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.

1. 1920s, industrial unionism against AFL craft
2. after early 1930s, in response to labor upsurge

(32-33): key--thus, we can think of 'four insurgent political practices'

1. earlier Red organizing
2. whether the union seceded from the AFL 'from below', or whether it was an officers' revolt
3. whether the union was organized independently, or whether it was done by a CIO organizing committee
4. whether it was formed through amalgamation, or as a unitary organization

(33): earlier phase of organizing was carried by the TUEL (within the AFL, boring holes) and then, in 1929, the TUUL (new industrial unions, outside the AFL), after the demise of the Wobblies

(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

1. democratic constitution
2. institutionalized opposition
3. active membership

(66): constitution as a 'real reflection' of the internal political dynamics--as them, congealed

(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

1. prerogatives of management--labor or management?
   
2. union's freedom of action--right to resist and ability to impose sanctions
3. methods for handling disputes--what kind of grievance procedure?

(139-141): six indexes for measuring prolabor vs. procapital tendencies

1. management prerogatives--management or labor?
   
2. right to strike
3. contract term--long or short?
   
4. trade-off provision
5. grievance procedure--shop floor, or not?

(141-142): key argument--they find a 'sharp' difference between the Communist-led international unions and the others. this is incompatible with the 'functionalist' argument. [yes. but is not incompatible with a larger claim about structural determination]

(144): we want to control, also, across the four time periods:

1. immediate pre-WWII years of the Great Depression
2. the WWII years
3. immediate postwar offensive of organized labor, coupled with right-wing resurgence in Congress and Taft-Hartley in 1947
4. advent of the Cold War, attacks on Communist-led unions

(147): repression of communists--in January 1948, the CIO board votes to endorse Truman--this marks the beginning of the end for Communists within the CIO, in a sense. by late 1949 they vote to expel unions who follow Communist line. By late 1950, 11 miscreant unions are thrown out. 1954 is the coup de grace, when communist-infiltrated unions can be deprived of rights under the NLRB.

(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.

Just two years removed from slavery, Blacks were elected to state governments and Congress. All told, 600 Black Republicans joined state legislatures, 14 went to the U.S. House of Representatives, and 2 went to the U.S. Senate. Six African Americans became lieutenant governors, and thousands more held lesser offices, including judges and sheriffs.
(...) It highlights the complexity of the creation of the racial order that would dominate politics in the South for 100 years after the Civil War. Many people think that after the Civil War, Jim Crow became the law of the land. On the contrary, Jim Crow laws came into existence almost 30 years after the Civil War as a counterrevolution against the attempt at multiracial democratic rule across the South.

max weber, types of legitimate domination

part one: the basis of legitimacy (212-217)

(212): the premise, in effect: "every genuine form of domination implies a minimum of voluntary compliance, that is, an interest... in obedience."

(213): normally, domination cannot simply be based on material interest, affectual/ideal solidarity, but requires a "belief in legitimacy."

(213-214): much is obscured by weber's use of the word "freely"

(214): "what is important is the fact that in a given case the particular claim to legitimacy is to a significant degree and according to its type treated as 'valid'"

(215): crux, "three pure types of legitimate domination"

1. rational grounds--belief in the legality of enacted rules and the right of those elevated to authority under such rules to issue commands
   
2. traditional grounds--resting on an established belief in the sanctity of immemorial traditions and the legitimacy of those exercising authority under them
3. charismatic grounds--resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him.

(216): NB--"the idea that the whole of concrete historical reality can be exhausted in the conceptual scheme about to be developed is as far from the author's thoughts as anything could be."

part two: legal authority with a bureaucratic administrative staff (217-226)

(218-223): preliminary delineation of the basic nature of rational authority (enumerating, essentially, the rational, ordered features of bureaucratic organization--importance of 'technical qualification' (221-222))

(223): "the purely bureaucratic type of administrative organization--that is, the monocratic variety of bureaucracy--is, from a purely technical point of view, capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency and is in this sense formally the most rational known means of exercising authority over human beings... [moreover], the needs of mass administration make it today completely indispensable. the choice is only that between bureaucracy and dilettantism in the field of administration."

(224): here, furthermore, predicting that the bureaucracy will have to persist to manage a society like ours.

(224): important--reflections on capitalism and bureaucracy, and the question of their co-evolution: "though by no means alone, the capitalistic system has undeniably played a major role in the development of bureaucracy. indeed, without it capitalistic production could not continue and any rational type of socialism would have simply to take it over and increase its importance... on the one hand, capitalism in its modern stages of development requires the bureaucracy, though both have arisen from different historical sources. conversely, capitalism is the most rational economic basis for bureaucratic administration and enables it to develop in the most rational form, especially because, from a fiscal piont of view, it supplies the necessary money resources."

(225): "socialism would... require a still higher degree of formal bureaucratization than capitalism..." [of course, to a dilettante he sounds prophetic; for us, it is clear that the notion that this nonsense explains 1917 is simply hogwash]

(225): "bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge. this is the feature of it which makes it specifically rational."

(225): in general, the following social consequences (and here, the iron cage is forming)--second is tendency to plutocracy, and third is the dominance of a spirit of formalistic impersonality...

(226): bureaucracy is a process of 'social leveling', and "foreshadows mass democracy" [but, of course, this is all much more ominous than he is letting on here, as he writes elsewhere]

(226): two general characteristics

1. formalism
2. "tendency to substantive rationality" -- tendency to a "utilitarian point of view in the interest of the welfare of those under their authority."
   

part three: traditional authority (226-241)

(226-227): traditional authority -- "in the simplest case... based on personal loyalty which results from common upbringing... obedience is owed not to enacted rules but to the person who occupies a position of authority by tradition or who has been chosen for it by the traditional master."

