Manning v. Ellsberg

Updated

A lot of people have made a big deal out of the fact that Daniel Ellsberg has been a vigorous defender of Bradley Chelsea Manning (and also, a little more tentatively, of Edward Snowden). Ellsberg has repeatedly emphasized that "Manning c'est moi."

For people of a certain age and set of political commitments, Ellsberg's defense of Manning has raised a specter: Does doubting the propriety of these contemporary leakers implicitly reneg on one's long-held political commitments about the Vietnam War? Does thinking that these leakers were out of line mean that one has become some sort of Establishment-kowtowing moral midget?

The salient difference between Manning and Ellsberg, it seems to me, has to do less with the nature of their acts, than with the nature of the wars they were aiming to undermine. 

Let us begin by observing plainly that as a general matter leaking is an ethical violation: a violation of the trust of the organization one belongs to. This violation may be justified, of course, if the organization one belongs to is itself committing gross ethical violations that justify the fundamental disruption of the mission of these organizations, or of specific wrong-doers within these organizations.

In this sense, the burden of proof must be on the whistleblower: to prove that the crimes he is exposing are so serious not only that the disruption of the organization is justified but also that the leak is the only way to achieve this disruption. Any other view, it seems to me, is tantamount to suggesting that anyone at any level of any organization has the unilateral right to expose anything he wants any time he sees fit—and plainly no large organization of any sort can be run on these terms, regardless of mission.

The distinction, to me, between Manning and Ellsberg has to do with the nature of the war and the government in each case. From my historical vantage point, the Vietnam War (by 1965 probably and by 1971 certainly) absolutely was such a criminal enterprise that it justified radical measures of institutional disruption of the sort that Ellsberg attempted. Crucially, it was a criminal enterprise not just in its origins, but in its daily implementation: Millions of Vietnamese were being killed, and 100+ American draftees per week were dying in the name of a cause which was not just hopeless but in itself a grave injustice. Under these circumstances, throwing one's body on the gears to stop the operation of the machine, to paraphrase Mario Savio, was more than justified, it was approaching a duty. Ellsberg, for this reason, remains a hero to me.

What I would ask is this: do you believe the same of our current war(s)? To defend Manning's actions, one must make the case that the general operations of the institutions he was attempting to disrupt — not just the Iraq War, let us be clear, but the State Department generally — are so corrupt and evil that they demand such disruption. We are not talking about the origins of the war, the lies that justified it to begin with, but its actual practice. Was it a systematically criminal affair, justifying wholesale leaking in order to disrupt the general functioning of the state (as opposed to narrowly targeted retail leaks about specific incidents)?

To put it in comparative terms: Is Obama's White House no different in its essentials from Nixon's? Is the way the current Long War being prosecuted as criminally murderously as the way the Vietnam War was waged? Perhaps most provocatively: are the Islamic fundamentalist non-state actors, against which the US national security apparatus is primarily arrayed today, no different in their essentials from the national liberation movements of the Global South that the US national security apparatus of 1971 was primarily arrayed against? Believing that Manning is no different from Ellsberg requires answering all these questions mostly in the affirmative.

The conceptual origins of the black market in the moral economy of the 1940s

Among people who study illicit economies and trafficking it's become fashionable to suggest that illicit markets have always been with us, and that they always will be. Peter Andreas, for example, has recently written a very good book on how smuggling has been at the heart of virtually every major episode in the history of the American republic, from the Boston Tea Party to gun-running during the civil war to Prohibition to the War on Terror. Andreas argues, further, that efforts to stem or at least control smuggling have been at the heart of a variety of US state-building exercises, ranging from how the federal government's desire to cut down on excise duty evasion led to the creation of the professional civil service, to how efforts to crack down on the transportation of illicit substances helped provide a critical outlet for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to increase its reach in the 1920s. And at one level, it's certainly true that as long as there have been and continue to be different human communities with different values, there will always be people who attempt to prevent certain kinds of commerce between these communities (call them moralists and governments) and there will be others who will try to make money by arbitraging the price differences these regulations create (call them deviant entrepreneurs).

But before we take that story as too pat, maybe it's worth historicizing this concept of the illicit. One place to start with that might be with the following interesting little ngram, on the rise of the term "black market":

What we can see here is that prior to the late 1930s, the concept of the black market did not exist -- or at least there was no term for it. Deviant entrepreneurship may be a venerable practice -- Prohibition was of course one of the major episodes of US history during the "long 1920s" -- but the concept of a black market is something that appeared relatively late.

Why was this? Some clues can be found by looking at the evolution of the usage of the term. If we go to JSTOR to search for the earliest uses of the term, we discover something quite interesting. The earliest articles using the term address a very specific sort of black market, namely, the black market for currency. The handful of articles that talk about black markets in the 1930s all refer to occasions where deviant entrepreneurs were creating markets to route around fixed exchange rate regimes. The historical context for the rise of these "black" markets (a clue that the idea was a new one is that these early articles all use scare quotes) was the monetary situation of the 1930s: the gold standard had collapsed, but most governments were refusing to allow their currencies to "float."

To simplify: imagine if the dollar and the sterling have an official "pegged" exchange rate of 1:1. Imagine, further, that because of differences in the productivity in the two economies, a dollar can buy two widgets but a pound only one. Given this price disparity for widgets, the relative price of these two currencies should float to 1:2. However, the British government refuses to see the pound decline -- as this will reduce the widget-purchasing power of its people. Such a scenario creates two effects: first, many British sellers of widgets will insist on being paid in dollars, not sterling, creating a shortage in the sterling market for widgets, while others will secret the widgets out of the country in order to sell them for dollars; second, deviant entrepreneurs will emerge who will provide liquidity to exchange dollars for pounds at the true "market" rate, thereby allowing sterling holders to get their hands on the widgets. Such unsanctioned currency markets are what are being referred to in these documents. (For contemporary examples, see Argentina and Egypt.) In sum, these earliest uses of the term "black market" reflect a particular historical moment: the effort of governments to impose capital controls in the wake of the collapse of the gold standard during the Great Depression. For a characteristic early example of this usage of the term "black market," see Paul Einzig, "The Unofficial Market in Sterling," The Economic Journal 49:196 (December 1939).

By the early 1940s, however, a new meaning for the term "black market" begins to emerge. This usage refers to markets that route around government efforts to impose rationing in the context of the Second World War. The earliest example of this usage on JSTOR is by Miriam S. Farley: "Japan Experiments with Rationing," Far Eastern Survey 9:17 (14 August 1940). Farley explains how the Japanese, by then in year three of their war with China, having already imposed rations on gasoline, were now commencing to ration "commodities in general daily use," specifically sugar. (This is interesting because it underscores the extent to which Japan was already suffering from commodity supply issues, a year and half before the American phase of the war in Asia officially began.) The article closes by noting drily that there have been "many abuses of the gasoline rationing system" and that the fear was that this black market (no scare quotes) would spread to the other markets as rationing was extended to these. 

In a sense, this new usage was an extension of the original currency control-related concept. What governments are doing when they impose capital controls, after all, is rationing the currency -- the rationing of other goods was merely an extension of the same logic of government control over the economy's key resources.

