Colonial anthropology

Last Friday the New York Times reported that anthropologists have been working alongside the US military in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to make the occupation more effective:

In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy.

Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team’s ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations — in one case spotting a land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe — has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results.

This is not the only instance of professionals becoming handmaidens to the Bush White House. It has recruited psychologists to fine-tune interrogation techniques in Guantanamo over the protests of some members of the profession.

David Price

Anthropologists have also intervened to challenge the misuse of their skills. Chief among them is David Price, who has launched a Pledge of Non-participation in Counter-insurgency. Background articles can be found here. A number of them were written by Price and are included along with others in his excellent website. One of them that originally appeared in the Nation Magazine quite rightfully lauds Franz Boas:

On December 20, 1919, under the heading “Scientists as Spies,” The Nation published a letter by Franz Boas, the father of academic anthropology in America. Boas charged that four American anthropologists, whom he did not name, had abused their professional research positions by conducting espionage in Central America during the First World War. Boas strongly condemned their actions, writing that they had “prostituted science by using it as a cover for their activities as spies.” Anthropologists spying for their country severely betrayed their science and damaged the credibility of all anthropological research, Boas wrote; a scientist who uses his research as a cover for political spying forfeits the right to be classified as a scientist.

Franz Boas 1858-1942

While there are many reasons to admire Boas’s courage, his academic record was not entirely unblemished. While at the Museum of Natural History, Boas decided that Eskimos were suitable objects for study, because they represented a kind of “living fossil” that demonstrated a connection to Ice Age hunters in Europe. So eager was he to have some useful specimens that he commissioned Robert Peary to bring back some back from an Arctic expedition on his ship “The Hope.” Some 30,000 New Yorkers paid 25 cents each in 1896 to view the six Eskimos that Peary retrieved from their home. Later on they were transported to the basement of the Museum in order to be studied. When a reporter asked Boas how they were kept busy, he replied:

Oh, we try to give them little things to keep them busy. Their work doesn’t amount to much, but they have made some carvings, and occupied themselves either indoors or around the place with any employment that suggested itself to them. They do not seem discontented.

Only 8 months after their arrival, four of the six Eskimos had died of tuberculosis. One returned to Greenland and the last, a young boy named Minik who was the son of Qisuk, one of the deceased, remained in the custody of William Wallace, the Superintendent of the Museum. When Minik learned that tribal customs required the bones of ancestors be interred in their homeland, he was convinced by Boas and Wallace that a burial of the bones in New York City would suffice. When he reached the age of 15, he learned that Boas and Wallace had lied to him. The skeleton was being warehoused in the Museum’s basement, alongside hundreds of other bones that belonged to indigenous peoples. In “Skull Wars,” a book focused on the Kennewick man controversy, David Hurst Thomas, a curator of anthropology at the Museum of Natural History, recounts Boas’s flippant attitude toward the entire affair:

Pressed as to why the museum could claim Qisuk’s body when relatives were still alive, Boas replied, “Oh, that was perfectly legitimate. There was no one to bury the body, and the museum had as good a right to it as any other institution authorized to claim bodies.” When an Evening Mail reporter wondered if the body didn’t actually “belong” to Minik, Boas bristled “Well, Minik was just a little boy, and he did not ask for the body. If he had, he might have got it.”

 

Minik in New York

Minik’s lifelong struggle to retrieve his father’s skeleton and return them to his native soil has been documented in Ken Harper’s “Give Me My Father’s Body: The Story of Minik, the New York Eskimo.” A review of this book by Rhode Island College professor Russell A. Potter includes this observation on the cold-blooded “scientific” stance of Boas and Alfred Kroeber, a student of Boas’s who became famous for his writings on “Ishi”, the last hunter-gatherer in California.

They were brought to a damp basement room, and as might have been foreseen, most of them soon came down with tuberculosis, against which they had little resistance. Studied, even as they were dying, by some of the most prominent anthropologists of the day, including Franz Boas (also remembered as Zora Neale Hurston’s thesis advisor) and Alfred Kroeber (”discoverer” of Ishi and father of science-fiction novelist Ursula K. LeGuin), their last days were spent in agonizing pain without benefit of meaningful medical attention.

Considering that Franz Boas was one of the foremost critics of racial doctrines in the US, as well as a fierce opponent of the kind of misuse of anthropology now on display in Iraq and Afghanistan, one must surely wonder about the nature of such a social science. It is fairly easy to understand why an ardent Zionist and cultural anthropologist like Raphael Patai would write trash like “The Arab Mind.” But what explains Boas’s callous attitudes?

I think the key to understanding this kind of tunnel vision is unequal power relationships. No matter how enlightened the scientist, there is a built in imbalance in the way that one side is doing the studying and the other side is being studied. This imbalance rests on economic inequality. “Primitive” peoples simply lack the capital to fund scientific expeditions of the sort that Boas thought useful. Historical laws of capital accumulation made it impossible for Eskimos to send ships to countries like the United States to retrieve specimens to be studied in Greenland or Alaska. Fundamentally, anthropology rests on imperialist inequality no matter the good intentions of the scholars involved.

Some of the earliest attempts to institutionalize anthropology reflect this tendency, no matter the benign goals of those involved with the enterprise. In an article titled “The Discipline and its Sponsors” that appears in the collection “Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter” edited by Talal Asad, Stephan Feuchtang describes the birth of British anthropology as having an umbilical cord in the Empire.

Formed in February 1843 as a breakaway group of the Aborigines’ Protection Society, which had been founded in 1837 in the aftermath of the early 19th century Quaker campaign against the African slave trade, the Royal Anthropological Institute was to be “a centre and depository for the collection and systematization of all observations made on human races” as the RAI describes itself on its website.

Incorporating Wilberforce’s evangelistic fervor, the RAI sought “not to halt European colonisation overseas, but to change its character.” Feuchtwang sums up their approach:

The scientific aim, repeated into the present day, was archival, historical, and an academic reason for focusing on small-scale social units and not on large-scale systems, namely to record data from peoples vanishing through contact with Europeans—the aborigines of Australia, Oceania and the East Indies, the so-called tribals of India and tribes of Africa, not the so-called civilisations of the Far East and India, Malaya, Burma, Siam, the Middle East. The administrative aim was to co-ordinate information on the subject peoples for the preparation of colonial administrators so that they would not make anew the mistakes of the past.

Lord Hailey, a colonial administrator and member of the RAI, was a perfect symbol of this marriage between social science and social control. While in South Africa, Hailey employed a staff of anthropologists to conduct surveys of native peoples intended “to study the problems of culture contact and the application of anthropological knowledge to the government of subject races.” Feuchtwang describes Hailey’s mission in terms that will be instantly recognizable in terms of the tasks facing General Petraeus and his right-hand man, an Australian Lieutenant Colonel named David Kilcullen who has a PhD in anthropology with Islamic extremism in Indonesia his research topic.

Lord Hailey was obviously central in the articulation of colonial administration and professional anthropology. Writing from the vantage point of 1944 he described colonial development as passing through three stages, the first being introduction of law and order and creation of basic infrastructure for the economic development (i.e. extraction) of natural resources, the second, which he judged had then been reached, being one in which the colonial administration is faced with the ‘problem of assisting the indigenous communities to advance their social life and to better their standard of living.’ This would lead to the next stage, which he envisaged as the political advance of indigenous peoples. So his practical and effective interest in anthropology coincided with his second stage of colonial development. The anthropology which took his administrative interest was not the study of human origins, it was the study of how societies work. And the societies with which he thought administrators needed most help from anthropologists were not societies where an easily understood and compatible system could be incorporated easily to colonial rule using native personnel. These, we may note, were the ‘civilisations’ and ‘despotisms’ of the East, given to another set of academic disciplines and institutions altogether —namely, Oriental studies. Anthropology could help with another kind of people and imperial problem, tribal peoples of India and Africa and the Pacific ‘where administrators encountered cultures which were to them of a novel type, and where they did not find personnel of a class which they could readily associate with themselves in the formation of the legal administrative institutions of the country’ (i.e. colony).

Montgomery McFate

One of the odder figures to emerge out of the controversy over anthropologists and the US military is the oddly named Montgomery McFate, a Yale professor, who tries to strike an unconventional image no matter how conventional her ideas about American foreign policy. In an April 29, 2007 SF Gate profile, she is described as a “a punk rock wild child of dyed-in-the-wool hippies, a 41-year-old with close-cropped hair and a voice buttery with sardonic amusement, a double-doc Ivy Leaguer with a penchant for big hats and American Spirit cigarettes and a nose that still bears the tiny dent of a piercing 25 years closed.”

McFate also attracted the attention of New Yorker contributor and liberal hawk George Packer, who reported on her and David Kilcullen in an article titled “Knowing the Enemy: Can Social Scientists redefine the ‘war on terror’“. Although Packer has arrived at a somewhat pro forma opposition to the war in Iraq, it seems obvious that he would revert to his original pro-Bush outlook if people like Kilcullen and McFate produced results. Packer writes:

McFate grew up in the sixties on a communal houseboat in Marin County, California. Her parents were friends with Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and one of her schoolmates was the daughter of Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick and Paul Kantner. Like Kilcullen, she was drawn to the study of human conflict and also its reality: at Yale, where she received a doctorate, her dissertation was based on several years she spent living among supporters of the Irish Republican Army and then among British counterinsurgents. In Northern Ireland, McFate discovered something very like what Kilcullen found in West Java: insurgency runs in families and social networks, held together by persistent cultural narratives—in this case, the eight-hundred-year-old saga of “perfidious Albion.” She went on to marry a U.S. Army officer. “When I was little in California, we never believed there was such a thing as the Cold War,” McFate said. “That was a bunch of lies that the government fed us to keep us paranoid. Of course, there was a thing called the Cold War, and we nearly lost. And there was no guarantee that we were going to win. And this thing that’s happening now is, without taking that too far, similar.” After September 11th, McFate said, she became “passionate about one issue: the government’s need to actually understand its adversaries,” in the same way that the United States came to understand—and thereby undermine—the Soviet Union. If, as Kilcullen and Crumpton maintain, the battlefield in the global counterinsurgency is intimately local, then the American government needs what McFate calls a “granular” knowledge of the social terrains on which it is competing.

