn his back on workers, and that the CIO leadership would not lead a fight against Roosevelt. But by the time workers learned this bitter lesson, the greatest upsurge in U.S. working-class history was over. And the Communist Party had played a decisive role. The CP had an impact inside the labor movement which reached far beyond its own membership. Not only did the Communist Party have a substantial base among industrial workers, but by 1937, CP members held top leadership posts in 40 percent of CIO unions. There was a decisive missing element in the working-class movement of the 1930s: an organization of revolutionaries that was large enough to influence the course of the struggle. The Communist Party was large enough, but it had long ceased to be a revolutionary organization. So instead of leading workers toward revolution, the CP left thousands of workers without a way forward. Most workers who’d joined the CP during the course of the 1930s left by the end of the decade, undoubtedly confused and demoralized by the experience, with a grossly distorted vision of socialism. In the eyes of the most militant workers, the Communist Party discredited itself when it turned its back on the class struggle at its turning point in 1937. [too easy, one thinks]
stepan-norris and zeitlin, left out (2003)
Chapter One
(1): long 'Red Decade', early 30s to late 40s (bookended by 1933 and 1950, really)
(2): CIO originated in 1935, to 'organize the unorganized'-- broke, after charges of dual unionism, to become officially independent in November 1938
(3): by 1947, its international unions represented 80% of the country's industrial workers!
(4): Communists were best organized political group, within the CIO
(4-5): C Wright Mills as classic 'left' position on CP in unions--dictatorial, undemocratic, slavish to Moscow, etc.
(14-15): Communist Camp--stalwarts were UE, the ILWU, the MM; 'uncertain and shifting' were UAW, ACW, UPWA; anti-communist camp were USWA (especially powerful, of course), TWIA, URW.
(16): degeneration really begins in 1947 and 1948, they're arguing, as they are disoriented by Truman and the Marshall Plan, and their own failed and "uneven" support for Wallace in 1948
(17): in 1949-1950, when the CIO expelled 11 'communist-dominated' internationals, one estimate was that it lost up to a million members! (CIO's total memership in 1948, at its height, was 4.3 million). at their height, in 1946, they represented some 27% of the CIO's membership.
(20): key--the guiding thread of this book, then, is the importance of the 'intraclass struggle within the class struggle' [it is difficult, though, to speak about a 'relative autonomy'--for what is sometimes missing, I think, is the way in which the larger 'class struggle' redounds on this intraclass struggle. and, of course, the willingness to set this in the perspective of the longue duree. but these are only partial criticisms.]
(22-23): absolutely--their denials/ignorance of Stalin's terror, etc. should not obscure the critical democratic achievements of the rank-and-file of Communist trade unionists.
Chapter Two
(24-25): organizing 'The Rouge' in 1941--the last citadel to fall to the CIO
(26-30): key argument--Communists not in power, they're arguing, due to their 'organizational discipline'/monolithic activism, etc., but because of their actual, effective organizing. there is an element of contingency that we can admit, but we have to understand it as socially determined contingency--there are "indelible connections" between the 'insurgent practices' and whether a union was communist, or not.
(32): CIO, remember, is product of two phases of class struggle.
(37): key premise, which needs to be at the heart of our interrogation of their thesis--"objective conditions do not create organizations."
(38): argument--earlier Red organizing makes it more likely that the international is Communist
(40-41, 43): argument--same goes from workers' insurgency (UAW) vs. officers' revolt (SWOC)
(46): argument--same goes for amalgamation (UE) vs. unitary
(48-49): in sum--their theoretical model, quite useful table/diagram
(51-52): in sum--these four insurgent political practices increased the odds of Communist victory. BUT they are careful to warn against voluntarism, because all of this was made possible by the Great Depression. Men are not 'corks on a river', but a river exists nonetheless? [certainly, as phrased here, this theoretical tack is hardly objectionable]
Chapter Three
(54-57): key--Michels' iron law of oligarchy cannot, at all, take into account the intraclass struggles that took place--the fact that democratic unions existed, and that oligarghic unions existed. It is therefore totally ahistorical. [of course, there is a limit to which we want to push the notion of 'contingency', here, but as a rejoinder this is very important. but let's probe, here]
(59): three features of a democratic union
(69-82): argument--the four insurgent political practices and the likelihood of being democratic--amalgamation and secession from AFL had significant impact (but there all bound up with each other, don't forget, so there are indirect effects)
(85): diffuse vs. narrow ideology--Communism as former, business unionism as latter
(87-89): argument--Communist-leadership and democracy positively correlated (this holds even when you control for insurgent practices, factions, etc.--even though they recognize that this is not favorable, because each is implicated in the other)
(93): in sum--a theoretical model; quite useful, again.
(94): in sum--oligarchy and democracy as "alternative possible paths"; the outcome as contingent, not determined [again, I think this works as a rejoinder, but it would be hard to stand on its own, as an insight. surely there is some need to take a longer perspective (remember that we are looking at variation within the long 'Red decade')]
Chapter Four
(96): contrast between Fordist hierarchy and industrial democracy
(97): turning point for the UAW Local 600 was 1952, when Ford moved to 'de-centralize' (here they track the figures: 58,000 in 1941 voted for CIO (fraction had voted instead for AFL); had about 60,00 dues-paying members in the late 40's; decline begins in 1952.)
(99-102): the coupling of activism and socialism explains Local 600's rich political life, they argue. the 'insurgent practices' gave rise to a 'colossal overproduction' of experienced organizers.
(103-104): key--a contingent, strategic decision to build radical democracy in a diverse workforce--a "double-edged realm of possibility" [the implication being, of course, that the other strategy was also 'open'. but can this satisfy us? we want to give credit where credit is due; but we don't want to abandon explanation.]
(108-109): progressive militance at Rouge
(112): Reuthers' only answer to 'Stalinism' at Rouge, was 'bureaucratic force'
(113): argument--the left-wing units, at Rouge, were the most contentious/democratic
(114-115): argument--it was the Communists who were most tolerant of political opposition in the unions
Chapter Five
(121): Reuther and the 5-year contracts, in 1950--this "class accord" marked the end, as Davis argues. From 'struggle' to negotiation.
(124): Local 600 files a suit against Ford and the long contract.
(125): 'decentralization', then, was just as much a 'political' decision, as an economic one
(127-129): key--here, positioning themselves against 'functionalist' Marxist and pluralist understandings of the labor agreement, which unanimously see it as a harbinger of 'accord.' here, instead, they stress the diversity amongst agreements--and thus, the importance of not acceding to a notion of structural 'predetermination' [i have a question, though, about whether their interlocutors are speaking at cross-purposes--Gramsci is speaking of the 'trade union', whereas Burawoy seems to be speaking about 'collective bargaining'/labor agreement. but ultimately this isn't as important as the issue at hand--again, the spectre of overstatement]
(131): Walt Disney at the HUAC--trying to make a communist out of Mickey Mouse!
(133): key--here we get into dangerous territory; they want to talk about the 'hegemony of capital' as relational, dynamic, etc. of course--and to some extent what they have done is important. but within limits. and the critical thing, also, is to decide where we will place those limits. their framing suggests something much more loose than seems legitimate.
(133-134): three provisions of the contract
(144): we want to control, also, across the four time periods:
(149): KEY--nonetheless, even taking into account the official CP line during WWII, and all this--communists were more militant. this is remarkable, and very important.
(152-153): key--why is this? because unionists' were, and had to be, accountable to their rank-and-file. so it was the leadership of the CP that shifted, but the rank-and-file couldn't move, with them.
(156): further controls don't remove this 'stark' effect
(158): KEY--functionalist arguments must ignore the mechanisms by which 'structrual determination' happens--this, they're arguing, is to do violence to the notion of 'sociohistorical' causality. [i accept this as a critical intervention, with my earlier reservations noted. very useful.]
Chapter Six
(160-161): what difference does democracy make? perception that autocratic unions are more 'efficient'.
(162-163): important--they are arguing that democracy, actually, is critical to the forging of a coherent 'class identity' (which will, in turn, be critical to union power).
(165): argument--democracy gives you prolabor contracts.
(174, 179-180): argument--UE best, UAW second, and USWA a distant third on prolabor measures and wages, too.
(184): important--trade unionism is not, unlike some arguments, inherently depoliticizing. if it were so, how could you explain the breadth of political consciousness across trade unions?
(187): the Communists were least well-paid of all the organizers
(187-188): key--analysis shows that union democracy makes a real difference in the daily lives of workers. the larger theoretical claim, here, is that political relations within classes (given objective limits and possibilities') are relatively autonomous determinants of the relations between classes. [again, everything rests on the limits--but insofar as we agree to this, i have no real issue with this way of framing things. in the FN, also, they are acknowledging that they have abstracted away from employer's resistance, etc.--all of which would be one way into the question of 'objective conditions' and the State]
Other
(210): argument--communists and democratic unions fought for women's rights, as well
(225): UE was reluctant to fight for blacks' rights, for fear of opening a second front
(227-228): Local 600 and a thoroughgoing commitment to interracial community
(231): the Left-wing was central to interracial solidarity
(234-235): for most of its two decades of existence, CIO was a tremendous force for interracial solidarity (though it was hardly monolithically good, in this regard)
(254-255): CP and the racial question--it is critical to distinguish between what the leaders were saying, and what the activists were doing (the latter were the most consistent and principled in fighting for the rights of black workers)
(256): Operation Dixie, 1946--faded soon after it started, precisely because the CIO leadership was anxious to ban political agitation. it fell in on itself, more-or-less, as a result.
(264-265): overtly anti-Communist phase in CIO history begins from 1946 (this is also the date that Truman begins the government's loyalty program, under pressure from right-wing Congress). After the defeat of Henry Wallace, these escalate (Wallace had held massive interracial meetings in the South)
Conclusion
(266-269): summary of the book's findings
(271): Harry Bridges on 1949 explusion of the UE
(273): key--the 'difference' it could have made, had the Communists cohered [the analytical trouble, though, is when you treat this, as is implied, as simple contingency. Davis' formulation is more attractive, for this reason--you want to be able to explain this. without losing the sense of possibility and contingency, certainly. there is also, here, little discussion of the CP's own follies--very different discussion of their support of Wallace, for example]
(274): after the purges, in 1950 AFL was twice the size of the CIO
(275): without the Reds, 'Jim-crowism' in the CIO
(276-277): CIO's self-immolation left it powerless as industry, then, relocated [but here we have the spectre of the structural--could a powerful CIO have stopped this slide? how do we make sense of 'capital''s dominance, while accepting a partially contingent reading of this conjuncture?]
(278-287): "The Great Purge" of American Working Life
(286): one out of every five working people was put through screening, required to take an oath
(287288): key--argument, here, is that repression did not determine the fate of the CP. it was their incapacity in the face of this repression; their inability come up with a new strategy. specifically, a "corrupted internationalism" from 1945-1956--here focusing on two things: (1) reverse backing of Roosevelt-Wallace to back a third party ticket for Wallace, that destroyed the 'center-left alliance'; (2) going back into the mainstream [after ten pages of documenting repression, this is odd. and more importantly, it is unclear that these were the strategic blunders. entirely inverts Davis' argument, to an extent--but he also dates the fall much earlier. ]
(293): why the CP did an about-face in December 1947 and supported Wallace as a third party candidate, when they knew it would split the CIO? [clearly they have started the narrative of decline far too late--but let's think about this more, viz-a-viz the Davis]
(294): Cominform founded in October 1947--"united fronts from below"
Epilogue
(309-316): the debate over the 'Third Trade Union Federation' -- Foster saying the CP must stay within the trade union movement, and not make the mistake of the late 20's (shift to TUEL, from TUUL). an 'exquisite irony', because there he listened to the Comintern; had he listened to the same advice, he would have pushed for the 3rd Federation. implication, in this book, is that there was support amongst the trade unionists; moreover, that the communists could only have worked within their own trade union (election in Local 600 very close, in 1951) [anyway--all this has the character of guesswork, as they admit. not much use in pursuing this, right now]
---
TUEL: 1922-1929
TUUL: 1929-1935
James Matles
John Lewis
Walter Reuther--comes to be UAW president in 1946; by 1947, he wins a majority of the executive board.
Chapter One
(1): long 'Red Decade', early 30s to late 40s (bookended by 1933 and 1950, really)
(2): CIO originated in 1935, to 'organize the unorganized'-- broke, after charges of dual unionism, to become officially independent in November 1938
(3): by 1947, its international unions represented 80% of the country's industrial workers!
(4): Communists were best organized political group, within the CIO
(4-5): C Wright Mills as classic 'left' position on CP in unions--dictatorial, undemocratic, slavish to Moscow, etc.
(14-15): Communist Camp--stalwarts were UE, the ILWU, the MM; 'uncertain and shifting' were UAW, ACW, UPWA; anti-communist camp were USWA (especially powerful, of course), TWIA, URW.
(16): degeneration really begins in 1947 and 1948, they're arguing, as they are disoriented by Truman and the Marshall Plan, and their own failed and "uneven" support for Wallace in 1948
(17): in 1949-1950, when the CIO expelled 11 'communist-dominated' internationals, one estimate was that it lost up to a million members! (CIO's total memership in 1948, at its height, was 4.3 million). at their height, in 1946, they represented some 27% of the CIO's membership.
(20): key--the guiding thread of this book, then, is the importance of the 'intraclass struggle within the class struggle' [it is difficult, though, to speak about a 'relative autonomy'--for what is sometimes missing, I think, is the way in which the larger 'class struggle' redounds on this intraclass struggle. and, of course, the willingness to set this in the perspective of the longue duree. but these are only partial criticisms.]
(22-23): absolutely--their denials/ignorance of Stalin's terror, etc. should not obscure the critical democratic achievements of the rank-and-file of Communist trade unionists.
Chapter Two
(24-25): organizing 'The Rouge' in 1941--the last citadel to fall to the CIO
(26-30): key argument--Communists not in power, they're arguing, due to their 'organizational discipline'/monolithic activism, etc., but because of their actual, effective organizing. there is an element of contingency that we can admit, but we have to understand it as socially determined contingency--there are "indelible connections" between the 'insurgent practices' and whether a union was communist, or not.
(32): CIO, remember, is product of two phases of class struggle.
- 1920s, industrial unionism against AFL craft
- after early 1930s, in response to labor upsurge
- earlier Red organizing
- whether the union seceded from the AFL 'from below', or whether it was an officers' revolt
- whether the union was organized independently, or whether it was done by a CIO organizing committee
- whether it was formed through amalgamation, or as a unitary organization
(37): key premise, which needs to be at the heart of our interrogation of their thesis--"objective conditions do not create organizations."
