Digressions&Impressions

Covid Diaries Continued...

Last week I conveyed progress about my symptoms  (recall here; here; here; here; here; here; and last week). Inevitably (one of my two favorite jokes, Q: “Are you happy?” A: “Yes, I am happy, aber glücklich bin ich nicht…”),* that was followed by a horrid week-end of headaches. (To be sure the headaches are not as painful as six to eight weeks ago.) It was horrid because now accompanied by a weird nausea. 

So, while I was receiving all kinds of encouraging and optimistic well wishes, I was in no mood to project optimism. Luckily the headaches dissipated again and the start of this week (Monday-Wednesday) was pain free, mildly marred by the by now familiar fatigue (and accompanying hunger). Unfortunately, the last two days the headaches have returned. In both cases I awake in the middle of the night confused why I can't fall back to sleep, eventually I realize that I have a strange pain (which has moved, again, now to the back of my skull). But despite my insomnia, I did not want to skip this update.

As it happens, and perhaps not unrelated, I was shocked and deeply saddened by the news that Dr. Rachelle Dyanne “Dara” Bascara has passed away. (HT: her colleague Nick Cowen). I feel frustrated that my illness prevents me from writing a detailed appreciation now. Heidi Howkins Lockwood has a touching memorial on her facebook page, but I am not sure it is public.

Long before #MeToo was mainstream, Dara was one of the people who bravely broke the conspiracy of silence in the philosophy profession about the predatory culture of sexual harassments that was being tolerated. The shock at what she revealed, as well as the fact that some senior philosophers also criticized her for her actions, convinced me that the magnificent work of (recall) feministphilosophers crew had not yet ended this culture in our time. Her example and our correspondence going back to 2014 nudged me into a series of digressions that have remained among the most read (and friendship ending) pieces I published. Her example got me thinking anew about how to conceptualize the nature of philosophical integrity, the coherence between a philosophical life and thought (which I also digressed upon). 

 

When my family moved to London we got to know each other a bit in person. She was able to combine genuine activism, intellectual profundity, humor, perseverance in the face of much hardship and indifference, and more than a touch of glamour. She always made a point to attend my talks.

 

She was proud of her PhD thesis "Towards a Unified Theory of Oppression," at Birkbeck, and in our last quick chat she told me she was pleased to have a position at Lincoln. But since the Covid lockdowns our interactions had been much reduced. I always silently assumed Dara would have the last laugh. Dara and her family had already overcome shocking circumstances, including (if I recall correctly) a lengthy cover-up of a brutal police murder of her father.+ My sincere condolences to her loved ones, friends, and colleagues.

 

This week we had a Dutch election, and surprisingly my post from four years ago on the topic has held up exceedingly well (recall here). This time around the election campaign was even more focused on values. And foreign affairs barely figured into the campaign. The historic collapse of Social democracy and Christian democracy continued, but now all left-wing parties collapsed along with them. (In fairness, none run an impressive campaign.) Simultaneously, as a group the rise of neo-fascist parties continued, despite splintering and scandal, apace.

 

Democratic left and neo-fascist right (some of which clearly not paying even lip-service to minimal norms of democracy anymore) both have a fifth of the seats in parliament now. (That's not unprecedented: for most of the 1930s Holland was ruled by Colijn, who was not just a war criminal, imperialist and racist, but practically invented 'austerity'; see also this shocking episode on the fate of Chinese living in Holland). But oddly -- it was a year of pandemic mismanagement, unprecedented riots, long simmering exposés on institutional racism and perversion of the rule of law in so-called toeslagenaffaire (childcare benefits scandal) that reached all the way to the most important state actors and prompted a merely symbolic government collapse-- the ruling bourgeois quasi-liberal center (divided in a cosmopolitan and a more conservative branch) came out strengthened and will surely rule again.

 

Since I am a bourgeois liberal the result is probably the best I could hope for given the circumstances. One problem with Dutch multi-party representative democracy is that, despite its many virtues, it lacks good rituals for cleansing of the stalls. Even when a resignation is not just symbolic, the consequence is that many failed politicians get kicked upstairs (into quasi-judicial roles in the council of state) or are parked (as part of a spoils system) as mayors (in Holland these are appointed) and so can still influence people's lives in non-trivial ways. The effect is to give the appearance that nothing changes. My spleen about the election was lessened because my excellent direct departmental colleagues in "Challenges" were all over the media (including TV) as expert commentators.

 

I am always amused that Marx and Engels thought that Holland was a likely place to initiate socialist revolution. I now think that if the Nazis had allowed the Dutch government to continue as before after defeat in May 1940, De Geer would have been reelected. 

 

Hopefully, with Spring sunshine, next week my digression will be more upbeat.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Clarity, Analytic Marxism, and the Purported Sinking of dialectics (by Sidney Hook)

The only alternative to this procedure is to present one's own theory of dialectic....I shall argue that it would be best in the interests of clarity to let the term sink into the desuetude of archaisms; in fact, I shall try to show that this is the legitimate moral that can be drawn from any critical investigation of the assumptions and types of procedure most frequently designated as dialectical in the history of thought...

There are two generic conceptions of dialectic under which the various meanings of dialectic may be subsumed. The first is the conception of dialectic as a pattern of existential change either in nature or society or man where the "or" is not exclusive. The second is the view that dialectic is a special method of analyzing such change. Usually, but not always, it is held that the method of dialectical analysis in some sense "reflects" or "corresponds to" the dialectical pattern of change. In any case, there is always a distinction drawn, though with no great regard for consistency, between the dialectical type of change and other kinds. When the dialectic is identified with change as such, it is explicitly contrasted with some other natural or supernatural element which is regarded as undialectical, e.g., unchanging form or pattern. Similarly, with the conception of dialectic as method. Whether taken as a method of analysis or discovery or both it is always distinguished from other methods called undialectical, i.e., metaphysical, scientific, commonsensical, etc. This last distinction is of the first importance. For the alleged justification of the dialectic method consists in its power to lead us to the discovery of new truths or to a deeper and more adequate understanding of old truths, not accessible to us by any other method-- Sidney Hook (1939) "Dialectic in Social and Historical Inquiry" The Journal of Philosophy 36(14), 365-366.

A while ago (recall), I remarked with sardonic bemusement -- I am a liberal bourgeois intellectual, after all -- that analytic marxism is founded in an original sin, that is, an unearned dismissal of the dialectical method. That behind the brilliant rhetoric (recall) of G.A Cohen, Elster and the whole gang lies an appeal to clarity often linked to the stipulated superiority of the existing methods of social science. And while their embrace of clarity and rigor helped their careers in professional philosophy, and -- (let's stipulate) advanced academic discussion in a number of important scholarly fields -- it is by no means obvious they advanced marxism as a revolutionary doctrine to be feared by folks like me. For, while clarity is undoubtedly an important value that can be embraced by Marxists (see my treatment of Korsch's articulation of dialectics) it does not have, let's say, lexical priority over overthrowing capitalism.

In fact, I took considerable pleasure in pointing out that analytic marxists' dismissal of dialectics was unoriginal. For the rhetoric and whole style of pseudo-argument dismissing dialectics were anticipated by (recall here; and, for broader context, here and more recently here) the very bourgeois liberal philosopher, Ernest Nagel (who plays a non-trivial role in shaping analytic philosophy as such). But I noted that Nagel was, in turn, relying on Hook's efforts; and so it is worth looking at Hook.  

I often joke (with a note of ruefulness) that oblivion is the fate of all philosophers since the hegemony of analytic philosophy. But I was pleased to learn that our institutional collective memory, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, has an informative entry on Hook, which treats him as a "leading interpreter and proponent of Deweyan pragmatic naturalism" and "polemicist." Hook was once one of the leading New York intellectuals. And, pertinent for us, Hook became after trying initially to synthesize pragmatism and marxism a leading anti-communists as time passes. (His anti-communism increasingly has a McCarthyite tendency.) A key step in Hook's attempted synthesis and eventual turn against marxism is his rejection of the dialectical method.

Now, if we look at Hook's "Dialectic in Social and Historical Inquiry" all dialectic is dismissed. But strikingly we find only a single explicit mention of Marx's dialectic in a footnote: "I have omitted specific discussion of Marx in this paper because, whether or not we regard his findings as valid, I think it can be shown that he made no distinction between the dialectic method, as he understood it, and scientific method as applied to the historical and cultural sciences." (370) The footnote is more informative than it may seem. 

For, Hook's main strategy is to compare dialectics to ordinary "scientific method" which has a "basic unity" (378), and to find dialectics wanting in comparison to scientific method (371-379). But oddly, when he does so, he takes for granted that the metric/measure of comparison are the cannons of success internal to that scientific method. And to give a flavor of these cannons, among the criteria he identifies are "piece-meal verification" (371) and "predicting as closely as we can the specific form of the institutions of to-morrow" (375). 