Meanwhile, the NY Times cited at the beginning of this article is clear that the real Montgomery McFate has far more in common with Condoleezza Rice, no matter the outre appearance. It reported:

The process that led to the creation of the teams began in late 2003, when American officers in Iraq complained that they had little to no information about the local population. Pentagon officials contacted Montgomery McFate, a Yale-educated cultural anthropologist working for the Navy who advocated using social science to improve military operations and strategy.

Ms. McFate helped develop a database in 2005 that provided officers with detailed information on the local population. The next year, Steve Fondacaro, a retired Special Operations colonel, joined the program and advocated embedding social scientists with American combat units.

Ms. McFate, the program’s senior social science adviser and an author of the new counterinsurgency manual, dismissed criticism of scholars working with the military. “I’m frequently accused of militarizing anthropology,” she said. “But we’re really anthropologizing the military.”

If nothing, McFate is certainly familiar with the anti-imperialist wing of her profession. In an article titled ” Anthropology and counterinsurgency: the strange story of their curious relationship” that appeared in the March-April, 2005, Military Review, McFate cites Feuchtwang’s article in notes 21 and 22:

In Britain the development and growth of anthropology was deeply connected to colonial administration. As early as 1908, anthropologists began training administrators of the Sudanese civil service. This relationship was quickly institutionalized: in 1921, the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures was established with financing from various colonial governments, and Lord Lugard, the former governor of Nigeria, became head of its executive council. The organization’s mission was based on Bronislaw Malinowski’s article, “Practical Anthropology,” which argued that anthropological knowledge should be applied to solve the problems faced by colonial administrators, including those posed by “’savage law, economics, customs, and institutions.” (21) Anthropological knowledge was frequently useful, especially in understanding the power dynamics in traditional societies. In 1937, for example, the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Standing Committee on Applied Anthropology noted that anthropological research would “indicate the persons who hold key positions in the community and whose influence it would be important to enlist on the side of projected reforms.” In the words of Lord Hailey, anthropologists were indeed “of great assistance in providing Government with knowledge which must be the basis of administrative policy.” (22)

Citing Feuchtwang is of course not the same thing as agreeing with him. Indeed, she obviously views his aversion to colonial administrators exploiting the services of his profession as a hangover from the Vietnam era:

Although anthropology is the only academic discipline that explicitly seeks to understand foreign cultures and societies, it is a marginal contributor to U.S. national-security policy at best and a punch line at worst. Over the past 30 years, as a result of anthropologists’ individual career choices and the tendency toward reflexive self-criticism contained within the discipline itself, the discipline has become hermetically sealed within its Ivory Tower…

The retreat to the Ivory Tower is also a product of the deep isolationist tendencies within the discipline. Following the Vietnam War, it was fashionable among anthropologists to reject the discipline’s historic ties to colonialism. Anthropologists began to reinvent their discipline, as demonstrated by Kathleen Gough’s 1968 article, Anthropology. Child of Imperialism, followed by Dell Hymes’ 1972 anthology, Reinventing Anthropology, and culminating in editor Talal Asad’s Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter.

It is this “reflexive self-criticism” of course that David Price wants to keep alive, over and against the efforts of people like David Kilcullen and Montgomery McFate. Against the unseemly desire of principled anthropologists to keep the academy out of the business of killing, McFate urges reconciliation between the two estranged parties:

DOD [Department of Defense] yearns for cultural knowledge, but anthropologists en masse, bound by their own ethical code and sunk in a mire of postmodernism, are unlikely to contribute much of value to reshaping national-security policy or practice. Yet, if anthropologists remain disengaged, who will provide the relevant subject matter expertise? As Anna Simons, an anthropologist who teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School, points out: “If anthropologists want to put their heads in the sand and not assist, then who will the military, the CIA, and other agencies turn to for information? They’ll turn to people who will give them the kind of information that should make anthropologists want to rip their hair out because the information won’t be nearly as directly connected to what’s going on on the local landscape.”

The goal of this reconciliation would be to destroy the insurgency in both Iraq and Afghanistan and to consolidate puppet governments that would be obedient to the will of the American ruling class, although McFate puts in a somewhat different manner:

Successful counterinsurgency depends on attaining a holistic, total understanding of local culture. This cultural understanding must be thorough and deep if it is to have any practical benefit at all. This fact is not lost on the Army. In the language of interim FM 3-07.22: “The center of gravity in counterinsurgency operations is the population. Therefore, understanding the local society and gaining its support is critical to success. For U.S. forces to operate effectively among a local population and gain and maintain their support, it is important to develop a thorough understanding of the society and its culture, including its history, tribal/family/social structure, values, religions, customs, and needs.”

To defeat the insurgency in Iraq, U.S. and coalition forces must recognize and exploit the underlying tribal structure of the country; the power wielded by traditional authority figures; the use of Islam as a political ideology; the competing interests of the Shia, the Sunni, and the Kurds; the psychological effects of totalitarianism; and the divide between urban and rural, among other things.

My guess is that colonial anthropology will meet with the same success that it met with in Vietnam, for after all the problem is not us understanding the native, but the natives understanding us all too well.

Iranian University Chancellors Ask Lee Bollinger 10 Questions

http://www.farsnews.com/English/newstext.php?nn=8606300370

TEHRAN (Fars News Agency)- Seven chancellors and presidents of Iranian universities and research centers, in a letter addressed to their counterpart in the US, Colombia University, denounced Lee Bollinger’s insulting words against the Iranian nation and president and invited him to provide responses to 10 questions by Iranian academics and intellectuals.

The following is the full text of the letter:

Mr. Lee Bollinger Columbia University President

We, the professors and heads of universities and research institutions in Tehran, hereby announce our displeasure and protest at your impolite remarks prior to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent speech at Columbia University.

We would like to inform you that President Ahmadinejad was elected directly by the Iranian people through an enthusiastic two-round poll in which almost all of the country’s political parties and groups participated. To assess the quality and nature of these elections you may refer to US news reports on the poll dated June 2005.

Your insult, in a scholarly atmosphere, to the president of a country with a population of 72 million and a recorded history of 7,000 years of civilization and culture is deeply shameful.

Your comments, filled with hate and disgust, may well have been influenced by extreme pressure from the media, but it is regrettable that media policy-makers can determine the stance a university president adopts in his speech.

Your remarks about our country included unsubstantiated accusations that were the product of guesswork as well as media propaganda. Some of your claims result from misunderstandings that can be clarified through dialogue and further research.

During his speech, Mr. Ahmadinejad answered a number of your questions and those of students. We are prepared to answer any remaining questions in a scientific, open and direct debate.

You asked the president approximately ten questions. Allow us to ask you ten of our own questions in the hope that your response will help clear the atmosphere of misunderstanding and distrust between our two countries and reveal the truth.

1- Why did the US media put you under so much pressure to prevent Mr. Ahmadinejad from delivering his speech at Columbia University? And why have American TV networks been broadcasting hours of news reports insulting our president while refusing to allow him the opportunity to respond? Is this not against the principle of freedom of speech?

2- Why, in 1953, did the US administration overthrow Iran’s national government under Dr Mohammad Mosaddegh and go on to support the Shah’s dictatorship?

3- Why did the US support the blood-thirsty dictator Saddam Hussein during the 1980-88 Iraqi-imposed war on Iran, considering his reckless use of chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers defending their land and even against his own people?

4- Why is the US putting pressure on the government elected by the majority of Palestinians in Gaza instead of officially recognizing it? And why does it oppose Iran’s proposal to resolve the 60-year-old Palestinian issue through a general referendum?

5- Why has the US military failed to find Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden even with all its advanced equipment? How do you justify the old friendship between the Bush and Bin Laden families and their cooperation on oil deals? How can you justify the Bush administration’s efforts to disrupt investigations concerning the September 11 attacks?

6- Why does the US administration support the Mujahedin Khalq Organization (MKO) despite the fact that the group has officially and openly accepted the responsibility for numerous deadly bombings and massacres in Iran and Iraq? Why does the US refuse to allow Iran’s current government to act against the MKO’s main base in Iraq?

7- Was the US invasion of Iraq based on international consensus and did international institutions support it? What was the real purpose behind the invasion which has claimed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives? Where are the weapons of mass destruction that the US claimed were being stockpiled in Iraq?

8- Why do America’s closest allies in the Middle East come from extremely undemocratic governments with absolutist monarchical regimes?

9- Why did the US oppose the plan for a Middle East free of unconventional weapons in the recent session of the International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors despite the fact the move won the support of all members other than Israel?

10- Why is the US displeased with Iran’s agreement with the IAEA and why does it openly oppose any progress in talks between Iran and the agency to resolve the nuclear issue under international law?

Finally, we would like to express our readiness to invite you and other scientific delegations to our country. A trip to Iran would allow you and your colleagues to speak directly with Iranians from all walks of life including intellectuals and university scholars. You could then assess the realities of Iranian society without media censorship before making judgments about the Iranian nation and government.

You can be assured that Iranians are very polite and hospitable toward their guests.

Columbia University and evil dictators

I don’t think there is anything that I hate more than sanctimoniousness and there was plenty of it on display when Lee Bollinger’s sandbagged Mahmoud Ahmadinejad yesterday. As the NY Times reported, “Mr. Bollinger praised himself and Columbia for showing they believed in freedom of speech by inviting the Iranian president, then continued his attack.” Bollinger was also praised by the ultraright media, starting with Rush Limbaugh:

Rah-rah, way to go! I apologize for being critical of you, Mr. Bollinger. I really do. But, on the other hand, where’s this been for five years?

One can only wonder whether Columbia University’s moral compass has been broken in years past since its aversion to evil dictators seems to be rather selective.

In 1933, Hans Luther, the German Ambassador to the United States, was the featured speaker at the Institute of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University. As he began to speak, a woman in the audience called out “Why did they burn the homes of exiled professors?” The NY Times reported that an usher and a cop pounced on her at the same time and dragged her out. Another two protesters were subsequently removed from the audience. After Luther finished his remarks, Russell Potter, the head of the institute, denounced them as “ill-mannered children.”