(38): argument--earlier Red organizing makes it more likely that the international is Communist
(40-41, 43): argument--same goes from workers' insurgency (UAW) vs. officers' revolt (SWOC)
(46): argument--same goes for amalgamation (UE) vs. unitary
(48-49): in sum--their theoretical model, quite useful table/diagram
(51-52): in sum--these four insurgent political practices increased the odds of Communist victory. BUT they are careful to warn against voluntarism, because all of this was made possible by the Great Depression. Men are not 'corks on a river', but a river exists nonetheless? [certainly, as phrased here, this theoretical tack is hardly objectionable]
Chapter Three
(54-57): key--Michels' iron law of oligarchy cannot, at all, take into account the intraclass struggles that took place--the fact that democratic unions existed, and that oligarghic unions existed. It is therefore totally ahistorical. [of course, there is a limit to which we want to push the notion of 'contingency', here, but as a rejoinder this is very important. but let's probe, here]
(59): three features of a democratic union
- democratic constitution
- institutionalized opposition
- active membership
(69-82): argument--the four insurgent political practices and the likelihood of being democratic--amalgamation and secession from AFL had significant impact (but there all bound up with each other, don't forget, so there are indirect effects)
(85): diffuse vs. narrow ideology--Communism as former, business unionism as latter
(87-89): argument--Communist-leadership and democracy positively correlated (this holds even when you control for insurgent practices, factions, etc.--even though they recognize that this is not favorable, because each is implicated in the other)
(93): in sum--a theoretical model; quite useful, again.
(94): in sum--oligarchy and democracy as "alternative possible paths"; the outcome as contingent, not determined [again, I think this works as a rejoinder, but it would be hard to stand on its own, as an insight. surely there is some need to take a longer perspective (remember that we are looking at variation within the long 'Red decade')]
Chapter Four
(96): contrast between Fordist hierarchy and industrial democracy
(97): turning point for the UAW Local 600 was 1952, when Ford moved to 'de-centralize' (here they track the figures: 58,000 in 1941 voted for CIO (fraction had voted instead for AFL); had about 60,00 dues-paying members in the late 40's; decline begins in 1952.)
(99-102): the coupling of activism and socialism explains Local 600's rich political life, they argue. the 'insurgent practices' gave rise to a 'colossal overproduction' of experienced organizers.
(103-104): key--a contingent, strategic decision to build radical democracy in a diverse workforce--a "double-edged realm of possibility" [the implication being, of course, that the other strategy was also 'open'. but can this satisfy us? we want to give credit where credit is due; but we don't want to abandon explanation.]
(108-109): progressive militance at Rouge
(112): Reuthers' only answer to 'Stalinism' at Rouge, was 'bureaucratic force'
(113): argument--the left-wing units, at Rouge, were the most contentious/democratic
(114-115): argument--it was the Communists who were most tolerant of political opposition in the unions
Chapter Five
(121): Reuther and the 5-year contracts, in 1950--this "class accord" marked the end, as Davis argues. From 'struggle' to negotiation.
(124): Local 600 files a suit against Ford and the long contract.
(125): 'decentralization', then, was just as much a 'political' decision, as an economic one
(127-129): key--here, positioning themselves against 'functionalist' Marxist and pluralist understandings of the labor agreement, which unanimously see it as a harbinger of 'accord.' here, instead, they stress the diversity amongst agreements--and thus, the importance of not acceding to a notion of structural 'predetermination' [i have a question, though, about whether their interlocutors are speaking at cross-purposes--Gramsci is speaking of the 'trade union', whereas Burawoy seems to be speaking about 'collective bargaining'/labor agreement. but ultimately this isn't as important as the issue at hand--again, the spectre of overstatement]
(131): Walt Disney at the HUAC--trying to make a communist out of Mickey Mouse!
(133): key--here we get into dangerous territory; they want to talk about the 'hegemony of capital' as relational, dynamic, etc. of course--and to some extent what they have done is important. but within limits. and the critical thing, also, is to decide where we will place those limits. their framing suggests something much more loose than seems legitimate.
(133-134): three provisions of the contract
- prerogatives of management--labor or management?
- union's freedom of action--right to resist and ability to impose sanctions
- methods for handling disputes--what kind of grievance procedure?
- management prerogatives--management or labor?
- right to strike
- contract term--long or short?
- trade-off provision
- grievance procedure--shop floor, or not?
(144): we want to control, also, across the four time periods:
- immediate pre-WWII years of the Great Depression
- the WWII years
- immediate postwar offensive of organized labor, coupled with right-wing resurgence in Congress and Taft-Hartley in 1947
- advent of the Cold War, attacks on Communist-led unions
(149): KEY--nonetheless, even taking into account the official CP line during WWII, and all this--communists were more militant. this is remarkable, and very important.
(152-153): key--why is this? because unionists' were, and had to be, accountable to their rank-and-file. so it was the leadership of the CP that shifted, but the rank-and-file couldn't move, with them.
(156): further controls don't remove this 'stark' effect
(158): KEY--functionalist arguments must ignore the mechanisms by which 'structrual determination' happens--this, they're arguing, is to do violence to the notion of 'sociohistorical' causality. [i accept this as a critical intervention, with my earlier reservations noted. very useful.]
Chapter Six
(160-161): what difference does democracy make? perception that autocratic unions are more 'efficient'.
(162-163): important--they are arguing that democracy, actually, is critical to the forging of a coherent 'class identity' (which will, in turn, be critical to union power).
(165): argument--democracy gives you prolabor contracts.
(174, 179-180): argument--UE best, UAW second, and USWA a distant third on prolabor measures and wages, too.
(184): important--trade unionism is not, unlike some arguments, inherently depoliticizing. if it were so, how could you explain the breadth of political consciousness across trade unions?
(187): the Communists were least well-paid of all the organizers
(187-188): key--analysis shows that union democracy makes a real difference in the daily lives of workers. the larger theoretical claim, here, is that political relations within classes (given objective limits and possibilities') are relatively autonomous determinants of the relations between classes. [again, everything rests on the limits--but insofar as we agree to this, i have no real issue with this way of framing things. in the FN, also, they are acknowledging that they have abstracted away from employer's resistance, etc.--all of which would be one way into the question of 'objective conditions' and the State]
Other
(210): argument--communists and democratic unions fought for women's rights, as well
(225): UE was reluctant to fight for blacks' rights, for fear of opening a second front
(227-228): Local 600 and a thoroughgoing commitment to interracial community
(231): the Left-wing was central to interracial solidarity
(234-235): for most of its two decades of existence, CIO was a tremendous force for interracial solidarity (though it was hardly monolithically good, in this regard)
(254-255): CP and the racial question--it is critical to distinguish between what the leaders were saying, and what the activists were doing (the latter were the most consistent and principled in fighting for the rights of black workers)
(256): Operation Dixie, 1946--faded soon after it started, precisely because the CIO leadership was anxious to ban political agitation. it fell in on itself, more-or-less, as a result.
(264-265): overtly anti-Communist phase in CIO history begins from 1946 (this is also the date that Truman begins the government's loyalty program, under pressure from right-wing Congress). After the defeat of Henry Wallace, these escalate (Wallace had held massive interracial meetings in the South)
Conclusion
(266-269): summary of the book's findings
(271): Harry Bridges on 1949 explusion of the UE
(273): key--the 'difference' it could have made, had the Communists cohered [the analytical trouble, though, is when you treat this, as is implied, as simple contingency. Davis' formulation is more attractive, for this reason--you want to be able to explain this. without losing the sense of possibility and contingency, certainly. there is also, here, little discussion of the CP's own follies--very different discussion of their support of Wallace, for example]
(274): after the purges, in 1950 AFL was twice the size of the CIO
(275): without the Reds, 'Jim-crowism' in the CIO
(276-277): CIO's self-immolation left it powerless as industry, then, relocated [but here we have the spectre of the structural--could a powerful CIO have stopped this slide? how do we make sense of 'capital''s dominance, while accepting a partially contingent reading of this conjuncture?]
(278-287): "The Great Purge" of American Working Life
(286): one out of every five working people was put through screening, required to take an oath
(287288): key--argument, here, is that repression did not determine the fate of the CP. it was their incapacity in the face of this repression; their inability come up with a new strategy. specifically, a "corrupted internationalism" from 1945-1956--here focusing on two things: (1) reverse backing of Roosevelt-Wallace to back a third party ticket for Wallace, that destroyed the 'center-left alliance'; (2) going back into the mainstream [after ten pages of documenting repression, this is odd. and more importantly, it is unclear that these were the strategic blunders. entirely inverts Davis' argument, to an extent--but he also dates the fall much earlier. ]
(293): why the CP did an about-face in December 1947 and supported Wallace as a third party candidate, when they knew it would split the CIO? [clearly they have started the narrative of decline far too late--but let's think about this more, viz-a-viz the Davis]
(294): Cominform founded in October 1947--"united fronts from below"
Epilogue
(309-316): the debate over the 'Third Trade Union Federation' -- Foster saying the CP must stay within the trade union movement, and not make the mistake of the late 20's (shift to TUEL, from TUUL). an 'exquisite irony', because there he listened to the Comintern; had he listened to the same advice, he would have pushed for the 3rd Federation. implication, in this book, is that there was support amongst the trade unionists; moreover, that the communists could only have worked within their own trade union (election in Local 600 very close, in 1951) [anyway--all this has the character of guesswork, as they admit. not much use in pursuing this, right now]
---
TUEL: 1922-1929
TUUL: 1929-1935
James Matles
John Lewis
Walter Reuther--comes to be UAW president in 1946; by 1947, he wins a majority of the executive board.
Monday, January 25, 2010
barrington moore, social origins of dictatorship and democracy (1966)
preface and acknowledgments (xi-xix)
(xi): animated by skepticism of thesis that "industrialism was the main cause of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, because of the veyr obvious fact that Russia and China were overwhelmingly agrarian countries when the communists established themselves."
(xii-xiii): clarifying why these countries, in particular (and why not looking at small countries--there decisive influence comes from without).
(xiii): "The focus of interest is on innovation that has led to political power, not on the spread and reception of institutions that have been hammered out elsewhere..."
(xiii): very much a Weberian, ideal-type-ist, comparative approach, rather than a search for real abstractions. but perhaps the book itself is evidence that the difference between these two need not be so large?
(xiv): explorer is to native as sociologist is to historian!? a bit odd, this.
(xiv-xvii): KEY, central theses--"...one may discern three main historical routes from the preindustrial to the modern world.
(xvii): you have some elements of reaction in the progressive examples, and vice-versa--thus, we have empircally-based general categories that transcend particular cases. moreover, there is invariably an element of contingency in the argument.
PART ONE: REVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF CAPITALIST DEMCORACY
Chapter One, England and the Contributions of Violence to Gradualism (3-40)
I. Aristocratic Impulses behind the Transition to Capitalism in the Countryside (3-13)
(3): "The focus in this chapter will be on the particular and very significant part that the classes in the countryside played in the transformation to industrialism."
(4-5): from the 1300s, he's arguing, we see the growing importance of commerce in countryside and in towns--and thus, the "dismounting of feudalism and its replacement by England's relatively weak version of royal absolutism."
(5): increasing importance of the wool trade in the Late Middle Ages (1300-1500), oriented to markets in the Italy and the Low Countries
(5): and the Black Death in 1348-1349 and demographic collapse, which gave an impetus to peasant rebellion.
(5): this chapter focused on the upper classes; by the late 1300s and the 1400s, especially, feudalism was in decline--it had "become parasitic, deriving its strength from the maneuvers of powerful magnates and the countermoves of the monarch."
(5-6): The Wars of the Roses (1455-1485) marks this process, the weakening of the landed aristrocracy and the emergence of the Tudor dynasty.
(6): Henry VIII, the second of the Tudor Kings, breaks with the Catholic Church without
supporting the Protestant Reformation--confiscation of the onasteries, etc.
(6-7): important, in sum: (1) ROYAL PEACE, AND (2) WOOL, combining in a specific way--"Combined with the continuing stimulus of the wool trade, the Tudor peace generated a powerful stimulus to the growth of a commercial and even capitalist outlook in the countryside." [quoting Tawney--the Tudor victory had "made the command of money more important than the command of men... [This change]... marks the transition from the medieval conception of land as the basis of political functions... to the modern view of it as an income-yielding investment."--BUT is this sufficient? hypothetically it could have happened at any time, no? isn't it question-begging?]. "The key to the English situation is that commercial life in both town and countryside during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries grew up mainly though not entirely in opposition to the crown."
(8-9): thus, economic individualism was not simply the preserve of Adam Smith and the bourgeoisie; enclosing landlords, too, "provided at least as important a breeding ground..."
(9): enclosures, key--"propelled by the prospect of profits to be made either in selling wool or by leasing their lands to those who did and thereby increasing their rents, the lords of the manors found a variety of legal and semilegal methods to deprive the peasants of their rights of cultivation in the open fields..."
(10): key--"...a change from the feudal seigneur who was at worst a lawless tyrant to an overlord who was closer to an acute man of business exploiting the material resources of the estate with an eye to profit and efficiency..." These habits existed, too, in the yeomen--the upper ranks of the peasantry, and the chief force behind small enclosures; analogy drawn to kulaks.
(13): important, comparative point--"Thus in England the chief carriers of what was eventually to be a modern and secular society were at this time fundamentally men of commerce in both the countryside and the towns. In sharp contrast with what happened in France, these men pushed forward mainly on their own instead of under the umbrella of paternalist royal patronage."
(14): the Crown, Charles I, had started to antagonize commercially-minded elements in the countryside and the town (unlike in France, power had always been delegated to the gentry in the countryside; so the Crown's meddling was impositional). this was, of course, setting the scene for the First Civil War.
II. Agrarian Aspects of the Civil War (14-19)
(14-16): summary of these trends: "in the light of this general background there would seem to be little reason to question the thesis that commercially minded elements among the landed upper classes, and to a lesser extent among the yeomen, were among the main forces opposing the King and royal attempts to preserve the old order, and therefore an important cause, though not the only one, that produced the Civil War... From the gentry as a class, then, came the main representatives of a decisive historical trend modifying the structure of English rural society... Thus under the impact of commerce and some industry, English society was breaking apart from the top downward in a way that allowed pockets of radical discontent produced by the same forces to burst temporarily in the limelight [this has interesting implications--more radical elements doing the dominant oppositional classes' handiwork; and for 1848, since it sheds light on potential cleavages in the alliance].. In this process, as the old order breaks up, sections of society that had been losing out due to long-run economic trends come to the surface and do much of the violent 'dirty work.' of destroying the ancien regime..."
(16): act of beheading the King, for example, was a popular demand rooted in the desires of 'urban journeymen and peasants' (in the Army); a preponderance of the poorer gentry amongst the regicides.
(17): modernizers and traditionalists, too, not always opposed--certainly, for example, united in their fears of the 'lower orders.' even amongst the gentry, of course--"One would scarcely expect men of substance to have an easy conscience about kicking over two of the main props, king and church, that supported the social order." [again, the ghosts of 1848]
(17): important, certainly--"the policy of the leaders of the rebellion was clear and straightforward. They opposed interference with the landlord's property rights on the part of the king and on the part of radicals from the lower orders" [abolition of the Star Chamber, 'the main royal weapon against enclosing landlords' -- the peasants, clearly, are being marginalized]
(18-19): important--"In economics the Civil War did not produce any masive transfer of landed property from one group or class to another..." but it was, certainly, a revolution--"its revolutionary consequences were deep and lasting in the area of law and social relationships. with the abolition of the Star Chamber, the peasants lost their chief protection against the advance of enclosures..."