As the Ngram above suggests, the concept of the black market soared throughout the war years, as virtually every country imposed rationing quotas on a growing list of commodities, and as unofficial markets arose in parallel to supply the well-to-do with goods that the government deemed should be distributed on a basis other than market purchasing power. This ration-breaking conceptualization of "black markets" reached its apex in the immediate postwar years, as the deprivation conditions in war-ravaged Europe and Asia meant that price controls and quotas were essential for keeping the desperate populations alive. But the very omnipresence of such rationing also created unprecedented opportunities for deviant entrepreneurs to make windfalls by constructing "black market" supply chains that circumvented the quotas. While size estimates of such markets in places like Berlin and Vienna in the the first years after the war are inherently unreliable, they were undoubtedly huge. The black market was the defining feature of the immediate postwar economic landscapes in these locations. Indeed, one of the greatest movies of the twentieth century, "The Third Man" (1949, based on Graham Greene's screenplay), centers on the adventures of Harry Lime (played by Orson Welles), who runs a black market in (as it turns out, counterfeit) medicine in the ruins of postwar Vienna. This is how Lime famously justified himself:

As the Ngram above shows, it is just as "The Third Man" was released in the late 1940s that the term "black market" (still understood primarily as a unofficial market designed to route around rationing strictures) began to dip in popularity. Here again historical context explains why. The Marshall Plan began in April 1948, and with it the economies of Western Europe begin to overcome the chronic shortages of goods that had led governments to feel the need to impose rationing (and thus created opportunities for deviant entrepreneurs like Harry Lime). With the end of shortages and rationing, the empirical phenomenon of "black markets" went into decline, and hence chatter about the phenomenon also declined a bit, though the concept, having been invented, never quite went away.

It is only the 1960s that the current modern sense of the term black market begins to arise, that is, as a concept that is primarily focused on goods that are not so much rationed as considered per se sinful (as it were, haram in the Islamic jurisprudence sense). While the older sense of the term black market -- referring to unlicensed markets for goods that are considered otherwise wholesome, such as food, medicine or fuel -- has continues to get used in a limited way, from the 1960s forward the term black market increasingly refers to markets for things that on some fundamental, material level are considered inherently beyond the moral pale: above all narcotics, but also prostitution, killing of endangered species, human trafficking, and so on. Of course, there had long been prohibitions on various sorts of goods in American society (notably on alcohol during capital-P Prohibition) but in the 1920s nobody at the FBI referred to what Al Capone was doing with the term "black market."

Fully exploring the nuanced post-1960 meanings of the term "black market" is beyond the scope of this blog post, but one thing worth underscoring here is the shift in the ethical constitution of black markets. In the 1930s and 1940s, black markets arose because rich people wanted to get around government-imposed regulations designed to enforce communal standards of egalitarian solidarity. Quotas were predicated on the notion that during depression and wartime, all members of the national community were supposed to suffer deprivation together. In other words, if there was a limited supply of sugar or gasoline, then government would dictate that everyone (after the government's own set-aside, naturally) would get the exact same amount of sugar, or if not exactly the same amount, then some amount based on a moral economy of distributive justice. Of course, rich people have never been content with getting the same as what everyone else has of these desirable goods, and there have always been those who were willing to either embezzle the government's share or sell their own share (or act as a broker for either of these) in order to meet the desires of those with money. If the presence of the black markets reveal the limits of such egalitarian-communitarian ideals during the 1940s, we should nonetheless pay a certain respect to the moral principles which the deviant entrepreneurs were attempting to subvert. Black markets, in this sense, are the tribute virtue pays to vice.

By contrast, the moral principles that underpin the laws that are the object of today's black markets are rooted in a very different set of moral principles. Today's black markets are designed to route around moral prohibitions concerning certain types of consumptions. In other words, if the government regulations that led to black markets in the 1930s and 1940s were about ensuring that everyone would have access to certain classes of commodities (medicine, food, fuel), the government regulations that lead to most of today's black markets are about ensuring that no one has access to certain classes of goods and services, be it prostitution or drugs or rhino horns.

Best Movies of the 1970s

The 1970s is generally acknowledged as the greatest decade for cinema, especially for Hollywood, as the shackles of the old censorship were thrown off and a brilliant new generation of filmmakers arrived, steeped in European filmmaking and committed to showing the seamier side of American life in its unvarnished glory. It was also the decade that essentially invented the industrial model for blockbuster production.

So many great ones: Jaws. Star Wars. The Conversation. The Godfathers. McCabe and Mrs. Miller. The Sting. Carrie. Nashville. Scenes from a Marriage. Apocalypse Now. The Exorcist. Badlands. Days of Heaven. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The Spy Who Loved Me. Shaft. Deep Throat. A Clockwork Orange. Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Annie Hall. Manhattan. Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein. Animal House. Chinatown. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Alien. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Barry Lyndon. The Exorcist. Rocky. Etc.

Precisely because this new generation had such an unprecedented commitment to confronting the more louche and sordid aspects of American life (one reason why Steven Spielberg, though of that generation by age, has never really fit in with it), the movies of that era are also an incredible window into the social anxieties of the era, or at any rate the social anxieties of the white men who were making these movies. In no particular order, here are the dozen+ indispensable movies for capturing this "structure of feeling" of the 1970s.

For the feeling of postindustrial social ruin:

• Dirty Harry
• Dog Day Afternoon
• Death Wish
• Serpico
• Taxi Driver
• Saturday Night Fever
• The Warriors
• Mad Max

For the sense of lost innocence:

• American Graffiti
• The French Connection
• Network 
• Deliverance
• Kramer v Kramer
• The Last Picture Show
• Three Days of the Condor

The Fog of Development

I've spent a good part of the last few weeks thinking about development assistance, especially development assistance in (subnational) conflict zones. For three years, I've supported a World Bank project researching the impact of development initiatives on such conflicts in Asia. It's been an absolutely amazing experience, which I will blog more about this summer, when the results are published.

Perhaps the most amazing finding, to me, is just how little donors know about where their money goes in these places, much less about what the impact of their projects may be. I've decided to coin a term to describe this: The Fog of Development.

The Fog of Development has many driving factors, but the underlying one is epistemic: we just don't know what we know. And this has at least three dimensions:

1. Development agencies don't, and apparently can't, follow the money. So we have don't have any sort of precise sense of what effect the "development" spending is having. (You can look from the ground up at individual projects to make project assessments, but it's near-impossible to track a particular dollar from the donor down to the village.)
2. The developmental state, if it does collect development-related data, does so extremely badly, and  it collects conflict-related data even more haphazardly. Or, if it does collect these things well, it usually refuses to share them, or actively distorts them. In ways you as an analyst cannot determine.
3. When foreign developmental agencies try to collect the impact data themselves, they usually fail, for two reasons. First, they often refuse to answer "sensitive" questions, for fear of being excluded (or for fear of their lives). Second, if they do ask the "sensitive" (i.e. crucial) questions, they are probably not going to get honest answers from respondents, who suffer from the same incentives and fears, but worse.

In sum, we don't know what we don't know. And yet the band plays on.

The maturing global narcotics business in Africa

The latest United Nations Office of Drug Control report contains grim news about how the global prohibition regime is creating new opportunities for deviant entrepreneurs (PDF) in Africa.

The drug business in Africa, which used to be controlled by South Americans and was mainly about smuggling toot to Europe, is undergoing a strategic metamorphosis.

• First, the product strategy is changing: West Africa is becoming a producer-for-export of horse and tina, while continuing to run Peruvian flake to Europe. Domestically produced hash is also a growing export.
• Second, the supply chain strategy is changing: Africa is now exporting to Asia (the supply chain used to run in reverse, with meth being brought in from Asia in exchange for wildlife and illicit minerals). Domestic consumption of harder stuff is growing. (I expect a crack/meth epidemic in Lagos in a couple of years.) Tactically, traffickers are also breaking shipments into smaller batches and using sea as much as air links.
• Third, the personnel strategy is changing: West African (mainly Nigerian) gangs, instead of acting as essentially hired help, are taking over the management of business from Chinese and Latin Americans (aping the pattern whereby the Mexicans took over the North American cocaine supply chains from the Colombians).

As Charlie Sheen would say: #winning.

What is the Subject of Intellectual History?

Cross-posted in slightly different form at the US Intellectual History group blog.

Last week, Ben Alpers mused on the possibility of an intellectual history of “irrational” thought. His particular examples were the late writings of Philip K. Dick, which might (charitably) be described as mystical, and the writing of L. Ron Hubbard, which might (less charitably) be called commercial in nature. Whether either of these sets of texts is “irrational” is open to debate, but what I found most interesting about Alpers’s riff was his suggestion that virtually any text is a potential subject for intellectual history.