(227): interesting--"the exercise of power is oriented toward the consideration of how far master and staff can go in view of the subjects' traditional compliance without arousing their resistance. when resistance occurs, it is directed against the master or his servant personally, the accusation being that he failed to observe the traditional limits of his power. opposition is not directed against the system as such--it is a case of 'traditionalist revolution.'" [perhaps thinking of a peasant jacquerie, i suppose; and in this sense it might be interesting to re-cast the argument about the uniqueness of the proletarian revolution in these ideal-typical, Weberian terms. though i'm not sure it would still work.]

(229): "master's discretion" exists in place of rationally established rules and regulations.

(231): gerontocracy and primary patriarchalism

(231): patrimonalism -- "whenever traditional domination develops an administration and a military force which are purely personal instruments of the master."

(232): estate-type domination -- when the administrative staff appropriates administrative powers and economic assets

(238-240): important, capitalism and traditional authority--capitalist trading, capitalist tax farming, capitalist provision of supplies for the state, capitalist plantations may emerge. "All these [latter] forms are indigenous to patrimonial regimes and often reach a very high level of development... [But a higher] type of capitalism is altogether too sensitive to all sorts of irrationalities in the administration of law, administration and taxation, for these upset the basis of calculability."

part four: charismatic authority (241-246)

(241): charismatic authority

(243): "the administrative staff of a charismatic leader does not consist of 'officials'... it is rather chosen in terms of the charismatic qualities of its members..."

(244): important--"Since it is 'extra-ordinary,' charismatic authority is sharply opposed to rational, and particularly bureaucratic, authority, and to traditional authority, whether in its patriarchal, patrimonial, or estate variants, all of which are everyday forms of domination; while the charismatic type is the direct antithesis of this. Bureaucratic authority is specifically rational in the sense of being bound to intellectually analysable rules; while charismatic authority is specifically irrational in the sense of being foreign to all rules... Traditional authority is bound to the precedents handed down... charismatic authority repudiates the past, and is in this sense a specifically revolutionary force."

part v: the routinization of charisma (246-255)

(245): "in traditionalist periods, charisma is the great revolutionary force." [and later?]

(245): important--"in its pure form charismatic authority may be said to exist only in statu nascendi. It cannot remain stable, but becomes either traditionalized or rationalized, or a combination of both."

(249): routinization through succession, but also through the interests of the administrative staff.

(251): moreover, "for charisma to be transformed into an everyday phenomenon, it is necessary that its anti-economic character should be altered. it must be adapted to some form of fiscal organization to provide for the needs of the group..."

(254): "along with the ideology of loyalty, which is certainly by no means unimportant, allegiance to hereditary monarchy in particular is very strongly influenced by the consideration that all inherited and legitimately acquired property would be endangered if people stopped believing in the sanctity of hereditary succession to the throne. it is hence by no means fortuitous that hereditary monarchy is more adequate to the propertied strata than to the proletariat."

part six: feudalism (255-)

(255): two types: fiefs, and benefices.

(257): a tension emerges whenever the grants are "highly developed"--because the overlord's authority, then, "is very dependent on the voluntary obedience and and hence the purely personal loyalty of the members of the administrative staff, who... are themselves in posession of the means of administration."

(259): out of this struggle, in a sense, the seeds of absolutism--"in modern times it everywhere issued in the ruler's victory, and that meant in bureaucratic administration... it was influenced by the rise of the bourgeoisie... it was in addition aided by the competition for power by means of rational... administration among the different states. this led, from fiscal motives, to a crucially important alliance with capitalistic interests..."

(260): "prebendal feudalism"

(262-263): important--"the above discussion makes it quite evident that 'ruling organizations' which belong only to one or another of these pure types are very exceptional... in general, it should be kept clearly in mind that the basis of every authority... is a belief by virtue of which persons exercising authority are lent prestige. the composition of this belief is seldom altogether simple..."

(264): importance of administrative staff, for authority: "for the habit of obedience cannot be maintained without organized activity directed to the application and enforcement of the order."

(265): re: discussion of german post-WWI experience, the bureaucracy appears here as a 'tool' to be handled. an empty instrument. [how is this articulated with the state, in the weberian model?]

(266): ah, brief mention of the russian revolution

part seven: the transformation of charisma in a democratic direction (266-271)

(266-267): charismatic authority, in particular it seems, can "be subject to an anti-authoritarian interpretation, for the validity of charismatic authority rests entirely on recognition by the ruled..." in this sense, he's arguing, it can, as it's routinzed, develop into a democratic form of organization on the basis of the principle of election.

(267): extending democracy to the administrative staff (and this, it seems, means that "they are not 'bureaucratic'") [is this a possible escape route, away from the iron cage? he does go on to imply that these will be wildly more 'inefficient'; but there is a place to raise the normative foundations of the definition of 'efficiency']

part eight: collegiality and the division of powers (271-284)

(271-272): exogenous limitations on the powers of authority (means which are necessary, agencies with their own authority, etc.)--"principle of collegiality"

(277): "collegiality almost inevitably involves obstacles to precise, clear, and above all, rapid decision"

(277): "collegiality is in no sense specifically 'democratic.' where privileged groups have had to protect their privileges agianst those who were excludded from them they have always attempted to prevent the rise of monocratic power..."