(19): this is a critical point (leveled against the critics of those who label the Civil War a bourgeois revolution)--the fact that landed elites were still in command of the state apparatus after this, and even after 1832, does not mean this wasn't a bourgeois revolution. precisely because, as we have seen, of the increasing commercialization of countryside... "The aristocratic order survived, but in a new shape, for money more than birth was now its basis. And Parliament itself became the instrument of landed capitalists... "
(20): in sum--"while the original impulse toward capitalism may have come from the towns far back in the Middle Ages, it proceeded on the land as strongly as in the cities... both the capitalist principle are directly antithetical to... : divinely supported authority in politics, and production for use rather than for individual profit in economics. Without the triumph of these principles in the seventeenth century it is hard to imagine how English society could have modernized peacefully--to the extent that it actually was peaceful--during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries..."
III. Enclosures and the Destruction of the Peasantry (20-28)
(20): enclosures after the Civil War as legal, and historically-significant form of violence (this was not the landed aristrocracy against independent peasants; but landed capitalists against peasantry). either way, moreover, "the enclosures were the final blow that destroyed the whole structure of English peasant society embodied in the traditional village."
(21-22): speaking, here, of a decline in the 'openness' of local government to the peasantry, after the Glorious Revolution [we must ask, then, about the general thesis of the book--increasing democratization? clearly this is presented as a blip, but we can't leave its significance under-interrogated...].
(22): the anti-democratic writ of Parliament, as property triumphed over the peasantry in matters of enclosure.
(22): key--"The outcome of the Civil War itself, in sharp contrast to that of the French Revolution, was to strengthen greatly the position of the landed upper classes."
(23): 1688 to the end of the Napoleonic Wars (ca. 1815) as the "golden age of the great landed estate" (some technological improvement, in fertilizer, new crops, crop rotation; but also the simple efficiency of economies of scale)
(24): the rural capitalist, he's noting, is fairly divided into two:
(26): "the intrusion of commerce into a peasant community generally sets in motion a tendency toward the concentration of land in fewer hands..."
(26-28): key, enclosures--graphic, moving account of the disintegration and suffering of the peasant communities (some stayed on land to be rural laborers; others migrated to the cities in search of work)--"it seems quite clear that when the common fields disappeared and a new economic system began to win out in the countryside, the old peasant community finally gave way and disintegrated... the enclosures greatly strengthened the larger landlords and broke the back of the English peasantry, eliminating them as a factor from British political life."
(29): amen--"That the violence and coercion which produced these resluts took place over a long space of time... must not blind us to the fact that it was massive violence exercised by the upper classes against the lower." [this is critical, as it contains a larger point about modernization and its relationship to violence--reminds me of Chris Harman's comment on Stalin; all the violence of modernization condensed into a few, exceptionally brutal years]
IV. Aristocratic Rule for Triumphant Capitalism (29-39)
(29): when considering the 'peaceful transition' to parliamentary democracy in the 19th century, we would do well to remember the violence that scarred the 17th and 18th centuries.
(29): consequence one--"perhaps the most important legacy of a violent past was the strengthening of Parliament at the expense of the King" [bequeathed an institutional mechanism for settling conflicts of interest]
(30): "the strong commercial tone in the life of the landed upper classes... also meant that there was no very solid phalanx of aristrocratic opposition to the advance of industry itself... the most influential sector of the landed upper classes acted as a political advance guard for commercial and industrial capitalism."
(30): consequence two--"the other main consequence was the destruction of the peasantry. It meant that modernization could proceed in England without the huge reservoir of conservative and reacitonary forces that existed at certain points in Germany and Japan... And it also of couse meant that the possibility of peasant revolutions in the Russian and Chinese manner were taken off the historical agenda."
(31): the French Revolution induced a period of reaction, in England--only to be lifted with the Battle of Waterloo.
(32): what was key re: the rise of the commercial classes in the 19th century, in England, was that "the road had been smoothed for them... under the leadership of the landed classes." [contrast with Prussia, where the State had to establish a uniform legal system, currency, etc.] "... The absence of a strong monarchy resting on an army and a bureaucracy, as in Prussia, made easier the development of parliamentary democracy... "
(32): important--"In the meantime the landed gentry and those above it in the social scale retained a firm hold on the levers of political power... [With reform bill of 1832, and the striking down of Corn Laws in 1846, he writes] The landed upper classes suffered no disaster, but they learned the limits of their power."
(34): key--comparatively mild treatment of the Chartist movement (1838-1848), down to three factors [in Germany, on the other hand, the bourgeoisie leaned on the aristocracy and the State, to protect them against popular discontent]
(35): "Thus the theme of diehard opposition to the march of democracy is a rare and minor current among the landed aristocracy of England in the nineteenth century. One cannot find in English history the counterpart to... German conservatives ['take ten men and shoot the Reichstag!']"
(35): very KEY; reason for lack of conservativsm/reaction--"One of the reasons why such a scene seems incongrous in England... is that, unlike the Junkers, the gentry and nobility of England had no great need to rely on political levers to prop up a tottering economic position..."
(36): "In the nineteenth century, as in earlier periods, the lines between wealthy nobility, gentry, and the upper reaches of business and the professions were blurred and wavering."
(37): key-- "In nineteenth century Prussia the members of the bourgeoisie who became connected with the aristocracy generally absorbed the latter's habits and outlook. Rather the opposite relationship held in England." [this is his answer--and see below--to the puzzle that their seemed to be more osmosis between the two classes in Prussia, than in England]
(37): important, larger point--"Men who hold power do not necessarily exercise it simply in the interests of the class from which they arise, especially in changing situations."
(38): key, divergent paths of England and Germany in late-19th Century--an agricultural depression in the aftermath of the Civil War (the availability of American grain, by steamship), "seriously commenced to erode the economic base of the landed upper strata." Roughly the same thing happened in Germany. BUT: there, Junkers used the State to preserve their position, forming a "united agricultural front" with peasant proprietors and even industrial interests around a program of imperialism and reaction; in England, on the other hand, "...agriculture was allowed to commit decorous suicide... The economic base had shifted to industry and trade."
(39): in sum--"...what factors stand out as responsible for England's progress toward demcoracy? Those inherited from a violent past have already been mentioned: (1) a relatively strong and independent Parliament; (2) a commercial and industrial interest with its own economic base; (3) no serious peasant problem." Other factors are specific to the 19th century... the landed upper classes absorbed new elements into their ranks... it was possible because the economic position of the governing classes eroded slowly... [furthermore], there is no reason to deny the historical significance of moderate and intelligent statesmen."
Chapter Two, Evolution and Revolution in France (40-110)
1. Contrasts with England and their Origins (40-45)
(40): key, enormous differences with England, he's noting at the outset--
(41): "the French nobility lived very largely from dues collected in kind or in cash from their peasants." [features emerge by the late 1300s and during the 1400s]
(41): they were located in law, and dependent on the peasantry--these two facts "were to distinguish the French nobility from the English gentry for the remainder of its history."
(41-42): "at quite an early date the peasantry had managed to escape from personal servitude...by the time of the Revolution," de facto property rights. [this is not explained, at all]
(42): in fact, precisely because they lacked an independent economic base (a la the gentry in England), the feudals also slowly lost out to the Crown (and the growing Royal Bureaucracy). this was encapsulated in the "long reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715).
(42-43): even if this fact let urban wealth intrude into rural areas, the basic form of wealth accumulation in the countryside remained the collection of wealth (not production for market)
(43): key--"France did not undergo an extensive enclosure movement. By and large, the large proprietor was interested in preserving peasant tenures because they provided the basis of his existence. Only in the latter part of the 1700s did the situation begin to change."
(43-44): important--in the course of the 1500s and afterward, "the king consolidated and extended his authority..." at the expense of the nobility [he deprived them of judicial functions, raised soldiers and taxes on their lands, intervened in their affairs, and forced them to submit to his Parlements]. This, again, culminated in Louis XIV. King had to ensure loyalty of nobility, though, which he did through the Church and War.
2. The Noble Response to Commercial Agriculture (45-56)
(45): until the opening decade of the 1700s, there certainly was a weak impluse toward commercial agriculture in France [limited markets, mostly in wheat--problem was to feed those who didn't grow, which was a small problem].
(49-50): crux of the matter, it seems: [after a lengthy discussion of the wine trade,] "The monarchy wanted a prosperious nobility as a decorative adjunct to the crown... But the crown did not want the nobility to establish an independent economic base that could enable it to challenge royal power." [I'm worried we're verging on a tautology here--no independent economic base is supposed to explain strength of monarchy; so how can strength of monarchy also explain no independent economic base?]
(50): "...successful commercial farming for the high aristocrat involved a temporary escape from French society." [mention of Haiti]
(51): "All these facts indicate that the cultural and legal barriers were becoming much less important during the 18th century." [in other words, this is not where we want to look if we want to understand the weakness of commercial agriculture]
(52): yes, a critique of Weber that parallels the charges leveled by Ellen Meiskins Wood--"Those who follow Weber, especially those who speak in terms of some abstract drive for achievement, neglect the importance of the social and political context in which such changes manifest themselves. The problem is not merely whether French rural nobles tried to run their estates efficiently... The key question is whether not in so doing they altered the structure of rural society in a way similar to what took place in those parts of England where the enclosure movement was strongest. The answer to this question is simple and decisive. They did not. Those nobles who represented the leading edge of commercial advance in the French countryside tried to extract more from the peasants."
(53): discussing Toulouse, where despite production for market, there was no real technical innovation--"the nobles used the prevailing social and political framework to squeeze more grain out of the peasants and sell it." [again, worried about a tautology--isn't the lack of an economic base meant to explain that social and political framework?]
(53-54): explaining the land tenure situation, as it differs from England; but I must say, I don't fully follow...
(55): in sum, though: "In contrast to England, commercial influences as they penetrated into the French countryside did not undermine and destroy the feudal framework. If anything they infused new life into old arrangements, though in a way that ultimately had disastrous consequences for the nobility... Essentially what the landed proprietor possessed were certain property rights, whose essence were claims, enforceable through the repressive apparatus of the state, to a specific share of the economic surplus..." [if run like this, the tautology fades, I think--but do need to think through this, some more]
(56): "In England the fusion between countryside and town was in the main directed against the crown... In France the fusion took place through the crown with very different political and social consequences."
3. Class Relationships under Royal Absolutism (56-62)
(56-57): in the 1600s, the French bourgeoisie was not the spearhead of modernization; instead, "it was heavily dependent on royal favor, subject to royal regulation..." [like Tokugawa Japan or even Akbar's India]
(57): thus, under Louis XIV, "the impulse toward establishing the bases of a modern society... came much more from the royal bureaucracy than from the bourgeoisie. That, however, was scarcely the deliberate intention of the crown. At the same time its real function... was to maintain order, supervise the economy..."
(57-58): like other agrarian bureaucracies, it was confronted with a limited source of surplus, like elsewhere (partial solution was to sell positions in the bureaucracy)
(58): regardless--"French society of the 1600s and 1700s presents us with an illuminating mixture of competing trades that scholars sometimes regard as characteristically Western and characteristically Oriental: feudalism, bourgeoisie, and bureaucracy." [an admirable universalism]
(59): "...the sale of offices was at the root of the king's independence of the aristocracy, of any effective control by a parliament. It was the key prop of royal absolutism. At the same time the practice undermined the king's independence [since it made office a piece of property]"
(60): key--had the effect of steeling the bourgeoisie to stand with the State against feudal elements; but also of converting bourgeois elements into feudals. "...The system diverted energy and resources from commerce and industry."
(62-63): why didn't such a pervasive monarchy, then, pursue the path of a Germany or Japan--a "conservative path to modernization"? he isn't providing the answer now, only suggesting that "agrarian problems played a very important part in bringing about this result."
4. The Aristocratic Offensive and the Collapse of Absolutism (62-70)
(63): the last half of the 1700s saw "a penetration of commercial and capitalist practices into agriculture." [a brief enclosure movement]
(64): crucial: the method of surplus-extraction (and the political apparatus that corresponded), in France, was simply different than in England [in France, feudal; in England, commercial]
(64): interesting that, right here at one of his most concretely Marxist moments, he is pushing back against caricatured Marx--"...any notion that the economic substructure somehow automatically determines the political superstructure, can lead one astray. The political mechanism was decisive..." [as was, then, the effort to smash it]
(64): key--enclosure movement in France more of a government move than in England, where it was indigenously actualized by gentry. "Hence capitalism was seeping into the French countryside... in the form of feudalism through the seignoral reaction, in the form of an attack on feudalism, and... through the officially sponsored enclosure movement. More rapid penetration had to await the measures of the Revolution..." [critical--all of this, though [increased feudal dues, enclosures], had the critical effect of turning the peasantry against the established order--this encouraged the unity of the Third Estate]
(65): this negative response, of course, is why "the most prosperous peasantry in Europe could become a major force for revolution."
(66-67): it was not that the nobility was closed (he's providing examples of bourgeoisie incorporation), that explains the Revolution.
(67): important--it is the case that in England this fusion took place against the king. In France, it was the monarchy that turned commoners into landed aristrocrats.
(67-68): concomitant to all this, there was expansive growth in commerce, and trade [embodied in proposals made by Turgot, which had the effect of antagonizing the sans-culottes by liberalizing grain market]
(69): KEY--"As it came to France, capitalism often wore a feudal mask... The demand for property rights within the prevailing system was very strong, as the sale of offices and the seigneurial reaction demonstrates. Capitalism... permeated the ancien regime.. Partly for this reason the radical thrust behind the Revolution, based on the sans-culottes and sections of the peasantry, was explicitly and strongly anticapitalist."
5. The Peasants' Relationship to Radicalism during the Revolution (70-92)
(70): "only when popular grievances could coalesce even briefly with those of more powerful groups would they help to bring the monarchy crashing down..."
(70-71): important--in the absence of commercial revolution (or manorial reaction), "many French peasants had become in effect small property owners." [though, he notes that, in some places families without land may have been anywhere from 20 to 70% of the rural population."]
(71): two major demands, amongst poorer peasantry
(73): for the upper ranks of the peasantry, on the other hand, discontent was a product of a fact of "possessing the land without really owning it... Mainly wanted to eliminate the arbitrary aspects of the feudal system that had been increasing in the last years..."
(74-75): the impulses giving rise to the Revolution in this context: decreasing duties on British manufactures, natural disasters, reactionary pressure of stratum of nobility [others were quite willing to compromise], etc.
(75): summer of 1789, then, sees a series of peasant uprisings
(75-76): important, no bourgeoisie on the barricades--"full-scale violence [actually] frightened the bourgeoisie, who retreated into the arms of the nobility"
(76): with the storming of the Bastille, major traits of the radical elements in the French Revolution
(80): 25th of August 1792, feudal dues disappeared; 28th of August, villagers receive back commond lands
(81-83): important, peasant radicalism, in the form of 'loi agrarire': equal distribution of lands, making the Commune uncomfortable, it seems (splitting the ranks) [March 1793 the death penalty decreed for preaching it!] -- all this, he's saying, a response to the intrusion of capitalism into the countryside.