I have to confess, I had a pretty allergic reaction to this claim. It bothered me for much the same reason that Daniel Rodgers’s much-celebrated Age of Fracture rubbed me the wrong way: it didn’t seem to offer any basis for defining what sorts of texts were appropriate to include in a discussion of “the ideas of the age.” Alpers stated quite resolutely in the comments to his piece that he really felt that in fact, yes, any text could be given the intellectual history treatment. The discussion then migrated over to Twitter, where I started asking, rhetorically, whether it would be appropriate to write an intellectual history of, say, Glenn Beck’s half-baked rantings. When I got some affirmatives to that, I went yet further, and asked, How about an intellectual history of Honey Boo-Boo‘s utterances? Yes? Then how about an intellectual history of moans by porn stars? All verily texts, no?


What these admittedly snarky tweets were trying to get at, however, was actually something quite vital: my point was that, in fact, everyone has their standards for what qualifies as worthy of “intellectual” treatment — it’s just that some people’s standards are a lot lower than others’. What I’d like to do in this post is sketch out, in a more serious manner, what I take to be the appropriate limits of the enterprise of intellectual history.

I should begin by noting that I am definitely favor broadening the scope of topics that intellectual historians turn their sights on. For example, my own work (both scholarly and in industry) has dealt primarily with “policy intellectuals,” a topic/category that would likely have seemed bizarre to intellectual historians of Henry May or Perry Miller’s era. In the intervening years, however, we’ve seen many wonderful intellectual histories written on all manner of unlikely topics, ranging from punk music (Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces) to cooking (Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young, and Maxime Bilet’s Modernist Cuisine, v. 1) to college football (Brian Ingrassia’s The Rise of the Gridiron University). While all of these books are arguably cultural histories as much as intellectual histories, in each case they demonstrated that these topics contain surprising intellectual depths and textual complexities.

The question that books like this raise, then, is precisely the one that Alpers and I took up: is there any topic at all that isn’t amenable to intellectual history?

To answer this question, we must begin by noting that the central methodological feature of intellectual history is *close textual reading* — that is, careful, sustained interpretation of a text in order to “unpack” meanings that might otherwise appear obscure, inscrutable, or difficult. (I use the word “text” very broadly here – it could include music, art, etc.) Within that broad rubric, there are of course many different approaches to this sort of careful reading: Exegesis, Talmudism, New Criticism, Deconstruction, and so on. But regardless of these particulars, what sets intellectual history off from other forms of historical inquiry is this sustained, close examination of texts.

To some extent, virtually all historians do this sort of reading in their work. In other words, most historiography contains intellectual-historical “moments,” in which the historian engages in a sustained close reading of some text, be it a personal letter, a political speech, or a private diary. But it’s also clear that close reading is not the only or even the primary sort of reading that most historians do. When historians examine, for example, bills of lading, or birth and death certificates, or bureaucratic forms, or financial accounts, they certainly scrutinize them for credibility, but they don’t usually analyze them in terms of complicated textuality: these documents are mainly assumed to be modestly functional in their communicative purpose. In sum, the sort of close reading I am referring to as the hallmark of the intellectual-historical method is in fact generally, and rightly, reserved for certain types of texts.

So, what are the types of texts that deserve this sort of sustained critical reading?

I would argue that to be worthy of the intellectual-historical approach, a text needs to have two essential features. First, the text should have been “carefully wrought” by its author(s); that is, it should be something that was self-consciously produced to be read with care. Texts produced for simple functional reasons really don’t merit this approach: there’s no such thing as a close reading of a telephone book (as even Avital Ronnel would probably admit). Second, the text needs to be one that situates itself within a tradition of similar texts. Most such texts will usually signal this intertextuality in relatively overt ways, that is, by referencing or commenting on other, similar texts. When you think of what it is that intellectual historians mainly do when they engage in close reading, it is precisely unpacking these intertextualities.

Keeping these two defining features of “intellectual history-worthy” texts in mind, it becomes clear why it makes no sense to speak of an intellectual history of, say, Honey Boo-Boo, or porn movie grunts, or elevator music – these are simply not works of ideas that require exegesis. These texts are, fundamentally, not intellectual objects – they are objects that operate in terms other than intellectual ones. To treat them as intellectual objects is at best silly. To be harsh about it, there’s simply no reason to apply our pearly methodology to such swinish texts. Or, if you prefer a martial metaphor, applying intellectual history methods to such texts is likely killing a fly with a bazooka.

I should hasten to add that this is not at all to say that such objects are without historical interest. They absolutely are. Historians of American life in the early years of the 21st century will certainly need to reckon with the significance of Reality TV and ubiquitous pornography. My point here, rather, is that such reckonings will be much better accomplished using tools other than close textual reading. For example, future historians may wish to contextualize such objects in terms of the political economy of their production, or examine the psychological (and physiological) nature of the reactions the produce in audiences, or any number of other techniques. As they say in Britain: horses for courses.
Before concluding, let me address one possible objection directly, which is whether the distinction I’m making is a fundamentally elitist, Arnoldian one. The answer is, yes it is. In practice, the distinction I’m making almost always ends up reproducing a high/low culture distinction. And I have no problem defending this distinction, for in fact some cultural objects are much more “rich,” “complex,” “textured,” “difficult,” or whatever other metaphor you wish use to describe what separates great works from non-great ones.

Let me go further and say this: everyone knows this in their gut, even if twenty years of reading French Theory has caused them to somehow forget it. Honey Boo-Boo’s or Jenna Jameson’s utterances just aren’t as rich a vein to mine using the technique of close reading as, say, John Rawls or bell hooks. Anyone who claims otherwise is, I’m sorry, full of it. (And yes, in making this sort of absolute claim I fully realize that I am engaged in disciplinary boundary work.) My ultimate point is that we all have our standards, we all have our intellectual hierarchies, and the only question is how honest and transparent we are about them.

Postscript: I should note one thing I did change my mind about over the course of last week’s Twitter exchange (yes, I remain capable of occassionally changing my mind!): perhaps it is true, after all, that virtually all overtly political texts fall into the category of “texts worthy of close reading.” This is because, however clumsy or misconceived, virtually all political texts are not only self-consciously wrought, but also situate themselves in some sort of inter-textual tradition, if only implicitly. In which case, maybe Glenn Beck is worthy of the intellectual history treatment, after all, and maybe Daniel Rodgers wasn’t quite so unreasonable when he chose to start Age of Fracture with Peggy Noonan. My gut still tells me that including these sorts of writers defines the project of “intellectual history” awfully far down, but there’s at least a case to be made that their writings meet the criteria I’ve laid out above. So I’ll have to think more on this one.

The Lehman Brother nuke

In 2006 RAND staged a wargame to think through the implications of a nuclear terror incident. They created a specific scenario - a tactical nuclear device being detonated by a terrorist organization in the Long Beach harbor - and then staged a role-play to determine how key stakeholders would react and work together. The experience must have been incredible, because even the write-up is riveting. When I revisited this text today, however, what struck me with particular force was RAND's assessment (this is in 2006, remember) of what the longer-term economic implications of such an event would be:

The attack is likely to have dramatic economic consequences well beyond the Los Angeles area: 

• Many loans and mortgages in Southern California might default. 
• Some of the nation’s largest insurance companies might go bankrupt. 
• Investors in some of the largest financial markets might be unable to meet contract obligations for futures and derivatives. 

While exact outcomes are difficult to predict, these hypothetical consequences suggest alarming vulnerabilities. Restoring normalcy to economic relations would be daunting, as would meeting the sweeping demands to compensate all of the losses.

As some of you will no doubt observe, all of these consequences in fact did come to pass just two years after this report was issued - as a result of the Lehman Brothers default, the consequent collapse of AIG, and the cascade effects which are still creating malign reverberations throughout the global economy, above all in the Eurozone.

Usually when people say that something would be "like a nuclear bomb going off" they are exaggerating; but in the case of the Lehman default, it is accurate.