(278): 'dictatorship of the proletariat' being read as an individual dictatorship (on behalf of masses) [you can critique marx, but no need to butcher him--this is straw-manning at its worst]

(281): "from an historical point of view it is in terms of collegiality that the concept of an 'administrative agency' first came to be fully developed... only collegial bodies of officials, which were capable of standing together, could gradually expropriate the Occidental monarch, who had become a 'dilettante.'

(281): from monarchy, to bureaucracy, to prime minister, to monocracy (and the victory, then, of the bureaucracy)

(283): "historically, the separation of power in Europe developed out of the old system of estates..."

part nine: parties (284-289)

(286): "structurally, parties may conform to the same types as any other organizations."

(286): "it is of crucial importance for the economic aspect of the distribution of power and for the determination of party policy by what method the party activities are funded."

part ten: direct democracy and representative administration (289-292)

(289): ah, weber is seeing our alternative; what do you think, max?

(290): he believes that "immediate democracy" needs to be small-scale and insufficiently concerned with technical concerns, necessarily -- otherwise the bureaucracy will reassert itself. (see also 291)

(290): the notable, the representative--"presupposes that the individual is able to live for politics without living from politics."

part eleven: representation (292-298)

(292): appropriated representation

(293): estate-type representation

(293): instructed representation

(293): free representation

(294): weber sees the separation between active parties and politically-passive citizens

(296-297): exploring, in general, the harmonious co-evolution of representative government and modern capitalism

(296): "one factor in the development of free representation was the undermining of the economic basis of the older status groups. this made it possible for persons with demagogic gifts to pursue their career regardless of their social position. the source of this undermining process was modern capitalism."

(297): interesting--"two main factors have tended to make monarchs and ministers everywhere favorable to universal suffrage, namely, the necessity for the support of the proletariat in foreign conflict and the hope, which has proved to be unjustified, that, as compared to the bourgeoisie, they would be a conservative influence." [can we just saw, weber is deploying these class-categories--ideal-typically, perhaps--with reckless abandon? i approve! and he neglected to mention agitation for universal suffrage, of course]

(297): important--class character of parliamentary system: "parliaments have tended to function smoothly as long as their composition was drawn predominantly from the classes of wealth and culture... established social status rather than class interests underlay the party structure. the conflicts tended to be only those between different forms of wealth, but with the rise of class parties to power, especially the proletarian parties, the situation of parliaments has changed radically."

(298): the 'soviets' as an interest group [but let's not forget that he basically also admitted the class character of bourgeois democracy, above]

(299): mention of 'works councils' in germany, too

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"the state of martial rule," ayesha jalal

central thesis: book makes a very convincing case that the first eleven years of Pakistan's history, preceding Ayub's coup in 1958, confirmed the dominance of non-elected institutions (specifically, the civil bureaucracy and the military) over the political process. internally, this represented a failure to transcend the inherited weaknesses of the Muslim League as a political organization (which won power in precisely those provinces where it had no real political presence, eleventh hour alliances with landed elites notwithstanding). externally, jalal demonstrates how the subordination of the political process suited the strategic designs of the British and then the Americans (though she never argues that they were "agents" of this accommodation, they unquestionably figure).

moreover, jalal makes important points, in particular, about the impact of this excessive centralization on centre-province relations. those eleventh hour alliances were never going to offer legitimacy to the State in the eyes of provincial inhabitants--what was crucially absent from Pakistan's early political scene, she suggests, was the sort of political project that could unite provincial grievances (a socialist project, we can say). without it, the centre retreated into itself. this "closing off" of all traditional means of engagement with State authority only exacerbated the problems of provincialism.

in my humble opinion, jalal doesn't make explicit the thoroughly "backward" justifications offered for this progressive centralization of State power, even while she traces them in great detail (she does make the obligatory refutation of the silly thesis that military rule stepped into the vacancies left by "bickering politicians"; indeed, her point is that these bickering politicians are the product of the same structural dynamics that encourage military dominance via the consolidation of central authority). in particular, one could stress more the continuities with colonial rule, which are truly striking to those unfamiliar with the history: Pakistan was governed according to the British Government of India Act of 1935 for the first 9 years of its existence. and even when the first constituent assembly, after those 9 years, agreed upon the first constitution in 1956, it was pressured into making huge concessions to presidential authority. in that sense, it is important to stress that pakistan never made a "break" with the colonial era (complementing this inherite political "superstructure," remember, is the patronizing of landed elites by jinnah in the time immediately preceding partition). if there's one thing jalal's book lacks, then, it is this sense of outrage at the unforgivable hubris of the project of managed, colonial democracy.

but a great read and valuable reference-book all round.

--- important quotes/excerpts ---

(introduction): good summary of her central theses

(17): "With no organizational machinery in the Muslim-majority provinces, Jinnah and the league had little option but to advocate terms largely defined by landed notables in control of local politics."

(28): "A man of unquestionable constitutional acumen, Jinnah could see the perils ahead in letting anyone other than himself exercise the vast powers bestowed upon the governor-general [in newly independent Pakistan]"

(60): "While the provincial arenas continued to serve as the main centres of political activity, those who set about creating the new central apparatus were either politicians with no identifiable bases of support or civil servants well-versed in the traditions of British Indian administration." (these pages trace also the separation of the Muslim League from the business of government)

(135): "By the time Pakistan's first prime minister became the target of an evidently hired assasin, the institutional balance had begun gravitating away from the political centre in Karachi to military headquarters in Rawalpindi. It was to take a few years and the unfolding of yet more painful domestic political and economic crises before the central government was forced to make the shift..."