Now, I don't mean to remind you constantly I am no Marxist, but even I can see that Hook is rigging the comparison against the dialectician. For Hook presupposes, oddly, that the "alleged justification of the dialectic method consists in its power to lead us to the discovery of new truths or to a deeper and more adequate understanding of old truths." But while undoubtedly dialecticians make such claims, and from my bourgois perspective often exaggeratedly so, this is not what the dialectician, is fundamentally interested in. For she is, I quote, Korsch (recall) committed to articulating "a theory of social revolution." It is plausible that if that is one's aim, one may well find that at times one has deeper understanding of social reality than those with more, say, armchair sensibilities.

Even a bourgeois intellectual like me can discern that in/with the ordinary scientific method as embraced by Hook, revolution is at best an afterthought. The scientific method (which is good at describing and predicting states of affairs) then functions as a kind of input into a different process  (i.e., changing the world). But while nobody denies that in this way science can contribute to enormous social transformations, including many unanticipated ones, this way of conceiving it allows capital to have a more than fair shot at shaping these outcomes.+ People like me would consider that a virtue of Hook's approach! 

By contrast, a key methodological move the dialectician asserts to make revolution really possible,  is "the coincidence of reality and consciousness." This coincidence makes marxist dialectic often seem weird. But as Bertell Ollman shows in Dance of the Dialectic,* the weirdness merely echoes the kind of things one finds in the whole tradition of what he calls the 'philosophy of internal relations' -- with Spinoza as one of the paradigmatic exemplars --  which simply rejects what since Tarski has come to be known as the classical account of truth. And so it is, also, no surprise, again quoting Korsch, this is "bound to appear to [critics of dialectics] as theoretically false and unscientific."

I do not mean to suggest there are no other arguments in Hook. But while all of them land serious blows, none of them take 'conduciveness to the revolution' as a fundamental aim. So, I regret to say we have returned to where started. I ruefully conclude that those purportedly most in the know about marxist dialectics (Hook, the analytic marxists, etc.) have produced refutations that ought not convince the would be revolutionary.** And while I have no standing as a score-keeper on such matters, I report as a psychological fact that it strikes me as a true scandal that these purported refutations are so obviously (to use a technical term) Quatsch. 

 

 

 

Marx on Ideology Critique and Social Explanation in the Jewish Question

Nevertheless, North America is pre-eminently the country of religiosity, as Beaumont, Tocqueville, and the Englishman Hamilton unanimously assure us. The North American states, however, serve us only as an example. The question is: What is the relation of complete political emancipation to religion? If we find that even in the country of complete political emancipation, religion not only exists, but displays a fresh and vigorous vitality, that is proof that the existence of religion is not in contradiction to the perfection of the state. Since, however, the existence of religion is the existence of defect, the source of this defect can only be sought in the nature of the state itself. We no longer regard religion as the cause, but only as the manifestation of secular narrowness. Therefore, we explain the religious limitations of the free citizen by their secular limitations. We do not assert that they must overcome their religious narrowness in order to get rid of their secular restrictions, we assert that they will overcome their religious narrowness once they get rid of their secular restrictions. We do not turn secular questions into theological ones. History has long enough been merged in superstition, we now merge superstition in history. The question of the relation of political emancipation to religion becomes for us the question of the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation. We criticize the religious weakness of the political state by criticizing the political state in its secular form, apart from its weaknesses as regards religion. The contradiction between the state and a particular religion, for instance Judaism, is given by us a human form as the contradiction between the state and particular secular elements; the contradiction between the state and religion in general as the contradiction between the state and its presuppositions in general. Karl Marx (1843/1844) On The Jewish Question, Proofed and Corrected: by Andy Blunden, Matthew Grant and Matthew Carmody, republished at marxists.org.

I returned to the early Marx of Zur Judenfrage after nearly thirty years because of a discussion in my department about the nature of ideology critique. And I did so because in the intervening years I had picked up somewhere that it is the original Marxist ideology critique. And indeed it anticipates, as Jo Wolff notes in his SEP entry, a standard criticism of liberalism: that the political project that is supposed to emancipate us both presupposes and promotes our separation and, thereby, promotes a false view of life (that is, greed) and a false (Hobbesian) view of freedom (that is, security from threats). It also anticipates the line of argument that liberal democracy just is a species of applied or debased christianity. I leave to others to trace the link of influence from this piece to Max Weber, Nietzsche, Freud, and Carl Schmitt and all the luminaries of modernity.

In re-reading the argument I was struck by the claim that the "existence of religion is the existence of defect, the source of this defect can only be sought in the nature of the state itself." In particular, the causal claim this presupposes -- viz., social defects are the effects of the nature of the state [hereafter: the causal claim] -- can be made best visible "where the political state exists in its completely developed form." It is no surprise that Marx quotes The Social Contract further down, because this kind of causal claim that deviations from human flourishing in social life can be explained by social even political causes is articulated in The Social Contract.+

The United States is then the main instance of such complete development because it, or at least some of its states, allows pure freedom of religion even granting that all political rights (including holding office) can be gained without a formal religious requirement.* Marx does not deny that the causal claim operates in other (post-Feudal) political contexts, but in those contexts there are interfering social mechanisms (so Marx is intuitively thinking of the causal claim in terms of its instantiation of a law with ceteris paribus conditions). 

The way Marx traces out the argument suggests something like the following: that there continue to be religious individuals is the effect of the liberal state's promotion of capitalism and individualism (since it does not promote a religion). Their religiosity is essentially a byproduct of this. And because religious association is constituted by individual choice it generates not community, but growing difference and differentiation (and so, as Weber notes, value pluralism). Now, in context this fact is used to criticize Bauer's argument that Jewish emancipation is only possible on the condition that Jews give up their Judaism. While the main criticism of Bauer is that he has an incomplete understanding of emancipation, the conceptual argument is that Bauer aims for the impossible (because the liberal state effectively promotes religious diversity). 

While Bauer's argument is developed in a Prussian context (where relations of subordination are christianized), Marx's criticism of Bruno Bauer remains of interest in light of the militant secularism of French laïcité (which is effectively anticipated by Bauer), which is the true Atheist state described by Marx. (More than the United States, France evacuates traditional religiosity from the public sphere.) From a Marxist perspective, even more than the US, French secularism (which presupposes our separateness in civil society) is doomed to fail in virtue of its effective tendency to promote religiosity among (sovereign) individuals, and simultaneously to insist that the French state itself is the only legitimate political tie in common.

But the proposed site of religiosity, civil society, is incapable of being truly heavenly according to Marx because it presupposes our separateness and promotes our greed. But because our religiosity has not been extinguished, it has in fact been stimulated, its only effective site is the state (which presents itself as striving for eternality). Thus, the state is effectively an idol not just from the perspective of the Marxist, who recognizes that the state continues the (essentially Christian project of) estrangement of abstract citizens from themselves (by secular means), but also from the perspective of those citizens who reject an individualist (i.e., protestant) conception of religion (and state).

In fact, if we think about the causal claim it is accompanied by a further claim (which Marx explicitly asserts): "the imperfection even of...politics [in the perfected state] becomes evident in religion." So, the presence of religious fundamentalism among citizens of a state that understands and presents itself as atheist, is indicative of the fact that the state itself has taken on the character of a supreme idol. So, rather than seeing fundamentalism as something archaic or atavistic it is a distinctly modern effect of a society that is capitalist and with a secular public sphere. 

Let me return to the building blocks of Marx's argument: his causal claim presupposes a proper functioning view of human nature. In his account of the effects of history this proper functioning is deformed/undermined by economic practices which are, in turn, secured by state power. (Again, note the echo of Rousseau here.) So, Marx here already anticipates features of his later view (recall) that is more articulated in (say) The Communist Manifesto and the Critique of the Gotha Program. Crucially, Marx's argument (in terms of social defects) in The Jewish Question does not get off the ground without such a proper functioning view of human nature. 

Now one may well wonder why from the perspective iof such a proper functioning view of human nature religion is a defect. Presumably because it is seen to undermine an authentic, communal life that belongs to our essence. It is possible Marx could allow that a non-individualistic religion -- one that glories our communal life in shared joyful activity (recall Plato's natural religion) -- wouldn't be thought defective. But perhaps he treats all religion as instances of superstition (there is language in the Jewish Question that suggests this). I am not sure.

Let me wrap up. Recall that for Mill ideology is the product of a system of hierarchy or domination in which the ruling classes promote falsehoods which justify their rule. Along the way this ideology undermines the proper functioning of the moral sentiments of the rulers and the ruled. In general the ruled see through these falsehoods, even if at times the ideology effectively promotes servility. What makes something ideological is not just that it is false and corrosive of our nature, but (and here Mill echoes Smith) that it serves a particular (factional/class) interest. (This sounds, in fact, like the kind of thing one would expect from a vulgar marxist.) So, we may say that the liberal idea of ideology requires the false to serve ruling faction and undermine our capacity to political and moral judgment. From a liberal perspective, one can always smell/rat out the existence of ideology if we ask 'cui bono?' and follow the trail. 