Historicizing postmodernity and "postmodern theory"

A couple nights ago I had a little Twitterflurry with @Interdome and @ekstasis, that went a little something like this:

 

The point of departure for this debate was my tweeting the following, which linked to @CoreyRobin's review of Daniel Rodgers's Age of Fracture (an important recent book that I confess deeply disliking -- but that's for a separate blogpost):

Postmodernism was counter-revolutionary in practice if not in principle http://crookedtimber.org/2012/10/17/age-of-fracture-or-age-of-counterrevolution/ … just look at the GOP's "skepticism about facts"

Now @Interdome (AKA Adam Rothstein, whom I don't know) has responded with a thoughtful blogpost, in which he defends post-structuralist theory. The nub of his argument is that one should not conflate postmodernity, as an era, with the body of theory that became popular contemporaneously to that era (properly called post-structuralist theory, but which in popular writing is commonly referred to as postmodern theory). Rothstein argues, further, that any nostalgia for modernist certitudes is misguided, since the primary products of those certitudes were oppression, war, and overconsumption. Finally, he takes umbrage at the suggestion that today's GOP is somehow practicing a kind of "vulgar post-structuralism" in its attacks on science.

Let's take those arguments one at a time. (And let me also acknowledge that this debate is in some ways a rerun, with contemporary signifiers, of the Habermas-Lyotard debate from thirty years ago.)

Obviously it's illegitimate to conflate a critical theorist with the object of his or her theory. It would be ridiculous to blame Marx for nineteenth century capitalism's rapaciousness, say, or William F. Buckley for the inefficiencies of Great Society welfare programs. Likewise it's absurd to suggest that, say, Judith Butler is responsible for climate change denialism, or to suggest that someone who talks about racism is actually perpetuating that racism (one of the American right's dumbest recent tropes).

What I was suggesting, however, was not that post-structuralists were identical to or responsible for the revanchist politics of the late 20th century. Rather, I was referring to the political effect that post-structural theory has had, as well as the ugly ways it has been vulgarized.

To make this case, we need to begin by historicizing poststructuralist theory, that is, to recognize that post-structuralism was as much an artifact of the era of conservative ascendance as supply-side economics or Madonna music videos. Rothstein depicts post-structuralist theory as occupying some Archimedean point outside the historical epoch in which it arose. He suggests that it offers a timeless set of epistemic truths, rather than itself being embedded in (and dare I say a symptom of) that era's own pathologies. By contrast, I would suggest that, now that Minerva's Owl has alighted, it is evident that post-structuralist theory suffered in significant ways from what is known in the intelligence community as "mirror-imaging," that is, the tendency of analysts to take on the characteristics of the objects they are assessing.

In what sense does post-structuralist theory (covertly?) reflect the pathologies of postmodernity? To fully answer that question would take many volumes -- it's part of Daniel Rodgers's project in Age of Fracture -- but let me here put my finger on the two things that I think are most salient. Both of these matters speak directly to the question of whether post-structuralism, despite overtly being critical of how power has operated in the postmodern era, in fact has contributed to the dominant, reactionary politics of that era.

The first point derives from post-structuralist theory's profound epistemological skepticism -- the "hermeneutic of suspicion" that Rothstein refers to. This epistemological skepticism in its sophisticated form represents a compelling critique of the verities of positivistic modernism, but in the hands of inept practitioners (or cynics) can easily shade into vulgarian anti-scientific discourse. This is why the infamous "Sokal hoax" was so embarrassing: it revealed that the language of post-structuralism was all too easily appropriated to render a specious anti-scientific argument in a manner that the leading practitioners of that body of theory did not find objectionable.

Second, the "incredulity toward metanarratives," which Lyotard described as the hallmark of the postmodern outlook, all too easily degenerates into a rejection of any sort of narrative, just as anti-authoritarianism can blur into a rejection of all authority. It's important to note that poststructuralists didn't just assert that the particular master narratives of high modernism were bunk, but rather that all master narratives were bunk, and usually pernicious bunk, at that. In this vein, I think it's altogether too easy to say that Lyotard was just describing something he saw out there in the culture: he was himself deeply engaged in the debunking of metanarratives -- very specifically, the metanarrative of the working class's subjective emancipation through collectivization. In other words, postmodernism's epistemic agenda was specifically aimed at undermining the grandest of the modernist collective action programs, namely socialism. In the French context, post-structuralism was thus "counter-revolutionary" in a very specific and explicit way.

But as post-structuralist theory migrated to the United States in the 1980s (there to be reimagined as a holistic thing called "French Theory") it was taken up by folks with a different political agenda from post-1968 French anti-communists. In the United States, post-structuralism emerged as a toolkit for unmasking dominant narratives of race, class, and gender that privileged white, male, middle-class life in America. Over the course of the last two decades of the twentieth century, at the very moment when neoliberalism was running wild and "left" high modernism was collapsing, post-structuralist theory was sweeping through the American academy as a tool for "deconstructing" various dominant paradigms. Post-structuralist theory (at least in its pre-9/11 maximalist moment) came to be about the radical critique of all socially-received categories. There was no such thing as race, gender, class, nation, tribe, etc.; these were all just myths that the Man had put over on us in order to push his own domination. (I'm caricaturing, but not by much.) In the context of American culture war politics during the 1980s and 1990s, this political agenda seemed on its face to broadly speaking "left," if by left we simply mean a generalized sympathy for the excluded and the poor and opposition to unbridled capitalism and the lingering white supremacist dimensions of American life.

Unfortunately, however, the story doesn't end there. Here it's important to make a basic point: any effective politics cannot end simply with the countering of oppressive cultural categories; ultimately, it must be about collective action. By definition, collective action requires that people act in unison, which in turn requires that people put aside their differences. You don't need to be sociobiologist to observe that people tend to be selfish, so the question is, what is it that gets people to be willing to put aside those individual differences? In practice, it is almost always some narrative that gets an agglomeration of people see themselves as forming some sort of unity of shared interest or identity that trumps their differences. Collective action cannot survive without such narratives.

This brings me to my point about how post-structuralism ended up being reactionary as a matter of praxis: in draining the amniotic fluid of socially-constructed collective categories, it was all but inevitable that the collective action baby would end up getting aborted. Specifically, post-structuralism's radical attack on all collective categories as "socially-constructed," while good for undermining narratives of oppression that relied on such categories, has had a reactionary political effect where it undermined narratives and categories that are necessarily for progressive political action, notably the category of social class. Incredulity toward meta-narratives doesn't just undermine white supremacism, it doesn't just undermine socialism, it undermines the very possibility of collective action, because in practice collective action almost always depends on some meta-narrative which is capable of getting people to put aside their inevitable differences and pursue the collective goal. And without collective action, we're left without emancipatory hope. In sum, by undercutting the narrative bases for collective action, post-structuralism has been reactionary in effect if not in intent.

It's important to note here that I've slipped in a crucial assumption into this argument, and I'd like to bring that out. I'm assuming that collective action is something we should actually wish for. Here, inevitably, we get into the biggest of all historical judgments, which is whether the collective actions undertaken in the name of modernism were, ultimately, a good thing or not. Rothstein is clearly a skeptic. He sees the symbolic high points of modernist collective action as (I quote) "imperialism, world wars, American-made cars, and boom-towns." Take just a small step further and you're with Adorno, declaring that Auschwitz is modernity's apotheosis.

I guess your mileage may vary on this, but I don't accept the wholesale rejection of the project of modernity. I can't sit and look back on the history of the collective actions undertaken over the last three hundred years and say humanity as a whole would be or have been better off if none of that had been undertaken, and we instead had remained under the various anciens regimes. Sure, there have been terrible depredations during our long current historical epoch, but ultimately I am with Habermas at an ethical level: what we need to cure modernity's ills is more of it -- it's an incomplete project.