(145): first elections based on adult franchise in Pakistan's history--provincial elections in Punjab, March 1951

(151): critical: anti-ahmediya riots came in a context of serious economic crisis; state did not do anything to nip them in the bud

(152): "...[T]he shift in Pakistan's foreign policy [from London to Washington] owed nothing to popular opinion. Quite the opposite. Relentless demands for military equipment by the defence establishment generated pressures for warmer relations with the United States; financial stringency and a deepening food crisis made them irresistible..."

(186): legends of the fail--proposal by ambassador to US for governor-general to change government, in efforts to stave off a "fanatical theocracy"

(200-202): story of the attempt to dismiss the first constituent assembly by the governor-general, and then consequent legal wrangling (Sindh High Court reverses, eventually Chief Justice re-reverses)

(213-222): extensive discussion of 1956 constitution and its absurdly anti-democratic (of the liberal sort, even) provisions

(236): "Yet here was the rub. Nowhere had the consequences of the disjunction between the political process and the imperatives of state consolidation been felt more acutely than in the realm of economic decision-making. The absence of stable and popularly based governments at the centre capable of keeping firm checks on the demands of military headquarters and the activities of a sprawling administrative machinery had been as great, if not greater, obstacle to sound economic planning than the shortage of finance and trained personnel."

(241-246): a useful discussion of the Harvard Advisory Group years ("Clearly then, the first five year plan was an attempt to confirm, correct, and coordinate rather than to radically change the tenor of the central government's past economic politices. The mere fact that the final verison of the plan was made public just six months before the military takeover demands a closer scruitny of the political and structural obstacles in the way of its implementation.")

(257): birth of the National Awami Party, 1956

(269-270): "Yet the centre which for so long had dodged the issue of elections was now to face them when its revenues were falling and defence and civil administration expenditures were rising. Barely able to remain solvent, the centre could meet the provinces half way only by slashing the budgets of the two institutions which were the best hope the stat had for surviving assaults from below. This double paradox--the need to dole out funds to allay some of the provincial grievances just prior to the elections and the impossibility of finding the finances without cutting back on defence and civil administration--was the crisis of the state which the October 1958 military intervention aimed at dispelling if not altogether resolving."

(272): June 1958 mobilizations

(276): As of October, Mirza gone, Ayub ascendant

(277): "The very fact that the British transferred power in India to two centralized high commands instead of the provincial and the local bosses whose support they had so long solicited and used to strengthen their raj meant that the institutionalisation and consolidation of a new political centre over the Muslim-majority areas was implicitly a question of society accomodating itself to a state whose structures of authority were as uncertain as its claims to legitimacy were vague and ambiguous... This is where Islam proved to have its uses" (this is important to complicating the assertion that we are dealing with simple continuities of colonial rule)

(278): "the ambiguities of Islam seemed to offer the best hope of lending legitimacy to a state which, because it had only the most tenuous roots in society, was coming to base its authority on an administrative rather than a political centralization."

(288): interesting reflection on the stratified socio-economic base of syncretic islam (i.e., the welding of landed powers and pirs/etc.)

(295): [GOOD SUMMARY OF WHOLE THESIS]: It was during the first decade of independence that an interplay of domestic, regional and international factors saw the civil bureaucracy and the army gradually registering their dominance over parties and politicians withing the evolving structure of the state. While allowing the state a relative autonomy of action in directing the course of political and economic developments, the shifts in the institutional balance of power by their very nature militated against forging organic links with society. With decision-making firmly in the hands of a ruling alliance drawn mainly from the top echelons of the bureaucracy and the army, although loosely tied to dominant classes and interest groups, there was no obvious equation between the actual wielding of state authority and the structures of economic power and social control. Consequently, the relative autonomy of the Pakistani state from the internal class structure came to rest in large part on the closely nurtured connections of its senior state officials--civil and military--with the centres of the international capitalist system."

(302-303): discussion of the absurdity of Ayub's "basic democracts"

(304): re: land reforms and more, Jalal writes: "Preoccupations with the growth-redistribution debate has tended to blur analyses of the state's critical role int he creation of socio-economic privilege. The overwhelming trend has been to focus on the location of dominant socio-economic groups in relation to the state structure. But the dissonance between the military and the bureaucracy's institutional interests and those of socio-economic groups makes it equally, if not more important, to investigate how positions within the state apparatus facilitate the relocation of functionaries of government at various levels in key socio-economic sectors.

(307-308): November 1968 mobilizations

(310-311): Jalal suggests reconciliation was made impossible (between Bhutto and Mujib) by the entrenched role of the "praetorian guard and the mandarins."

(311): assessment of PPP's base

(317): Jalal links Bhutto's use of the Islamist idiom to the oilboom-financed patronage of religious forces (also the beginnings of the story of migrations to and from the Gulf, for sure)

(320): Zia's call for an end to class discord in the name of Allah.

---- timeline -----

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Governor-General_of_Pakistan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Prime_Ministers_of_Pakistan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presidents_of_Pakistan

lecture 2, "the paris commune and its legacy"
john merriman

----

hung over Europe for 20, 30 years following it -- "in my view," the massacre that followed the commune anticipated the 20th century, where you became guilty for simply who you were (you were guilty if you were left in paris)

it was the largest massacre until the armenian genocide (in europe, only?)

----

what was it?

has to be placed in two contexts

(1) in the context of the regime of napoleon the third -- which lasted from 1852-1870 (when he was rounded up by the Prussians). in the late 1860s, there was a revival of republican, socialist, and anarchist organizations -- in 1868, the emperor legalizes public meetings, and you had these in cafes and large warehouses. people were agitating for democratization, etc. -- so, a wave of political mobilzation.

in 1870s, there was a wave of strikes, which had previously been illegal--unions would in fact be illegal until 1881.