One attractive feature of the liberal conception of ideology is that the victims of it can see through it (and this eventually leads to standpoint epistemology). They generally do not need ideology critique to learn the truth of their situation. In this liberal conception if we could make our ruling ideas more impartial and reinforce our natural capacities, ideology can be overcome. And one natural route, although not the only one, to the undermining of ideology (and this (recall) anticipates Jason Stanley) (and here) is according to the liberal the flattening of hierarchy, which would undermine the 'demand' for such false justifications (and also undermine its supply by making it less profitable). Another route is to make sure that people flourish within a liberal polity.

If we go beyond Bauer's own aims, we can see that in Zur Judenfrage Marx, in effect, criticizes this liberal idea of ideology as itself a species of ideology. And Marx's main point is not that it serves the interest of capital (although clearly this is implied). But rather because the political emancipation implied by impartiality in the context of liberal state is, while worth having if you lack it, itself a defective ideal of emancipation. It is emancipation into a fragmentary and inauthentic life, and so no genuine emancipation at all.++ 

The explicit role of the Jews in Marx's analysis is, as is well known, not too flattering to Jews (or Christians). But the role they play in his analysis is also to show that on Marx's account it is by no means obvious that the subordinated victims of an ideology will see through the ideology. And so we see here already the rudiments of the need for a project of consciousness raising. That is to say, ideology critique takes on the shape of unmasking so that the victims of ideology can be oriented to a better ideal. This clearly has, although Marx does not alert his reader to it, the character of a kind of religious conversion.

I do not wish to try to settle the debate between Marx and liberalism. I just note that modern liberals may claim that such an ideology critique misses the mark. After all the proud modern liberal is, when legislating public reason, agnostic about the good life; this only works if the defectiveness of modern life is not widely felt. Such agnosticism does not tempt the older perfectionists like Smith and Mill, who have a conception of human flourishing that is a partial rival to Marx's. But I have gone on long enough today.

 

 

C.L.R. James' case against Moderation

Toussaint on February 8th [1802] did not yet know the fun extent of his reverses, but as the blows fell upon him he braced himself not for surrender but for resistance. The dream of orderly government and progress to civilisation was over. He had held on to the last shred of hope for peace, but as he saw the enemy closing in, then and then only did he prepare to fight. Grievous had been his error, but as soon as he decided to look the destruction of San Domingo fairly in the face, he rose to the peril, and this, his last campaign, was his greatest. He outlined his plan to Dessalines. "Do not forget, while waiting for the rainy season which will rid us of our foes, that we have no other resource than destruction and fire. Bear in mind that the soil bathed with our sweat must not furnish our enemies with the smallest sustenance. Tear up the roads with shot; throw corpses and horses into all the fountains, burn and annihilate everything in order that those who have come to reduce us to slavery may have before their eyes the image of that hell which they deserve." It was too late. Events were to show that if he had but mobilised the masses before and purged his army, the French attack would have been crippled at the start. His desire to avoid destruction was the very thing that caused it. It is the recurring error of moderates when face to face with a revolutionary struggle.--C.L.R. James (1938) The Black Jacobins, pp. 243 (in the 2001, Penguin edition) 

In the quoted paragraph, three sub-themes of The Black Jacobins come together: first, the book is a study in revolutionary leadership. By this I do not just mean it's a study of the leaders and leadership of revolutionaries (which it is), but it's also a more general study on the nature of leadership, including counter-revolutionary leadership, during revolutions. It is truly majestic study in this respect. 

Second, the book as a whole is a fierce and insightful polemic against moderates in a revolutionary context. Not all of the moderates dissected by James are leaders and only a few end up on the side of the revolution.  The third feature is that James treats all of his agents sharing in a fundamental nature. And, in general, he is very critical of race-specific explanations (below I give some further evidence of this).

My interest here today is primarily in this second feature because James' treatment of moderation illuminates his overall argument and is instructive to would be moderates and their critics. The theme of moderation is set up, almost surreptitiously, at the start of the book, where he notes, while discussing the nature of slave society of San Domingo, that "the regular clergy of San Domingo instead of being a moderating influence were notorious for their irreverence and degeneracy." (26) While there is no reason to believe that James is a friend of organized religion or clerical privilege, the comment reveals that he also thinks that in some pre-revolutionary and/or hierarchical societies some institutions or classes can play a proper moderating functional role. And one of his criticisms of the clergy of San Domingo, one might say a naturally moderating force, is that they failed to moderate the harms of slavery and general corruption. (The implied contrast is with Las Casas, a "priest with a conscience;" recall here). Slave society has thoroughly corrupted the clergy's humanity and religiosity and, thereby, they end up reinforcing society's ills.

The previous paragraph may be thought a bit forced. But this analysis of moderation runs through James' treatment of the mulattoes. Many of these were property owning. And as the revolution unfolds in France their-would-be leaders "claimed for [their] people social and political rights." (52) These claims are described as "moderate" (52) by James. One of these leaders was "hanged...on the spot" and the other "lynched" by the whites. "Leaders in this terror were the small whites: the managers and stewards of the plantations and the mass of the townsmen." (52)

As the a-synchronous revolutions in France and San Domingo unfold, we see the "moderate" (82)  mulattoes regularly trying to through their lot in with either the local property owners and/or with whoever is in charge in Paris against the slave population.* This turns out to be a disaster for all the mulattoes.

Their error is not merely tactical. It is fundamentally, in James' telling, ideological. For, the underlying problem is that the revolution itself -- which James views, in part, as a mechanism for consciousness raising into discovering what one's true interests are -- fails to do its proper job. This becomes clear in a passage devoted to its effect on the San Domingo blacks which prepares the way for the judgment (from p. 243) quoted in the passage at the top of this post:

For the moment the blacks did not know where their true interests lay. And if they did not, it was not their fault, because the French Revolution. being still in the hands of Liberals and "moderates," was clearly bent on driving the blacks back to the old slavery. (101)

James is quite clear there are exceptions to his class analysis. But generally, moderates during the French revolution are incapable of breaking with slavery because their fortunes are tied to seeing slavery as a species of property. (In fact, James makes clear he thinks that it is fortunes from slavery that made possible a bourgeoisie capable of the initial phases of the French Revolution.) And in James' argument the very forces that benefit initially from revolutionary advances (the Bordeaux slave-owners in France; the petty whites in San Domingo) are the very forces that prevent further emancipation of slaves. In France this is due to loss aversion from economic privilege; in San Damingo it is due to a desire by the not rich (petty) whites to advance in an hierarchical society without abolishing the general (racialized) hierarchy. James echoes without fully realizing it, perhaps, Gouges' insight that (recall; and here with my debt to Eileen O'Neill) French revolutionary mass democracy is no advance for women if it means that enfranchised men can rule over women.

Now, James is clear that, in revolutionary moments, moderation always leads to ruin in virtue of the actions of (what for a lack of a better term, I'll call) reactionaries, who, rather than settle for modest loss of status, end up gambling it all in continued defense of privilege:

The current legend that the abolition of slavery resulted in the destruction of the whites is a shameless lie, typical of the means by which reaction covers its crimes in the past and seeks to block advance in the present. In May 1792 the whites were all tumbling over each other to give rights to the Mulattoes, and Roume says that when the decree of April 4th arrived, they published it the day after. It was too late. If they had done it a year before, at the outbreak of the slave revolution, they would have been able to master it before it spread. Why didn't they? Race prejudice? Nonsense. Why did not Charles I and his followers behave reasonably to Cromwell? As late as 1646, two years after Marston Moor, Mrs. Cromwell and Mrs. Ireton had tea with Charles at Hampton Court. Cromwell, great revolutionary but great bourgeois, was willing to come to terms. Why did not Louis and Marie Antoinette and the court behave reasonably to the moderate revolutionaries before August 10th? Why indeed? The monarchy in France had to be torn up by the roots. Those in power never give way, and admit defeat only to plot and scheme to regain their lost power and privilege. Had the monarchists been white, the bourgeoisie brown, and the masses of France black, the French Revolution would have gone down in history as a race war. But although they were all white in France they fought just the same. The struggle of classes ends either in the reconstruction of society or in the common ruin of the contending classes.--Black Jacobins, 103-104 (emphasis added)

It is important to recognize that James' intent here is not to justify terror or genocide. By this I do not mean he moralizes against them. He clearly thinks terror and genocide become inevitable in certain circumstances and are pretty much the expected outcome when the (previously) privileged use terror to defend their hierarchy. 