(84): yes, the spectre of 1848, again--"...the bourgeois revolution needed the help of the radical revolution, as we have seen with the events of July 14 and August 4..." [of course!] This, even though "the two were fundamentally incompatible due to incompatible attitudes toward property..."
(86): critical, effects and context of the third uprising--"...both the rural and the urban radicals shared a common hostility at this point to the rich who were profiting from the Revolution and to the unfettered workings of the market... To sum up the meaning of the uprising..., the bourgeois revolution had been pushed sharply to the left under radical pressure and forced to shed the moderates (arrest of 32 Girondins), while the urban radicals and the peasants were still marching together..." This was the 'heroic' and 'desperate' time of the Revolution, led by the Committee of Public Safety (my understanding--you had the Constituent Assembly until 1791; the Legislative Assembly until the second uprising; and the Commune, until now)
(88): key, running into trouble--for the wealthier peasants -- as producers -- the system of price controls implemented in the third phase was oppressive, and they evaded it (even though the high, unregulated price of wheat had enabled the uprising, in the first place). Thus, the radical phase of the Revolution was "in many places an outright attack on the substantial peasants... worst of all, townsmen... were its main agents in the countryside..."
(89): in sum--"The obvious and decisive fact of the radical phase is this: the urban sans-culottes had been able to push the Jacobin leaders into policies that saved the Revolution but at the cost of turning the peasants against it... To the extent that these conditions prevailed elsewhere in the countryside [high price of bread relative to wages], they alienated radical support from the Revolution and dried up the sources of rural radicalism"
(90): important--Ventose decrees, Robespierre and Saint-Just realizing that they needed to make concessions to the peasantry. Alas, "it would have been very difficult to meet the expressed desires of the poorer peasants without putting a spike into the wheels of the bourgeois and capitalist revolution... Thus during the radical phase the needs and aspirations of the urban sans-culottes finally came into direct and open conflict with all sections of the countryside..."
(91): key--against the Marxist argument that the bourgeois revolution could not follow the radical revolution this far, Moore attributes the failure of the radical revolution to the tension that his policies brought them into conflict with the countryside--and in a way that aggravated the misery of the city-dweller.
(92): "No matter how radical the city was, it could do nothing without the help of the peasants. The radical revolution was over." [I need to sharpen my understanding of what exactly led to this fall-out; what I have culled from this chapter seems a bit confused...]
6. Peasants against the Revolution: The Vendee (92-101)
(92): from 1793 to 1796--the "only major peasant uprising against what is loosely called the Left" (calling for restoration of King, what have you)
(92): key, there is actually no paradox here: "the main thrust of the counterrevolution was anticapitalist against the merchants and manufacturers in nearby towns and those scattered through the heart of the Vendee itself... Resembles the great peasant upheavals that were the main popular force breaking apart the old regimes of Russia and China before the communist victories..."
(93): importantly--"The counterrevolutionary area was one where commercial agriculture had not penetrated..." But this, he is suggesting, is not an answer. Instead, something more specific is needed. His best guess is not the lightness of burden, nor the myth that these peasants lived amongst the nobility, but that "the leading peasants in the areas that were to become counterrevolutionary already had some of the major benefits of private property (because these were areas where enclosures had taken place)." Led to a "stubborn individualism--"in many instances a man would not see his neighbors for long stretches of time. "...What might be expected to happen if the Revolution failed to abolish rents and took more taxes out of the peasants than had been the case under the old order? What if the Revolution promoted a substantial bourgeois land grab? Finally, what if the Revolution came as a wholesale attack on peasant society? These are things that did happen."
(98): key, then--"What mattered most in the specific conditions of the Vendee was the attack on the clergy because it was part of a general offensive: economic, political, and social at once." So things like the reorganization of local government, the seizure of church properties, etc. (which had led to a very large bourgeois land grab).
7. Social Consequences of Revolutionary Terror (101-108)
(101): writing, now, against the impulse to regard the Terror "as a daemonic outburst of mob violence..." Certainly, there was much that was indiscriminate (the 1792 September Massacres, for example).
(103-104): roughly 30,000 to 40,000 victims of revolutionary repression--"Yet in assessing it, one has to keep in mind the repressive aspects of the social order to which it was a response. The prevailing order of society always grinds out its tragic toll of unnecessary death year after year... [T]o dwell on the horrors of revolutionary violence while forgetting that of normal time is merely partisan hypocrisy." [and this is just as true in China, India, etc.]
(104): reminder that the radical arm of the revolution was a negative, defensive reaction to the bourgeois revolution ("the steady spread of capitalist figures..." / the free market in grain, etc.).
(105): KEY POINT--you could not have had a peaceful transition, had the conservatives smothered the Revolution successfully, as you 'did' in England after the civil war. "The underlying social structure of France was fundamentally different and hence ruled out the kind of peaceful transition... that England experienced in the 1700s and 1800s."
(105): key--addressing himself to the question of whether it was, or was not, a bourgeois revolution: "To deny that the predominant thrust and chief consequences of the Revolution were bourgeois and capitalist is to engage in a trivial quibble... [Certainly, he agrees that the bourgeoisie were not protagonists, themselves, BUT] That the ultimate outcome of all the forces at work was a victory for an economic system of private property and a political system based upon equality before the law... are truths undeniable even if they are familiar." [see also pg. 109]
(105): Bourbon Restoration recovered half of the property lost during the Revolution!
(106): key, and in sum--"...the destruction of the political power of the landed aristocracy constitutes the most significant process at work in the course of French modernization. Ultimately it is largely... traceable to the response of the French nobility to the problems of agriculture in an increasingly commercial society. Royal absolutism was able to tame and control an aristocracy that had difficulty in establishing an independent economic base." [this eliminated, he's adding, the threat of right-wing authoritarianism]
(107): key--it also created "small-peasant property," with ambiguous consequences--"the experience of requisitioning, the attempt to place ceilings on the prices of grain, and the encouragement given to small holders and agricultural workers during the radical phase... turned the upper stratum of the peasants decisively against the Republic." [there is more, certainly, that needs to be said about the divisions in the peasantry; why are we so concerned, after all, with the upper peasantry, given their limited numbers?]
(107-108): some provisional reflections on revolutionary and reactionary tendencies of peasantry, but nothing conclusive beyond these few generalizations about the 19th and 20th centuries in France
(108): again, a summary--Revolution was imperative, precisely because the ancien regime stood in the way of democratization; this was not the case in England, where you had a landed elite that were quite bourgeois ("part of democracy's entering wedge")
(110): in tracing the end of the French revolution, he speaks about how the Jacobin need to get food to urban areas and revolutionary armies broke the alliance with the richer peasants. but i am confused, perhaps because of poor comprehension: why did the poor peasants leave this alliance? or, differently put, why was the counterrevolution successful--did it have the backing of poor peasants?
Chapter Three, The American Civil War: The Last Capitalist Revolution (111-158)
1. Plantation and Factory: An Inevitable Conflict? (111-114)
(111): In America, of course, no well-entrenched agrarian society, of either feudal or bureaucratic forms. (1) Rather, "commercial agriculture" was important from the very beginning. (2) No political struggles, then, between a monarch and a landed aristocracy. (3) No massive class of peasants, comparable to Europe or Asia.
(112): key, a revolution not motivated by desire to cast off economic fetters--"The conclusion... amounts to the statement that the American Civil War was the last revolutionary offensive on the part of what one may legitimately call urban or bourgois capitalist democracy. Plantation slavery in the South... was not an economic fetter upon industrial capitalism. If anything, the reverse may have been true... But slavery was an obstacle to a political and social democracy." [but hang on, there is a point about technical inefficiency of slavery, owing to the low cost of labor, and whatever else--but let's watch this proceed]
(112): rightly passing over the American Revolution, which "did not result in any fundamental changes in the structure of society."
(114): to the question of whether there was some inherent contradiction between the industrial capitalism of the North and the plantation economy of the South, "we can answer.. with a provisional negative: there is no abstract general reason... Special historical circumstances... had to be present in order to prevent agreement between an agrarian society based on unfree labor and a rising industrial capitalism." [here he is making a comparison to Germany, where advanced industry got along well with highly repressive forms of rural labor (even if the Junker was not a slave-owner)]
(115): BUT--"if the conflict between the North and South had been compromised, the compromise would have been at the expense of subsequent democratic development in the United States..."
2. Three Forms of American Capitalist Growth (115-131)
(115): By 1860, there were three different forms of society in the US:
(116): "In Southern society, the plantation and slave owners were a very small minority. By 1850, there may have been less than 350,000 in a white population of six million... only a small minority owned most of the slaves... [7% owned 75%!]"
(117): "...the smaller farmers in the South by and large accepted the political authority of the big planters..."
(117-118): "Slavery was almost certainly not on the point of dying out for internal reasons... If slavery were to disappear from American society, armed force would be necessary..."
(118): Emancipation Proclamation (1863) only emancipated slaves in areas where the North had no jurisdiction!
(118): "These considerations point strongly toward the conclusion that slavery was economically profitable."
(119): Slavery shifting to the "low South", and West (not in the tobacco growing areas, after 1850). This shift was of course threatening the balance of slave states and free states (Missouri coupled with Maine)
(121): key--but even if running a plantation was a capitalist task, the Southern plantocracy was not bourgeois--not opposed to hereditary privilege, and not based in town life. "Here was a real difference and a real issue."
(123): key-- "It is almost impossible to speak of purely economic factors as the main causes behind the war, just as it is impossible to speak of the war as mainly a consequence of moral differences over slavery. The moral issues arose from economic difference. Slavery was the moral issue... Without the direct conflict of ideals..., the events leading up to the war... are totally incomprehensible" [but what do we make of the hollowness of the Emanicpation proclamation? the notion that Lincoln was willing to save the union, alone?]
(124): after the 1830s, the North became a manufacturing center--the American Economy as a whole was less depndent on a "single agricultural staple." Cotton ceased to dominate the Northeast.
(125): regardless, though, it certainly wasn't Northern business interests behind the war--they "were very far from bellicose advocates of a war of liberation or even war for the sake of the union."
(127): the conflict comes, then, over the supply of labor to Northern Capitalists--"Perhaps more than any other factor, these trends set the stage for armed conflict and aligned the combatants in such a way as to make possible a partial victory for human freedom."
(128-129): key--the West is an important part of this story--"From the 1830s onward, there was a gradual redirection of Western produce toward the Eastern seaboard" [made possible by transportation revolution]. As a result, he's arguing, "The outlook of the early individualist and small-scale capitalist, characteristic of the Northeast, spread to the dominant upper stratum of the Western farmers." This, he's suggesting, produced a fear of competition from slavery.Similarly, Southern planters see this new strata as a threat.
(130): this was the underpinning of the bargain that brought Lincoln to office, in 1860--"business was to support the farmers' demand for land, popular also in industrial working-class circles, in return for support for a higher tariff."
(131): interesting--"Here energies that in Europe would have gone into building trade unions... went into schemes providing a free farm for every workman whether he wanted it or not. The actual effect of the Westward trek... was to strengthen the forces of early competitive and individualist capitalism by spreading the interest in property." [this was more a myth than reality--speculators had their hands on it, and maybe some of the more wealthy, enterprising workers]
(131): "The link between Northern industry and the free farmers ruled out for the time being the classic reactionary solution to the problems of growing industrialism..." It also brought the country towards civil war.
3. Toward an Explanation of the Causes of the War (132-140)
(132-133): no obvious, 'mortal' conflict in economic terms, between the two systems
(134): important--"In addition to the conflict between free farmers in the West and the plantation system, about the strongest case one can make in strictly economic terms is that for the South secession was not an altogether unreasonable proposal mainly because the South did not need much that the North really had to offer."
(134): other than economic answers, historians have given three explanations
(140): alternative way of framing it: causes for unity were being undermined--"it is difficult to find a case in history where two different regions have developed economic systems based on diametrically opposite principles and yet remained under a central government that retained real authority in both areas... Cohesive forces appear to have been weak..."
(140-141): there was also, he's arguing, neither (1) a strong working-class in the North, nor (2) threat of foreign power which could bind North and South together under a common banner (Germany 1871, Japan 1868 are said to have been examples of this)
(141): in sum--"...[T]he ultimate causes of the war are to be found in the growth of different economic systems... Two further factors made compromise extremely difficult. The future of the West appeared uncertain in such a way as to make the distribution of power at the center uncertain... Secondly... the main forces of cohesion in American society... were still very weak."
4. The Revolutionary Impulse and its Failure (141-148)
(141): Unlike the French Revolution and, partly, unlike England, there was no real "radical upsurge" during the Civil War [here we need 'Black Reconstruction' and the others--the 'new' histories of the Civil War, even if the kind of argument Moore is making is still defensible (no artisans, sans-culottes, though?)]
(142): slave outbreaks had no political consequences? To the DuBois!
(141-145): Thaddeus Stevens and Radical Republicans provided the revolutionary impulse that did exist, intending to wage 'progressive capitalism's' war on the 'baron and serf' slavery (combination of workers, industrialists, and some railroad interests at its height, in 1865-1868). The South were to be treated as a 'conquered people', and their society reconstructed (land reform, land confiscation, 'forty acres and a mule').
(146-147): The 1867 reconstruction acts floundered, though, because "influential Northern sentiment was in no mood to tolerate an outright attack on property... The failure of land reform was a decisive defeat and removed the heart of the Radical program."
(147): In the absence of this radical reconstruction, there was a move towards a new form of labor--not wage labor (which didn't work, when attempted first), but sharecropping.
(148): this didn't enrich the planters, but it did have the effect of making the South more of a one-crop economy than before (as everyone was pressed to grow cash-crop)
(148): key--of course, 1876 marks the return to normalcy--as elite moderates make an alliance across battle lines (Hayes-Tilden), and occupational regime is finally dismantled. "...the classic conservative coalition was possible. So came Thermidor to liquidate the 'Second American Revolution'"
5. The Meaning of the War (149-155)
(149-152): War gave a massive boost to industrial capitalism through permitting policies that would never have been tolerated, without it (high tariffs, end of slavery, subsidies, national banking and currency system). At the same time, this was not why the war happened, again--industrial capitalism did not necessarily have to regard plantation slavery as an obstacle; slavery was an obstacle to the establishment of democracy, however (and democracy is not a prerequisite of industrial capitalism--Germany, Japan).
(152): "Slavery was a threat and an obstacle to a society that was indeed the heir of the Puritan, American, and French Revolutions."
(153): "Striking down slavery was a decisive step, an act at least as important as the striking down of absolute monarchy in the English Civil War and the French REvolution..."
PART THREE: THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS AND PROJECTIONS
Chapter Seven, The Democratic Route to Modern Society (413-432)
(413): again, three routes to the modern world
(415): Western feudalism predisposed societies toward the parliamentary path, because of certain institutions it contained--"immunity of certain groups from the ruler, conception of right of resistance to unjust authority." [come on, though, this is quite unconvincing--reading into the relationship of lord to vassal the modern concept of the contract?]
(416): Marx's concept of an oriental despotism that coordinates the irrigation system he finds unconvincing, though it can be a starting point.