(2) the franco-prussian war, napoleon the third gets suckered into a war without any allies at all, against otto von bismarck (the prussian chancellor). it involves the candidacy of a royal family member for the candidacy of france, which would have left the empire surrounded by the prussians. napoleon protests vigorously, and his ambassador abuses bismarck's envoy(!). bismarck reveals to the european world that napoleon had earlier tried to make a deal, intolerable to the british.

so, in sum, they go to war, in the summer of 1870 against prussia, expecting to win. he was, though, "blown out"

----

on september 4th, 1870, a crowd storms down town hall, and want to prolong resistance against the prussian army, which is routing the french. napoleon the third is very sick anyway, soon to die, he is captured in the battle of sedan and sent packing to britain.

there are those who want to keep fighting--one of the demands of prussia (german empire will be proclaimed in late january, in versailles) is that there be a huge indemnity that the french will have to pay. and that alsace and loren, the eastern, german-speaking provinces, would be annexed by germany (and these were two of the most prosperous, industrialized provinces of france)

so, in sum, people in paris find themselves surrounded. there is a wall around the city, keeping out the german troops. elsewhere, resistance is sparse--in metz, in october, a general capitulates to bismarck.

----

to be sure, there were lots of crowds in paris who were shouting for war, which was surprising, in a sense. but the siege goes on, and on.

paris changes appearences--military dress, uniforms become increasingly visible.

there is the problem of food, how to feed all these people. you have enough for only a month, or so (you are fine in terms of drink, b/c of wine cellars). they use balloons! a symbol of liberty, but presumably this is not exactly sufficient. (there were 65 baloon flights, carrying about 20,000 pounds. pigeons are used to fly messages out, germans bring in falcons to munch the pigeons!)

there were some massacres, in the north-east, but nothing like paris would see in 1914, or 1939-1940.

the national guard from the outskirts took refuge, so a bit like a medieval siege.

you have 2,000,000 people, in total (a smattering of foreigners). the population begins to eat animals--dogs, rats and cats. canine butchers replace horse butchers, animals in the zoo were eaten, etc.

bismark had projected that the siege would end, eventually -- but paris creates a committee of sobriety, and encourages people to eat healthy!? these are the fancy folk.

----

it ceased being funny, of course. hunger sets in, even if it was nothing like the siege of leningrad, where 1,000,000 died -- but there were people dying, etc. and venereal disease was rampant, as was drukenness, mental illnessess.

attempts to break out do not work. (there is a contest to see "how we get out"? two suggestions: (1) prostitutes are a resource for paris, they should be used to seduce and poision prussian soldiers. (2) take the orchestras of paris and teach them to play german music--one day they would march out and play this music, with a huge trojan horse behind it!)

----

as things are going downhill, people start to say we must fight, but we need to unite to imagine a new world. in january 1871, a red sign is put up (red was illegal between 1849 and 1851, because it was believed to excite people!), saying "make way for the commune."

----

france capitulates at the end of january 1871 -- the prussian cavalry trot down the champs d'elysses symbolically clean up the stones, etc., and france is all set to lose the war. france has a provisional government, much of the provinces return a monarchist assembly. the landlords come back to paris, and tell the people to pay back money with interest (pay back the indemnity).

and so people are incredibly angry.

theirs, expecting paris to rise, possbily, sends troops to mon matre(sp.?), because the national guard of paris has still got its guns. these troops go to disarm the national guard, but the guard is alerted--they take two commanders from the troops, and they shoot them.

thiers is now ready to "get these bastards."

and now, paris is surrounded again, but by troops of the provisional government.

---

and so the commune begins (march 18, 1871). it will last until the 2nd of may, 1871. (lenin calls this the "festival of the oppressed")

so, for the first time, ordinary parisians find themselves masters of their own lives (the population of the city is swollen with political refugees). as in the french revolution, and 1848, clubs of women begin to form, demanding their rights.

all sorts of impressive social legislation is passed. (secular education system, nurseries for women workers, uniform contracts for female unions, ban night-baking).

this also explains, in part, the viciousness of the massacre of ordinary working women. they were seen as "uppity." many of the important communards are women.

you have the jacobins (republican socialists from the revolutionary tradition), you have the anarchists, you have moderat republicans (who simply desire more liberty vis-a-vis the centralized state), you have moderate socialists.

there are debates, meetings, arguments, etc., as the guns draw nearer.

there were communes in other cities, as well, with a variety of demands. paris keeps waiting for these armies of citizens to come and rescue it.

----

within paris, you have poorer people invading the fancy areas, for the first time as independent citizens.

an artist calls for the tearing down of the statue of napoleon, as a symbol of centralized oppression.

for once they had won.

they had to defend paris, of course. cannons, they have. they build these huge barricades, a tradition that stretched back to the 16th century (of course, you can build barricades across smaller streets, but not really across big boulevards--and that was part of the rebuilding of paris in the 1850s and 1860s).