Rather, the emphasized part is the key feature of James' view on political life that moderates -- be they Girondists in Paris or Toussaint in San Domingo -- fail to grasp. And the reason why on James' view the moderates fail to grasp this, is that they are (i) too interested in generating the (economic) fruits of post-revolutionary peace and (ii) mistakenly assume all others are similarly motivated; the moderates, thus, do not grasp (iii) that those that have benefitted from tasting being on top of the hierarchy cannot be bought off easily with the (expansive) fruits of peace. Toussaint's "desire to avoid destruction" was motivated by his interest in keeping financial and human capital on the island so that prosperity could be maintained (even if shared more widely).

It is an interesting question to what degree (ii-iii) really fit James' Marxist scheme of history. In addition, not all extreme social hierarchies are undone by revolution. One can think of instances of relatively peaceful regime transitions (South Africa, Chile, etc.) that may vindicate the moderate's belief that violent revolution is not always inevitable. I do not wish here to dispute James' believe that at some moment the moderate must choose sites and, perhaps inevitably, will choose wrongly. Rather, what James can teach the moderate, or at least has taught this skeptical liberal, perhaps unwittingly, is the recognition of the significance of the fear of status loss in possible transitions. To what degree such fear can be bought off financially or accommodated with a new kind of status, I leave to another occasion.

 

 

Otto Bauer and the Origin of the Functionalist Account of European Federation

But because it is precisely from the progress of social production and the international division of labor that the principle of nationality emerges, it is soon confronted by its own limits. Already within capitalist society, ever-closer interaction links the different states; a generally valid form of regulation of this interaction becomes even more necessary, a legal system the validity of which extends beyond the borders of the individual states. The increased interaction between states resulting from the development of the capitalist economy, the emergence of the great modern states, and the expansion of the power of the European nations over the colonial territories abroad has given rise to international law. In the first instance, the states regulate their relations through treaties. To the old pacts of alliance and peace are added agreements concerning the laws of land and naval warfare. Economic relations also gradually come to be regulated by agreements between states. Thus emerges the diverse system of treaties that constitutes the foundation of modern international law: agreements concerning inland and maritime shipping, trade and customs duties, railway traffic, postal and telegraph systems, and measures, coinages, and weights. But international law soon reaches beyond the sphere of immediate economic interests. Thus, today agreements between states regulate the policing of sanitary conditions, in particular in regard to the struggle against epidemics, and the struggle against both the white and black slave trade; thus, there is the attempt to initiate through agreements parallel systems of regulating civil and procedural law.
Out of all these agreements there emerges a series that creates a quite new structure, the international authority. Wherever the foundation of common administrative activity is to be established, the states create a common organ, an authority that, by virtue of its international mandate, is permanently to fulfill the tasks assigned it by the treaties between states. Such a character is borne by the international health commissions, the international commissions for the monitoring of the financial administration of individual states, the international rivers commissions. These are granted rights that are otherwise accorded to sovereign states and that even the theory of the state has therefore attempted to construe as a particular form of the state, as riverstates.
But by far the most important among the international authorities are the so-called administrative communities. These have been emerging since the 1860s and are based on agreements to which every state is in principle free to accede. Among them are, for example, the International Postal Union, the International Telegraph Union, the Community of States for the Protection of Commercial Property, the Association of States for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, the Union of States for the Struggle Against the Seizure of Slaves, the Central Office of International Transport, the Office of the Standing Sugar Commission, and so on. Some of these authorities have already been granted judicial power, for example, the Health and Rivers Commissions, the offices of the International Postal Union and the Community of Railways; in addition, since 1899 The Hague has housed the permanent Court of Arbitration.
As imperfect as these individual structures are, they carry within them the healthy seed of new social organisms. The interaction between the different states has already become so close that the law and organs of the state are proving to be no longer enough. The direction of development is toward a legal system that stands above state rights and binds the states themselves; it is creating organs the activities of which will no longer be hindered by any state frontier. State treaties and international authorities today satisfy this need. But they are beset by an internal contradiction. The community of international law has statutes and organs, but has not itself yet been constituted as a legal entity. We have statutes and are ignorant of the collective will that establishes them and whose power guarantees them; we have international organs  and are ignorant of the body whose organ they should be.
In socialist society, the agreements between the polities and the international organs will without doubt rapidly grow in number. At the same time, the increasing interaction between the different polities will in the first instance compel the implementation of the international division of labor.
However, international regulation to a far greater extent will become possible and necessary only when the social processes that are today composed of innumerable decisions and actions of individuals are consciously regulated by the different polities. For example, large migrations will be possible only on the basis of international treaties. Finally, in socialist society the planned regulation of international interaction will also be necessary due to the fact that every disappointed expectation, every inappropriate calculation affecting the individual merchant, the individual emigrant, will quite directly affect the whole society. One can imagine, for example, the consequences when a socialist polity organizes itself for the production of a good that is to be exchanged against the products of the other nations and finds this expectation disappointed. The international division of labor is impossible if the exchange of goods and interaction is not directed and regulated on an international basis.
Interstate agreements and administrative communities will thus ultimately not be able to meet the needs of the society of the future. Statutes that are not guaranteed by an organized collective will and organs that cannot be regarded as the organ of any entity will not suffice for this society. It will ultimately have to constitute the community of international law as a legal entity and provide it with permanent representatives. This will come about the day the national polities establish an international office to which they entrust supreme authority over the exchange of goods between the polities and thereby indirectly also supreme authority over the production within every polity. Just as the development of capitalist commodity production linked the manorial estates and the towns isolated during the Middle Ages to form the modern state, so too will the international division of labor create in socialist society a new type of social structure above the national polity, a state of states, into which the individual national polities will integrate themselves. The United States of Europe will thus be no longer a dream, but the inevitable ultimate goal of a movement that the nations have long since begun and that will be enormously accelerated by forces that are already becoming apparent.-Otto Bauer (1907 [1924]) The question of Nationalities and social democracy, [Die Nationalitätenfrage und die Sozialdemokratie]. translated by Joseph O'Donnell, University of Minnesota Press  pp. 412-414 (emphases in original).*

A few months ago Christopher Brooke alerted me to the significance of Bauer's work, and the passage above in particular, in the context of a series of posts on the historical and conceptual roots of modern federalism and its complex relationship to modern imperialism. When the book appeared Bauer was not yet a leading political figure and much of the excitement and turmoil of his life was still ahead. He was not, however, obscure, because Lenin makes a point of alerting his reader to the fact Bauer is one of his targets as one of “most prominent theoreticians” of the (bankrupt) Second International in his Preface to the French and German Editions Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism A Popular Outline.

It is noticeable that Bauer does not mention Hobson's Imperialism because there are many striking similarities in their analysis of the economic roots of (nationalist forms of) imperialism (recall here; here). And while Bauer is clearly marxist/socialist (as Hobson is not), not unlike Hobson, he sees in imperialism the possible seeds of something better. And in so doing Bauer articulates what we may call a functionalist account of the rise of federalism. And such functionalism is one of the ongoing, ruling commitments of the political and bureaucratic class of the EU. (I am unsure how well known Bauer's influence on this is--feel free to send literature my way!) So, it is worth taking a look at. 

Bauer's book has its roots in Bauer's PhD in law at the University of Vienna. And this is visible in the crucial passage quoted above. Internal law is rooted in capitalist development which gives rise to international trade. International trade generates the demand for international law along multiple dimensions (regulation of warfare and commerce). And with growing commerce, including commerce as a consequence of imperial conquest (this is part of Bauer's larger argument in the book), the range and complexity of international commercial law expands. 

Interestingly enough, it is the complex nature of some of modern commerce that gives an impulse to new forms of international collaboration, a "new structure, the international authority. Wherever the foundation of common administrative activity is to be established, the states create a common organ, an authority that, by virtue of its international mandate, is permanently to fulfill the tasks assigned it by the treaties between states." These international authorities have important characteristics: (i) they are created by states (ii) who create or delegate juridical authority to them; (iii) they are functionally, that is domain specific, organized;  (iv) they are technocratic in character, that is, a place where under the guise of authoritative law experts meet to solve coordination and standard setting problems; (v) they rely on the member states (with juridical/military power) for enforcement; (vi) they are heterogenous in character (not all have the same juridical power and internal structure). And (vii) in virtue of their existence, the character of states and their self-conception (that's the point of some turning into 'riverstates') and state sovereignty changes.

Crucially, for Bauer, the effect of (vii) is also to make room for, (viii), that is, there is a teleology toward both (a) a larger edifice of international law built into these new structures and (b) a (minimalist) federal state. It is pretty clear this directedness is a consequence of the economic forces of capitalism as it has turned into globalization and imperialism. 

Strikingly, the teleology is not automatic. For while, a spontaneous order ("innumerable decisions and actions of individuals") gives rise to the need for coordination and standardization, political guidance is needed for the organization and transformation of the state system ("consciously regulated by the different polities.") And what he has in mind is not just more treaty-making, but the establishment of a political (and federal) representative structure ground in international law ("constitute the community of international law as a legal entity and provide it with permanent representatives.")