(417): as regards the process of modernization, "one point is clear:" persistence of royal absolutism or a hulking bureaucracy is not favorable to democracy. At the same time, they were important to 'checking' the nobility.
(417): a decisive precondition, too, "has been the emergence of a rough balance between the crown and the nobility... The pluralist notion that an independent nobility is an essential ingredient in the growth of democracy has a firm basis in historical fact." [but what about France?]
(418): but the nobility does need a bourgeoisie--if it seeks its freedom outside of this alliance, democracy is not the result (Russia as an example of this)
(418): ok--strong agreement with the "Marxist thesis that a vigorous and independent class of town dwellers has been an indispensable element in the growth of parliamentary democracy."
(419): furthermore--"among the most decisive determinants influencing the course of subsequent political evolution are whether or not a landed aristocracy has turned to commercial agriculture, and if so, the form that this commercialization has taken."
(419): European feudalism had three main divisions of land. Japan showed resemblances to this arrangment; some similarities in India. China was not like this.
(421-422): a 'cultural' explanation is quite unconvincing, he's arguing. agreed.
(422): important--"Where it has been possible for landlords to make use of the coercive apparatus of the state in order to sit back and collect rents, a phenomenon found widely in Asia and to some extent in prerevolutionary France and Russia, there is clearly no incentive to turn to less repressive adaptations."
(423): there are therefore at least three major variables:
(424): and here's an odd, contingent point, that throws the comparisons into doubt, I feel -- one that opens into the question of the 'permanent revolution', though: "the English bourgeoisie from the 17th through much of the 19th century had a maximum material stake in human freedom because it was the first bourgeoisie and hand not yet brought its foreign and domestic rivals to their full powers."
(426): again, England and the US (for different reasons) were the only countries to escape the peasant question (he attributes the "instability of French democracy in the 20th century to this fact").
(426): the role of violence--the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and the American Civil War
(427): provided the distinctions between the cases remain clear, "it is necessary to group revolutions by the broad institutional results to which they contribute."
(428): KEY, Barrington Moore against the classic concept of the bourgeois-democratic revolution--"..this meaning of the bourgeois revolution is such a simplification as to be a caricature of what took place. To see that it is a caricature we need only recall
(430): once more, an executive summary of FIVE conditions (looking at these, through India):
(432): in Germany and Japan, you have capitalism in agriculture and industry, but no popular upheaval
(434-435): critical distinction, labor-repressive labor system vs. market labor system--the crux of his distinction between the English example (and the West of the US) and the Japanese, German, Russian, and even French cases is the form of surplus extraction. in the latter case, a reliance on a 'labor-repressive' system (rather than the labor market) to ensure an adequate labor force and adequate surplus ties the landed aristocracy to the State apparatus. [this is precisely where Skocpol pushes back--to her, the distinction between the two on the basis of their political implications is not admissable; it is rather another way of assessing the claim about the strength of the central bureaucracy]
(436): this seems deeply problematic--from the subordination to the House of Hohenzollern in the 1600's and 1700s, he's reading ideas of subordination to a central institution that he links to fascism! too ambitious, and he immediately acknowledges this. so where does it leave the claim?
(437-438): interesting, citing Marx and Engels on the German 1848--a bourgeoisie which was to weak to rule, and for the right to make money threw in its lot with the landed aristocracy and the royal bureaucracy (this will not, though, bring fascism in and of itself, just a conservative modernization from above--that only happens under the inability of these democracies to cope and to bring about fundamental structural changes). If this coalition is wanting, he adds, you move towards Russia and China.
(438): and what he's noting about fascism, let us remember, is the significant role of the landed elite (made possible by the failure of peasants to band together with urban strata)
(438-439): discussing the rationalization of the new order in Germany and Japan in the 1800s, which had already been done, in England and France, under royal absolutism.
(440): the State, obviously, was critical for incipient industrialization, and the taming of the labor force (but this is perhaps where the contrast with the other examples becomes blurred, a la Skocpol's claim?)
(441): raising the question of the autonomy of the State structure, which is posed, though unclearly, here--it must be able to "free itself from the influence of both extreme reactionary and popular or radical pressures in the society, something that can happen rather more easily than simplified versions of Marxism would allow us to believe."
(442): ultimately, though, these regimes are in a bind, because modernization will require changes in social structure, which they want to stabilize. the answer to this, he's arguing, is militarism.
(443): drawing parallels between McCarthyism and the situation in England, during and after the Napoleonic Wars.
(444): this is the real question--why did England, in its reactionary phase during the Napoleonic Wars, not launch itself onto the reactionary path of a Germany or Japan--the answer, critically, was the relative weakness of the repressive apparatus, in England. [one thinks Skocpol will pick up, right here; whereas for Moore this pushes the question back]
(445): he's playing with the 'fascist' possibility in the Russian case, but for me this is revealing how undefined the term itself has been, till this point.
(446): again, this needs lengthy interrogation--"...the Russian peasants were revolutionary and eventually the major force in exploding the old regime."
(446): Fascism and the Subcontinent
(447-8): Fascism, a provision definition--"Fascism is inconceivable without... the entrance of the masses onto the historical stage. Fascism was an attempt to make reaction and conservatism popular and plebian... [It] stressed not only the inevitability of hierarchy, discipline, and obedience, but also positied that they were values in their own right... Another feature was the stress on violence... Plebian anticapitalism thus appears as the feature that most clearly distinguishes 20th century fascism from its predecessors, the nineteenth-century conservative and semiparliamentary regimes..."
(448-449): Fascism and the peasantry--most successful in appeal to the peasant whose holding was relatively small and unprofitable for the particular area in which it existed" [the 'little fellow'--seduced by the romantic image of an idealized peasant. though, it goes without saying, this was only ever an ideological justification, rather than a policy pursued by the Nazis]
(450-451): example of Japan, Italy--same pseudoradical and propeasant features, though in the latter especially, this was entirely opportunistic and ideological (policy catered to big agriculture, after Mussolini took power)
Chapter Nine, The Peasants and Revolution (453-583)
(453): "The process of modernization begins with peasant revolutions that fail. It culminates during the 20th century with peasant revolutions that succeed." [catchy -- but the first part is not clear]
(453): recovering the peasant as a subject of history, after he/she had been dismissed
(453-45 ): we want to understand what triggers peasant revolutions, and why. at this stage, certain theories can be dismissed:
(459): the general hypothesis--it is society's with a central authority that are more vulnerable to rebellion; but where regulation is diffuse (i.e., the caste system), rebellion is less likely. [this is useful, because England and France seem to fit the model, too, though he doesn't acknowledge this in the same way...]
(459-460): if landed elites take up commercial agriculture, the more limited the rebellion
(462): discussing the context leading up to the Peasant War in Germany--enserfment was the response, there, to the rise of an export market in grain
(466): the aristocratic victory in the Peasant War, he's arguing, foreclosed the possibility of liberal democracy emerging (since, presumably, it consolidated a labor-repressive system of surplus extraction)
(467): English squire vs. German Junker
(477-478): "To sum up, the most important causes of peasant revolutions have been the absence of a commercial revolution in agriculture... and the concomitant survival of peasant social institutions into the modern era... Where the peasant community survives, as in Japan, it must remain closely linked to the dominant class in the countryside if revolution is to be avoided."
(479): "By themselves peasants have never been able to accomplish a revolution. On this point the Marxists are absolutely correct, wide of the mark though they are on other crucial aspects. The peasants have to have leaders from other classes..." [And anyway,] "peasant revolts have been repressed far more often than they have succeeded."
(481): noting that artisans and journeymen played a much more important role than Marxist theory might lead us to believe (this is Craig's intervention, as well, but there it is 1848 under scrutiny)
(481): deeply unsatisfactory account of the Russian Revolution
--
(1) there is a preliminary problem in the opposition of democracy to communist dictatorship, but we will keep this on the shelf for when the concepts are elucidated further.
(2) the question-begging character of the argument, which almost inheres in its Weberian set-up. we can always, it seems, push the chain of causality back. our task is to think through when this is useful, and when it is not. (example of impulse given by wool trade, in 1300s/1400s England--can we not ask to have this pushed back, further? or is it simply a contingent factor?)
(3) obvious problem in Russia's case was that the peasantry did not, in the slightest, 'lead' the revolution. it will be interesting to see how he justifies the claim that they constituted the decisive revolutionary impulse; it is, certainly, more defensible, but still requires some reconciling to the larger narrative of Bolshevik triumph.
(4) cleavages in the revolution; poorer elements doing dirty work. one can see why this might culminate in 1848, and 'permanent revolution'
(5) increasing lack of democracy in the aftermath of the civil war, for the peasantry (pg. 21)
(6): Stalin as condensation of the typical violence, rather than atypical, which is inherent in the path of modernization.
(7) the critique of Moore that the German and Japanese examples are disingenuous, because their fascist 'phases' were temporary, raises the more fundamental question, i think, of what in each example we can treat as a true 'characteristic', and what we treat as 'temporary'. this is, of course, fundamental--the balance of contingency and theory is the challenge of any good history.
preface and acknowledgments (xi-xix)
(xi): animated by skepticism of thesis that "industrialism was the main cause of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, because of the veyr obvious fact that Russia and China were overwhelmingly agrarian countries when the communists established themselves."
(xii-xiii): clarifying why these countries, in particular (and why not looking at small countries--there decisive influence comes from without).
(xiii): "The focus of interest is on innovation that has led to political power, not on the spread and reception of institutions that have been hammered out elsewhere..."
(xiii): very much a Weberian, ideal-type-ist, comparative approach, rather than a search for real abstractions. but perhaps the book itself is evidence that the difference between these two need not be so large?
(xiv): explorer is to native as sociologist is to historian!? a bit odd, this.
(xiv-xvii): KEY, central theses--"...one may discern three main historical routes from the preindustrial to the modern world.
- "the first of these leads through what I think deserve to be called bourgeois revolutions... A key feature in such revolutions is the development of a group in society with an independent economic base, which attacks obstacles to a democratic version of capitalism that have been inherited from the past. Though a great deal of the impetus has come from trading and manufacturing classes in the cities, that is very far from the whole story. The allies this bourgeois impetus has found, the enemies it has encountered, vary sharply from case to case. The landed upper classes... were either an important part of this capitalist and democratic tide, as in England, or if they opposed it, they were swept aside in the convulsions of revolution or civil war. The same thing may be said about the peasants. Either the main thrust of their political efforts coincided with that toward capitalism and political democracy, or else it was negligible. And it was negligible either because capitalist advance destroyed peasant society or because this advance began in a new country, such as the United States, without a real peasantry."
- "...the second route has also been capitalist, but culminated during the twentieth century in fascism... I shall call this the capitalist and reactionary form. It amounts to a form of revolution from above. In these countries the bourgeois impulse was much weaker. If it took a revolutionary form at all, the revolution was defeated. Afterward sections of a relatively weak commercial and industrial class relied on dissident elemetns in the older and still dominant ruling classes.. to put through the political and economic changes required for a modern industrial society... Industrial development may proceed rapidly under such auspices. But the outcome, after a brief and unstable period of democracy, has been fascism."
- "The third route is of course communism, as exemplified in Russia, and in China. The great agrarian bureaucracies of these countries served to inhibit the commercial and later industrial impulses even more than in the preceding instances. The results were twofold. In the first place these urban classes were too weak to constitute even a junior partner in the form of modernization taken by Germany and Japan... And in the absence of more than the most feeble steps toward modernization a huge peasantry remained. This stratum, subject to new strains and stresses as the modern world encroached upon it, provided the main destructive revolutionary force that overthrew the old order..."
- "Finally, in India we may perceive still a fourth general pattern that accounts for the weak impulse toward modernization. In that country there has been neither a capitalist revolution from above or below, nor a peasant one leading to communism. Likewise the impulse toward modernization has been very weak. On the other hand, at least som eof the historical prerequisites of Western democracy did put in an appearance... [T]his case stands somewhat appart from any theoretical scheme that it seems possible to construct for the others..."
(xvii): you have some elements of reaction in the progressive examples, and vice-versa--thus, we have empircally-based general categories that transcend particular cases. moreover, there is invariably an element of contingency in the argument.
PART ONE: REVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF CAPITALIST DEMCORACY
Chapter One, England and the Contributions of Violence to Gradualism (3-40)
I. Aristocratic Impulses behind the Transition to Capitalism in the Countryside (3-13)
(3): "The focus in this chapter will be on the particular and very significant part that the classes in the countryside played in the transformation to industrialism."
(4-5): from the 1300s, he's arguing, we see the growing importance of commerce in countryside and in towns--and thus, the "dismounting of feudalism and its replacement by England's relatively weak version of royal absolutism."
(5): increasing importance of the wool trade in the Late Middle Ages (1300-1500), oriented to markets in the Italy and the Low Countries
(5): and the Black Death in 1348-1349 and demographic collapse, which gave an impetus to peasant rebellion.
(5): this chapter focused on the upper classes; by the late 1300s and the 1400s, especially, feudalism was in decline--it had "become parasitic, deriving its strength from the maneuvers of powerful magnates and the countermoves of the monarch."
(5-6): The Wars of the Roses (1455-1485) marks this process, the weakening of the landed aristrocracy and the emergence of the Tudor dynasty.
(6): Henry VIII, the second of the Tudor Kings, breaks with the Catholic Church without
supporting the Protestant Reformation--confiscation of the onasteries, etc.
(6-7): important, in sum: (1) ROYAL PEACE, AND (2) WOOL, combining in a specific way--"Combined with the continuing stimulus of the wool trade, the Tudor peace generated a powerful stimulus to the growth of a commercial and even capitalist outlook in the countryside." [quoting Tawney--the Tudor victory had "made the command of money more important than the command of men... [This change]... marks the transition from the medieval conception of land as the basis of political functions... to the modern view of it as an income-yielding investment."--BUT is this sufficient? hypothetically it could have happened at any time, no? isn't it question-begging?]. "The key to the English situation is that commercial life in both town and countryside during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries grew up mainly though not entirely in opposition to the crown."
(8-9): thus, economic individualism was not simply the preserve of Adam Smith and the bourgeoisie; enclosing landlords, too, "provided at least as important a breeding ground..."
(9): enclosures, key--"propelled by the prospect of profits to be made either in selling wool or by leasing their lands to those who did and thereby increasing their rents, the lords of the manors found a variety of legal and semilegal methods to deprive the peasants of their rights of cultivation in the open fields..."
(10): key--"...a change from the feudal seigneur who was at worst a lawless tyrant to an overlord who was closer to an acute man of business exploiting the material resources of the estate with an eye to profit and efficiency..." These habits existed, too, in the yeomen--the upper ranks of the peasantry, and the chief force behind small enclosures; analogy drawn to kulaks.
(13): important, comparative point--"Thus in England the chief carriers of what was eventually to be a modern and secular society were at this time fundamentally men of commerce in both the countryside and the towns. In sharp contrast with what happened in France, these men pushed forward mainly on their own instead of under the umbrella of paternalist royal patronage."