----

who were the communards?

when revolutions are victorious, of course, everyone says "i was there!"

here, you have a body count, of more than 15,000 people. they were the ordinary parisians who couldn't get out, basically -- they were the poor socialists, anarchists, republicans, etc. their defence of paris reflects tensions between urban and conservative, rural france--the army that they were fighting was largely recruited from rural areas.

and so the commune is basically proletarian--people from the working quarters. artisans, craftsmen, domestic servants, etc. and they were trying to imagine a world in which they could rule.

prof argues it reflects the artisinal base of the french economy at that time.

the myth of the commune--for the conservatives, this was the "fury of hell", those who rose up to slay their social betters. for the republicans, this was a defense of the republic against the monarchy, restored (which is partly true, of course).

for marx, lenin--this was armageddon for the ruling class. though not marx's industrial working-class, of course, but a very different kind of working-class (semi-proletarianized, prof is arguing). this of course informs the "breaking of the chains" argument; testing the "dictatorship of the proletariat"

----

the most important result, however, in prof's opinion, was the massacre itself.

the troops came in through the western gate--they use the boulevards that had been built by napoleon the third as a way of getting to the working-class areas (those areas that had always risen up). hausmann, of course, was the man who had plowed through working-class neighborhoods, that had once lain where those boulevards now are. he did it to bring more light, to bring more air, to free the flow for capital, and because you can't build barricades across the boulevards.

so the troops come pouring in, across boulevards that had been built in the 1850s and 1860s. and the damage was staggering.

and then the women were put on trial--there was a rumor that women had been burning down fancy houses. and so this rumor was part of the fear of "uppity women." and they squished them like grapes.

they shot them all.

in the end, there was a paris in which everybody had been guilty.

chimney sweepers were executed because they had charcoal on their cheeks; they would rip of your shirts, to see if you had any bruises from recoiling rifles; it wasn't a "neutral" massacre, they went to the radical areas, and that's where they went in and massacred the populations.

"why don't you get over this?" this was the ultimate lesson of the commune, which would hang over europe. it was a sign that the state was strong, and can be vicious. don't let anyone tell you that the victims of terrorism are equal, in number, to the victims of state terrorism. but this was the real lesson--the state was growing in power with napoleon, unification. the state could strike back with unparalleled savagery. and that's what happened at the commune.

minimum 15,000 died, probably closer to 25,000. (when they did the census in 1872, in paris, there were 10,000 less shoemakers than there had been before--an extraordinarily radical trade, don't forget). flames engulfed the bodies, they were gone, lost to history.

amnesty for the communards would come in 1879. but the massacre hung like a shadow over french and european politics, for years and years.

What is most galling, from a socialist perspective, is the dawning notion that capitalism may be leaving us with less than it found on this planet, about 400 years ago, when the capitalist mode of production began to take off. Marx imagined that industrial capitalism had potentially solved the age-old problem of scarcity and that there was plenty to go around if only it was equitably distributed. But industrial capitalism--with some help from industrial communism--has brought about a level of environmental destruction that threatens our species along with countless others. The climate is warming, the oil supply is peaking, the deserts are advancing and the seas are rising and contain fewer and fewer fish for us to eat. You don't have to be a freaky doomster to see that extinction may be what's next on the agenda.

President Obama and His People

From anti-politics, to politics.

The self-evidence which assimilates democracy to a representative form of government resulting from an election is quite recent in history. Originally representation was the exact contrary of democracy. None ignored this at the time of the French and American revolutions. The Founding Fathers and a number of their French emulators saw in it precisely the means for the elite to exercise power de facto, and to do so... in the name of the people that could not exercise power without ruining the very principle of government... 'Representative democracy' might appear today as a pleonasm. But it was initially an oxymoron.
--Jacques Rancière¹

As we approach the end of the inaugural month of Barack Obama's reign as president-elect, one can't help but recall the feel-good eulogizing that greeted the news of his election. The Kenyan president, for example, declared November 6th a public holiday in Obama's honor,² Magic Johnson told us he wept through the night,³ and Nicholas Kristof, that titan of the mainstream “Left,”⁴ relayed the widespread impression that America had “powerfully revitalized” the “idea[s] of equality and opportunity.” Even for those whose man lost, the historic consequences of Obama's victory were impossible to ignore: the “greatest democracy in the world,” it seemed, had proven the glory of its foundation by demonstrating the resilience of its ideals. As a black family arrived to claim an office once built by black slaves, America expiated its Original Sin.

To leftists, the colossal partiality of these and accompanying narratives, I think, has always been evident. Never was it true, for example, that only America could crown a son from the sea of those it systematically oppresses; after all, Evo Morales—who has told stories of, many years ago, savoring orange peels flung from the speeding cars of rich Bolivians—became his country's first indigenous president three years ago this month. Nor was Obama carried into the presidency by a tide of revolutionary agitation (as Morales was). Instead, as the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) recently celebrated, he was produced, by astute campaign-managers and sedulous staffers, as an ideological “place-holder” onto which millions of consumers projected their radical aspirations.⁵

It is a dynamic evident in these myriad forms of myth-making, I think, that speaks to the heart of what the Obama era threatens to represent. As Simon Critchley argued recently, “Obama’s politics is governed by an anti-political fantasy. It is the call to find common ground, to put aside our differences and achieve union.... It is a powerful moral strategy whose appeal to the common good attempts to draw a veil over the agonism and power relations constitutive of political life.”⁶ Though, of course, this tactic hardly has its origins in Obama's campaign, the fact of his election as an oppressed black man in particular, I think, threatens to re-brand the iniquities of an entire political system (and, particularly, the history of its formation) with this fantasy of perpetual union. This, again, is the negative significance of his blackness: his ascent to power, through the electoral system, has vindicated American democracy—when allied to the “anti-politics” at the heart of his campaign, then, it threatens a terminal form of forgetfulness. Far from encouraging us to reproduce the spirit of those masses who have struggled against the State that now readies itself to crown him, Obama instead comes to embody the cosmic judiciousness of that very State apparatus.