A big part of my antipathy to post-structuralism's anti-collective action effects has to do with my growing horror about global elites' failure to act against climate change. The simple, fundamental truth is that if we don't manage to create a broadly accepted metanarrative about the need to stop the runaway train of GHG emissions, then we will destroy civilization in ways that even the most hardened skeptic of modernity should blanch at.

And this is where we get back to my argument that the contemporary right is engaged in a kind of "vulgar post-structuralism." Indeed, the right's critique of climate science uses tropes (admittedly in crude form) that should be all too familiar to post-structuralist critics of categories like race or gender. The climate change deniers claim that the narrative about anthropogenic climate change as a threat to civilization is not "true" but rather is "socially constructed and politically biased balderdash" designed by elites who dress up their socialist, one-worldist agenda in the meretricious language of science.

Now, Rothstein may not like this, but this mode of argumentation derives directly from the post-structuralist efforts in the 1980s and 1990s to deconstruct categories like race and gender: these weren't "real" things, just categories that certainly elites had invented in order to divide and oppress. Oh, but we were sincere, and they're just cynics! I can hear the defense. I'm not convinced. There might be some PR flaks for oil companies who are mere cynics, but there are many climate skeptics who sincerely believe that the whole of climate science is an elite ruse designed to allow for the imposition of socialism and one world government. The post-structuralist theory-derived cognitive and political tools serve their arguments all too well. We may not like what modernity brought us, but what humanity desperately needs, despite everything, is not no "schemes to improve the human condition," but rather better schemes to improve the human condition. If we are to avoid boiling the planet, we cannot resign ourselves simply to straying through the infinite nothing.

The bitter truth is that the only hope of confronting the runaway climate change problem is by galvanizing humanity-scale political action. It is only if humanity can find a way to see itself as sharing a single fate that the necessary collective political actions will be remotely possible. But prospects for such action have been profoundly undermined by a philosophical agenda whose most notable practitioner famously declared that the very category of Man was no more solid "than a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea." So much for galvanizing political action.


So, to sum up, it seems to me that the big and important way to understand post-structuralist theory is to situate it as an artifact of the late 20th century era of post-Fordist neoliberalism (e.g. "postmodernity" in David Harvey and Frederic Jameson's terms). To put a bumper-sticker on it, I see post-structuralism as rooted in the same skepticism about state action, and indeed collective social action of all sort, as the right-wingers on the other side of the political aisle. You read a "post-structuralist" like James Ferguson, and he's as skeptical of the state as anyone in the IMF ever was. This is the fundamental sense in which post-structuralism was a part of its era, rather than simply a critical voice describing that era.

But I can't leave it there. Because, much as I hate to admit this, in a profound way I accept the post-structuralist critique: I too am incredulous of metanarratives. I accept the post-structuralist credo that, in the desert of the real, ethical action of any sort may be impossible, and that negation and refusal may be all that's left. I accept that, now that the high modernist baby's been aborted, it's not going back into the womb.

But I can't say that any of this makes me feel very happy. Hence my position of "melancholic wistfulness": I feel acutely the loss of that moment when the modernist baby seemed so full of promise. Just because I recognize that the baby was never going to grow up to be the healthy child of high modernist dreams is no reason for me to celebrate the abortion with the post-structuralists. It's a tragedy.

The future political economy of post-crisis Europe

Two weeks ago George Soros wrote an article where he explained the essential political dynamic of the Eurocrisis, by invoking a specific historical comparison:

There is a close parallel between the euro crisis and the international banking crisis of 1982. Then the IMF and the international banking authorities saved the international banking system by lending just enough money to the heavily indebted countries to enable them to avoid default but at the cost of pushing them into a lasting depression. Latin America suffered a lost decade. 

Today Germany is playing the same role as the IMF did then. The details differ, but the effect is the same. The creditors are in effect shifting the whole burden of adjustment onto the debtor countries and avoiding their own responsibility for the imbalances. Interestingly, the terms “center,” or “core,” and “periphery” have crept into usage almost unnoticed, although it is obviously inappropriate to describe Italy and Spain as periphery countries. In effect, however, the introduction of the euro relegated some member states to the status of less developed countries without either the European authorities or the member countries realizing it. In retrospect, that is the root cause of the euro crisis. 

Just as in the 1980s, all the blame and burden is falling on the “periphery” and the responsibility of the “center” has never been properly acknowledged. In this context the German word Schuld is revealing: it means both debt and guilt. German public opinion blames the heavily indebted countries for their misfortune.

This is precisely the argument I made two years ago. Back then I made the exact same comparison, and explained why this German approach to the resolution of the Eurocrisis put into question the very existential and moral premise of European Union:

The question is whether the Germans can get away with imposing what amounts to a structural adjustment program (SAP) on their fellow euro-zone members. In other words, are the Germans going to be allowed to do to PIIGs what the US did to Latin America in the aftermath of the 1982 debt crisis. 

That story is worth remembering in some detail. What happened in that case was that US banks, flush with petrodollars from the Middle East, had gone on a huge lending spree in the 1970s to Latin American governments, which used the money on a mixture of corrupt payoffs for rich elites and promises of social welfare for the middle classes. By the early 1980s, as interest rates skyrocketed, these countries were no longer able to service their debts. Mexico declared in 1982 that it was not going to pay, several other Latin American countries followed suit, and for a few months that winter it looked possible that the entire global capitalist banking system might implode. 

To make a very complicated story short, what happened next was that the U.S. and the IMF agreed to restructure the Latin Americans' debts, in exchange for the imposition of "structural adjustment." The SAPs contained a number of critical elements, which in principle were designed to ensure the fiscal health of the debtor governments, but which also entailed a form of national and transnational class warfare: the rolling back of state ownership of key industries; the lowering of tariff barriers; the restriction of the autonomy of unions; the curtailing of price controls on food, water and other life essentials; and the scaling back of social welfare promises. 

This process of economic restructuring is most often remembered as having been responsible for producing a so-called "Lost Decade," in which economic growth rates plummeted across Latin America. But arguably what went lost was something much bigger than a mere decade of productivity. In fact, the SAPs ultimately involved the wholesale abandonment of an entire social-political vision, namely the promise of "development" as a process of building "social modernist" welfare states akin to those enjoyed in the Global North. In other words, it spelled the end of a certain kind of social dream, a certain kind of political ideal -- the dream that they would one day converge with the wealth and lifestyle of the North. 

Now, the U.S. bankers and politicians could get away with destroying this dream in part because they themselves didn't really believe in that dream any longer (if indeed they ever had); in part because the U.S. people felt no political or social solidarity with the Latin Americans; and in part because Latin American elites were disunified in their response to the demands of Washington and New York. 

By contrast, the whole point of the European Union is supposed to be about pan-continental political solidarity in the name of building social welfare states. Furthermore, the social democratic nature of all the European governments means that throwing the middle classes under the banking bus is anathema - especially if it's "our" (Greek, Spanish, etc.) middle classes and "their" (German, French) banks. 

So that's the key question: Is the European Union a fundamentally socially democratic institution? a collection of social and political equals who will stand together in a time of hardship? If that's the case, then the Germans will have to pay. Or alternately, will the Germans succeed in getting the taxpayers and social service consumers in the PIIGs to pay? In which case the beautiful dream of pan-European solidarity will be revealed as a lie, and it's hard to see how the European Union survives as a political project.

Soros's analysis from two weeks ago makes precisely the same point about what the outcome of imposing such a structural adjustment program will be for the comity of European nations:

The European Union that will emerge from this process will be diametrically opposed to the idea of a European Union that is the embodiment of an open society. It will be a hierarchical system built on debt obligations instead of a voluntary association of equals. There will be two classes of states, creditors and debtors, and the creditors will be in charge. As the strongest creditor country, Germany will emerge as the hegemon. The class differentiation will become permanent because the debtor countries will have to pay significant risk premiums for access to capital and it will become impossible for them to catch up with the creditor countries. 

