eric hobsbawm, the age of capital (chapter 1: 'springtime of peoples')

(10): "There have been plenty of greater revolutions in the history of the modern world, and certainly plenty of more successful ones. Yet there has been none which spread more rapidly and widely, running like a brushfire across frontiers, countries and even oceans."

(10): French Republic proclaimed February 24, 1848; German revolution(s), Italy and Hungary in March... "Within a matter of weeks no government was left standing in an area of Europe which is today occupied by all or part of ten states [France, West Germanyh, East Germany, Austria, Italy, Czechoslovakea, Hungary, part of Poland, Yugoslavia, and Romania] not counting lesser repercussions in a number of others."

(10): YET--"within six months of its outbreak its universal defeat was safely predictable, within eighteen months of its outbreak all but one of the regimes it overthrew had been restored, and the exception (the French Republic) was putting as much distance as it could between itself and the insurrection to which it owed its existence."

(12-13): Radicals, Hobsbawm's suggesting, had a simple model--a French revolution towards a "unitary centralized democratic republic of Germany, Italy, or Hungary or whatever the country happened to be..." But "moderates... were enmeshed in a web of complex calculations, based essentially on the fear of democracy which they believed to equal social revolution."

(13-17): "Their common characteristics:"

(1) "They all succeeded and failed rapidly, and in most cases totally..." (France counter-attack by April, when conservatives made it to the assembly en masse on the backs of a "politically-inexperienced" peasantry; and then the revolutionary workers were defeated in Paris, in June; Hapsburg reaction by June; in Germany and Austria the old regimes regained power "between the summer and the end of the year); remaining parts of Italy and Hungary recaptured by summer 1849). "There had been one and only one major irreversible change: the abolition of serfdom in the Habsburg Empire."

(2) "All the revolutions had something else in common, which largely accounts for their failure. They were, in fact or immediate anticipation, social revolutions of the labouring poor. They therefore frightened the moderate liberals whom they pushed into power and prominence... at least as much as the supporters of the old regimes." Adding that though the communists didn't have a major role in events in Germany, events in France in February, where the 'leaders were socialists and communists and its provisional government included a mechanic,' frightened them. In sum, page 17: "Eighteen forty-eight failed because it turned out that the decisive confrontation was not between the old regimes and the united 'forces of progress', but between 'order' and 'social revolutions.' Its crucial confrontation was not that of Paris in February but that of Paris in June, when the workers, manoeuvred into isolated insurrection, were defeated and massacred... It is characteristic of the ferocity of the hatred of the rich for the poor that some three thousand were slaughtered after defeat, while another twelve thousand were arrested, mostly to be deported to Algerian labour camps." The revolution was strongest, Hobsbawm adds, where radicals were able to lead or do without the moderates--this was most likely in lands where national liberation was the point of unity (i.e., Italy and Hungary, which is where the revolutions lasted the longest)

(20): KEY: "As we shall see the reactionary 1850s were to be, in economic terms, a period of systematic liberalization. In 1848-9 moderate liberals therefore made two important discoveries in Western Europe: that revolution was dangerous and that some of their substantial demands (especially in economic matters) could be met without it. The bourgeoisie ceased to be a revolutionary force."

(20-21): discussing the role of 'intellectuals' and of the petty-bourgeoisie -- many of them, he's arguing, were important for the 'democratic left,' but certainly not 'foundational'. many of the youth of this class, in fact, would do very well for themselves in the reactionary years of the 50s and 60s.

(21): KEY: "As for the labouring poor, they lacked the organization, the maturity, the leadership, perhaps most of all the historical conjuncture, to provide a political alternative. Strong enough to make the prospect of social revolution look real and menacing, they were too weak to do more than frighten their enemies." The weaknesses, enumerated: (1) "numerical deficiency"--not always a majority in the cities, which were anyway counterbalanced by the weight of the peasantry; (2) ideological and political immaturity. "The most politically conscious and activist stratum among them consisted of the pre-industrial artisans... The poor and unskilled in the cities and, outside Britain, the industrial and mining proletariat as a whole, had hardly any developed political ideology as yet."

(22-23): KEY: even though he is noting their political non-organization, he is also arguing that "we should not underestimate [their] potential." in one sense, they were yet to be 'bought off' by capitalism, as their pauperism was very evident. moreover, they weren't able to concentrate on their economic demands; their demands had an invariably 'political' content, without which "no revolution is made." It was "organization, ideology and leadership" which were underdeveloped.