President Nicholas Murray Butler: did not care about Nazi official’s views

Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, was even more outspoken in his support of Hans Luther. After he learned of campus unhappiness with the invitation extended to the Nazi official, he made clear his determination to ignore it. He never would have dreamed of insulting Luther in the manner that Bollinger insulted Ahmadinejad. In an excellent paper titled “Complicity and Conflict: Columbia University’s Response to Fascism, 1933–1937“, U. of Oklahoma professor Stephen H. Norwood details Butler’s deference toward the Nazi official:

Dismissing the student criticism, President Butler indicated that he held Ambassador Luther in high esteem. He declared that Luther “is the official diplomatic representative to the Government of the United States on the part of the government of a friendly people,” and was entitled to “the greatest courtesy and respect.” Butler announced that the Nazi ambassador was a “gentleman,” and that Columbia would provide him with “a welcome appropriate to his distinguished position.” He was pleased to receive any guest like Ambassador Luther who was “intelligent, honest, and well-mannered”; he did not care what his views were.

When protestors attempted to pass out leaflets in front of the building where the Nazi ambassador was holding forth, the university had them arrested. So much for free speech. As might be expected, the NY Times was most deferential to Luther’s boss Adolph Hitler, who was described as saying that the differences between Poland and Germany were “not important enough to justify the shedding of blood.” Then as now you could always count on the newspaper of record for its probing analysis.

Perhaps you can excuse the university since the Nazi regime had not yet descended into the kind of murderous behavior that it became associated with later on. But by 1936 there could be no confusion. The labor movement and all opposition parties had been smashed and thousands of opponents of the regime had been imprisoned or executed. The moral stink of the Nazi regime was by then too rank to ignore.

Evidently the stink was not that great to persuade the university to turn down a 1936 invitation to help the Nazis celebrate the 550^th anniversary of the University of Heidleberg, an event that the Columbia University teacher’s union and the Columbia Spectator strongly opposed. British universities were in the forefront of opposing this celebration, with Oxford and Cambridge turning the Nazis down. Unlike Columbia University, they couldn’t stomach the declaration of Berhard Rust, the German Minister of Education, that “It is the duty of the National Socialist student to create a National Socialist university.”

I can imagine that Professor Arthur Remy, who was chosen to represent Columbia, must have had a swell time at this bash. On June 27^th he and a bunch of other professors from upstanding institutions like Cornell, Vassar, Yale and U. of Michigan did have to listen to a bunch of Nazi bigwigs, a small price to pay for all the Gemulichkeit. The April 28 NY Times reported:

Despite assertions made here that the event would have purely academic local significance, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and other Nazi functionaries will be among the most prominent hosts to the scholars and scientists who have been invited to represent the universities of the world.

Something tells me that Columbia’s Arthur Remy didn’t create a scene in the audience like the woman who wanted to know “Why did they burn the homes of exiled professors?”

Not everybody at Columbia was so mature and so restrained as Arthur Remy. Robert Burke of Youngstown, Ohio, who was the Junior President-Elect of the Columbia student body, was advised by the administration that it would be “in the best interests of all” that he not register for the Fall term, according to the June 29 NY Times. His crime was “taking part in a demonstration on May 12 at the home of Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University.” The students were protesting the university’s decision to go to Heidleberg. Burke, who was an amateur boxer and extremely popular on campus, crossed the line when he ruined President Murray’s alumni gathering. Dean Herbert E. Hawkes told the Times, “The demonstration on this occasion employed insulting, obscene and profane language and even invaded the foyer of the president’s home while he was entertaining at dinner the surviving members of the class of 1881.”

Without a doubt, Robert Burke was far too good for the likes of Murray Butler. Turning once again to Stephen H. Norwood, we learn:

President Butler, Dean Hawkes, and other Columbia administrators were personally uncomfortable with Burke, a “rugged face[d]” Irish-American from Youngstown, Ohio, who was working his way through Columbia. Burke had become a leader of the radical American Student Union (ASU) on campus, and in March 1936 had led a picket line of Columbia students to support striking building service workers employed by the university. Former Spectator editor-in-chief James A. Wechsler noted that Dean Hawkes “always lamented” that Burke’s “manners were not sufficiently elegant.”

Burke had struggled to earn his Columbia tuition, working in Youngstown for two years as a truck driver and for one year in a steel mill before he had saved enough to enroll. Burke had developed into a tough amateur boxer good enough to win New York’s Golden Gloves middleweight final, and he earned money at Columbia teaching young men to box. Almost alone among Columbia’s athletes, he became active in the movement to boycott the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He often worked thirty hours a week outside of class to pay his tuition, “roam[ing] through every conceivable job which promised a dollar or a meal.” He washed dogs, and even sold his blood.

The administration considered Burke’s apparently exemplary academic performance irrelevant in expelling him. President Butler insisted that the university was under no contractual obligation to give a diploma for “achievement and excellence” if it disapproved of a person “for any reason whatsoever.”

After Nazi Germany became an official enemy of the US, it would have been inappropriate to send somebody to a gathering such as this. As should be obvious from Lee Bollinger’s talking points about Iran killing US troops in Iraq, it is imperative to not stray too far from foreign policy imperatives about which the ruling class is united. Today, unfortunately, the consensus across the political spectrum is that Iran needs to be taught a lesson. The difference is only how severe that lesson should be.

When Bollinger told Ahmadinejad that he exhibited “all the signs of a petty and cruel dictator,” the Iranian president might have wondered whether great and cruel dictators are judged by a different yardstick at the university. After all, the Shah of Iran was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree only two years after the CIA organized a coup to overthrow Mossadegh. By any measure, the Shah was one of the most horrible dictators of the post-WWII period. One supposes that as long as he was on the State Department’s A list, Columbia University would be happy to put down the red carpet for the torturing beast.

President Grayson Kirk: enjoyed cozy relations with the CIA

Columbia University certainly had the right connections to recognize major talents like the Shah when it came to bestowing honors. In 1968, Columbia students published an eye-opening pamphlet titled “Who Rules Columbia” that established the university’s institutional connections to the CIA, especially with the Asia Foundation:

The Asia Foundation has received much if not all of its financial support from the CIA. It has a budget of about $7 million a year to provide “private American assistance to those Asian groups and individuals working for continued social and economic improvement.” The foundation has resident representatives in 14 Asian countries, with American offices in New York and San Francisco. At various times, representatives have been kicked out of Cambodia, Indonesia and more recently, India, reputedly for their various intelligence activities.

The person who makes the link between the Asia Foundation and Columbia is Grayson Kirk, president of the University. Kirk has been on the board of the Foundation for many years, and is one of its most influential trustees. In 1962, when Robert Blum, president of the Foundation, resigned, Kirk was appointed Chairman of the Nominating Committee of the Trustees, whose purpose was to select a new president. In his search for suitable candidates for this position, Kirk sought the advice and suggestions of Dean Rusk and Averell Harriman, a move which indicates the importance of the Foundation. He also encouraged recommendations from George S. Moore, President of the First National City Bank of New York, and A.L. Nickerson, Chairman of the Board of Socony Mobil Oil Company, Inc., concerning members of the bank and of Socony Mobil, which had experience in Asian affairs. One man who was proposed as a possible choice was Robert Amory, but Kirk himself is reported to have feared that he might bring embarrassment to the Asia Foundation. From 1952-1962, Amory was Deputy Director of the CIA.

The relationship between the Asia Foundation and Columbia is a reciprocal one. Since at least 1961, the Foundation has given grants to Columbia’s School of Journalism, recently financing the Japanese Science Writers’ Project and Fellowships for Asiatic Journalists. Grayson Kirk’s long and intimate association with the Asia Foundation suggests what an able and prominent supporter of the CIA this university president really is. It follows that many of his administrative decisions as President of Columbia University have also reflected the interests, priorities and concerns of the CIA. Certainly such decisions would not infringe on these concerns. Consider Kirk’s attitude toward the NSA (National Student Association)-CIA exposure: “One shouldn’t jump to conclusions that the people in these organizations were being used as spies.” The money was donated “more for propaganda purposes than for anything else.” Kirk’s only complaint about the CIA’s funding of non-governmental organizations was that “a certain amount of this seems to have been handled clumsily by people in Washington.”

Maybe one day we’ll find out the extent of Columbia University’s present day connections with government agencies, both covert and overt. As the drums for war beat louder and louder, it will be increasingly necessary for an isolated and discredited Bush administration to rely on ostensibly liberal and humanitarian figures, such as Ivy League presidents.

Just as the student protests of 1968 led to the unearthing of secret documents that revealed such ties, it is entirely possible that continued anger over the war in Iraq and future war with Iran might propel the students of today toward bolder actions that might put them in the proud tradition of people like Robert Burke.

Is H-Net going under?

Apparently H-Net might be going out of business. For most normal people who have not been initiated into this academic inner sanctum, suffice it to say that you have not been missing much. H-Net is a collection of mailing lists moderated by tenured professors that share these features in common:

1. All messages must be approved by the moderator before they appear on the list. This creates a sluggish environment, no matter the intention of the list owner.

2. The non-academic is made to feel like an outsider. Many of the lists actually require you to fill out a form before you are allowed to become a subscriber. They ask you which university you attend or teach at, what your research interests are, etc. It is a little bit like applying for a job.

3. The lists tend to be focused on academic business, such as job openings, journal announcements, etc. And when they do address the research agenda of the list, they often tend to be scholastic inquiries rather than attempts to engage other academics in a debate over ideas. The simple truth is that many of the tenured professors who even deign to subscribe to H-Net lists prefer a one-way conversation in print journals rather than the rough-and-tumble world of the Internet.

On H-Net’s home page, they describe themselves this way:

Subscriptions are screened by the list’s editors to promote a diverse readership dedicated to friendly, productive, scholarly communications. Each list publishes between 15 and 60 messages a week. Subscription applications are solicited from scholars, teachers, professors, researchers, graduate students, journalists, librarians and archivists.