The divergence in economic performance, instead of narrowing, will become wider. Both human and financial resources will be attracted to the center and the periphery will become permanently depressed. Germany will even enjoy some relief from its demographic problems by the immigration of well-educated people from the Iberian Peninsula and Italy instead of less qualified Gastarbeiter from Turkey or Ukraine. But the periphery will be seething with resentment.

Is that really the Europe the Germans want? Or maybe it's just the only Europe they're willing to pay for.

The future of economic growth and democracy

My friend Jay Ulfelder has just offered up a provocative blogpost over at Dart Throwing Chimp, his must-read blog on democratization and political forecasting. His argument, in essence, is that while development theorists have struggled mightily to specify the causal relationship between development (more specifically, economic growth) and democracy, the historical co-evolution of national democratic institutions and sustained economic growth is, at a high level, inarguable. It's just very, very hard to pin down. Ulfelder suggests that Eric Beinhocker’s recent book, The Origin of Wealth, which uses complexity theory to explain the history of development, may offer a way forward for establishing the relationship between these two megavariables.

In ruminating on this topic, Ulfelder suggests that one way to conceptualize different modes of political organization is as different forms of "social technology," each of which is optimized for different sorts of social (that is, political) functions. What democracy-as-social-technology is uniquely optimized for, from this perspective, is allowing large, distributed groups of people to solve problems collectively and consensually in the context of barriers to communication over the geography and population in question. It's also very good at securing legitimacy from populations no longer overawed by the leadership cadre's supposedly divine appointment. He quotes Henry Farrell and Cosma Rohilla Shalizi to explain why:

Democracy can do this better than either markets and hierarchies, because it brings these diverse perceptions into direct contact with each other, allowing forms of learning that are unlikely either through the price mechanism of markets or the hierarchical arrangements of bureaucracy. Furthermore, democracy can, by experimenting, take advantage of novel forms of collective cognition that are facilitated by new media.

Beinhocker's book is on my to-read list, so I won't weigh in on the value of complexity theory to development theory — though it's certainly more promising than the handwave that modernization theorists used to make about how democracy and industrialization "went together because in some sense they had to go together" — but I would sound two notes of caution about any conclusions we may be able to reach about the relationship between economic growth and democracy.

The first note of caution is that, even if we can establish what the historical relationship has been between economic growth and the "technology" of democracy, this doesn't necessarily mean that the relationship will hold going forward. We shouldn't fall into the Whig/teleological trap of assuming that because these two variables have been correlated for this particular historical phase ("modernity," which in this sense can be said to start in the 19th century), that they are necessarily going to be correlated in later and more advanced phases. It might be true that the benefits to collective problem solving that democracy offers is what works best in a smokestack economy, but that in a few decades, when computing power can directly "read" minds (obviously I'm speaking both speculatively and metaphorically) it will be possible to aggregate preferences without the mediating step of the ballot. Post-democratic political legitimacy will be secured more by performance than by process. (There are people who argue that the Chinese are encouraging the use of microblogging site Weibo precisely because they believe that social media can allow them to monitor public opinion directly and in real time — and also because it can help them to identify and suppress malcontents.)

In fact, Ulfelder's conceptualization of democracy as a form of "technology" suggests that democracy is likely to be eventually superseded by a better technology, since almost all technologies eventually become obsolete. Pace Fukuyama, democracy is no more "the end of history" than steam trains were "the end of transportation." Just as coal-fired steam engines offered the best mode of locomotion until the internal combustion engine was developed, so may democracy have been the best mechanism for political preference aggregation in an pre-cybernetic era. In sum, the democratic-capitalist moment may only be an episode, not the final stage: past returns as no guarantee of future results, as the saying goes.

The second note of caution is a more general one, and it has to do with the ecological sustainability of endless growth. If indeed democracy has in part been a helpful mechanism for enabling sustained growth, it's also true that sustained growth has been a critical factor for sustaining democracy. In fact, modern democracies find the idea of sustained non-growth or even shrinkage literally inconceivable. Arguably, it is only a growing pie that allows democratic politics not to turn uncivil and even murderous. A growing pie allows for politics to be about dividing spoils -- which is something democracy is good for. But democracy may in fact be a very bad way to deal with a stagnant or shrinking resource pool, since tyrannical majorities are likely to arrogate shrinking shares to themselves. One reason why James Madison's dark fears about the tyranny of the majority were never realized may be that the US has managed to sustain economic growth almost continuously since its inception, thus curbing majoritarian redistributionist impulses. Correspondingly, if you believe (as I do) that finding a process that can stop the human species from completely strip-mining of the planet is the single most urgent task facing humanity, then this analysis of the relationship between democracy and the "growth imperative" is dispiriting, for it suggests that only an authoritarian solution can possible prevent the headlong, democratically elected decision to destroy the planet for short-run fun times.

A truly dark possibility emerges from the conjunction of these two cautionary notes. It may well be that democracy is a legacy technology that is growing increasingly ossified over time and is destined to be replaced by other social technologies that are more suitable for sustaining economic growth. In which case we may end up with a situation in which the strip-mining of the planet actually accelerates, even as the democratic values and institutions which we hold dear are slowly (or perhaps quickly) eclipsed.

Plutocratic Insurgency

I recently engaged in a private exchange with leading 4GW thinker Robert Bunker on the question of how to periodize what he calls "plutocratic insurgency." Here are a few notes I took in the course of that exchange. The point of departure for this sort of an inquiry is to ask what the JohnGaltification of society would actually look like in practice—what would it seriously mean for the wealthy to opt out of participation in the collective institutions that make up society?

This is not an abstract exercise. One of the most important global trends of the last few decades has been the tendency of wealthy elites to hole themselves up in walled off enclaves. These islands of elitism are designed to be largely self-sufficient in their ability to deliver health care, food, security, education, entertainment, etc. to their residents, even as they sit amid seas of social misery. (Mike Davis has spent a good portion of his career chronicling this sort of thing, starting in Los Angeles with City of Quartz, and examining it as a global phenomenon in collections like Dead Cities and Evil Paradises.)  From the point of view of the denizens of such communities, the primary function of the wider society is to serve as a source of cheap, servile labor, and as a well of resources to be looted. Gated communities, in turn, are merely an example of a broader pattern, in which economic, social, or political enclaves are carved out of a national state and enabled to play by a fundamentally different set of rules from the surrounding territory.

In themselves the creation of such enclaves do not amount to a plutocratic insurgency. Rather, plutocratic insurgency arises wherever you see financial and economic elites using such enclaves as staging areas for making war on public goods. This is what I take to be the defining political-economic feature of plutocratic insurgency: the attempt on the part of the rich to defund the provisioning of public goods, in order to defang a state which they see as a threat to their prerogatives. (Conceptually, plutocratic insurgencies thus need to be separated from kleptocracies—the latter involve the using the institutions of state to loot the population, whereas the former wish to neutralize those institutions in order to facilitate private sector looting. In practice these may overlap or co-mingle.)

Before discussing the periodization of this phenomenon, it's worth noting that the idea of plutocratic insurgency on its face is paradoxical, perhaps even oxymoronic: shouldn't plutocrats be the folks most invested in the perpetuation of a system which has them at the top? Why would the system's biggest beneficiaries want to make war on the system? The answer lies in part in the rise of an ideology—or perhaps more accurately, a narrative—that has allowed society's winners to imagine their success not as being the result of either the luck or the skill to work the system for their maximum personal benefit, but on the contrary as having been arrived at by pure dint of their own rebellion against the system. So when did this weird phenomenon begin to take hold?

While the ideological origins of the plutocratic insurgency can be traced to the foundation of the Mont Pelerin Society, it really starts to gain cultural visibility with the corporate raiders of the 1980s, guys who thought of themselves not as the leading lights of the empire, but rather as "barbarians at the gates" (a term Henry Kravis had no problem embracing at the time). These guys didn't see themselves as the system's ultimate winners, but rather as iconoclasts who were being rightfully rewarded for destroying entrenched, unproductive rent-seekers. What began to surface in the 1980s has only gained momentum with the growing financialization of the US economy.