(14): the Crown, Charles I, had started to antagonize commercially-minded elements in the countryside and the town (unlike in France, power had always been delegated to the gentry in the countryside; so the Crown's meddling was impositional). this was, of course, setting the scene for the First Civil War.
II. Agrarian Aspects of the Civil War (14-19)
(14-16): summary of these trends: "in the light of this general background there would seem to be little reason to question the thesis that commercially minded elements among the landed upper classes, and to a lesser extent among the yeomen, were among the main forces opposing the King and royal attempts to preserve the old order, and therefore an important cause, though not the only one, that produced the Civil War... From the gentry as a class, then, came the main representatives of a decisive historical trend modifying the structure of English rural society... Thus under the impact of commerce and some industry, English society was breaking apart from the top downward in a way that allowed pockets of radical discontent produced by the same forces to burst temporarily in the limelight [this has interesting implications--more radical elements doing the dominant oppositional classes' handiwork; and for 1848, since it sheds light on potential cleavages in the alliance].. In this process, as the old order breaks up, sections of society that had been losing out due to long-run economic trends come to the surface and do much of the violent 'dirty work.' of destroying the ancien regime..."
(16): act of beheading the King, for example, was a popular demand rooted in the desires of 'urban journeymen and peasants' (in the Army); a preponderance of the poorer gentry amongst the regicides.
(17): modernizers and traditionalists, too, not always opposed--certainly, for example, united in their fears of the 'lower orders.' even amongst the gentry, of course--"One would scarcely expect men of substance to have an easy conscience about kicking over two of the main props, king and church, that supported the social order." [again, the ghosts of 1848]
(17): important, certainly--"the policy of the leaders of the rebellion was clear and straightforward. They opposed interference with the landlord's property rights on the part of the king and on the part of radicals from the lower orders" [abolition of the Star Chamber, 'the main royal weapon against enclosing landlords' -- the peasants, clearly, are being marginalized]
(18-19): important--"In economics the Civil War did not produce any masive transfer of landed property from one group or class to another..." but it was, certainly, a revolution--"its revolutionary consequences were deep and lasting in the area of law and social relationships. with the abolition of the Star Chamber, the peasants lost their chief protection against the advance of enclosures..."
(19): this is a critical point (leveled against the critics of those who label the Civil War a bourgeois revolution)--the fact that landed elites were still in command of the state apparatus after this, and even after 1832, does not mean this wasn't a bourgeois revolution. precisely because, as we have seen, of the increasing commercialization of countryside... "The aristocratic order survived, but in a new shape, for money more than birth was now its basis. And Parliament itself became the instrument of landed capitalists... "
(20): in sum--"while the original impulse toward capitalism may have come from the towns far back in the Middle Ages, it proceeded on the land as strongly as in the cities... both the capitalist principle are directly antithetical to... : divinely supported authority in politics, and production for use rather than for individual profit in economics. Without the triumph of these principles in the seventeenth century it is hard to imagine how English society could have modernized peacefully--to the extent that it actually was peaceful--during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries..."
III. Enclosures and the Destruction of the Peasantry (20-28)
(20): enclosures after the Civil War as legal, and historically-significant form of violence (this was not the landed aristrocracy against independent peasants; but landed capitalists against peasantry). either way, moreover, "the enclosures were the final blow that destroyed the whole structure of English peasant society embodied in the traditional village."
(21-22): speaking, here, of a decline in the 'openness' of local government to the peasantry, after the Glorious Revolution [we must ask, then, about the general thesis of the book--increasing democratization? clearly this is presented as a blip, but we can't leave its significance under-interrogated...].
(22): the anti-democratic writ of Parliament, as property triumphed over the peasantry in matters of enclosure.
(22): key--"The outcome of the Civil War itself, in sharp contrast to that of the French Revolution, was to strengthen greatly the position of the landed upper classes."
(23): 1688 to the end of the Napoleonic Wars (ca. 1815) as the "golden age of the great landed estate" (some technological improvement, in fertilizer, new crops, crop rotation; but also the simple efficiency of economies of scale)
(24): the rural capitalist, he's noting, is fairly divided into two:
- the big landowner (who did no work himself, though looked at the figures--his contribution was legal and political, arranging the enclosures);
- and the large tenant farmer (whose contribution was economic, the real pioneers of agricultural development).
(26): "the intrusion of commerce into a peasant community generally sets in motion a tendency toward the concentration of land in fewer hands..."
(26-28): key, enclosures--graphic, moving account of the disintegration and suffering of the peasant communities (some stayed on land to be rural laborers; others migrated to the cities in search of work)--"it seems quite clear that when the common fields disappeared and a new economic system began to win out in the countryside, the old peasant community finally gave way and disintegrated... the enclosures greatly strengthened the larger landlords and broke the back of the English peasantry, eliminating them as a factor from British political life."
(29): amen--"That the violence and coercion which produced these resluts took place over a long space of time... must not blind us to the fact that it was massive violence exercised by the upper classes against the lower." [this is critical, as it contains a larger point about modernization and its relationship to violence--reminds me of Chris Harman's comment on Stalin; all the violence of modernization condensed into a few, exceptionally brutal years]
IV. Aristocratic Rule for Triumphant Capitalism (29-39)
(29): when considering the 'peaceful transition' to parliamentary democracy in the 19th century, we would do well to remember the violence that scarred the 17th and 18th centuries.
(29): consequence one--"perhaps the most important legacy of a violent past was the strengthening of Parliament at the expense of the King" [bequeathed an institutional mechanism for settling conflicts of interest]
(30): "the strong commercial tone in the life of the landed upper classes... also meant that there was no very solid phalanx of aristrocratic opposition to the advance of industry itself... the most influential sector of the landed upper classes acted as a political advance guard for commercial and industrial capitalism."
(30): consequence two--"the other main consequence was the destruction of the peasantry. It meant that modernization could proceed in England without the huge reservoir of conservative and reacitonary forces that existed at certain points in Germany and Japan... And it also of couse meant that the possibility of peasant revolutions in the Russian and Chinese manner were taken off the historical agenda."
(31): the French Revolution induced a period of reaction, in England--only to be lifted with the Battle of Waterloo.
(32): what was key re: the rise of the commercial classes in the 19th century, in England, was that "the road had been smoothed for them... under the leadership of the landed classes." [contrast with Prussia, where the State had to establish a uniform legal system, currency, etc.] "... The absence of a strong monarchy resting on an army and a bureaucracy, as in Prussia, made easier the development of parliamentary democracy... "
(32): important--"In the meantime the landed gentry and those above it in the social scale retained a firm hold on the levers of political power... [With reform bill of 1832, and the striking down of Corn Laws in 1846, he writes] The landed upper classes suffered no disaster, but they learned the limits of their power."
(34): key--comparatively mild treatment of the Chartist movement (1838-1848), down to three factors [in Germany, on the other hand, the bourgeoisie leaned on the aristocracy and the State, to protect them against popular discontent]
- strong current of opinion in favor of doing something to alleviate mass distress--devotion to idea of libery [possibly a question-begging explanation, but ok]
- lack of a strong repressive apparatus
- a favorable economic turn and poor-friendly legislation took the steam out of the movement
(35): "Thus the theme of diehard opposition to the march of democracy is a rare and minor current among the landed aristocracy of England in the nineteenth century. One cannot find in English history the counterpart to... German conservatives ['take ten men and shoot the Reichstag!']"
(35): very KEY; reason for lack of conservativsm/reaction--"One of the reasons why such a scene seems incongrous in England... is that, unlike the Junkers, the gentry and nobility of England had no great need to rely on political levers to prop up a tottering economic position..."
(36): "In the nineteenth century, as in earlier periods, the lines between wealthy nobility, gentry, and the upper reaches of business and the professions were blurred and wavering."
(37): key-- "In nineteenth century Prussia the members of the bourgeoisie who became connected with the aristocracy generally absorbed the latter's habits and outlook. Rather the opposite relationship held in England." [this is his answer--and see below--to the puzzle that their seemed to be more osmosis between the two classes in Prussia, than in England]
(37): important, larger point--"Men who hold power do not necessarily exercise it simply in the interests of the class from which they arise, especially in changing situations."
(38): key, divergent paths of England and Germany in late-19th Century--an agricultural depression in the aftermath of the Civil War (the availability of American grain, by steamship), "seriously commenced to erode the economic base of the landed upper strata." Roughly the same thing happened in Germany. BUT: there, Junkers used the State to preserve their position, forming a "united agricultural front" with peasant proprietors and even industrial interests around a program of imperialism and reaction; in England, on the other hand, "...agriculture was allowed to commit decorous suicide... The economic base had shifted to industry and trade."
(39): in sum--"...what factors stand out as responsible for England's progress toward demcoracy? Those inherited from a violent past have already been mentioned: (1) a relatively strong and independent Parliament; (2) a commercial and industrial interest with its own economic base; (3) no serious peasant problem." Other factors are specific to the 19th century... the landed upper classes absorbed new elements into their ranks... it was possible because the economic position of the governing classes eroded slowly... [furthermore], there is no reason to deny the historical significance of moderate and intelligent statesmen."
Chapter Two, Evolution and Revolution in France (40-110)
1. Contrasts with England and their Origins (40-45)
(40): key, enormous differences with England, he's noting at the outset--
- whereas in England you had an independent landed gentry, in France they were appendages of the Crown;
- whereas in England they adopt commercial agriculture, in France they live off what they can extract from the peasantry;
- whereas in England they respond to the rise of the manufacturing classes by becoming capitalists themselves, in France they are destroyed by the Revolution.
- whereas in England the peasant problem disappeared, in France it persisted and was consolidated gradually both before and after the Revolution.
(41): "the French nobility lived very largely from dues collected in kind or in cash from their peasants." [features emerge by the late 1300s and during the 1400s]
(41): they were located in law, and dependent on the peasantry--these two facts "were to distinguish the French nobility from the English gentry for the remainder of its history."
(41-42): "at quite an early date the peasantry had managed to escape from personal servitude...by the time of the Revolution," de facto property rights. [this is not explained, at all]
(42): in fact, precisely because they lacked an independent economic base (a la the gentry in England), the feudals also slowly lost out to the Crown (and the growing Royal Bureaucracy). this was encapsulated in the "long reign of Louis XIV (1643-1715).
(42-43): even if this fact let urban wealth intrude into rural areas, the basic form of wealth accumulation in the countryside remained the collection of wealth (not production for market)
(43): key--"France did not undergo an extensive enclosure movement. By and large, the large proprietor was interested in preserving peasant tenures because they provided the basis of his existence. Only in the latter part of the 1700s did the situation begin to change."
(43-44): important--in the course of the 1500s and afterward, "the king consolidated and extended his authority..." at the expense of the nobility [he deprived them of judicial functions, raised soldiers and taxes on their lands, intervened in their affairs, and forced them to submit to his Parlements]. This, again, culminated in Louis XIV. King had to ensure loyalty of nobility, though, which he did through the Church and War.
2. The Noble Response to Commercial Agriculture (45-56)
(45): until the opening decade of the 1700s, there certainly was a weak impluse toward commercial agriculture in France [limited markets, mostly in wheat--problem was to feed those who didn't grow, which was a small problem].
(49-50): crux of the matter, it seems: [after a lengthy discussion of the wine trade,] "The monarchy wanted a prosperious nobility as a decorative adjunct to the crown... But the crown did not want the nobility to establish an independent economic base that could enable it to challenge royal power." [I'm worried we're verging on a tautology here--no independent economic base is supposed to explain strength of monarchy; so how can strength of monarchy also explain no independent economic base?]
(50): "...successful commercial farming for the high aristocrat involved a temporary escape from French society." [mention of Haiti]
(51): "All these facts indicate that the cultural and legal barriers were becoming much less important during the 18th century." [in other words, this is not where we want to look if we want to understand the weakness of commercial agriculture]
(52): yes, a critique of Weber that parallels the charges leveled by Ellen Meiskins Wood--"Those who follow Weber, especially those who speak in terms of some abstract drive for achievement, neglect the importance of the social and political context in which such changes manifest themselves. The problem is not merely whether French rural nobles tried to run their estates efficiently... The key question is whether not in so doing they altered the structure of rural society in a way similar to what took place in those parts of England where the enclosure movement was strongest. The answer to this question is simple and decisive. They did not. Those nobles who represented the leading edge of commercial advance in the French countryside tried to extract more from the peasants."
(53): discussing Toulouse, where despite production for market, there was no real technical innovation--"the nobles used the prevailing social and political framework to squeeze more grain out of the peasants and sell it." [again, worried about a tautology--isn't the lack of an economic base meant to explain that social and political framework?]
(53-54): explaining the land tenure situation, as it differs from England; but I must say, I don't fully follow...
(55): in sum, though: "In contrast to England, commercial influences as they penetrated into the French countryside did not undermine and destroy the feudal framework. If anything they infused new life into old arrangements, though in a way that ultimately had disastrous consequences for the nobility... Essentially what the landed proprietor possessed were certain property rights, whose essence were claims, enforceable through the repressive apparatus of the state, to a specific share of the economic surplus..." [if run like this, the tautology fades, I think--but do need to think through this, some more]
(56): "In England the fusion between countryside and town was in the main directed against the crown... In France the fusion took place through the crown with very different political and social consequences."
3. Class Relationships under Royal Absolutism (56-62)
(56-57): in the 1600s, the French bourgeoisie was not the spearhead of modernization; instead, "it was heavily dependent on royal favor, subject to royal regulation..." [like Tokugawa Japan or even Akbar's India]
(57): thus, under Louis XIV, "the impulse toward establishing the bases of a modern society... came much more from the royal bureaucracy than from the bourgeoisie. That, however, was scarcely the deliberate intention of the crown. At the same time its real function... was to maintain order, supervise the economy..."
(57-58): like other agrarian bureaucracies, it was confronted with a limited source of surplus, like elsewhere (partial solution was to sell positions in the bureaucracy)
(58): regardless--"French society of the 1600s and 1700s presents us with an illuminating mixture of competing trades that scholars sometimes regard as characteristically Western and characteristically Oriental: feudalism, bourgeoisie, and bureaucracy." [an admirable universalism]
(59): "...the sale of offices was at the root of the king's independence of the aristocracy, of any effective control by a parliament. It was the key prop of royal absolutism. At the same time the practice undermined the king's independence [since it made office a piece of property]"
(60): key--had the effect of steeling the bourgeoisie to stand with the State against feudal elements; but also of converting bourgeois elements into feudals. "...The system diverted energy and resources from commerce and industry."
(62-63): why didn't such a pervasive monarchy, then, pursue the path of a Germany or Japan--a "conservative path to modernization"? he isn't providing the answer now, only suggesting that "agrarian problems played a very important part in bringing about this result."