In other words, if you don’t fall into one of the categories listed above, you’d better mind your p’s and q’s. Nine years ago I became a subscriber to H-Amindian (American Indian History and Culture) at a time when I was writing a series of articles about Marxism and the American Indian. After somebody posted a query about Cherokee’s owning slaves, I replied with a brief excerpt from George Lipsitz’s “Rainbow at Midnight” that called attention to how “some Native Americans held black slaves (in part to prove to whites that they could adopt civilized European American ways), and some of the first chartered African American units in the U.S. army went to war against Comanches in Texas or served as security forces for wagon trains of white settlers on the trails to California.”

Apparently, this didn’t sit well with one of the real subscribers who resented hearing what an outsider like Lipsitz had to say about their “research area,” as well as me for having the temerity to post it. Melissa Meyers, a history professor from UCLA, sniffed and harrumphed, “Scholars, even those as esteemed as George Lipsitz, should refrain from facile explanations of native behavior until they have done adequate homework in the field.” Well, I never…

I unsubbed about a month later.

My next encounter with an H-Net mailing list was with something called H-Radhist (History, Theory, Politics from a Radical Perspective) that was moderated by a character named Van Gosse who has functioned on the steering committee of UFPJ, a perfect place for him. The list is pretty much defunct as would be indicated by the most recent messages:

H-Net Job Guide - September 1, 2007 to September 8, 2007 (fwd) “Jobguide” <jobguide@mail.h-net.msu.edu>

H-Net academic announcements posted to the web 2007-09-03 - 2007-09-04 (fwd) H-Net Announcements <announce@mail.h-net.msu.edu>

H-Net Job Guide - August 25, 2007 to September 1, 2007 (fwd) “Jobguide” <jobguide@mail.h-net.msu.edu>

Now you have to ask yourself how something as lively as radical history can become so stultifyingly boring. That was Van Gosse’s talent, I suppose. When I was subbed to H-Radhist, I made the mistake of posting articles from Harry Braverman and Bert Cochran’s “American Socialist” that I had been scanning. Gosse told me that the list was for “discussion”, not such material. I was so struck by his obtuseness that I unsubbed immediately.

That was the last mailing list I actually subscribed to. Nowadays, I check the archives of something called H-HOAC (H-Net Network on American communism and anticommunism). A more proper name for it would be H-HUAC since the main focus is on amateur sleuthing about who was a commie traitor. There are endless discussions about Alger Hiss, for example, but very few about the real legacy of the CPUSA in the mass movement. For this type of discussion to take place, there would have to be input from scholars like Mark Naison. I imagine that they steer clear of the list because they might have perceived it correctly as a toxic dump.

Since H-Net has been such a major player in the academic cyberworld, there has been some discussion about its collapse from the professor bloggers. T. Mills Kelly, a historian at George Mason University, kicked off the discussion with a post to his Edwired blog titled “The End of H-Net“. He discovered something that I noticed years ago:

In the past several years, however, the various lists I’ve been a member of have become quieter and quieter–and one, H-MMedia, died a quiet death on January 12, 2005. Not only has the volume of email I’ve been receiving gone down, but the quality of the material in those messages has declined to the point where I almost never request a posting from the H-Net servers any more (I have all my lists set to “digest” so that I only get a summary of the list’s traffic each week). The vast majority of the postings seem to be conference announcements, requests for papers, or cross-postings from other lists. Definitely not the cutting edge of scholarship these lists used to offer.

In a follow-up, Mills drew a contrast between academic blogs like his own and the stuffed-shirt atmosphere of H-Net:

[B]loggers can post what they want when they want without the intermediary of an editor, they often stand accused of being somehow “unacademic” in tone or content. H-Net defenders, by contrast, point out that because H-Net lists are edited and moderated, they maintain that higher tone and quality control that we in the academy insist upon. Why we insist on speaking to one another in more rarefied tones and why we fear letting the hoi palloi is, I think, a topic for an entirely different discussion.

(I don’t think that Kelly has to worry too much about appearing overly refined since he does not even know how to spell hoi polloi.)

Progressive Historians, a group blog, chimed in by enumerating 6 ways in which academic blogs are superior to listservs:

1. They’re more aesthetically pleasing. Let’s face it, after all these years, e-mail is still ugly. Listservs tend to be even worse.

2. Posting doesn’t have to go through the bottleneck of moderation.

3. Browsing at your own pace. The main problem with listservs, as Edwired notes, is that they generate masses of e-mail that are fired at you with no warning and when you’re least likely to want to read them.

4. Thematically-organized content. Blogs that use tags (we’re not one of them) make it possible for a poster to read posts on a single subject without having to sign up for a separate e-mail list.

5. Relative anonymity. It sounds strange that a blog could be more anonymous than an e-mail list, but think about this: if you post something to a listserv, you know that all your colleagues are going to read it.

6. Blogging just sounds cooler. What would you rather put on your CV, “Moderator, H-Ideas e-mail list” or “Contributing Editor, History News Network?” And seriously, who wants to tell people they’ve just written a book review for a listserv? Blogs are much more conducive to scholarly or semi-scholarly work than are listservs.

While the Progressive Historian blogger would see himself or herself as a champion of democracy and equality second to none, there is something that he and the Margaret Dumonts at H-Net have in common. They both see themselves as separate and distinct from the hoi palloi [sic] that T. Mills Kelly refers to, especially the last point. Frankly, the question of what I would put on my CV never popped into my head. This sort of thing smacks of the kind of Norman Podhoretz “Making It” syndrome that convinced me to bust out of academia in the first place.

My own experience is that academic blogs are susceptible to the same kind of in-group authoritarianism as H-Net. I have had two experiences that convinced me that they perpetuate all the rigid hierarchies that you find in the academic world. One is Crooked Timber, a group blog with “progressive” pretensions. Politically, it occupies a space roughly equivalent to Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party and the British Labour Party prior to Tony Blair. It has been a critic of the war in Iraq, but finds all sorts of reasons to defend NATO’s war in the Balkans. About a year or two ago, I posted an item about Srebrenica that ran counter to the ideological agenda of one of the blog owners and found it unceremoniously deleted with a warning that I should not “troll” on Crooked Timber any more. I stopped posting comments at that point.

I had an even more alienating experience on Cliopatria, a group blog for historians, when I found myself baited continuously by the founder Ralph Luker, a minor academic figure with the personality of a toy Doberman pinscher. Luker’s mistake was to label me as a “troll” on Cliopatria after I had the gumption to defend Ward Churchill on Crooked Timber. Like Beetlejuice, I have a knack for showing up at places where my name is mentioned. After I began to post on Cliopatria, Luker did everything he could to be unpleasant to me, making all sorts of ignorant jibes about commies, etc. Since I have a hide thicker than a rhinoceros, this had no effect on me. I don’t get ulcers; I give them. I finally stopped posting on Cliopatria for the same reason as Crooked Timber. One of the blog owners deleted a post that he considered to be uncivil. Considering the spittle I had to wipe off my face from Luker on a regular basis, I considered this the height of hypocrisy and blew it off.

Notwithstanding the sterility of H-Net and the badmouthing of listservs by both Edwired and Professional Historians, I do believe that they can be extremely useful. Unlike blogs, the playing field is level–as long as they are not the premoderated variety on display at H-Net. There is no substitute for the give-and-take between professional scholars and the hoi polloi like me. One of the best examples is PEN-L, a mailing list for leftwing economists  that has been operating since the early 1990s. It is moderated by my friend Michael Perelman, a professor at U. Cal Chico. Perelman, who takes his socialist ideas seriously, has never made me feel like an outsider. I have posted on PEN-L since the early 1990s and have learned an enormous amount from the professionals who post there. I have also felt that I have made a real contribution to PEN-L myself. It is this kind of give and take that should pervade every forum on the Internet, whether it is an academic blog or a listserv.

Like Gutenberg’s printing press, the Internet is a medium that has the potential for cutting edge social change. Just as the printing press gave the plebeians of the 16^th century the power to distribute “dangerous” ideas, so does the Internet have that capability today. Understandably, some figures of authority have become nervous about that. They feel challenged by wikis and resent the ability of bloggers to create an alternative source of news and analysis to the mainstream media. It should be the responsibility of progressive academics to encourage this development and not stifle it. In this light, I for one would not mourn the demise of H-Net.

Michael Bérubé: amateur red-baiter

Amateur anti-Communist

As a long-time observer of the “cruise missile left,” I was happy to see Alexander Cockburn nail them in a recent Counterpunch:

The war party virtually monopolized television. AM radio poured out a filthy torrent of war bluster. The laptop bombardiers such as Salman Rushdie were in full war paint. Among the progressives the liberal interventionists thumped their tin drums, often by writing pompous pieces attacking the antiwar “hard left”. Mini-pundits Todd Gitlin and Michael Bérubé played this game eagerly. Bérubé lavished abuse on Noam Chomsky and other clear opponents of the war, mumbling about the therapeutic potential of great power interventionism, piously invoking the tradition of “left internationalism”. Others, like Ian Williams, played supportive roles in instilling the idea that the upcoming war was negotiable, instead of an irreversible intent of the Bush administration, no matter what Saddam Hussein did.

Bérubé, a publicity-hungry Penn State professor who is Alan Colmes to red-baiter David Horowitz’s Sean Hannity, defended himself on Crooked Timber, a group blog that he joined recently and that was made to order for him. This is a gang of underachieving liberal academics with socialist pretensions who spent most of the 90s demanding that the dastardly Serbs be brought to heel and then without skipping a beat cheered on the B-52’s as they rained bombs down on the Taliban. When George W. Bush took the next logical step and invaded Iraq, they responded that this was not what they had in mind. However, a jury would likely have found them guilty of being accessories after the fact. US imperialism certainly saw all these invasions as consistent with each other, even if liberals like Bérubé could not. This would require an understanding of class politics that is sadly missing in the postmodernist swamp he inhabits.

Whenever I think of Bérubé’s attack on antiwar organizers in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, I am reminded of Lillian Hellman’s contemptuous view of the “anti-antifascist left” during the 1930s. These were people who didn’t make a career of bashing Hitler, only bashing the people who had the guts to stand up to Hitler. It is like writing op-ed pieces in the NY Times in 1936 taking the Spanish Republic to task for not disassociating itself from the Kremlin sufficiently. It was bollocks then and bollocks now, as the British say.