On the one hand, then, an ideology of rebellion and success through the undermining of "the takers." The flip side is a material point: the very wealthy today are so rich that they can effectively afford to buy for themselves the sorts of goods which previously required a state to provide. The result is a phenomenon whereby many plutocrats today see no reason to contribute anything to their host societies, and indeed actively make war on the idea that citizenship imbues them with any economic or social responsibilities. (People as different as Stephen Schwartzman and Sheldon Adelson fit this bill, as do the Koch brothers.) In sum, plutocratic insurgency is another way of characterizing the most ideologically ambitious bleeding edge of what sometimes gets terms "Neoliberalism" or "Thatcherism," or "Reaganism." "There's no such thing as society," Thatcher famously declared, thus issuing the cri de coeur of insurgent plutocrats everywhere.  

Beyond the United States, the critical event for the rise of the global plutocratic insurgency was the ideological collapse of state socialism, which everywhere on earth shifted the Overton Window dramatically to the right. Not only was the threat of left-wing grabs largely neutralized by socialism's implosion, but counterrevolutionaries on the right were emboldened by this collapse to attempt to roll back even the moderate, liberal forms of the welfare state. Arguably the most successful plutocratic insurgency in history was staged by the so-called oligarchs who arose from the ruins of the Soviet collapse. These were (mainly Jewish*) men who had started their business careers in the dark-gray corners of the Soviet "second economy," learning how to profit by sharp and ruthless dealing that took state strictures as opportunities rather than limits. Aided by useful idiots like Jeffrey Sachs, they grabbed the vast majority of the state-owned assets that Yeltin was selling off in a drunken fire sale designed to ensure that Communism could never again return to Russia. Eventually, in the Aughts, the former KGBers led by Vladimir Putin would stage a counter-insurgency and defenestrate most of the first generation oligarchs. What the rise of Putin signalled was the end of the Russia's plutocratic insurgency, and the reassertion of the state's interests as prior to those of the wealthy.

It might seem like the story laid out here is a liberal, perhaps even a Marxist one. While it's true that liberals have long fretted about the "secession" of the rich, increasingly conservatives are also getting alarmed. Ultimately, however, I don't think this is really a liberal or conservative matter. It's a question of national and social coherence as such: do people living together in a contiguous territory feel themselves somehow to be "in the same boat," willing to share responsibilities and risks collectively? Those engaged in the plutocratic insurgency answer that question with a defiant "No!" The plutocratic insurgency from above thus mirrors the deviant globalization insurgency from below, and taken together they embody the contemporary crisis of the nation-state.

* UPDATE:  I should clarify the significance of the dramatic overrepresentation of Jews among the first-generation Russian oligarchs, including Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Gusinsky, Alexander Smolensky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Mikhail Friedman, Vitaly Malkin, and others. First, Jewishness was not incidental to these men becoming oligarchs in the first place. While many late Soviet Communist Party members were enriching themselves with bribes, official anti-semitism made it almost impossible for Jews to get ahead within the formal Communist hierarchy. The most effective (and perhaps only) way for Soviet Jews to get ahead commercially, therefore, was by participating in the organization of the "second" (black market) economy. Unsurprisingly, therefore, ambitious Jews were overrepresented among those involved in the second economy, particularly in and around Moscow. This made them well-positioned to take advantage as the state economy collapsed. The biographies of most of the aforementioned oligarchs conform broadly to this pattern. Second, the Jewishness of the oligarchs also helps explain the course of their eventual removal from the apex of the post-Soviet economy. The fact that these oligarchs were Jewish helps account not only for why their appropriation of former state assets was widely perceived by the (anti-semitic) Russian public and elite establishment as illegitimate, but also for why there was little domestic Russian outcry when Putin threw them out of the country or into jail.

Humanity Call for Papers: The New International Economic Order and the Global Interregnum of the 1970s

The 1970s are remembered in the Global North as a time of stagflation, malaise, and political drift. But from point of view of much of the Global South, this same epoch was a time of unprecedented economic prosperity and political ambition. Particularly for primary producers in the wake of the OPEC oil price hikes, the 1970s were a time of unparalleled hopes for a rebalancing of global power relations and institutional authority. One manifestation of the new global mood was a profound shift in the understanding of global responsibilities for achieving development in the South.

Drawing on anticolonial thought and dependency theory, the UN General Assembly in 1974 proposed the creation of a “New International Economic Order” that offered a new interpretation of both the moral imperatives and global mechanisms of development. While Robert McNamara's World Bank spent the 1970s moving away from funding big infrastructure projects toward programs designed to meet the "Basic Needs" of the global poor, the NIEO constituted a more aggressive set of proposals for the global redistribution of wealth and technology transfers from North to South, with the objective of building a kind of welfare state at the scale of humanity itself. Although many in the North, and particularly in the United States, dismissed this agenda, there were others who gave it a sympathetic hearing, notably former West German Chancellor Willie Brandt, who chaired an international commission that in 1980 would endorse much of the global redistributionist agenda.

The Brandt Report arrived, however, at the very moment when the ideological and political mood in the North had begun to shift decisively against such ideas, replaced instead by a Neoliberal agenda spearheaded politically by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The Third World debt crisis that erupted over the next two years would provide the impetus to move the developmental agenda away from global redistribution and the provisioning of Basic Needs, and toward the "structural adjustment" of national economies. Imposed as conditions in exchange for financial bailouts, these programs involved the downsizing of the state-provided social protections and the diminishment of state control over national economies. Across the South, financial austerity and global economic integration would emerge as the developmental leitmotifs of the rest of the twentieth century. While the themes of the NIEO would get refigured in terms of a "right to development," the idea that states in the North somehow bore a moral and perhaps even legal responsibility to enable and fund the development of the South largely withdrew into the realms of non-binding UN resolutions and the utopian discourses of politically marginalized nongovernmental organizations.

The journal Humanity is issuing a call for papers to explore this episode in the history of development. We welcome papers that explore the philosophical, legal, economic, political, and institutional contexts in which calls for global redistribution were articulated, as well as ones that assess how those calls were eventually marginalized. Successful proposals will lead to papers presented at a fully-funded conference in fall 2013 and published in a subsequent dossier of the journal. Send a proposal of no more than 400 words to humanity@pobox.upenn.edu, by October 20, 2012.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the crisis of the Western welfare state

Responding to friendly critics on "Crooked Timber," Francis Spufford, author of Red Plenty, a new novel about the ideological climax moment for the Soviet Union in the early 1960s (which I confess I haven't read yet), perfectly captures my own sense of what the Soviet Union's collapse meant politically in the West:

I was 27 when the Soviet Union fell, ceased to be, shuffled off this mortal coil. I was too young to have experienced... it way back in the 1970s as a place which, barbarous and dictatorial though it was, nevertheless was essentially on the reasonable side of the economic argument; somewhere that, by opting for planning, had chosen the better economic model. On the other hand, I was too old to [experience] it as a will-o’-the-wisp, vanishing as I studied it, and leaving nothing behind but tedium and stale air. For me, as a teenager in the early 80s, having the traditional nuclear annihilation dream at regular intervals – my friends would usually drive past me in a bus while the asphalt melted just behind my fleeing heels – the USSR was not a possible object of admiration, but it was an object of solidity. Its defining feature was its permanence. It was an inevitable part of the planet’s architecture: obsolete but immovable. And then it did move, and when it went its going suddenly disclosed a set of hidden linkages that pulled various aspects of my familiar, home experience away after it. It seemed that my Western socialism – the unbarbarous kind – had had an unsuspected dependence on the existence of the Soviet model. And not just because the USSR was definitionally useful to social democrats, letting us point and say “Not that!” It had also served, it turned out when it was gone, as a sort of massive concrete tentpeg, keeping the Overton Window (not that it was called that, yet) tethered at its lefthand edge in a way that maintained the legitimacy, in western discussion, of all kinds of non-market thinking. When the USSR vanished, so with amazing speed in the 1990s did the entire discourse in which there were any alternatives to capitalism that had to be taken seriously. This was the biggest intellectual change of my lifetime – the replacement of one order of things, which I had just had time to learn and to regard as permanent, with a wholly different one, in radical discontinuity with it.