Against this, it is the Left's duty to, as Walter Benjamin wrote, “articulate what was past...” in the knowledge that “not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious.”⁷ Much as we must, as Critchley argues, foreground the “agonism and power relations constitutive of political life” in the present, we must also, against Obama, decry the fatuous re-making of the history of American government into a celebration of the foresight of its forefathers. These days who takes time to remember, for example, that the contours of the American Constitution were determined by fifty-five white men anxious to establish a Federal Government strong enough to safeguard their fortunes?⁸ Or that throughout the history of bourgeois democracy, only pitched battles have forced the gradual extension of the franchise⁹—and this, too, as ruling elites adjusted to the arrival of the lower classes by concentrating instead on purchasing their hearts and minds?

Of course, in the heady bliss following Obama's victory, few wanted to be the grouchy dogmatists insisting that the arrival of this black man was far too contrived, aside from being too little, too late. Yet this is the price of responsible participation in today's political life: to re-introduce, partly by remembering, the fact of “agonisms.” When, at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Alexander Hamilton proposed that the President and Senate be appointed for life based on his estimation that “the people are turbulent and changing... they seldom judge or determine right,”¹⁰ his callous elitism expressed the timelessness of the wealthy man's desire, however sublimated, to sustain the class cleavages that make privilege possible. (Indeed, in James Madison's famous words, this brand of “peace” was to be the primary responsibility of government: “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”)¹¹

Similarly, when today, in Obama-land, the doctrine of “anti-politics” moves many an eager liberal to obviate past struggle in the name of “all-the-progress-we've-made,” it falls to the Left to recover histories of mass movements battling against State obstinacy. Indeed, the fantasy of agonism-free politics depends quite squarely on this notion that America has “arrived”—on the idea that the need for protracted struggle against entrenched interests is obsolete. Indeed, much like corollary talk of politicians' expertise serves to secure the distance between assemblies and the demos they discipline, the doctrine of anti-politics works to obscure the very immediate inequalities at the heart of modern American society.

In this sense, I suggest, the question on which many thoughtful Leftists have hung their hopes for Obama's presidency—namely, the dim prospects of the enraged electorate which voted for him transcending his candidacy and becoming a progressive social movement—really depends on the possibility of shattering the myths that furbished the “anti-political” pulse of his campaign. In other words, this distinction between anti-politics and politics really marks the difference between Obama's voters, as an electorate mobilizing around him as an empty signifier, and Obama's voters, as a mass movement prepared to stand, against power, for principles.

Only once America can be convinced, against Obama's best efforts, that the world we carry in our hearts will not be engineered by the men and women assembling on Capitol Hill, but won by the world-historical agitation of those these representatives exclude from politics proper, will the dream of the “Obama Left” be possible. It scarcely needs to be said that, for those establishment hacks invested in the permanence of anti-politics, the new First Man's baby steps have been win-win: not only did the success of his candidacy “restore” the reputation of a democratic system tarred by the iniquities of the Bush cabal, but his politicking has banished worries that he himself may have carried “Change” into the White House. For those of us, on the other hand, hoping for the restoration of a movement ethic to a civic life neutered by corporate electioneering, much seems to rest on the possibility that, in a time of crisis, Obama's unapologetic pragmatism will prove intolerable to the electorate he promised to empower.

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1Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, pg. 53

2http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7710394.stm

3http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/27565680/

4Nicholas Kristof, “The Obama Dividend”

5 http://adage.com/moy2008/article?article_id=131810

6Simon Critchley, “What's Left After Obama?”

7Thesis VI, http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/ThesesonHistory.html

8Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, pg. 90-91

9Chris Harman, A People's History of the World, pg. 390

10Zinn, A People's History of the United States, pg. 96

11Noam Chomsky, “Consent Without Consent,” http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ConsentPOP_Chom.html

The origins of republican America were addressed above - to create a nominally democratic government Adam Smith said should be "instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor." The nation's founders achieved mightily, handing down their legacy to succeeding generations of leaders always mindful of who gave them power and who they had to serve. At the nation's birth, only adult white male property owners could vote; blacks were commodities, not people; and women were childbearing and homemaking appendages of their husbands. Religious prerequisites existed until 1810, and all adult white males couldn't vote until property and tax requirements were dropped in 1850. States elected senators until the 17th amendment in 1913 gave citizen voters that right, and Native Americans had no franchise in their own land until the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act gave them back what no one had the right to take away in the first place. Women's suffrage wasn't achieved until the 19th Amendment passed in 1920 after nearly 100 years of struggling for it. The 1865 13th Amendment freed black slaves, the 1870 15th Amendment gave them the right to vote, but it wasn't until passage of the landmark Civil and Voting Rights Acts in the mid-1960s, abolishing Southern Jim Crow laws, that blacks could vote, in fact, like the Constitution said they could decades earlier. Today those rights are gravely weakened for all through unfair laws still in force and a nation growing more repressive and less responsive to the needs of ordinary working people and the nation's least advantaged. The limited high-water mark of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society has steadily eroded since in loss of civil liberties and essential social benefits.

This is why you won't hear Barack Obama's progressive and educated supporters saying much about the interesting fact that Obama was recently selected by Association of National Advertisers (ANA) as the "Marketer of the Year." According to ANA trade journal Advertising Age two weeks before the presidential election, "Sen. Barack Obama has shown he's already won over the nation's brand builders."