If I understand him right this higher authority is also limited in character. Its jurisdiction is fundamentally economic ("the exchange of goods"). Now, the glue that would hold such a limited European Union together is, on the one hand, socialism, and, on the other hand, economic-juridical integration. 

What's striking about Bauer's approach is that it is quite clearly not wholly modeled on (say the way Kant and Adam Smith are inspired by) The United States of America, where republican/representative government comes conceptually first (or close to first alongside commercial connectedness). In Bauer's approach, politics remains in a sense nationalist (and socialist), but integrated in (and subordinated to) a larger juridical structure devoted to coordination and problem solving. (Kind of what Austrian liberals were hoping from the empire.) I use 'in a sense' because in socialism there are no incompatible ends, so it (the higher authority) need not do more (and certain kinds of politics are abolished). In addition, although this is not explicit in Bauer, socialism provides a common civic religion that ties the whole together.

It would be worth exploring what the pre-history of Bauer's ideas are. Brooke has given me hints to suggest that Cobden may be very important for this part of the story. But I close with the thought that one way to understand the present tragedy of the EU is that even more than Hayek (recall here; and here) or Mises (recall) and Kautsky (here; and recall Luxemburg's criticism) it has de facto adopted Bauer's vision (he died in 1938) without a glue like socialism that can help coordinate ends and act as a civic religion. 

 

The Day Before the Restoration?

The first sign of a thoroughly ill-adjusted or bankrupt form of society is that the ruling classes cannot agree on how to save the situation. It is this division which opens the breach, and the ruling classes will continue to fight with each other, just so long as they do not fear the mass seizure of power.--C.L.R. James (1938) The Black Jacobins, 100

In all his wisdom, C.L.R. James misses, or perhaps deliberative obscures (in his riff on Plato), what history and his own narrative show: that in the breach, more often than not, it's not the masses that seize power but a strong-man.* And unless one has a providential faith in democracy, it is  pretty clear that whoever wins tomorrow's election, they lack a vision, even the appetite, and perhaps the means to save the situation. The very forces that brought Donald Trump to power, and that have been emboldened by his four years there, will not go away if he is replaced by Joe Biden. I do not mean to suggest there is no difference between the two; and that for humanity's sake, and the survival of liberal democracy, I wish for a resounding defeat of the craven remaining office-holders of the Republican party. (The party and its elites itself had been defeated by Trump even before (recall) the South Carolina primary in 2016.)

The zero-sum, ethno-nationalism that Trump has espoused is, even if he wins the electoral college, not a majoritarian creed Stateside. But because he is the beneficiary of decades long movement toward an imperial presidency without countervailing powers-- aided and abetted by jurists and many fine intellectuals--, his capacity for mischief has been great. The harm of his presidency would be greater still if he were as competent at, and interested in, ruling as he is in dominating our attention. Luckily he has shown little appetite for foreign adventure.

Trump's signature political project, the Wall, is not a solution to society's problems, but a way to pretend a solution. To say this is not to claim its effects are a mirage. The cruelty toward society's most vulnerable it has helped unleash offer full display of the underlying social deformations at work. And even if one is indifferent to human rights, the party that used to claim to support property rights is now on record supporting one of the largest federal land grabs and uses of eminent domain in recent American history.

There is no doubt that the olicharchic, rent-seeking Wall Street bailouts and upwardly redistributing monetary policy paved the way for the success of his drain the swamp. Unlike most of his critics, I do not see in Trump a fascist (although I allow that it's possible that in defeat, which is by no means certain, he may encourage violence). But this demagogue is one of the foreseable, most brazenly corrupt American Presidents in nearly a century. And it says something, alas, about the inability of our ruling classes, that there is no true heart for cleaning up the government that he was not impeached for violations of the Emoluments Clause for which there is ample evidence from many of his daily practices. 

You may wonder why a digression on an American election starts with a quote from Black Jacobins; I don't share in James' marxism or his marxist interpretation of history. But early in his narrative James writes that "economic prosperity is no guarantee of social stability," (45; in context, James' is claim is compatible with great inequality and exploitation.) It's a simple sentence, but its affirmation goes against the deeply held conviction that prosperity and economic growth deliver social peace.

A long list of fundamental political problems -- environmental catastrophe; an overgrown financial system; a dysfunctional system of public health and health-care; a generation long decline in productivity; a for-profit, algorithmically mediated polarizing news-ecology incapable of facilitating democratic public opinion; a factionalized judiciary ambivalent (at least a  major part of it) about democracy; an unwillingness to root out racism and propensity toward violence in badly trained police forces; an opiate/suicide crisis; an empire built on the extraction of cheap fossil fuels; etc. -- have been left to fester for decades now despite prosperity. And rather than finding a way to depoliticize religion, it is a background fuel if not the spark to many forms of social polarization. 

The list in the previous paragraph is by no means exhaustive. An argument can be made, and has been made, that the great strength of liberal democracy is to find ways to muddle through. But on the horizon the enemies of freedom are emboldened  and have become increasingly brazen. The destruction of Hong Kong is taking place in front of our eyes (also here); the greatest liberal project of the last half century, the EU, is about to lose one of its key members while several others are sliding into one-party states; goaded by Islamic terrorism, France is succumbing to a retreat from the values of an open society; everywhere trade wars loom, and even international scientific collaboration (on, say, vaccine development or pandemic preparation) is by no means a given anymore. Not all crises allow democracies to revitalize; the historical experience is that they die (with or without civil war).

With the benefit of further hindsight (recall) the Obama's administration solution to the health-care crisis, socializing risk and privatizing profit, reinforced a system of oligarchic rents that exists in our financial system and the tendency toward monopoly visible in online commerce. Since these profits help shore up a two-party duopoly (both parties are astounding fundraising operations), it is by no means obvious how true reform across such a wide swath of political challenges is possible.

At some point American universities, who have disproportionately trained and cultivated our (and foreign) ruling classes in order for these to betray them, will have to reckon with their role in the litany of social failure. But that's for another time.

A contested or stolen election will hasten the widening of the breach. No society has so much  private fire power. And no polity on earth has so much fire power at its disposal. With trust among elites declining -- this has been policy for the media and for political entrepreneurs on the left and right --, and with talk of judicial retribution against political enemies on the rise, the rise of a strongman is not impossible.** 

So, by all means let's vote and wish for restoration tomorrow. But what's needed is a political program and mass movement that can inspire a generation long renewal and repeated electoral victories. Joe Biden, who has run a disciplined and admirable campaign, does not promise that. 

My friends on  the democratic socialist left believe they have that program to use the outsized executive power to proper ends; in Ocasio-Cortez they have the gifted leader (who seems committed to democracy). But as James recognized, property will not give up power willingly and Stateside property is deeply entrenched. Without a credible alternative program and mass movement for renewal, her inevitable rise as the only humane vision on the table will accelerate the underlying crisis.

 

 

7 March 1979: Foucault on the Radicalness of Liberal Governmentality (XXV)

First of all, we should not forget that the diffusion of the German neo-liberal model has taken place in France on the basis of a strongly state-centered, interventionist, and administrative governmentality, with precisely all the problems this entails. Second, the attempt to introduce and implement the German neo-liberal model in France takes place in a context of an initially relatively limited, and now acute economic crisis which is the motive, pretext, and reason for the introduction and implementation of the model and, at the same time, what checks it. Finally, for the reasons I have just mentioned, the third characteristic is that the agents of the spread and implementation of this model are precisely those who administer and direct the state in this context of crisis. Because of all this, the implementation of the German model in France involves a whole range of difficulties and a sort of awkwardness mixed with hypocrisy, examples of which we will see. Michel Foucault, 7 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 8, The Birth of Biopolitics, 192

According to Foucault, the twentieth century is characterized by two kinds of "reduction of state governmentality." (191) One is through  the "growth of party governmentality," as occurred most dramatically in fascist and communist states.* Lecturing in 1979 the Marxist kind was not yet something of the past.

As an aside Foucault is also having a bit of fun here because for Max Weber the mediating function of parties (and party bosses) is characteristic of nineteenth century developing liberal democracies.  (Of course, that is compatible with the rule of law, which, by contrast, true party governmentality erodes.) This is a core commitment of twentieth political science (see, e.g., Schattschneider). As I have noted before, this feature of liberal democracy has been eroded by the development of the open primary (this started to happen in Foucault's life-time).