It might be useful to review what Bérubé was actually saying 5 years ago, the period described by Cockburn as one of a “filthy torrent of war bluster”. The invasion of Afghanistan had created a powerful momentum to rally around the flag. Todd Gitlin, the Columbia journalism professor linked correctly to Bérubé by Cockburn, had written an atrocious book titled “Intellectuals and the Flag” that lectured the “hard left” for not genuflecting before the stars and stripes.

Bérubé felt inspired by the patriotic fever to write an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education on November 29, 2002 that was a classic red-baiting attack on unpatriotic elements in the antiwar movement. Written just 3 months before the invasion of Iraq, it was an all-out assault on the ANSWER coalition, which for all its faults did at least understand that imperialism had to be opposed in the streets.

Bérubé’s article is titled “Toward an Ideal Antiwar Movement: Mature, Legitimate, and Popular”. All in all, it has the familiar tone of Irving Howe lecturing 1960s radicals about the need to behave. Clearly it was written for the benefit of Bérubé’s peers in academia since anybody in the position to actually organize an ‘ideal’ antiwar movement would not be wasting their time reading a trade magazine for the professorate. He was far more interested in cultivating his own image as an anti-Communist liberal than actually building some kind of alternative to ANSWER. It is doubtful that Bérubé actually organized any kind of protest in his entire life so he wouldn’t know where to start.

In a rare moment of self-awareness, he actually admits to his rather inconsequential nature:

Perhaps I am just an armchair activist, sitting at home in my study, jawing over the fine points of texts, when I should be organizing teach-ins and rallies.

He begins with an anecdote that clearly establishes his national-security mindset. As a 21 year old, he was drawn to an anti-nuclear protest in Central Park in June 1982 but was at odds with most of the participants “in believing that nuclear weapons launched from submarines were a good deterrent.” He decided to grace the demonstration with his presence despite the widespread presence of signs stating that “One Nuclear Bomb Can Ruin Your Entire Day.” In perhaps a concession to youthful impetuousness, he decided not to “think too much about who was organizing the rally.” Bérubé had read in The New York Times that Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger had described the protest as “led by Soviet agents and sympathizers.” That did not worry Bérubé since his crowd “did not, in fact, contain a single Soviet agent or sympathizer.” In reading this nonsense, I am reminded of Joel Kovel’s diagnosis of anti-Communism as a psychiatric disorder.

Moving forward in time, Bérubé is far more tuned in to who is a Red or not:

Twenty years later, the left has begun organizing mass demonstrations against a war in Iraq. But who’s doing the organizing? For the October 6 rally in New York, a group called Not in Our Name, behind which one can find Refuse and Resist!, which in turn has ties to the Revolutionary Communist Party. For the October 26 rally in Washington, a group called Act Now to Stop War & End Racism (ANSWER), run out of Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center, itself a front for the Workers World Party. The groups involved in the demonstrations thus carry some heavy far-left baggage.

Bérubé’s “mature, legitimate and popular” antiwar movement would be stripped of the “heavy far-left baggage” and have Todd Gitlin’s American flag draped across it. This movement would, in his words, pay Iraqi dissidents-in-exile the respect of taking seriously their longstanding desire for “regime change.” In other words, Ahmed Chalabi would be speaking from the podium rather than Ramsey Clark. This movement would also take seriously “the possibility that Saddam Hussein will not really cooperate with United Nations inspections and will seek to develop and deploy weapons of mass destruction.” So instead of demonstrating at the Pentagon, the antiwarriors assembled in the literature professor’s mind would be marching on the Iraqi Consulate demanding that Saddam Hussein liquidate a WMD program that most independent arms monitors described as having been liquidated years earlier.

Finally, Bérubé’s antiwar movement would have insisted that the best alternative to war was the “smart sanctions” that Colin Powell had championed in the early months of the Bush administration. It might be useful to review the motivation behind “smart sanctions” when they were proposed in 2001–before 9/11. As a result of the bad publicity that Clinton era sanctions had generated in the Arab world (remember Madeline Albright’s defense of the sanctions even though they had cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children), there was a powerful momentum to end them. In the face of such pressure, Powell was devising a new strategy that could continue the economic stranglehold on a long-suffering population. Phyllis Bennis explained what the Bush administration had in mind:

Even before September 11th public awareness regarding the impact of sanctions had continued to rise in the U.S., even more so in Europe and with growing outrage across the Middle East. In response, Colin Powell made the replacement of the existing sanctions with a new “smart sanctions” arrangement a cornerstone of his State Department’s approach to Iraq policy. Throughout the first months of the Bush administration in 2001, a new U.S.-proposed sanctions arrangement was under discussion in the Security Council. Officially the proposal was designed to loosen some restrictions on importing food and other goods, while tightening the semi-clandestine oil shipments out and consumer goods in over Iraq’s long and porous borders. In fact, it was a spin-driven proposal, intended primarily as a public relations ploy to undercut growing regional concern about the dire conditions facing Iraqi civilians under sanctions. As originally endorsed by Powell, the new arrangement would have only tinkered with the sanctions’ impact, not reversed them.

In other words, Bérubé would have expected the antiwar movement to embrace a policy that served “primarily as a public relations ploy to undercut growing regional concern about the dire conditions facing Iraqi civilians under sanctions.”

It should be obvious at this point that Bérubé was never serious about building an alternative to ANSWER. He was only interested in red-baiting it out of existence. If you strip away his leftist pretensions, you are left with the same kind of fetid, flag-waving garbage that used to grace the editorial pages of American newspapers during the mass demonstrations of the 1960s and 70s.

When I was in the Socialist Workers Party at the time and busy raising money or passing out leaflets for the antiwar movement, I would periodically be reminded of the kind of witch-hunting mentality that had never been completely expunged with the repudiation of Joe McCarthy.

If you really want to discover where Bérubé got his ideas, the best place to look are the columns of Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, who red-baited the antiwar movement every chance they got. A November 12, 1969 column could have practically been written by our postmodernist professor. It begins:

The tens of thousands of well-meaning war protestors set to converge on Washington Saturday will be joining a demonstration planned since summer by advocates of violent revolution in the U.S. who openly support Communist forces in Vietnam.

Evans and Novak continue in a vein that reads exactly like an FBI dossier:

The link between Hanoi and elements of the New Mobe was again demonstrated Oct. 14 when Premier Pham Van Dong of North Vietnam sent greetings to American antiwar demonstrators. [Fred] Halstead, the Trotskyite leader, drafted a reply to Hanoi approved by a majority of the New Mobe’s steering committee.

Red-baiting such as this has been fully assimilated by people such as Bérubé, Marc Cooper and David Corn who all wrote “exposés” of the Iraq antiwar movement in the Boston Globe, the Washington Post and other corporate media. Unlike our latter-day “antiwar” liberals, Evans and Novak had the honesty to admit that they were professional anti-Communists, a calling that these rank amateurs can only aspire to.

A reply to Wright

First of all, I want to thank Erik Olin Wright for taking the trouble to write such a thorough and considered response to my critique. In keeping with remarks I already made, it demonstrates his true respect for the democratic culture of the Internet, which will certainly be as key to our future revolutions as the Gutenberg press was for the peasant revolts of an earlier epoch.

In point one of Wright’s response, he states, “Once you acknowledge that capitalism may be an indefinitely robust, dynamic form of economic organization, then one has to directly engage the issue of how to convince people that an alternative is possible, viable, and desirable.”

After reading this, it reminded me of a real gap in AM literature. One can not think of a single work that actually describes the history of an actual living revolution. It is mainly theorizing about revolution, as in G.A. Cohen’s “Karl Marx’s Theory of History.” I imagine that it is not just a coincidence that Wright has many of the same preoccupations as Cohen, who is fixated on the statement in the Communist Manifesto that the “fall [of the bourgeoisie] and the victory of the proletariat are inevitable.” “If the advent of socialism is inevitable,” Cohen asks, “then why should Marx and Engels, and those who they hoped to activate, strive to achieve socialism?”

If you study the history of living revolutions since the days of the Paris Commune, you will discover that people go to the barricades not because they have developed ideas about a new economic system that is superior to the one that they are living under, like Linux compared to Microsoft Windows. Rather, they are driven to such extremes because the system that they are living under becomes intolerable.

Ever since the 1930s, this has meant that revolution is an event that takes place mainly in the global South. People took up arms in Nicaragua against Somoza not because Carlos Fonseca had succeeded in persuading them that a socialist Nicaragua was preferable, but because the current system was condemning infants to death by diarrhea and students protesting against these conditions were being thrown out of helicopters.

If you examine the historic program of the FSLN (alas, long forgotten in the wake of the US victory), you will find very little in the way of a roadmap or compass. It includes basic demands very much in line with those put forward by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto:

The revolutionary government will apply the following measures of an economic character:

–It will expropriate the landed estates, factories, companies, buildings, means of transportation, and other wealth usurped by the Somoza family and accumulated through the misappropriation and plunder of the nation’s wealth.

–It will expropriate the landed estates, factories, companies, means of transportation, and other wealth usurped by the politicians and military officers, and all other accomplices, who have taken advantage of the present regime’s administrative corruption.

–It will nationalize the wealth of all the foreign companies that exploit the mineral, forest, maritime, and other kinds of resources.

–It will establish workers’ control over the administrative management of the factories and other wealth that are expropriated and nationalized, etc.

You don’t need an advanced degree in social science to formulate demands such as these. You simply need to respond to the deeply felt needs of the population for justice.

In point three of his rebuttal, Wright defends the use of ‘ideal types’:

The ‘ideal type’ on the other hand, abstracts from all of the forms of variation and tries to identify those mechanisms in capitalism which are most systematically generative of its common properties across these variations. These are the mechanisms which make all capitalisms varieties of capitalism. If we are to talk about modes of production or systems of production ­ capitalism, feudalism, socialism, etc. ­ then we cannot dispense with such abstractions, whether or not they are called ‘ideal types.’