4. The Aristocratic Offensive and the Collapse of Absolutism (62-70)
(63): the last half of the 1700s saw "a penetration of commercial and capitalist practices into agriculture." [a brief enclosure movement]
(64): crucial: the method of surplus-extraction (and the political apparatus that corresponded), in France, was simply different than in England [in France, feudal; in England, commercial]
(64): interesting that, right here at one of his most concretely Marxist moments, he is pushing back against caricatured Marx--"...any notion that the economic substructure somehow automatically determines the political superstructure, can lead one astray. The political mechanism was decisive..." [as was, then, the effort to smash it]
(64): key--enclosure movement in France more of a government move than in England, where it was indigenously actualized by gentry. "Hence capitalism was seeping into the French countryside... in the form of feudalism through the seignoral reaction, in the form of an attack on feudalism, and... through the officially sponsored enclosure movement. More rapid penetration had to await the measures of the Revolution..." [critical--all of this, though [increased feudal dues, enclosures], had the critical effect of turning the peasantry against the established order--this encouraged the unity of the Third Estate]
(65): this negative response, of course, is why "the most prosperous peasantry in Europe could become a major force for revolution."
(66-67): it was not that the nobility was closed (he's providing examples of bourgeoisie incorporation), that explains the Revolution.
(67): important--it is the case that in England this fusion took place against the king. In France, it was the monarchy that turned commoners into landed aristrocrats.
(67-68): concomitant to all this, there was expansive growth in commerce, and trade [embodied in proposals made by Turgot, which had the effect of antagonizing the sans-culottes by liberalizing grain market]
(69): KEY--"As it came to France, capitalism often wore a feudal mask... The demand for property rights within the prevailing system was very strong, as the sale of offices and the seigneurial reaction demonstrates. Capitalism... permeated the ancien regime.. Partly for this reason the radical thrust behind the Revolution, based on the sans-culottes and sections of the peasantry, was explicitly and strongly anticapitalist."
5. The Peasants' Relationship to Radicalism during the Revolution (70-92)
(70): "only when popular grievances could coalesce even briefly with those of more powerful groups would they help to bring the monarchy crashing down..."
(70-71): important--in the absence of commercial revolution (or manorial reaction), "many French peasants had become in effect small property owners." [though, he notes that, in some places families without land may have been anywhere from 20 to 70% of the rural population."]
(71): two major demands, amongst poorer peasantry
- land
- preservation of specific village customs that served their interests
(73): for the upper ranks of the peasantry, on the other hand, discontent was a product of a fact of "possessing the land without really owning it... Mainly wanted to eliminate the arbitrary aspects of the feudal system that had been increasing in the last years..."
(74-75): the impulses giving rise to the Revolution in this context: decreasing duties on British manufactures, natural disasters, reactionary pressure of stratum of nobility [others were quite willing to compromise], etc.
(75): summer of 1789, then, sees a series of peasant uprisings
(75-76): important, no bourgeoisie on the barricades--"full-scale violence [actually] frightened the bourgeoisie, who retreated into the arms of the nobility"
(76): with the storming of the Bastille, major traits of the radical elements in the French Revolution
- the fear of counterrevolutionary plots
- defensive uprising amongst the masses, mainly artisans and journeymen
- will to punish and destroy enemies
- storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789
- storming of the Tuileries on August 10, 1792, which led to the execution of Louis XIV
- uprising on May 31, 1793, which led to the reign of terror and Robespierre.
(80): 25th of August 1792, feudal dues disappeared; 28th of August, villagers receive back commond lands
(81-83): important, peasant radicalism, in the form of 'loi agrarire': equal distribution of lands, making the Commune uncomfortable, it seems (splitting the ranks) [March 1793 the death penalty decreed for preaching it!] -- all this, he's saying, a response to the intrusion of capitalism into the countryside.
(84): yes, the spectre of 1848, again--"...the bourgeois revolution needed the help of the radical revolution, as we have seen with the events of July 14 and August 4..." [of course!] This, even though "the two were fundamentally incompatible due to incompatible attitudes toward property..."
(86): critical, effects and context of the third uprising--"...both the rural and the urban radicals shared a common hostility at this point to the rich who were profiting from the Revolution and to the unfettered workings of the market... To sum up the meaning of the uprising..., the bourgeois revolution had been pushed sharply to the left under radical pressure and forced to shed the moderates (arrest of 32 Girondins), while the urban radicals and the peasants were still marching together..." This was the 'heroic' and 'desperate' time of the Revolution, led by the Committee of Public Safety (my understanding--you had the Constituent Assembly until 1791; the Legislative Assembly until the second uprising; and the Commune, until now)
(88): key, running into trouble--for the wealthier peasants -- as producers -- the system of price controls implemented in the third phase was oppressive, and they evaded it (even though the high, unregulated price of wheat had enabled the uprising, in the first place). Thus, the radical phase of the Revolution was "in many places an outright attack on the substantial peasants... worst of all, townsmen... were its main agents in the countryside..."
(89): in sum--"The obvious and decisive fact of the radical phase is this: the urban sans-culottes had been able to push the Jacobin leaders into policies that saved the Revolution but at the cost of turning the peasants against it... To the extent that these conditions prevailed elsewhere in the countryside [high price of bread relative to wages], they alienated radical support from the Revolution and dried up the sources of rural radicalism"
(90): important--Ventose decrees, Robespierre and Saint-Just realizing that they needed to make concessions to the peasantry. Alas, "it would have been very difficult to meet the expressed desires of the poorer peasants without putting a spike into the wheels of the bourgeois and capitalist revolution... Thus during the radical phase the needs and aspirations of the urban sans-culottes finally came into direct and open conflict with all sections of the countryside..."
(91): key--against the Marxist argument that the bourgeois revolution could not follow the radical revolution this far, Moore attributes the failure of the radical revolution to the tension that his policies brought them into conflict with the countryside--and in a way that aggravated the misery of the city-dweller.
(92): "No matter how radical the city was, it could do nothing without the help of the peasants. The radical revolution was over." [I need to sharpen my understanding of what exactly led to this fall-out; what I have culled from this chapter seems a bit confused...]
6. Peasants against the Revolution: The Vendee (92-101)
(92): from 1793 to 1796--the "only major peasant uprising against what is loosely called the Left" (calling for restoration of King, what have you)
(92): key, there is actually no paradox here: "the main thrust of the counterrevolution was anticapitalist against the merchants and manufacturers in nearby towns and those scattered through the heart of the Vendee itself... Resembles the great peasant upheavals that were the main popular force breaking apart the old regimes of Russia and China before the communist victories..."
(93): importantly--"The counterrevolutionary area was one where commercial agriculture had not penetrated..." But this, he is suggesting, is not an answer. Instead, something more specific is needed. His best guess is not the lightness of burden, nor the myth that these peasants lived amongst the nobility, but that "the leading peasants in the areas that were to become counterrevolutionary already had some of the major benefits of private property (because these were areas where enclosures had taken place)." Led to a "stubborn individualism--"in many instances a man would not see his neighbors for long stretches of time. "...What might be expected to happen if the Revolution failed to abolish rents and took more taxes out of the peasants than had been the case under the old order? What if the Revolution promoted a substantial bourgeois land grab? Finally, what if the Revolution came as a wholesale attack on peasant society? These are things that did happen."
(98): key, then--"What mattered most in the specific conditions of the Vendee was the attack on the clergy because it was part of a general offensive: economic, political, and social at once." So things like the reorganization of local government, the seizure of church properties, etc. (which had led to a very large bourgeois land grab).
7. Social Consequences of Revolutionary Terror (101-108)
(101): writing, now, against the impulse to regard the Terror "as a daemonic outburst of mob violence..." Certainly, there was much that was indiscriminate (the 1792 September Massacres, for example).
(103-104): roughly 30,000 to 40,000 victims of revolutionary repression--"Yet in assessing it, one has to keep in mind the repressive aspects of the social order to which it was a response. The prevailing order of society always grinds out its tragic toll of unnecessary death year after year... [T]o dwell on the horrors of revolutionary violence while forgetting that of normal time is merely partisan hypocrisy." [and this is just as true in China, India, etc.]
(104): reminder that the radical arm of the revolution was a negative, defensive reaction to the bourgeois revolution ("the steady spread of capitalist figures..." / the free market in grain, etc.).
(105): KEY POINT--you could not have had a peaceful transition, had the conservatives smothered the Revolution successfully, as you 'did' in England after the civil war. "The underlying social structure of France was fundamentally different and hence ruled out the kind of peaceful transition... that England experienced in the 1700s and 1800s."
(105): key--addressing himself to the question of whether it was, or was not, a bourgeois revolution: "To deny that the predominant thrust and chief consequences of the Revolution were bourgeois and capitalist is to engage in a trivial quibble... [Certainly, he agrees that the bourgeoisie were not protagonists, themselves, BUT] That the ultimate outcome of all the forces at work was a victory for an economic system of private property and a political system based upon equality before the law... are truths undeniable even if they are familiar." [see also pg. 109]
(105): Bourbon Restoration recovered half of the property lost during the Revolution!
(106): key, and in sum--"...the destruction of the political power of the landed aristocracy constitutes the most significant process at work in the course of French modernization. Ultimately it is largely... traceable to the response of the French nobility to the problems of agriculture in an increasingly commercial society. Royal absolutism was able to tame and control an aristocracy that had difficulty in establishing an independent economic base." [this eliminated, he's adding, the threat of right-wing authoritarianism]
(107): key--it also created "small-peasant property," with ambiguous consequences--"the experience of requisitioning, the attempt to place ceilings on the prices of grain, and the encouragement given to small holders and agricultural workers during the radical phase... turned the upper stratum of the peasants decisively against the Republic." [there is more, certainly, that needs to be said about the divisions in the peasantry; why are we so concerned, after all, with the upper peasantry, given their limited numbers?]
(107-108): some provisional reflections on revolutionary and reactionary tendencies of peasantry, but nothing conclusive beyond these few generalizations about the 19th and 20th centuries in France
- influential peasants are not concerned about democracy; they want guarantees of property and social position
- continued advance of capitalism threatens small peasant property
(108): again, a summary--Revolution was imperative, precisely because the ancien regime stood in the way of democratization; this was not the case in England, where you had a landed elite that were quite bourgeois ("part of democracy's entering wedge")
(110): in tracing the end of the French revolution, he speaks about how the Jacobin need to get food to urban areas and revolutionary armies broke the alliance with the richer peasants. but i am confused, perhaps because of poor comprehension: why did the poor peasants leave this alliance? or, differently put, why was the counterrevolution successful--did it have the backing of poor peasants?
Chapter Three, The American Civil War: The Last Capitalist Revolution (111-158)
1. Plantation and Factory: An Inevitable Conflict? (111-114)
(111): In America, of course, no well-entrenched agrarian society, of either feudal or bureaucratic forms. (1) Rather, "commercial agriculture" was important from the very beginning. (2) No political struggles, then, between a monarch and a landed aristocracy. (3) No massive class of peasants, comparable to Europe or Asia.
(112): key, a revolution not motivated by desire to cast off economic fetters--"The conclusion... amounts to the statement that the American Civil War was the last revolutionary offensive on the part of what one may legitimately call urban or bourgois capitalist democracy. Plantation slavery in the South... was not an economic fetter upon industrial capitalism. If anything, the reverse may have been true... But slavery was an obstacle to a political and social democracy." [but hang on, there is a point about technical inefficiency of slavery, owing to the low cost of labor, and whatever else--but let's watch this proceed]
(112): rightly passing over the American Revolution, which "did not result in any fundamental changes in the structure of society."
(114): to the question of whether there was some inherent contradiction between the industrial capitalism of the North and the plantation economy of the South, "we can answer.. with a provisional negative: there is no abstract general reason... Special historical circumstances... had to be present in order to prevent agreement between an agrarian society based on unfree labor and a rising industrial capitalism." [here he is making a comparison to Germany, where advanced industry got along well with highly repressive forms of rural labor (even if the Junker was not a slave-owner)]
(115): BUT--"if the conflict between the North and South had been compromised, the compromise would have been at the expense of subsequent democratic development in the United States..."
2. Three Forms of American Capitalist Growth (115-131)
(115): By 1860, there were three different forms of society in the US:
- cotton-growing South;
- the West, a land of free-farmers;
- and the rapidly industrializing Northeast.
(116): "In Southern society, the plantation and slave owners were a very small minority. By 1850, there may have been less than 350,000 in a white population of six million... only a small minority owned most of the slaves... [7% owned 75%!]"
(117): "...the smaller farmers in the South by and large accepted the political authority of the big planters..."
(117-118): "Slavery was almost certainly not on the point of dying out for internal reasons... If slavery were to disappear from American society, armed force would be necessary..."
(118): Emancipation Proclamation (1863) only emancipated slaves in areas where the North had no jurisdiction!
(118): "These considerations point strongly toward the conclusion that slavery was economically profitable."
(119): Slavery shifting to the "low South", and West (not in the tobacco growing areas, after 1850). This shift was of course threatening the balance of slave states and free states (Missouri coupled with Maine)
(121): key--but even if running a plantation was a capitalist task, the Southern plantocracy was not bourgeois--not opposed to hereditary privilege, and not based in town life. "Here was a real difference and a real issue."
(123): key-- "It is almost impossible to speak of purely economic factors as the main causes behind the war, just as it is impossible to speak of the war as mainly a consequence of moral differences over slavery. The moral issues arose from economic difference. Slavery was the moral issue... Without the direct conflict of ideals..., the events leading up to the war... are totally incomprehensible" [but what do we make of the hollowness of the Emanicpation proclamation? the notion that Lincoln was willing to save the union, alone?]
(124): after the 1830s, the North became a manufacturing center--the American Economy as a whole was less depndent on a "single agricultural staple." Cotton ceased to dominate the Northeast.
(125): regardless, though, it certainly wasn't Northern business interests behind the war--they "were very far from bellicose advocates of a war of liberation or even war for the sake of the union."
(127): the conflict comes, then, over the supply of labor to Northern Capitalists--"Perhaps more than any other factor, these trends set the stage for armed conflict and aligned the combatants in such a way as to make possible a partial victory for human freedom."
(128-129): key--the West is an important part of this story--"From the 1830s onward, there was a gradual redirection of Western produce toward the Eastern seaboard" [made possible by transportation revolution]. As a result, he's arguing, "The outlook of the early individualist and small-scale capitalist, characteristic of the Northeast, spread to the dominant upper stratum of the Western farmers." This, he's suggesting, produced a fear of competition from slavery.Similarly, Southern planters see this new strata as a threat.
(130): this was the underpinning of the bargain that brought Lincoln to office, in 1860--"business was to support the farmers' demand for land, popular also in industrial working-class circles, in return for support for a higher tariff."
(131): interesting--"Here energies that in Europe would have gone into building trade unions... went into schemes providing a free farm for every workman whether he wanted it or not. The actual effect of the Westward trek... was to strengthen the forces of early competitive and individualist capitalism by spreading the interest in property." [this was more a myth than reality--speculators had their hands on it, and maybe some of the more wealthy, enterprising workers]
(131): "The link between Northern industry and the free farmers ruled out for the time being the classic reactionary solution to the problems of growing industrialism..." It also brought the country towards civil war.
3. Toward an Explanation of the Causes of the War (132-140)
(132-133): no obvious, 'mortal' conflict in economic terms, between the two systems
(134): important--"In addition to the conflict between free farmers in the West and the plantation system, about the strongest case one can make in strictly economic terms is that for the South secession was not an altogether unreasonable proposal mainly because the South did not need much that the North really had to offer."