Liberal democracies, by contrast, "regimes like our own" experiment with the second "form of reduction" and "attempt to find a liberal governmentality." (191) And it is very important for Foucault's argument that liberal governmentality has two different templates: one that he calls the "German model," which is the ORDO liberal version he has articulated in the first seven lectures.  This ORDO model is ""being diffused, debated, and forms part of our actuality, structuring it and carving out its real shape, is the model of a possible neoliberal governmentality." (192) The other approach is the Chicago school.*

Now, what's crucial -- and what has taken me a long time to discern -- is that Foucault makes a rather sharp distinction between the way the German model functions in its origin and what happens to it when (ahh) its copy is diffused and 'implemented' elsewhere; the implementation is, simultaneously, a "radicalization," (207). But Foucault does not make the distinction (between original and copy) fully explicit because he does not repeat the analysis of the previous weeks to draw out all of the contrast.

For, in a seeming paradox, while the ORDOs confronted a much more distinctive circumstance, the collapse of Nazi Germany and occupation, Foucault treats original ORDO-neoliberalism as a kind of organic political solution to circumstances. (Here he implicitly kind of tracks Röpke conception of what ought to happen as factual.) Whereas the application of the copy of neoliberalism in France during the apparently more ordinary political crisis of the 70s is treated as disruptive. And so lurking in Foucault there is a surprisingly nineteenth century assumption in which ideas and society form a kind of organic whole.**

One way to track the most fundamental difference is that in Germany, post Stunde Null, the ORDOs had to invent (recall lecture 4) a new kind of sovereign power, which simultaneously made the NAZIs illegitimate, and that would constitute the legitimacy of the Bonn Republic by the maintenance of certain basic rights by way of the rule of law and economic growth with social characteristics. Whereas in France, liberal governmentality is imported by leading technocrats of a legitimate state in economic crisis. And for Foucault this starts to happen around 1970 or "from 1970 to 1975 or anyway in the decade now coming to a close." (195) 

As another aside, Foucault here very quietly, and prudently, skips the collapse of the third republic, and all the turbulence of the fourth republic, and the founding of the fifth, not to mention '68. Or to be more precise, he mentions some of it in the lecture, but from a vantage point, as if, of relatively little import. Given some of the flamboyant political persona associated with Foucault, it is  no surprise that his prudence when discussing his own society goes so unremarked so often. And, he turns the rise of Giscard into a turning moment in French history (197). But it means one misunderstands him easily.

Now, for Foucault the awareness among the technocrats that France is in economic crisis is triggered by the 1973 oil crisis. Foucault's interpretation of it is worthy of attention, but I skip to the effect of it (which gives a sense of his analysis of it):  

Liberalism, that is to say, the total, unrestricted integration of the French economy in an internal, European, and world market, was the choice which appeared, first of all, as the only way to be able to rectify the erroneous investment choices made in the previous period because of interventionist objectives, techniques, and so on; so, liberalism was the only means of correcting these investment errors by taking into account the new factor of the high cost of energy, which was in reality only the formation of a market price for energy. (196)

Crucially, then, the diffusion of the ORDO template means in France not just a correction on Keynesian countercyclical dirigisme, but more importantly an insertion of France into a new kind of political economy in which energy costs would be (potentially) high and a submission (to use a Hayekian phrase) to the discipline of impersonal market forces. For students of the EU Foucault's observation is key because it suggests that from a French political perspective, the EU's Delors era (starting in 1985) originates in a change of intellectual climate of the 70s. 

Foucault's discussion of French experience with social security and the negative income tax anticipates the far more elaborate treatment (and much to recommend) of American neoliberal (recall) family policy by Melinda Cooper (Family Values).  But while interesting today I skip  to Foucault's conclusion:

Full employment and voluntarist growth [of the Keynesian era] are renounced in favor of integration in a market economy. But this entails a fund of a floating population, of a liminal, infra- or supra-liminal population, in which the assurance mechanism will enable each to live, after a fashion, and to live in such a way that he can always be available for possible work, if market conditions require it. This is a completely different system from that through which eighteenth and nineteenth century capitalism was formed and developed, when it had to deal with a peasant population which was a possible constant reservoir of manpower. When the economy functions as it does now, when the peasant population can no longer ensure that kind of endless fund of manpower, this fund has to be formed in a completely different way. This other way is the assisted population, which is actually assisted in a very liberal and much less bureaucratic and disciplinary way than it is by a system focused on full employment which employs mechanisms like those of social security. Ultimately, it is up to people to work if they want or not work if they don’t. Above all there is the possibility of not forcing them to work if there is no interest in doing so. They are merely guaranteed the possibility of minimal existence at a given level, and in this way the neo-liberal policy can be got to work. (207)

Now, what's important, and remarkable, is that Foucault is not claiming to unmask. On his presentation, the new system is not hidden. It's a self-conscious construct of French technocracy explicit in "the speeches, writings, and texts." (194) It involves the creation of a floating population that is not starving, but available (note the modality) for possible work. And the intention is to keep this population above subsistence by a safety-net. The pay-off is both a more efficient and productive economy that is capable of giving consumers what they wish in a high cost energy environment as well as reduce the amount of compulsion in society. Because unlike the friends/partisans of taylorist social democracy, Foucault tacitly grants their critics that the previous era of full employment also involved a lot of forced homogeneity.+

Since plans for negative income tax and basic income are still thought radical (despite the earned income tax credit and equivalencies elsewhere), we must acknowledge that Foucault's diagnosis is in some sense premature. And as Cooper shows, when neoliberal ideas where implemented, when political winds followed, they involve non-trivial amount of force with an ideology of moral hazard--many more sticks than carrot we might say. From our vantage point, then, neoliberalism never arrived fully (because it was hijacked by intrinsically conservative ideology). 

 

 

 

Hobson, and the Liberal explanation of Imperialism

By the late 1890s, he became convinced that the “new” imperialism, unfolding mainly in Africa and Asia, represented an overriding danger to British democracy. It threatened “peace, economy, reform, and popular self-government,” catalyzing instead militarism, reaction, and jingoism. Imperialism presented a multicausal explanation for the emergence of the “earth hunger” that had gripped the imperial powers since roughly 1870. Its “leading characteristic” was competition between great capitalist empires.

The main stimulus was investment. Oversaving among capitalists and underconsumption by the masses meant that the rich could not invest their money profitably in the domestic market. In search of a high rate of return, they pushed for the opening of foreign markets, which in turn required territorial acquisitions. This system benefitted the few—chiefly financiers and their allies in the political establishment—at the expense of the many. The “business interests of the nation as a whole are subordinated to those of certain sectional interests that usurp control of the national resources and use them for their private gain.” Employing a common radical trope, he argued that imperialism was “irrational from the standpoint of the whole nation,” although “it is rational enough from the standpoint of certain classes in the nation.” Using various forms of manipulation and misleading propaganda, this profit-driven imperialism was disguised as necessary government policy; it was a “calculating, greedy type of Machiavellianism” wrapped in the evocative language of “national destiny” and the spread of “civilization.” Like Hobhouse, he warned against the corrupting effects of disingenuous language.--Duncan Bell (2009) "Hobson, Hobhouse, Liberalism" in (2016) Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire, 356-357 (emphasis added) [HT Chris Brooke]

I was directed to Hobson by the following remark by Perry Anderson (recall) in his famous (2019) NLR review of Adam Tooze's Crashed: "Durand’s answer [in Fictitious Capital] is that they represent an updated version of Hobson’s vision of the future at the start of the twentieth century: namely the extraction of high levels of profit from investment in production in zones of cheap labour on the periphery of the system, above all in Asia. If this is so, the ‘enigma of profits without accumulation’ would dissolve, because firms are indeed investing; not in their domestic economies, where growth, employment and wages stagnate, but in overseas locations, where they have secured very high rates of return." In Anderson's argument the mention of Hobson is, at first sight, a mere aside. 

In Durand's Fictitious Capital (2017; originally appeared as Le capital fictif in 2014), Hobson's concerns about the rise of a "new financial aristocracy" in light of (now quoting Durand) China's insertion into the circuits of world capitalism, are presented as "strangely prophetic" (140-141). Durand, in turn, is explicitly echoing Lenin (see here), whom he cites as his source on Hobson. Now Durand -- who is a trained economist -- goes on to summarize Hobson as follows:

The World Hobson describes is characterised by three elements: 1) ‘a financial oligarchy’ dominates the rich countries; 2) the workers of these countries are employed in ‘personal services’ or ‘minor industrial services’; 3) the centre draws a ‘tribute’ from the peripheral countries in the form of both profits and industrial and agricultural products. We can translate this system of relations into contemporary terms: the financial profits that feed the upward concentration of income in the rich countries are founded on the exploitation of industrial labour and natural resources in the countries of the global South. Industrial activities that have become redundant in the countries of the centre are reduced to their bare bones, with the result that workers in such areas find themselves limited to support or service activities with little added value (personal services in particular), which cannot be traded at the level of international commerce. Durand's Fictitious Capital, p141 (emphasis added)

Now, Bell and Durand give a good sense of Hobson's overall argument. And neither of them can be said to misrepresent Hobson's (1902) Imperialism.1 Even so, I think they both end up failing to convey Hobson's underlying argument. (I return to Lenin below)

For, the existence of a "financial oligarchy" that oversaves, and a mass of workers that under-consumes, is for Hobson not a natural fact as it might be taken to be if one thinks it is the ordinary effect of monopoly capitalism. But Hobson is quite clear that such over-saving, "which is the economic root of Imperialism is found by analysis to consist of rents, monopoly profits, and other unearned or excessive elements of income, which, not being earned by labour or by head or hand, have no legitimate raison d'étre." In particular, as he explains on the previous page, such monopoly profits are not themselves the effect of market-forces, but the consequence of "trust[s] or other combine[s]." (Quoted from Chapter VI) In addition, monopoly profits are fueled by tariffs; this is why, for Hobson it is axiomatic that "Imperialism repudiates Free Trade, and rests upon an economic basis of Protection." (Quoted from Chapter V) Why does this matter?