I think that there is a significant difference between an abstraction and an ‘ideal type’, especially when it comes to the question of socialism. As opposed to feudalism and capitalism, which have been around for over 1000 years and 500 years respectively, there is little evidence of an ‘ideal type’ such as socialism to compare them to. When Marx wrote “Capital,” he developed an abstraction out of a mountain of historical detail. You can see the same kind of analysis at work in Robert Brenner’s writings on the immediate precapitalist period. However, your discussion of socialism is not grounded in any kind of historical reality. Before I would embark on a project to replace Marxist concepts about socialism with your own ideas, I would at least make an attempt to grapple with that history.

For example, you write, “Whether because of inherent tendencies of revolutionary party organizations to concentrate power at the top or because of the terrible constraints of the historical circumstances of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, whatever potential for the Communist Party to be subordinated to an autonomous civil society was destroyed in the course of the early years of the revolution.” After you raise the question, you answer it in a backhanded way by stating that the USSR became “the archetype of authoritarian statism under the ideological banner of socialism.”

I would argue that studying this history–warts and all–has much more value than coming up with “ideal types” for socialism. We know that socialist revolution will inevitably take place under conditions of “terrible constraints,” either in a desperately poor country like Nicaragua or in an advanced industrialized society in the future. By studying how our ancestors grappled with real-life challenges, we can come up with our approaches. Of course, studying such histories can only have partial value in light of the fact that every revolution in history has its own distinctive features.

In point four, Wright defends his use of the Israeli Kibbutz as “a democratic egalitarian economic organization.” I would only respond that to use this example risks alienating Arab intellectuals for reasons I have already tried to explain, but that is certainly his business as author.

In his final point, Wright defends the use of ‘models’, stating:

Even if it is the case that alternatives to capitalism will only arise when ‘conditions of daily life have become so onerous that they revolt against the system in its totality,’ it is still crucial what kinds of models, designs, experiments, innovations are part of the menu of political debate. I suppose if you believe strongly that ‘where there is a will there is a way’ and ‘necessity is the parent of invention’ then there might be no need for a prior exploration of democratic-egalitarian institutional designs, but the historical record of the failure to build democratic egalitarian alternatives in the aftermath of system-challenges is not very encouraging. Furthermore, if you skeptical that a transformation of capitalism in developed capitalist countries will take the form of a “revolt against the system in its totality” leading to a massive ruptural break, then it becomes even more important to understand such cases and to worry about how the spaces for them can be enlarged.

To answer this, I will conclude with a brief excerpt from an article I wrote on neo-Utopian thinking about 10 years ago that answers John Roemer, another Analytical Marxist who makes many of the same mistakes as Wright:

What Marx and Engels saw as the three main features of utopian thought:

1) Ahistoricism: The utopian socialists did not see the class struggle as the locomotive of history. While they saw socialism as being preferable to capitalism, they neither understood the historical contradictions that would undermine it in the long run, nor the historical agency that was capable of resolving these contradictions: the working-class.

2) Moralism: What counts for the utopian socialists is the moral example of their program. If there is no historical agency such as the working-class to fulfill the role of abolishing class society, then it is up to the moral power of the utopian scheme to persuade humanity for the need for change.

3) Rationalism: The utopian scheme must not only be morally uplifting, it must also make sense. The best utopian socialist projects would be those that stood up to relentless logical analysis.

As Engels said in “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”, “To all these socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power. And as absolute truth is independent of time, space, and of the historical development of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered.”

All of these themes are present to one degree or another in the projects of market socialists like John Roemer or their new left rivals Albert and Hahnel.

At first blush, John Roemer seems an unlikely utopian since he couches his schema in hard-headed microeconomics. In “Market Socialism, a Blueprint: How Such an Economy Might Work”, he says that “it is possible to use markets to allocate resources in an economy where firms are not privately owned by investors who trade stock in them with the purpose of maximizing their gain, and that the government can intervene in such an economy to influence the level and composition of investment should the people wish to do so.”

This doesn’t sound particularly ‘visionary’, does it? What is particularly utopian about the schemas of Schweickart, Roemer et al is not that they have the redemptive and egalitarian power of Saint-Simon or Robert Owens, but that it is based on an ahistorical notion of how socialism comes into existence.

Specifically, there is no historical agency. Roemer shares with the 19th century utopians a tendency to present a vision that is detached from history. Since history play very little role in Roemer’s thought overall, it is understandable why he would devote himself to utopian schemas. Furthermore, since AM is based on removing one of the key aspects of the Marxist understanding of capitalism –the labor theory of value– it is difficult to see how any historical agency can carry this social transformation out. Once the class-struggle is removed, the socialist project becomes an exercise in game-playing by rational actors. Since rationalism is a cornerstone of utopian thought, market socialism would have an appeal because it is eminently rational.

Answering the question of whether his schema will work, Roemer offers the following assurance:

“Is it possible for a market system to equilibrate an economy in which profits are distributed as I have described and in which the government intervenes in the investment behavior of the economy by manipulating interests if the managers of firms maximize profits, facing market prices, wages and interest rates? My colleagues Joaquim Silvestre, Ignacio Ortuno, and I have studied this question, and the answer is yes.”

My, isn’t this reassuring. There is only one problem. The difficulties we face in building socialism are not on the theoretical front, but in the application of theory. The reason for this of course is that such applications always take place in the circumstances of war, economic blockade, internal counter-revolution, etc., where even the best laid plans off mice and men often go astray.

Erik Olin Wright replies

(This appeared in the comments section underneath my original post. Since there were a number of glitches that make it somewhat difficult to read, I am posting Wright’s comments here in an easier to read format. I will reply to this shortly.)

There is, needless to say, much with which I disagree in the evaluation of my work by Louis Proyect. I will here only address of few of the more important points:

1. Concerning my exposition of Marx’s theory of the destiny of capitalism, especially “the self-destruction thesis”:

I do not disagree with the basic point that most Marxist economists in the last half century or so have dispensed with the crisis-intensification thesis or the claim that the laws of motion of capitalism have a tendency to destroy capitalism’s conditions of existence. My characterization of this theoretical argument was directed at classical Marxism in general and Marx in particular, not to ‘Marxism’. My assessment in these terms is entirely in keeping with the quote of Braverman, which also criticizes Marx’s formulations. I presented this account because Marx’s theory of the destiny of capitalism offers such an elegant solution to the problem of showing that an alternative to capitalism is possible. The indeterminist view of the trajectory of capitalism in which there are no tendencies which increase capitalism’s vulnerability puts much greater burden on the argument that a viable alternative to capitalism is possible. Once you acknowledge that capitalism may be an indefinitely robust, dynamic form of economic organization, then one has to directly engage the issue of how to convince people that an alternative is possible, viable, and desirable.

2. The criticism that “there is absolutely no engagement in Wright with the social realities of present-day America, from the problems of immigrant labor to the decline of the trade union movement. It makes no sense of speaking about compasses to lead you in the direction of socialism while ignoring the pitfalls in your immediate path.”:

The argument and analysis in the book is not meant to be a political proposal geared to the United States today. Nor is it meant to provide clear coordinates for formulating specific strategies of transformation anchored in specific historical-political contexts. Rather the idea is to provide some principles for thinking about strategy and context. The central thrust of those principles is that the guts of a socialist alternative to capitalism is radical egalitarian democracy ­ which I refer to as a socialism of social empowerment. What the book proposes is a variety of different ways in which we can move in that direction in any society/economy/context dominated by capitalism. Now, perhaps this is a useless enterprise and somehow a distraction from more important problems. Perhaps there is no need to provide general clarification of the logic and foundations of our understandings of alternatives to capitalism. But I do think this is important, and I think it is important to elaborate these issues in a way that is not narrowly anchored in a particular time and place. My experience in discussing these issues around the world with people in very different contexts is that everywhere it stimulates good debate and discussion, and that suggests that it is worthwhile.

3. The critique of the use of ideal types:

The purpose of formulating clear concepts with specified meanings is so that when we debate issues and grapple with the difficult problems of figuring out how the world works and how it might be transformed we know that we are talking about the same things. Perhaps the expression ‘ideal type’ is suspect because of its association with certain strategies of theory building, but I do not see how it implies ‘accepting the formal logic straightjacket of bourgeois social science.’ Marx elaborates ideal type ­ formal abstractions ­ all the time when he tries to identify the salient mechanisms within capitalism. The term ‘ideal’ in ‘ideal’ type just means ‘abstractly and systematically conceptualized’. It is a contrast to other kinds of concepts, for example the notions of an ‘average type’ or a ‘modal type’, which are more descriptive concepts. Take the problem of capitalism. The ‘modal type’ of capitalism would be defined by the most typical form of capitalism we observe in the world. The ‘ideal type’ on the other hand, abstracts from all of the forms of variation and tries to identify those mechanisms in capitalism which are most systematically generative of its common properties across these variations. These are the mechanisms which make all capitalisms varieties of capitalism. If we are to talk about modes of production or systems of production ­ capitalism, feudalism, socialism, etc. ­ then we cannot dispense with such abstractions, whether or not they are called ‘ideal types.’

4. My use of the example of the kibbutz:

The example of the Israeli Kibbutzim is used to illustrate the viability of quite radical forms of democratic egalitarian economic organization. While the fact that the land for the kibbutzim was appropriated from local inhabitants is certainly relevant to the historical process by which this institution was created, in and of itself it is not relevant to the evaluation of its institutional form and progressive implications (unless for some reason you believe that the democratic egalitarian features of an agrarian cooperative can only have occur on stolen land, which does not seem plausible.) Also, the fact that by the 1980s the democratic egalitarian properties of many kibbutzim had already begun to seriously deteriorate does not necessarily undermine the usefulness of the empirical case for understanding democratic egalitarian forms of economic organization. All experiments of democratic egalitarian economic organization that occur in the capitalist world experience great pressures and have difficulty in reproducing their most radical elements.