(24): "They ought to have been bourgeois revolutions, but the bourgeoisie drew back from them."

(25): important--a lasting consequence of 1848, Hobsbawm is arguing, was that it forced "the defenders of the social order... to learn the politics of the people." Absolutism for its own sake--or tradition for tradition's sake--no longer withstood popular scrutiny.

europe at the world bank:
For far too long European governments have supported policies at the Bank that their domestic constituencies wouldn't tolerate for one second if a foreign bureaucracy imposed them at home. Would social democrats in Denmark tolerate that the World Bank impose on them "education reforms" like the school fees that have blocked access to primary education in Africa? Would Labor Party activists in Britain tolerate that the World Bank impose on them "health sector reforms" like clinic fees blocking access to prenatal care? Would European social democrats have tolerated that the World Bank impose on them the corrupt privatization of the water utility in Bolivia, the corrupt privatization of public pensions in Chile and Argentina, the destruction of Mozambique's cashew nut processing industry, the "labor sector reforms" that undermined the right to organize?

privatizing europe:
We are living in difficult times. In Italy privatisation began with the state-owned industrial corporations. Now the Prodi government is carrying it through to essential local public services – to what we consider to be ‘common goods’. In Germany they are still in the process of selling off their infrastructure: energy, railways, telecoms and so on. Everywhere, the views that emerged during the Thatcher and Reagan years in conservative parties have become all too common in parties of the centre-left – in spite of the growing evidence of the failure of privatisation and liberalisation from the standpoint of both consumer satisfaction and public finance efficiency.
(...) Privatisation in the UK has gone furthest. The sell off of industrial corporations such as steel and coal is historical memory. Britain is now engaged in opening up local government, health, education and part of the criminal justice system to private business. Public bodies are to become commissioning organisations, purchasing services from public, private and voluntary sector organisations. They are also being required to create new markets of competing providers where they do not already exist.
(...) In theory at least, governments claim to use liberalisation to stimulate competition and to make it difficult for institutions with a monopoly or near monopoly to fix prices. Hence liberalisation of services is said to benefit the consumer. Privatisation, on the other hand, is the partial or complete transfer of public industries to the private sector. It was used by Margaret Thatcher in its purest form – the outright sale of those industries – to defeat the trade unions.
(...) Italy provides a good example of how the impact of privatisation in reality conflicts with the theoretical claims of liberalisation. Last year, Perluigi Bersani, the minister for economic development during the first Prodi government (June 2006-February 2007), launched a liberalisation programme with the aim of attacking the privileges of monopolistic corporations, including taxi, insurance and pharmaceutical companies and mobile phone companies that impose unreasonable pay-as-you-go tariffs. Bersani’s attempt to protect consumer interests in the private sector will no doubt come up against strong corporate vested interest. The fact that it is necessary illustrates how disastrous were the consequences of the privatisations in the 1990s, when Italy went from being an economy dominated by state monopolies to one dominated by the oligarchies of private companies.
(...) Our experience in Italy illustrates one of several problems with privatisation and liberalisation that are common throughout Europe: the end of a state monopoly has not translated into the realisation of a competitive market. Instead it has produced private oligarchies and massive profits for private companies, with very little going to public authorities, which continue to face dire problems of underfunding and debt. Financial institutions have been the main beneficiaries of the privatisation of infrastructure in Europe. Across the continent it is the same story: a deterioration in those services that were liberalised and a shared experience of huge job cuts and a weakening of trade unions.
(...) The passage from public to private that has taken place in Europe has demonstrated the link between privatisation (of industries, infrastructure and public utilities) and the increasing influence of financial markets on the direction of the economy and society. In many European countries, privatisation has been directly linked to diffused shareholding and ‘popular capitalism’, whereby shares in what were public industries and services are sold on the financial market and bought up partly by private citizens but mostly by international investors such as insurance companies.
(...) The political implications of this need seriously to be discussed; it underlies many of the contradictions facing left-wing parties today. There is only one explanation for the propensity of erstwhile parties of the left to support privatisation: in rejecting their past these ex-socialist and ex-communist parties decided they wished to strike a deal with the new holders of financial power.
(...) Democracy is another fundamental problem that needs to be addressed. Privatisation has gone hand in hand with ‘individualistic’ and authoritarian political ideologies. The EU is witnessing a disastrous lack of civic participation in its policy-making. This has been highlighted in research by Greenwich University’s Public Services International Research Unit (see www.psiru.org), on behalf of the European Federation of Public Service Unions, that is highly critical of the official report of the European Commission on services and liberalisation.