So, rather than seeing Imperialism as a natural outgrowth of the ordinary development of capitalism, Hobson takes imperialism to be the effect of a political corruption of capitalism: it's the imposition of tariffs and the failure to secure proper antitrust law* that create the economic conditions for imperialism.** For, without tariffs and other anti-competitive policies, profits would be lower and wages higher. (Hobson's argument is entirely Smithian.) Once the state has been captured by protectionist interests, which generates high profits, but underconsumption, a military-financial-evangelical complex (a parasatic class) can easily promote Imperialism. Lenin sums up Hobson's point very nicely, "in its economic essence imperialism is monopoly capitalism.... monopoly arose out of the concentration of production at a very high stage. This refers to the monopolist capitalist associations, cartels, syndicates, and trust." (Lenin, 1916 Imperialism, Chapter 10. I return to Lenin below.)

Now, for Hobson imperialism is the effect of political decisions that are reversible if only Great Britain returned to Liberal projects. He thinks that in reversing imperial projects, the working poor of Great Britain will be wealthier, resources for public investment (in a public education, public goods, and perhaps a welfare state) will be opened up; the nation much richer, and also that it would open the door to less dangerous forms of nationalism, even the possibility of pacific international federation. (Something I return to soon.) I don't mean to suggest that Hobson has no interest in colonial (as distinct from imperial) projects or that he is free from an interest in racism/anti-semitism and eugenics--there are plenty of passages that may well have him canceled today. But at bottom Hobson's economic analysis of imperialism is rooted in political economy of a sort that anticipates the ORDO-liberal interpretation of the political dangers of economic concentration.

As I noted, Lenin does justice to Hobson's analysis. But at one point he differs, and I think this helps explain the reception of Hobson I started this post with. After Lenin writes:

At the beginning of the twentieth century, monopolies had acquired complete supremacy in the advanced countries, and although the first steps towards the formation of the cartels were taken by countries enjoying the protection of high tariffs (Germany, America), Great Britain, with her system of free trade, revealed the same basic phenomenon, only a little later, namely, the birth of monopoly out of the concentration of production.   

For Lenin monopoly capitalism just is the natural byproduct of being economically "advanced." And rather than being the exception, Great Britain, with its history of free trade, confirms the rule by also exhibiting monopoly capitalism despite having a different starting point. From Lenin's perspective this is converging evidence. So, if one takes the Leninist diagnosis for granted one need not mention the political conditions that generate a "financial oligarchy" that oversaves, and a mass of workers that under-consumes; it just is the natural condition of developed capitalist economies!

My interest here is not to settle the debate between a putatively Marxist and putatively liberal interpretation of the rise of imperialism. Rather, from my skeptical liberal position, what the confrontation shows, is that there is a challenge, one that has not gone away, that one might formulate toward the liberal position: how does one prevent anti-competitive state capture that serves already existing, powerful economic interests, if these interests benefit or are enriched from such capture? For, it is no good to say that normatively desirable liberalism would not generate imperialism, if really existing liberalism cannot prevent it.+ 

 

Polanyi (Karl), Adam Smith, The Great Transformation, and Credit.

The presence or absence of markets or money does not necessarily affect the economic system of a primitive society-this refutes the nineteenth-century myth that money was an invention the appearance of which inevitably transformed a society by creating markets, forcing the pace of the division of labor, and releasing man's natural propensity to barter, truck, and exchange. Orthodox economic history, in effect, was based on an immensely exaggerated view of the significance of markets as such. A "certain isolation;' or, perhaps, a "tendency to seclusion" is the only economic trait that can be correctly inferred from their absence; in respect to the internal organization of an economy, their presence or absence need make no difference.
   The reasons are simple. Markets are not institutions functioning mainly within an economy, but without. They are meeting place of long-distance trade. Local markets proper are of little consequence. Moreover, neither long-distance nor local markets are essentially competitive, and consequently there is, in either case, but little pressure to create territorial trade, a so-called internal or national market. Every one of these assertions strikes at some axiomatically held assumption of the classical economists, yet they follow closely from the facts as they appear in the light of modern research.
   The logic of the case is, indeed, almost the opposite of that underlying the classical doctrine. The orthodox teaching started from the individual's propensity to barter; deduced from it the necessity of local markets, as well as of division of labor; and inferred, finally, the necessity of trade, eventually of foreign trade, including even long distance trade. In the light of our present knowledge we should almost reverse the sequence of the argument: the true starting point is long distance trade, a result of the geographical location of goods, and of the "division of labor" given by location. Long-distance trade often engenders markets, an institution which involves acts of barter, and, if money is used, of buying and selling, thus, eventually, but by no means necessarily, offering to some individuals an occasion to indulge in their propensity for bargaining and haggling.--Karl Polanyi (1944) The Great Transformation, p. 61-62

Polanyi's official target here is the "nineteenth century myth," treated as "orthodox economic history," of the "classical economists" in which money causes the creation of markets and so facilitates the division of labor. This nineteenth century myth, in turn, adopts a theory of human nature theory, which includes the "propensity to barter, truck, and exchange," a reference to Smith's account of the origin of the division of labor.  And this propensity can (finally) express itself in the developing markets (and division of labor). 

The chapter I am quoting has been enormously influential in economic sociology, generating, somewhat ironically as Jens Beckert argues, a huge scholarly literature on embeddedness, and a certain kind of soft-marxist and republican political economy now fashionable again. I cannot tell you how often I read purported refutations of Adam Smith, classical economics, or liberalism more generally that echo Polanyi. I find this amusing because the story Polanyi tells after the "true starting point" is pretty much David Hume's account of the rise of commercial society in "Of Commerce" (except that Hume is more focused on the causes of productivity and adopts a kind of labor theory of value) and (recall) Smith's own account of Europe in Book III of Wealth of Nations (which, admittedly, Smith calls "retrograde" and does not rely on a labor theory of value.) But my interest today is not in defending the Enlightened Scots.

Polanyi's theory of the great transformation treats the development of markets as an imposition of the mercantile national and nationalizing state on towns and country that resisted this.* And this imposition inverted a kind of natural or at least better order of things: "Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system." (60)

And where markets did originally (before the great transformation) arise, they are hemmed in by local  restrictions, such that "Local markets are, essentially, neighborhood markets, and, though important to the life of the community, they nowhere show any sign of reducing the prevailing economic system to their pattern." (66) In other words, prior to the great transformation, markets are tamed by political life and serve community needs. And this story has an enormous pull on communitarians, social democrats, christian democrats and others partially nostalgic for a lost world. (Marxists tend to play a double game here: promoting the disaffection of the nostalgics, but accepting capitalism's destruction as needed for a better future.)

Now, when liberals confront the Polanyi style story, in response they sometimes note that the taming of markets also involves repeated acts of violence, but generally they tend to trot out the sudden upward curve of growing prosperity (wealth and consumption) since the industrial revolution. And the more insidious liberals may even justify colonialism and imperialism because those born late (including the descendents of surviving natives) benefit greatest from the creative destruction that follows from the spread of markets embedded in this curve.+ So, rather than addressing the roots of nostalgia generated by the present status quote, these liberals offer a consequentialist account about the status quo in terms of the good-making features of submitting to forces beyond most community's control (a great financial power, perhaps, excepted). Despite my (skeptical) liberal sympathies, it is obvious that the liberal response won't persuade. (That point is compatible with the further fact that most nostalgic folk are unwilling, in practice, to give up the comforts of modern life.)  

Polanyi had kind of anticipated the response. For, Polanyi pre-market societies are characterized by a different fundamental motive than market societies: the "transformation implies a change in the motive of action on the part of the members of society; for the motive of subsistence that of gain must be substituted." (43-44) And while Polanyi does not say this explicitly, a society based on  gain is in no sense properly reciprocal. (Here Polanyi cheats a bit because he relies on the reader to view gain as zero-sum not mutual.)