5. My analysis of “statism” and the fate of statist economies:

Contrary to the characterization of my argument, I believe that any viable socialist project of transformation will have strong statist elements. The proposal for a socialism of social empowerment is not an anarchist, anti-statist proposal. At its core is the idea of hybrid forms. The problem I address is the extent to which statist forms of economic organization are or are not effectively subordinated to social power rooted in civil society (or, equivalently, whether they are subjected to meaningful democratic accountability). I do not believe that this was the case in general in the statist, centralized-administrative economies. Thus does not mean that such economic structures had no socialist aspects ­ they did. Nor does it mean that they contained no potential of evolving in a more socialist direction through a process of social empowerment through civil society. I am pretty skeptical that this is really on the agenda in Cuba, but I could be wrong about this and the framework I propose certainly does not preclude this in any way. Indeed, the framework is precisely designed to allow for such a pathway towards social empowerment.

6. On the Porto Alegre participatory budget and its relationship to the problems of Brazil:

I completely agree that the problems of Brazil cannot be resolved at the local level ­ they are bound up with both the national structure of power and domination in the country and the location of Brazil in the world capitalism system. I would not suggest that the PB itself is a plausible basis for a transformation of capitalism. But I also disagree that it is just a nicer way of allocating resources: it is an experiment in a new form of participatory governance, and for all of its problems is an advance in our understanding of how democracy can be deepened. It is in these ways dramatically different from past versions of “sewer socialism” because it involves a transformation of the form of the state. To be sure this is limited ­ it is at the local level and it only concerns one aspect of local governance (although one should add that other forms of participatory governance have been developing alongside the participatory budget). But it is real, it is happening, and we can learn from it.

7. The critique of my use of Bruce Ackerman’s proposal for electoral financing:

The fact that Ackerman supported the war in Afghanistan does not demonstrate that his proposal for public financing of democratic competition is undesirable, unworkable, stupid, or anything else. Now, perhaps one could argue that in a socialist society elections between competing parties would disappear, or even that elections are no longer needed. This has sometimes been suggested by revolutionary socialists. But more plausibly, if we are serious about socialism as a profoundly egalitarian democratic society, then there will be a problem of how elections would be organized, how parties would get resources, and all of the other issues connected with this dimension of democracy, since even if direct democracy becomes more important, there will still be need for representative processes and institutions as well. The Ackerman proposal is an interesting one in this regard and should be evaluated, not dismissed through ad hominem arguments. The character of the attack on my use of Ackerman reflects a lack of serious intellectual commitment to these problems.

8. The accusations that my cases are mainly “gimmicks”:

It is easy to dismiss without discussion various institutional designs, such as randomly selected empowered Citizens Assemblies as simply ‘gimmicks’. I take a different stance: these are real-world experiments and innovations which we need to study and understand in order to increase our repertoire of possibilities. To derisively reject such analysis and say we have no need to understand these cases is to impoverish the imagination of people engaged in struggle for social justice and social change. Even if it is the case that alternatives to capitalism will only arise when ‘conditions of daily life have become so onerous that they revolt against the system in its totality,’ it is still crucial what kinds of models, designs, experiments, innovations are part of the menu of political debate. I suppose if you believe strongly that ‘where there is a will there is a way’ and ‘necessity is the parent of invention’ then there might be no need for a prior exploration of democratic-egalitarian institutional designs, but the historical record of the failure to build democratic egalitarian alternatives in the aftermath of system-challenges is not very encouraging. Furthermore, if you skeptical that a transformation of capitalism in developed capitalist countries will take the form of a “revolt against the system in its totality” leading to a massive ruptural break, then it becomes even more important to understand such cases and to worry about how the spaces for them can be enlarged.

Erik Olin Wright’s “Envisioning Real Utopias”

Erik Olin Wright

I had kicked around the idea of responding to sociologist Erik Olin Wright’s manuscript-in-progress “Envisioning Real Utopias” a few months ago, but decided against it mainly out of respect for Wright’s overall scholarship. Although I have big problems with Analytical Marxism (his methodology) and utopian thinking of any sort, he did have an excellent track record when it came to the nitty-gritty empirical research around class questions, starting with the 1973 “The Politics of Punishment: A Critical Analysis of Prisons in America.” If more leftist professors did this kind of yeoman scholarship, we’d all be better off.

When references to Wright’s work-in-progress turned up on recently on Crooked Timber and Political Theory Daily Review, I reconsidered since these two websites are excellent barometers of academic trends. As an outsider to this world, I find it endlessly fascinating–especially when it takes up questions of how to eliminate the capitalist system. So without further ado, here are some scattergun observations on the manuscript.

To start with, we should thank Wright for using the Internet to get feedback in this fashion. Over the years, I have found people such as Robert Brenner to be extremely uncomfortable with email debates. The preferred mode of operation for established Marxist scholars is to go into the woodshed for a couple of years or so and then unleash their finished product on the outside world. I am not sure what motivated Wright to take a different approach, but I hope it inspires others to follow his example.

Part one of “Envisioning Real Utopias” deals with the question of “What’s so bad about Capitalism?” Since I obviously would have no problem with any sort of answer to this question, I will move on immediately to the next part, which has to do with alternatives to the capitalist system. Since Wright finds Marx’s approach to this question “unsatisfactory in certain key respects,” I felt compelled as a troglodyte-Marxist of long standing to defend orthodoxy–even on heterodox terms.

In chapter 3 (”Thinking About Alternatives to Capitalism”), Wright announces at the outset that Marx proposed a highly problematic theory of the “long-term impossibility of capitalism,” which can be divided into 5 sub-theses:

1. Long-term nonsustainability.

2. Intensification of anticapitalist class struggle thesis.

3. Revolutionary transformation

4. Transition to socialism

5. Communism Destination

Now these constitute a kind of catechism for Marxist activists. When I went through a new member’s class in the Socialist Workers Party in 1967, this is more or less how it was explained to me. Of course, if your Marxism does not advance beyond this level, it is unlikely that it will make much of an impact politically.

While there are certainly grounds for thinking in more subtle ways about alternatives to capitalism, I am not sure that Wright’s answers are what we are looking for. To start with, Wright casts doubt on the “self-destruction” thesis in terms that are highly familiar to anybody who has taken Economics 101:

The thesis that the crisis tendencies of capitalism will have a systematic tendency to intensify over time is critical to the whole argument, for this is the basis for the idea that the contradictions of capitalism ultimately destroy its own conditions of existence. If the most we can say is that capitalism will have a tendency for periodic economic crises of greater or lesser severity, but there is no overall tendency of intensification of disruptions to capital accumulation, then we no longer have grounds for the idea that capitalism become progressively more fragile over time.

Basically, this is a straw-man construction. All of the major Marxist economic works since WWII have dispensed with the idea that there are mounting contradictions leading to permanent crisis. Except for the journals of tiny sects, you simply don’t find such arguments about “self-destruction” over the past 50 years. Back in May 1958, Harry Braverman was writing about “Marx in the Modern World” in the pages of the American Socialist in terms utterly at odds with Wright’s reductionist version:

Marx and the movement he shaped operated on the basis of imminent crisis. If he never gave thought to the kind of living standard inherent in a capitalism that would continue to revolutionize science and industry for another hundred years, that was because he thought he was dealing with a system that was rapidly approaching its Armageddon. He thought the social wars that would usher in socialism would take place under the social conditions he saw around him. In that sense, the economic obsolescence we can easily find in him today is of a piece with his errors of political foreshortening.

I could also refer Erik Olin Wright to the writings of Ernest Mandel, David Harvey or a host of other Marxist theoreticians who have little to do with notions of inevitable “self-destruction”. Since this would complicate his task of coming up with new theories to replace Marx’s, I doubt if he would have much interest in them.

Once he has dispensed with classical Marxist theory, Wright puts forward his new (”Wrightist”?) theory in chapter 4, titled “The Socialist Compass”. He starts off with the notion of a road map, but realizes that a compass is less rigid:

Instead of the metaphor of a road map guiding us to a known destination, the best we can probably do is to think of the project of emancipatory social change more like a voyage of exploration. We leave the well-known world with a compass that tells us the direction we are moving and an odometer which tells us how far from our point of departure we have traveled, but without a road map which lays out the entire route from the point of departure to the final destination. This has perils, of course: we may encounter chasms which we cannot cross, unforeseen obstacles which force us to move in a direction we had not planned. We may have to backtrack and try a new route.

Unfortunately, neither a road map nor a compass is the sort of metaphor that will be of much use to a socialist movement. Road maps and compasses are only useful when it comes to static realities, like a street, a lake, a rest stop, an ocean or a continent. Revolutionary politics defy any attempts to apply fixed categories since the ground is always shifting beneath your feet. Yesterday’s South might be tomorrow’s North. Indeed, there is absolutely no engagement in Wright with the social realities of present-day America, from the problems of immigrant labor to the decline of the trade union movement. It makes no sense of speaking about compasses to lead you in the direction of socialism while ignoring the pitfalls in your immediate path.

Ultimately, the obsession with coming up with “feasible” socialisms is a bit like the “maximalist” socialisms put forward on May Day by the old SP. In between the elections of SP candidates on “sewer socialism” platforms and the grand finale of a socialist world, they had very little to say. One imagines that is why Wright poses the question in terms of “utopian” solutions, since they are disconnected from politics as such.

The chapter does not start off promisingly since Wright defines the need for “ideal-types”:

To explain what this means I will first need to clarify a number of key concepts: power; ownership; and the state, the economy, and civil society as three broad domains of social interaction and power. Second, I will develop an ideal-type conceptual map of capitalism, statism, and socialism as types of economic structures based on different the configurations of ownership and power linked to these three domains. And third, I will explain how this ideal-type typology of economic structures helps inform a conceptual map of empirical variability of the macro-structures of economic systems.

I would suggest that ideal-types are the last thing we need. To speak in these terms means that you are accepting the formal logic straitjacket of bourgeois social science.

While I have stated previously that I probably have no disagreements with Wright about the meaning of capitalism, I do have to part company with him on his use of the terms statism and socialism.

He defines statism as “an economic structure within which the means of production are owned by the state and the allocation and use of resources for different social purposes is thus accomplished through the exercise of state power.” Socialism, by contrast, is “an economic structure within which the means of production are socially owned and the allocation and use of resources for different social purposes is accomplished through the exercise of what can be termed ’social power.’”