Pakistan needs scrutiny not charity
In October 2005, upon learning of the devastation that had been caused in Northern Pakistan by a massive earthquake, many of my British friends promptly emailed me with offers of help, ranging from money to filling in my duties at Cambridge while I visited the earthquake stricken region. At the time, I suggested to them that what countries like Pakistan need, even in the face of such calamities, is not charity but scrutiny. Pakistan is a rich country, with abundant natural as well as human resources. What keeps Pakistan from developing is not a lack of resources but the presence of an illegitimate, highly corrupt government, which is sustained not by the people of Pakistan but by powerful developed countries in the vanguard of movements for ‘good governance’, democracy and transparency. 160 million Pakistanis do not need charity from the British public. They need their scrutiny. They need them to deny oppressive governments legitimacy. And they need them to expose the double standards of their own government.

the struggle for bolivia's future:
On one side stand the pro-imperialist business elites from the eastern department of Santa Cruz, with direct ties to gas transnationals, large agribusiness, and the U.S. embassy. Their public face is the Santa Cruz civic committee and the four opposition-controlled governorships of the east. Through a concerted campaign they have begun to win over sections of Bolivia’s important middle classes, many of whom voted for Morales but backed opposition parties for the departmental governors.
(...) On the other side stand the combative indigenous and social movements rooted in the western highlands and the center of Bolivia, but which also reach into the east. Together with the middle classes they elected Bolivia’s first indigenous president in 2005. Morales’s victory on December 18, 2005, with 54.7 percent of the vote, was a product of two interlinked factors. First, after five years of intense social struggle, it marked the coming together of Bolivia’s oppressed classes and the eruption of a national revolution, led for the first time by the country’s indigenous majority. Second, it heralded the opening of a path out of the historic crisis of the Bolivian state, a consequence of internal colonization and imperialist domination.
(...) This new wave of struggle was the result of the three components of the historic crisis of the Bolivian state—the lack of economic development, due to its submission to imperialism, the social exclusion of the indigenous people, and the lack of any real popular representation through the existing political party structures.
(...) Instead, it was the platform of Evo Morales and Alvaro Garcia Linera (now vice-president), calling for a constituent assembly and the nationalization of gas, that provided an outlet for those seeking a way out of the crisis. MAS’s program was to promote a process of the decolonization of power, and renationalization of the economy and the state. The results of the December 18 congressional and presidential elections, where MAS received over 90 percent of the vote in the Chapare, around 80 percent in the El Alto and the altiplano, a surprising 30 percent in Santa Cruz, and a clean sweep of all the middle-class seats in La Paz, demonstrated the unification of Bolivia’s oppressed behind a national project of liberation spearhead by the indigenous, campesino, and cocalero movements. It was an unambiguous expression of the desires and hopes of the indigenous majority, who had drawn large sectors of the other oppressed classes behind them, to begin to chart a new path for Bolivia.
(...) Morales was quick to point out there existed the huge problem of the “colonial state”: winning government was not the same as decisively winning power. Morales explained, “After hearing the reports of the commission of transition, I have been able to see how the state does not control the state, its institutions. There is a total dependency, as we have seen in the economic sphere, a transnationalised country.”
(...) Crucially, Morales has continued to organize and shore up his support amongst his main social base. Central to this strategy has been moving forward in the economic sphere—the nationalization of gas, a measure supported by over 80 percent of the population. While some have criticized the measure for being too moderate, Morales has continued to point out that the nationalization is a process aimed at rebuilding the state petroleum company, YPFB, expanding state intervention to the entire productive chain, and increasing the industrialization of gas. Morales has stated that the process can only move forward with the continued mobilization of the people. To ensure this, Morales has made sure personally to deliver the fruits of the nationalization, traveling each week to numerous rural areas to hand out land and tractors, and to inaugurate new literacy and health care programs.
(...) The biggest flashpoint has been the Constituent Assembly, through which the movements hope to “constitutionalize” the steps forward taken so far, and out of which they hope to construct a new Bolivia. This new Bolivia would be based on recognition of the indigenous majority through a united, pluri-national, decentralized, social, and communitarian state. Decision-making power would be exercised by the indigenous and social movements through the creation of communitarian social power.[11] Such a state would “be the principal actor in economic planning and production, imposing a policy of equal distribution of the benefits” and would control all nonrenewable resources together with the indigenous communities that live in those regions. Fundamentally, the aim is the creation of a new state power through which the indigenous majorities can play their rightful role in Bolivian society.
(...) Confronted with this dilemma, the Morales leadership has opted for a change of tack reflected in the growing weight of the line of Garcia Linera: avoid unnecessary radical discourse, work toward achieving consensus in order to move forward, and win back the middle classes.

change in cuba:
Some Fidelistas and ardent supporters of the Cuban revolution will object that it is all caused by the US embargo. It is true that Washington's draconian blockade spanning more than four decades and 10 US presidents, has inflicted incalculable damage. The government estimates that since the sanctions were first imposed in the 1960s, Cuba has lost an average of $1.8bn dollars a year from exports denied, damage to production, from financial blocks on Cuban dollar accounts held with banks in third countries, and exorbitant extra shipping costs.
(...) Shortages of some medicines, and the high price of imported goods and machinery is rightly blamed on Washington's undeclared war on Cuba, but this does not account for the erratic supply of eggs, the high price of good-quality Cuban coffee in the shops, and the scarcity of fish, to name but a few home-made irritations inflicted on the good citizens of Havana.
(...) One of the revolutionary heroes of the urban underground in Santiago de Cuba 1959, Professor Jose Guzman, has expounded on the need for: "A decentralised cooperatives controlled by local communities." He has sent his research on this to party leaders.
(...) The changes that are coming are unlikely to fulfil the entrepreneurial hunger of investor groups that descend in droves on newly opened-up economies. Cuba is not eastern Europe. The Cuban objective appears to be to inject more flexibility and rationality into the existing economy, rather than capitulate to a neoliberal world.