(134): other than economic answers, historians have given three explanations
- a moral conflict over slavery--but this elides the fact that North never took a radical position on slavery
- the blunering of politicians--but this is unhhelpful
- push question back to why political machinery for consensus broke down
(140): alternative way of framing it: causes for unity were being undermined--"it is difficult to find a case in history where two different regions have developed economic systems based on diametrically opposite principles and yet remained under a central government that retained real authority in both areas... Cohesive forces appear to have been weak..."
(140-141): there was also, he's arguing, neither (1) a strong working-class in the North, nor (2) threat of foreign power which could bind North and South together under a common banner (Germany 1871, Japan 1868 are said to have been examples of this)
(141): in sum--"...[T]he ultimate causes of the war are to be found in the growth of different economic systems... Two further factors made compromise extremely difficult. The future of the West appeared uncertain in such a way as to make the distribution of power at the center uncertain... Secondly... the main forces of cohesion in American society... were still very weak."
4. The Revolutionary Impulse and its Failure (141-148)
(141): Unlike the French Revolution and, partly, unlike England, there was no real "radical upsurge" during the Civil War [here we need 'Black Reconstruction' and the others--the 'new' histories of the Civil War, even if the kind of argument Moore is making is still defensible (no artisans, sans-culottes, though?)]
(142): slave outbreaks had no political consequences? To the DuBois!
(141-145): Thaddeus Stevens and Radical Republicans provided the revolutionary impulse that did exist, intending to wage 'progressive capitalism's' war on the 'baron and serf' slavery (combination of workers, industrialists, and some railroad interests at its height, in 1865-1868). The South were to be treated as a 'conquered people', and their society reconstructed (land reform, land confiscation, 'forty acres and a mule').
(146-147): The 1867 reconstruction acts floundered, though, because "influential Northern sentiment was in no mood to tolerate an outright attack on property... The failure of land reform was a decisive defeat and removed the heart of the Radical program."
(147): In the absence of this radical reconstruction, there was a move towards a new form of labor--not wage labor (which didn't work, when attempted first), but sharecropping.
(148): this didn't enrich the planters, but it did have the effect of making the South more of a one-crop economy than before (as everyone was pressed to grow cash-crop)
(148): key--of course, 1876 marks the return to normalcy--as elite moderates make an alliance across battle lines (Hayes-Tilden), and occupational regime is finally dismantled. "...the classic conservative coalition was possible. So came Thermidor to liquidate the 'Second American Revolution'"
5. The Meaning of the War (149-155)
(149-152): War gave a massive boost to industrial capitalism through permitting policies that would never have been tolerated, without it (high tariffs, end of slavery, subsidies, national banking and currency system). At the same time, this was not why the war happened, again--industrial capitalism did not necessarily have to regard plantation slavery as an obstacle; slavery was an obstacle to the establishment of democracy, however (and democracy is not a prerequisite of industrial capitalism--Germany, Japan).
(152): "Slavery was a threat and an obstacle to a society that was indeed the heir of the Puritan, American, and French Revolutions."
(153): "Striking down slavery was a decisive step, an act at least as important as the striking down of absolute monarchy in the English Civil War and the French REvolution..."
PART THREE: THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS AND PROJECTIONS
Chapter Seven, The Democratic Route to Modern Society (413-432)
(413): again, three routes to the modern world
- the route of the bourgeois revolution
- capitalist road without a revolutionary surge (German and Japanese examples)
- the communist road
(415): Western feudalism predisposed societies toward the parliamentary path, because of certain institutions it contained--"immunity of certain groups from the ruler, conception of right of resistance to unjust authority." [come on, though, this is quite unconvincing--reading into the relationship of lord to vassal the modern concept of the contract?]
(416): Marx's concept of an oriental despotism that coordinates the irrigation system he finds unconvincing, though it can be a starting point.
(417): as regards the process of modernization, "one point is clear:" persistence of royal absolutism or a hulking bureaucracy is not favorable to democracy. At the same time, they were important to 'checking' the nobility.
(417): a decisive precondition, too, "has been the emergence of a rough balance between the crown and the nobility... The pluralist notion that an independent nobility is an essential ingredient in the growth of democracy has a firm basis in historical fact." [but what about France?]
(418): but the nobility does need a bourgeoisie--if it seeks its freedom outside of this alliance, democracy is not the result (Russia as an example of this)
(418): ok--strong agreement with the "Marxist thesis that a vigorous and independent class of town dwellers has been an indispensable element in the growth of parliamentary democracy."
(419): furthermore--"among the most decisive determinants influencing the course of subsequent political evolution are whether or not a landed aristocracy has turned to commercial agriculture, and if so, the form that this commercialization has taken."
(419): European feudalism had three main divisions of land. Japan showed resemblances to this arrangment; some similarities in India. China was not like this.
- the commons
- the land owned by feudal, worked by peasant
- peasants' own plots
- English landed aristocracy turned to commercial farming, moving peasants of the lands.
- The French landed elite left the peasants in possession--intensification of the old arrangement (I think). [this led to democracy only because of the Revolution, remember--it could equally have led to the German path]
- In E. Europe you had the manorial reaction--E. German Junkers reduced free peasants to serfdom, and a similar process was at work in Russia (though for political, and not economic reasons).
(421-422): a 'cultural' explanation is quite unconvincing, he's arguing. agreed.
(422): important--"Where it has been possible for landlords to make use of the coercive apparatus of the state in order to sit back and collect rents, a phenomenon found widely in Asia and to some extent in prerevolutionary France and Russia, there is clearly no incentive to turn to less repressive adaptations."
(423): there are therefore at least three major variables:
- the relationship of the aristocracy to the monarchy
- the response of the aristocracy to commercialization
- the relationship of the landed upper classes with the bourgeoisie
(424): and here's an odd, contingent point, that throws the comparisons into doubt, I feel -- one that opens into the question of the 'permanent revolution', though: "the English bourgeoisie from the 17th through much of the 19th century had a maximum material stake in human freedom because it was the first bourgeoisie and hand not yet brought its foreign and domestic rivals to their full powers."
(426): again, England and the US (for different reasons) were the only countries to escape the peasant question (he attributes the "instability of French democracy in the 20th century to this fact").
(426): the role of violence--the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and the American Civil War
(427): provided the distinctions between the cases remain clear, "it is necessary to group revolutions by the broad institutional results to which they contribute."
(428): KEY, Barrington Moore against the classic concept of the bourgeois-democratic revolution--"..this meaning of the bourgeois revolution is such a simplification as to be a caricature of what took place. To see that it is a caricature we need only recall
- the importance of capitalism in the English countryside, which enabled the landed elite to control the political machinery
- the weakness of any purely bourgeois impulse in the French case, and the importance, therefore, of radical elements; and the continuation of the peasant economy into present-day
- the fact that plantation slavery was an obstacle to democracy, certainly, but not so much to capitalism.
(430): once more, an executive summary of FIVE conditions (looking at these, through India):
- first condition is to develop a balance, in order to avoid too strong a crown or too independent a landed aristocracy.
- a turn toward an appropriate form of commercial agriculture either on the part of the landed aristocracy or the peasantry.
- weakening of the landed aristocracy, if not commercial
- prevention of an aristocratic-bourgeois coalition against peasants and workers (typical when the bourgeoisie is weak, and the basis for authoritarianism)
- a revolutionary break with the past
(432): in Germany and Japan, you have capitalism in agriculture and industry, but no popular upheaval
(434-435): critical distinction, labor-repressive labor system vs. market labor system--the crux of his distinction between the English example (and the West of the US) and the Japanese, German, Russian, and even French cases is the form of surplus extraction. in the latter case, a reliance on a 'labor-repressive' system (rather than the labor market) to ensure an adequate labor force and adequate surplus ties the landed aristocracy to the State apparatus. [this is precisely where Skocpol pushes back--to her, the distinction between the two on the basis of their political implications is not admissable; it is rather another way of assessing the claim about the strength of the central bureaucracy]
(436): this seems deeply problematic--from the subordination to the House of Hohenzollern in the 1600's and 1700s, he's reading ideas of subordination to a central institution that he links to fascism! too ambitious, and he immediately acknowledges this. so where does it leave the claim?
(437-438): interesting, citing Marx and Engels on the German 1848--a bourgeoisie which was to weak to rule, and for the right to make money threw in its lot with the landed aristocracy and the royal bureaucracy (this will not, though, bring fascism in and of itself, just a conservative modernization from above--that only happens under the inability of these democracies to cope and to bring about fundamental structural changes). If this coalition is wanting, he adds, you move towards Russia and China.
(438): and what he's noting about fascism, let us remember, is the significant role of the landed elite (made possible by the failure of peasants to band together with urban strata)
(438-439): discussing the rationalization of the new order in Germany and Japan in the 1800s, which had already been done, in England and France, under royal absolutism.
(440): the State, obviously, was critical for incipient industrialization, and the taming of the labor force (but this is perhaps where the contrast with the other examples becomes blurred, a la Skocpol's claim?)
(441): raising the question of the autonomy of the State structure, which is posed, though unclearly, here--it must be able to "free itself from the influence of both extreme reactionary and popular or radical pressures in the society, something that can happen rather more easily than simplified versions of Marxism would allow us to believe."
(442): ultimately, though, these regimes are in a bind, because modernization will require changes in social structure, which they want to stabilize. the answer to this, he's arguing, is militarism.
(443): drawing parallels between McCarthyism and the situation in England, during and after the Napoleonic Wars.
(444): this is the real question--why did England, in its reactionary phase during the Napoleonic Wars, not launch itself onto the reactionary path of a Germany or Japan--the answer, critically, was the relative weakness of the repressive apparatus, in England. [one thinks Skocpol will pick up, right here; whereas for Moore this pushes the question back]
(445): he's playing with the 'fascist' possibility in the Russian case, but for me this is revealing how undefined the term itself has been, till this point.
(446): again, this needs lengthy interrogation--"...the Russian peasants were revolutionary and eventually the major force in exploding the old regime."
(446): Fascism and the Subcontinent
(447-8): Fascism, a provision definition--"Fascism is inconceivable without... the entrance of the masses onto the historical stage. Fascism was an attempt to make reaction and conservatism popular and plebian... [It] stressed not only the inevitability of hierarchy, discipline, and obedience, but also positied that they were values in their own right... Another feature was the stress on violence... Plebian anticapitalism thus appears as the feature that most clearly distinguishes 20th century fascism from its predecessors, the nineteenth-century conservative and semiparliamentary regimes..."
(448-449): Fascism and the peasantry--most successful in appeal to the peasant whose holding was relatively small and unprofitable for the particular area in which it existed" [the 'little fellow'--seduced by the romantic image of an idealized peasant. though, it goes without saying, this was only ever an ideological justification, rather than a policy pursued by the Nazis]
(450-451): example of Japan, Italy--same pseudoradical and propeasant features, though in the latter especially, this was entirely opportunistic and ideological (policy catered to big agriculture, after Mussolini took power)
Chapter Nine, The Peasants and Revolution (453-583)
(453): "The process of modernization begins with peasant revolutions that fail. It culminates during the 20th century with peasant revolutions that succeed." [catchy -- but the first part is not clear]
(453): recovering the peasant as a subject of history, after he/she had been dismissed
(453-45 ): we want to understand what triggers peasant revolutions, and why. at this stage, certain theories can be dismissed:
- not simple deterioration of living, owing to impact of commerce and industry (think India--even if there have been upheavals)
- not a threat to peasant existence (i.e. enclosrues)
- where nobility lives amongst peasantry, less likely? (no, look at Russia)
- landless labor, large rural proletariat--but this doesn't explain the Russian Revolution, or even the Chinese Revolution, really
- religion? but it's always wielded by upper classes, interpreted differently by lower classes
(459): the general hypothesis--it is society's with a central authority that are more vulnerable to rebellion; but where regulation is diffuse (i.e., the caste system), rebellion is less likely. [this is useful, because England and France seem to fit the model, too, though he doesn't acknowledge this in the same way...]
(459-460): if landed elites take up commercial agriculture, the more limited the rebellion
(462): discussing the context leading up to the Peasant War in Germany--enserfment was the response, there, to the rise of an export market in grain
(466): the aristocratic victory in the Peasant War, he's arguing, foreclosed the possibility of liberal democracy emerging (since, presumably, it consolidated a labor-repressive system of surplus extraction)
(467): English squire vs. German Junker
- the former turned to commercial agriculture, destroyed the social organization of the peasantry through enclosures--no peasant war
- the latter turned to serfdom in the face of the export trade--faced with peasant war
- production for the market
- peace and order over a wide area; the creation of a strong central gov't
- character of link to the overlords (landlord, priest)--when strong, chances of rebellion are feeble
- class divisions within the peasantry
- and degree of cohesiveness within the peasantry [he is also making a distinction between revolutionary and conservative forms of solidarity--the latter is, in the main, a modern phenomenon (this is the context of Marx's comment on the peasantry being a 'sack of potatoes'--it's the effect of commerce, industry and a capitalist legal framework, at least in part, which encourages competition between households in a village]
(477-478): "To sum up, the most important causes of peasant revolutions have been the absence of a commercial revolution in agriculture... and the concomitant survival of peasant social institutions into the modern era... Where the peasant community survives, as in Japan, it must remain closely linked to the dominant class in the countryside if revolution is to be avoided."
(479): "By themselves peasants have never been able to accomplish a revolution. On this point the Marxists are absolutely correct, wide of the mark though they are on other crucial aspects. The peasants have to have leaders from other classes..." [And anyway,] "peasant revolts have been repressed far more often than they have succeeded."
(481): noting that artisans and journeymen played a much more important role than Marxist theory might lead us to believe (this is Craig's intervention, as well, but there it is 1848 under scrutiny)
(481): deeply unsatisfactory account of the Russian Revolution
--
(1) there is a preliminary problem in the opposition of democracy to communist dictatorship, but we will keep this on the shelf for when the concepts are elucidated further.
(2) the question-begging character of the argument, which almost inheres in its Weberian set-up. we can always, it seems, push the chain of causality back. our task is to think through when this is useful, and when it is not. (example of impulse given by wool trade, in 1300s/1400s England--can we not ask to have this pushed back, further? or is it simply a contingent factor?)
(3) obvious problem in Russia's case was that the peasantry did not, in the slightest, 'lead' the revolution. it will be interesting to see how he justifies the claim that they constituted the decisive revolutionary impulse; it is, certainly, more defensible, but still requires some reconciling to the larger narrative of Bolshevik triumph.
(4) cleavages in the revolution; poorer elements doing dirty work. one can see why this might culminate in 1848, and 'permanent revolution'
(5) increasing lack of democracy in the aftermath of the civil war, for the peasantry (pg. 21)
(6): Stalin as condensation of the typical violence, rather than atypical, which is inherent in the path of modernization.
(7) the critique of Moore that the German and Japanese examples are disingenuous, because their fascist 'phases' were temporary, raises the more fundamental question, i think, of what in each example we can treat as a true 'characteristic', and what we treat as 'temporary'. this is, of course, fundamental--the balance of contingency and theory is the challenge of any good history.
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