And what are some examples of an economic structure in which the means of production are “socially owned”? Wright states:

In Israel the traditional kibbutzim would constitute an example of social ownership: all of the means of production in the kibbutz were owned in common by all members of the community and they collectively controlled the use of the surplus generated by the use of those means of production. Worker cooperatives also can constitute examples of social ownership, depending upon the specific ways in which the property rights of the coop are organized.

It is rather remarkable to see the Israeli kibbutzim described in these terms at this stage of the game. Of course, you can only do so in the context of “ideal-types.” Once you step down from the Platonic clouds and deal with the reality of the kibbutz, you will understand that they always relied on the exploitation of Arab labor. In 1983, one out of five kibbutz workers was an Arab who could not even organize a trade union for higher wages. This is not to speak of the fact that the land was stolen from the original inhabitants. If such “social ownership” is supposed to be an advance over the nasty “statist” ownership of actually existing socialist states, then one wonders what kind of utopian dimension Wright hopes to introduce into our movement. For the Palestinians, the kibbutz have been rather lacking in the utopian department.

In considering the inadequacies of “statist” approaches (i.e., Marxist theories about the proletarian dictatorship), Wright resorts to the favorite villain of central casting, the old Soviet Union:

Whether because of inherent tendencies of revolutionary party organizations to concentrate power at the top or because of the terrible constraints of the historical circumstances of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, whatever potential for the Communist Party to be subordinated to an autonomous civil society was destroyed in the course of the early years of the revolution. By the time the new Soviet State had consolidated power and launched its concerted efforts at transforming the economy, the party had become a mechanism of state domination, a vehicle for penetrating civil society and controlling economic organizations.

As is so often the case with these sorts of exercises on “what went wrong,” Cuba does not enter the discussion. With its obvious departures from Stalinist practices, Cuba does not easily serve as a cautionary tale against the evils of “statism.” This is particularly unfortunate since the recent period has been marked by invitations from the very highest levels of the party to discuss the role of “autonomous civil society” in the building of socialism. It would behoove Erik Olin Wright to study this plucky little island’s attempt to create an alternative to capitalism.

I will conclude with a look at chapters 5 and 6, in which Wright explores “a range of real utopian proposals.” I am glad that he is proposing real utopian proposals as opposed to imaginary utopian proposals of the kind that tend to get my dander up. Frankly, the more one looks into these proposals, the more has to ask what is particularly “utopian” about them.

For example, Wright is impressed with the “participatory budget” that Lula’s party pushed for in the city of Porto Alegre:

In most cities that are governed by democratic institutions, the Mayor’s office prepares a city budget each year, which is then submitted to a city council for approval and amendment. But where does the mayor get the numbers? Usually this is done through a technical budgetary office filled with economists, city planners, political cronies and other associates of the Mayor. In Porto Alegre, in contrast, the budget is generated by a complex process centering on direct citizen participation in popular councils.

Given Wright’s distaste for “statist” economics, it is not surprising that he would gravitate toward municipal decision-making over how the local pie should be divided. If the voters of Porto Alegre decide to allocate 50 percent of the budget for better sanitation rather than cops, who could oppose that? Unfortunately, the major problems facing Brazil can only be resolved at the national level, including land distribution and an end to neoliberal economics. A “participatory budget” hardly amounts to some kind of “utopian” assault on the status quo. At best, it is a modern version of the kind of “sewer socialism” referred to above. Nobody would gainsay the right of the Brazilian people to find a more beneficial way to spend their tax dollars, but you don’t need to come up with a new tailor-made substitute for Marxism when Fabian Socialism is available right off the rack. When you strip away the social science jargon that Wright wraps his arguments in, that is what you are left with after all: Fabianism.

Wright, like other Analytical Marxists, is easily infatuated with what can best be described as individualistic solutions. John Roemer, for example, came up with the idea of coupon socialism, in which all citizens above 21 are supposed to receive coupons which they must invest in firms, but they are not free to sell or give the coupons to each other. This is supposed to reduce the concentration of wealth and open the door to socialism in some fashion. It is of course a silly idea from top to bottom.

Wright endorses a similar idea concocted by another left-leaning academic, but the instrument is a credit card rather than a coupon:

Bruce Ackerman has proposed a novel institutional device which potentially would have the consequence of both marginalizing the role of wealth in electoral politics and create a much more deeply egalitarian form of financing politics in general, not just conventional electoral campaigns. The basic idea is simple: At the beginning of every year every citizen would be given a special kind of debit card which Ackerman dubs a Patriot Card, but which I would prefer to call a Democracy Card.

I can’t say that I am one of Bruce Ackerman’s fans. After he and Todd Gitlin drafted an idiotic document titled “We Answer to the Name of Liberals” that “supported the use of American force, together with our allies, in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan,” I cast him into the lower depths of liberal hell along with the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Albert Shanker. My response to the Gitlin-Ackerman article is here.

The rest of Wright’s chapter goes on in this vein with “Citizen’s Assemblies” selected at random and other gimmicks. Ultimately, this sort of thing is simply another sterile exercise in utopian thought, not much different from Albert-Hahnel’s “Parecon” or the Socialist Labor Party’s century-old prescriptions about how socialist industrial unions have to become the basis for a new world.

Alternatives to capitalism will not arise because a critical mass of the population has become smitten with such utopian schemas, but because the conditions of daily life have become so onerous that they revolt against the system in its totality. As that day grows near, it will become urgent to develop a revolutionary movement of the classical type no matter whether that is fashionable in the academy or not.

 

A reply to Göran Therborn

Perry Anderson: “the world has moved on”

As many of you know, the January-February 2000 issue of New Left Review carried an article by Editor Perry Anderson titled “Renewals” that basically set a new direction for the journal. He characterized the period as one of diminished political expectations:

Ten years after the collapse of Communism, however, the world has moved on, and a condition of re-launching the review is some distinctive and systematic approach to its state today. What is the principal aspect of the past decade? Put briefly, it can be defined as the virtually uncontested consolidation, and universal diffusion, of neo-liberalism.

Given such objective conditions, it was necessary for NLR to downsize its politics as well:

What kind of stance should NLR adopt in this new situation? Its general approach, I believe, should be an uncompromising realism. Uncompromising in both senses: refusing any accommodation with the ruling system, and rejecting every piety and euphemism that would understate its power. No sterile maximalism follows. The journal should always be in sympathy with strivings for a better life, no matter how modest their scope. But it can support any local movements or limited reforms, without pretending that they alter the nature of the system.

Although I haven’t paid that much attention to NLR since it made this turn, I have continued to admire the work that Tariq Ali has done in challenging American imperialism. Additionally, the journal did seem to pull back a bit from Anderson’s pessimism and has always had at least one or two articles worth reading in the past 7 years, even if they haven’t had any direct relevance to struggles that the organized (or disorganized) left was involved with.

In the latest issue, however, there is a long article (unfortunately, it can only be read by subscribers or people like myself with university access) by Göran Therborn titled “After Dialectics: Radical Social Theory in a Post-Communist World” that practically cries out for a response, especially from a troglodyte Unrepentant Marxist like myself.

Göran Therborn: “empire and imperialism have staged a triumphant return“

Like many of his colleagues at NLR, Therborn is a big-time academician who is currently serving as a director at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies. He has been writing books about Marxism for 30 years, but I have the strong suspicion that he has never written a leaflet or organized a demonstration. That in itself does not condemn him. I would only suggest a bit more modesty on the good professor’s part when it comes to issuing directives to ’sans culottes’ like us.

His article is a mish-mash of observations on various intellectual currents that have arisen to challenge classical Marxism (no problem there) with ill-considered conclusions about what is politically feasible today. Suffice it to say that he shares Perry Anderson’s pessimism about what is feasible.

Perhaps as a reflection of his own gold medal academic achievements, Therborn begins his article by stressing socialism’s ability in the past to attract people of his own caliber:

Socialism and Communism exercised a powerful attraction over some of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century: Einstein was a socialist, writing a founding manifesto for the American Marxist journal Monthly Review; Picasso was a Communist, who designed the logo of post-World War ii Communist-led peace movements. In spite of its conservatively defined original task and its own staunchly conservative traditions, the Swedish Academy has allotted the Nobel Prize for literature to a series of left-wing writers, from Romain Rolland to Elfriede Jelinek.

Well, I don’t know. I think that Sartre had the right idea when he told the Nobel Prize committee to keep their stupid award. But I suppose that for a Swede like Therborn, there is a bit more panache associated with a home-grown institution that got its original impetus from a Swedish arms baron.

But things ain’t what they used to be. Sharing Perry Anderson’s belief that “the world has moved on,” Therborn is even more crest-fallen:

Then, suddenly, the high water withdrew, and was followed by a neoliberal tsunami. Socialist constructions were knocked down, many of them proving ramshackle or fake in the process; socialist ideas and Marxist theories were engulfed in the deluge. Privatization became the global order of the day, formulated in the Washington Consensus of the US Treasury, IMF and World Bank. At the dawn of the 21st century, not only liberal capitalism but empire and imperialism have staged a triumphant return, and with them the worldviews of the Belle Epoque.

Francis Fukuyama couldn’t have said it better. Of course, he has changed his tune since he issued his triumphalist “End of History” manifesto. Not only has Fukuyama developed the kind of weak-in-the-knees pessimism that characterized Perry Anderson 7 years ago, you find articles practically everywhere you look about Marxism’s continuing relevance. Perhaps the NLR folks aren’t aware of it, but there’s something called the NY of Books (nearly as high-toned as the NLR) that sees things differently. I would call their attention to Tony Judt’s review of Leszek Kolakowski’s “Main Currents of Marxism” and “My Correct Views on Everything”, and Jacques Attali’s “Karl Marx ou l’esprit du monde”, which suggests that it would premature to donate your collected Marx and Engels to the Salvation Army:

In recent years respectable critics have been dusting off nineteenth-century radical language and applying it with disturbing success to twenty-first-century social relations. One hardly needs to be a Marxist to recognize that what Marx and others called a “reserve army of labor” is now resurfacing, not in the back streets of European indu