In the few words remaining in the Digression, I can't settle the debate. But in returning to Polanyi, I noticed a curious absence in Polanyi's argument. He completely misses that the primitive economies of medieval europe were suffused with debt; as a leading authority puts it, "it was an important part of medieval life."** People had to make "many deals on credit to allow consumption." (Christine Desan Making Money, 214) Now, Graeber has much of interest to say, also to philosophers, about the role of virtual money in such credit/debt patterns (and perhaps being the original form of money). But here I just want to note an important effect, that a society characterized by mutual credit/debt relations was enmeshed in open ended mutual acrimony and litigation (Desan 218ff.).

So, the social relations that embed pre-market society, if there is such a thing, is one of open ended mutual score-keeping (of mutual loans) and mutual promises of repayment that themselves are potentially precarious, and potential open-ended conflict about trying to call in outstanding debts. And while, if Desan is to believed, it is true that matters were worse in medieval England - because of the English policy of making low denomination coinage scarce --, medieval England is the source of the beginning of the great transformation (recall this post on Adam Smith's account on the origin of capitalism) and so highly relevant to evaluating Polanyi's argument (Desan also names him as one of her targets early in her book). 

That is to say, one way to understand the great transformation is that it liberated ordinary people from being routinely in each other's debt, that is, a suffocating embrace of unsteady and stifling mutual obligations that could be called in at the worst possible moments. And in particular, because these credit obligations predictably generated lots of mutual conflicts, they created an opportunity for authorities to settle conflict. This may have helped develop the rule of law in the very long run, but it is pretty obvious in the interest of the powerful to have the not so powerful be in regular conflict with each other and need their mediating/legal services to settle conflict among ordinary people. This form of social embeddedness undoubtedly helped ensure the long-term stability of this mode of governance.   

 

 

 

On Kautsky and the Origin of the United States of Europe

Therefore there is today only one way: The union of the States of European civilisation in a confederation with a universal trade policy, a federal Parliament, a federal Government and a federal arm – the establishment of the United States of Europe.

This attained, something enormous would have been achieved. These United States would possess such overwhelming power that, without any war, they could compel all other nations, so far as these did not willingly do so, to join them, to disband their armies and give up their fleets. But with this would also disappear every necessity for the new United States themselves to be armed. They could then not merely give up all further armaments – the standing army, the warships for attack – the abandonment of which we to-day demand, but also every means of defence; even the citizen army itself would he longer be necessary.

Thereby would the era of eternal peace be securely founded, and unlimited economic means be set free – some 20 milliards it year in round figures for the whole world,

What rapid movement could this enormous sum by itself not give to social change, how painlessly might that change be thereby accomplished

But how is the constitution of the United States of Europe to be brought about?

....

Nevertheless the attempt to peacefully unite the States of Europe in a federal Commonwealth is by no means inconceivable. Its prospects are bound up with the prospects of the Revolution.

The Revolution in favour of peace may spring from two separate causes: one being the revolt against the intolerable burdens which have been imposed on the peoples by armaments; with the result that the peoples of Europe will have no other alternative than to drive to the devil all Governments which are imposing upon them new taxes simply in order to be able to continue indefinitely the development of armaments.

That it should come to this will be all the more likely in proportion as the armaments-folly takes on a more powerful form. But, really, it is so near that any Government which is most threatened by a revolution, which feels itself most threatened thereby, which, without prospects of escape, finds itself, as English people say, between the devil and the deep sea, would rather go down in the surging sea of war than give itself over to the devil of Revolution.

It would then forget, however, that it would not escape the devil by throwing itself into the sea; but that he would at once have it there completely. If the first possible cause of Revolution is the revolt against armaments, the second would be war itself.

The Revolution would follow upon war with unerring certainty; not as the product of a Social-Democratic plan, but from the foredoomed logic of the thing. Present-day statesmen count upon that outcome of war.

But whether the Revolution comes from armaments or from war, it will present an international phenomenon, and its first care will be to put an end for ever to the horrors of war. The Revolution will not, like our bourgeois pacifists, simperingly content itself with such petty palliative means as arbitration courts and armaments reduction, which at every moment may tweak down, but will strive to establish such conditions as will make a war thenceforth impossible. That it can only attain through the establishment of the United States of Europe. Governments which would, or could, set themselves in opposition would no longer exist.

Moreover, if the Revolution does not spring from the reaction against the burden of armaments, or against the horrors of war, but from some other ground, and it at the beginning it is not international but limited to a single State, it cannot in existing circumstances long remain so. It must spread over into other States, and it is inevitable that these then will combine. Together it is inevitable that these then will combine together in a close confederation which will exclude any possibility of war between themselves. The proletarian International will them have arrived at the reality of existence as a State. The United States of Europe and their final expansion into the United States of the Civilised World – that, and not the single nation is the stately foundation of the coming Socialist Society. What the cantons are for the Switzerland of today the present nations will be of the Socialist Commonwealth on the States of the future.--Karl Kautsky (1911), War and Peace

Earlier in the week, I noted that Kautsky's conception of the united states of Europe echoes, in some respects, Kant's Perpetual Peace. However, unlike Kant, who envisions multiple growing, regional defensive voluntary federations, Kautsky assumes that a United States of Europe's power is so overwhelming that, were it joined together, it can de facto enforce peace on the world and spend the peace dividend on prosperity. Despite the existence of mighty European empires and navies, it is to be doubted, with the benefit of hindsight, that this was an accurate understanding of the then existing balance of power (giving the growing industrial might of the USA and Japan, etc.).  

Kautsky thinks there are three routes to European peace: (i) a tax-revolt by citizens against the costs of armaments; (ii) a war so destructive that a socialist-cosmopolitan revolution would follow; (iii) a peace-time worker's revolution in a state that would be copied by others, and so usher in a cosmopolitan socialist federation.

As an aside, what's fascinating about this is the openness of the future in Kautsky's writings. At the time of this writing Kautsky is kind of the embodiment of orthodox marxism rejecting the accommodationist Bernstein (and others). While Kautsky does not seem to doubt the possibility of socialist revolution, he is not prophesying it either. He seems, in fact, more confident that once a revolution has been successful it will spread then that a revolution will be successful. 

More important, for Liberals interested in the retreat of liberal ideology after 1870 -- something lamented by then after the catastrophic first world war and at the height of the depression -- Kautsky offers a salutary reminder why this was so: imperialism was both profitable to many of liberalism's natural supporters and created the conditions for successful war-mongering among states. The Kantian (but not Smithian!) premise, that in a commercial society folk would be pacific gets fatally undermined.* It is to Kautsky's credit (this is the main message of the first two sections of the quoted essay) that he is willing to contemplate alliances with the weak, peace-wing of the bourgeoisie to forestall war. 

Chris Brooke, in comments on my previous post, noted that prior to decolonization most proposals for a federation of European States were, in effect, attempts at consolidating empire be it (to quote Lenin from 1915) "reactionary" -- with capitalism not overthrown -- or, as Kautsky hopes, "socialist." And, indeed, when the EU was founded, it still included non-trivial colonial empires (some of which a constitutive part of the EU). That the EU has survived shrinkage is conveniently forgotten by ardent federalists and Brexiteers alike.

That (iv) two catastrophic wars, hyperinflation, genocide, loss of empire and global hegemony, and, not least important, fear of soviet invasion did bring European political and financial elites voluntarily together around a European project was not foreseen by Marxists (although clearly Lenin does not rule out the possibility of a non-socialist Europe). [I am not ignoring the role of the US's efforts to nudge them into this!] It strikes me there are two, related important lessons here.

First, none of the Marxists believed in the strategic adaptability of European capitalism.+ All the Marxists believe in the inner contradictions of capitalism (with its rise of monopoly and surplus abroad) that create the conditions of war and revolution. They were not altogether wrong about this, but failed to foresee that in defeat, and when faced with possible revolution, European capitalism was more pragmatic than anybody ever imagined.+ In part, and here I echo Foucault, this is because Marxists have systematically underestimated (and ignored) the liberal art of government, which has a richer history than allowed.+ 

Second, one reason European capitalism could be pragmatic is because of the existence of a social democratic version of European federation. That this social democratic version has (inter alia) its roots in Kautsky, when he was still taken to be an orthodox marxist, is I think an important part of the story (something that had eluded me before). As is well known (I hope), Kautsky eventually preferred even imperfect democracy over dictatorship. And here he stands in for a world-historical possibility. For, when after WWII, European (liberal and christian democratic) elites moved to build European federation, social democrats, who had turned their back on the dictatorship of the proletariat and the permanent war-footing of Soviet experiment, were waiting for them. That is to say, they had followed Kautsky journey to the building blocks of a federated state, inspired by Kant and Adam Smith, Mazzini, (and going back to Rousseau, Spinoza, and More, with a joint trade policy and parliament.