Even though the collapse of the Soviet Union had no ideological impact on Western social democrats, who had no sympathy for the Soviet system's brutality and economic underperformance, it nonetheless provoked a broad-scale political crisis for social democracy. This is because the collapse of a far left alternative moved the entire political conversation to the right. What had been "centrist" politics in the 1970s and 1980s suddenly became as far left as you could go. (Consider how Bill Clinton – an instinctual centrist if ever there was one – is now represented and remembered, both by his supporters and detractors, as a "liberal.") At the same time, the right was able to move much further to the right, turning former solid conservatives into relative liberals within their political community, and permitting the political mainstreaming of rightist beliefs which only a few years ago would be have been derided as fringe or worse. This is what Spufford means when he says that the collapse of Soviet Communism shifted the West's Overton Window dramatically to the right.

This shift has had profound if slowly-evolving implications for social welfare programs. Over the course of the past two decades, the formerly near-universal consensus in favor of unemployment insurance, government-guaranteed retirement benefits, health care, and other social services has became open to questioning within mainstream political space in a way that would have been virtually inconceivable as recently as the 1980s – back when no less than Ronald Reagan conceded that social security represented the "third rail" of American politics. With the disappearance of a hard left alternative, however, the right has been able to push its social darwinist libertarian agenda with much greater confidence, that is, with much less fear of provoking a far-left backlash. Likewise, social democrats had a much harder time positioning themselves as the reasonable middle ground between the social darwinist libertarian right and the communistic left, or of making the case that unless the state made a decent patch of things for ordinary citizens, the specter of Communism lay around the corner. Thus the terminal crisis of the centrally-planned Soviet economy, which on its face had nothing to do with the legitimacy or viability the social democratic welfare state (whose focus was not on planning production but on creating a minimum and egalitarian standard of social consumption), ended up reshaping perceptions of political possibilities in a way that has nolens volens undermined the political inevitability of and thus commitment to the social democratic welfare state.

Arguably the impact of the collapse of Soviet Communism was even greater in the Global South. Margaret Thatcher's provocation in the 1970s that "There Is No Alternative" to economic liberalism, became by the 1990s the absolute political reality almost everywhere on earth outside Cuba and North Korea. In terms of thinking about development, the collapse of a perceived socialist alternative terminated all elite resistance to the so-called structural adjustment programs which emerged as the dominant developmental practice of the 1990s – and which today is being applied to peripheral Europe. The collapse of the socialist alternative made it safe for development leaders to back away from commitments to reducing poverty, supplying basic needs or reducing inequality. 

Periodizing the Anthropocene

There's a very important new paper out in Nature entitled "Approaching a state shift in the Earth's biosphere." Executive summary:

Localized ecological systems are known to shift abruptly and irreversibly from one state to another when they are forced across critical thresholds. Here we review evidence that the global ecosystem as a whole can react in the same way and is approaching a planetary-scale critical transition as a result of human influence. The plausibility of a planetary-scale ‘tipping point’ highlights the need to improve biological forecasting by detecting early warning signs of critical transitions on global as well as local scales, and by detecting feedbacks that promote such transitions. It is also necessary to address root causes of how humans are forcing biological changes.

Let's summarize this further: humans are producing a "sledgehammer effect" on the global ecosystem, overdrawing on a variety of "ecosystem services," and unless humanity changes the way it interacts with the environment in a radical way, we're looking at an ecological catastrophe of a scale that may well compare with the dinosaur-extinction event.

There's already an excited conversation taking place about this. For samples, check out Forbes, Wired, and Slate.

My own view on the "anthropocene" debate is that, seen in geological-ecological timescales, the phenomenon we've become acutely conscious of over the past couple of decades and which usually gets labelled "climate change" didn't actually begin with industrial revolution 250 years ago. Rather, it began 40,000 years ago, when humans arrived in Australia, initiating the ongoing process of mass mega-fauna extinctions. This phenomenon continued with the arrival of humans in the Americas, about 15,000 years ago, which also resulted in the loss of many of the continents' large beasts.  Agriculture begins around 10,000 years ago, and what's happened since then forms a single continuous process of progressive human "commandeering" (to use this paper's term) of the planet's resources.

Scientists usually treat the die-offs at the start of the Holocene as conceptually and processually separate from the current round of post-industrial die-offs, but I think it's better to regard them as one macro-process.  I suspect that the reason we treat these as separate historical episodes is partly because we still fetishize the historical significance of industrialization, and partly because we narcissistically think that human consciousness (and hence intent) is a biologically unique category.

Yes, industrialization enormously accelerated the continuous process of resource commandeering, but human population has been increasing more or less non-stop for 74,000 years (since the Toba Eruption [update: of which more below]), and ecosystemic resource appropriation by humans has been continuously increasing in parallel. Industrialization allowed for an increase in the pace of this commandeering, but did not a change the motive or direction, all of which has been trending for millennia toward global-scale ecosystem disruption. Even without global warming, the human impact on the global ecosystem would/will eventually be total. (The idea that humans would completely harness all of Earth's resources was explicitly blueprinted back in the 1960s by Konstantinos Doxiadis, published as Ecumenopolis: The Inevitable City of the Future — the most totalizing vision of modernization ever produced.) 

What has further accelerated the threat of planetary-scale ecosystemic "state shift" is an inadvertent byproduct of industrialization, namely the carbonization of the atmosphere and the oceans, which is now a second planetary-scale anthropogenic forcing mechanism. In geological terms, however, this distinction between direct and intentional commandeering of resources and indirect changes caused by atmospheric carbonization is overdrawn: it's all part of a single integrated process of anthropogenic ecosystemic transformation — two phases of a single historical episode.

(We don't have the evidence, but there's no reason not to believe that other episodes of global-scale "state shift," such as the K/T extinction event or the Cambrian explosion, didn't also proceed through various "phases" in which the central dynamic driver changed — for example, the initial shift may have been some alteration in atmospheric chemistry, but then as it unfolded, it killed or generated species, which then became direct drivers of change in their own right. None of that makes it hard for us to see these historical process as singular.)

Because we narcissistic humans like to believe human intelligence is some unique and privileged biological feature, we insist on distinguishing between the direct and intentional commandeering of resources (killing or domesticating megafauna, plowing the Great Plains, etc.) and the unintentional byproducts of our actions, like atmospheric carbonization. That distinction isn't particularly meaningful at an ecological level, however.

In sum, I believe that some Archimedean intellect millions of years from now is likely to regard the shift to the Anthropocene as a single process that unfolded over eighty millennia, beginning with the Toba Eruption, and culminating in the complete melting of the polar ice caps around the year 4000. How many humans will be around by then to see that world is anyone's guess….

Update: The Toba Eruption is hypothesized to have reduced the human population to as few as 10,000, isolated in a couple of tropical refugia. This population bottleneck may well have created the conditions for an extremely harsh "survival of the fittest" moment. Although anatomically modern humans predate the Toba Eruption by 100,000 years, this winnowing effect of the Toba bottleneck may well have selected for physically indistinct byt psychologically or socially crucial traits for surviving amid climatic chaos. Interestingly, geological events — asteroids and mass volcanic eruptions — are hypothesized to be the root cause of all the other big die-offs. If the Toba Hypothesis is correct (it's highly controversial) it would suggest that the Anthropocene is just another example of the same sorts of shift, which would seriously downgrade the somewhat exalted role that we humans cast ourselves in when we deem ourselves to be the fundamental driver of the historic shift. In fact, our own "peak humanity" moment is perhaps best seen as a mere epiphenomenon of deep geological processes.