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The prose in this piece is sufficiently smooth that one might almost be carried away by its perhaps slightly-too-clever argument that "limousine liberalism" -- to blame for many current woes -- is finally meeting its comeuppance. The piece's message is that the real villain is not liberalism, limousine or otherwise, but the capitalism that it has served. Consider this passage:
Brave and audacious as they were, rarely had the rebel movements of
the fabled sixties or those that followed explicitly challenged the
underlying distribution of property and power in American society. And
yet if liberalism had proved compatible enough with liberty, equality,
and democracy, capitalism was another matter.
A case could be made that some of the sixties movements did challenge "the
underlying distribution of property and power in American society." But since Fraser in this piece never bothers to define capitalism, he is free to argue, or at least to imply, that the only movements in recent years that have challenged "the
underlying distribution of property and power in American society" have done so under an anti-capitalist banner.
The implication is, at best, dubious. In 1976, Sen. Fred Harris ran for the Democratic presidential nomination on the message that what was needed was "a fairer distribution of wealth and income and power." Harris framed that message in terms of left-populism rather than (explicit) anti-capitalism. Bernie Sanders has framed a similar message against the backdrop of a stated commitment to democratic socialism. But that commitment has been mainly a matter of ideological self-labeling rather than program, since, as Fraser himself notes, Sanders's proposals have been mostly a left-tinged version of the New Deal, not anything notably more radical.
Btw, this is not to deny that Sanders is a socialist: within certain wide limits, a socialist is anyone who calls himself or herself that, and Sanders, who joined the Young People's Socialist League as a student, has long embraced the label. But Fraser the historian, in ignoring Fred Harris and his left-populist presidential campaign -- one that occurred after the New Left had burned itself out and when 'limousine liberals' for their part were somewhat in retreat -- can reasonably be faulted for having fallen into one of the memory holes of recent history.
Following someone's Twitter trail, I came upon an entire issue from 2014 of the journal Social Science History that has been made freely available (link). It contains an address by sociologist William Sewell, as well as a piece by Julian Go on British imperialism 1760-1939, among other things.
Signing off the computer for the evening, I just ran across this WaPo piece about Tea Party and other right-wing opposition to reauthorization of the U.S. Export-Import Bank. This is a Chamber of Commerce vs. Club for Growth fight, to name two groups on opposite sides. Moreover, the new House majority leader, McCarthy, has announced he is opposed. Another Republican congressman, according to the piece, recently gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation in which he said the party had to come down firmly on the side of "free enterprise" (as opposed to "mercantilism" or "industrial policy"). Does that mean he opposes all government subsidies to business? All provisions of the tax code tilted in a pro-business direction? There are probably various angles from which one could gloss all this, but I'll let readers provide their own. Btw, the phrase in this post's title that's in quotes is taken from the article.
Added later: If you want to oppose 'corporate welfare', fine. But wrapping oneself in the rhetoric of a pure laissez-faire, free-market system is just political flummery, because there is no such thing. Modern economic systems require some degree of state involvement, and businesses and the state have been intertwined forever, going back at least to the 'long 16th century'. I view these points as being obvious, but sometimes saying the obvious can't hurt.
In "The Sociology of Imperialisms" (1919), Joseph Schumpeter defined imperialism as a drive for expansion for its own sake:
...whenever the word imperialism is used, there is always the implication...of an aggressiveness, the true reasons for which do not lie in the aims which are temporarily being pursued; of an aggressiveness that is only kindled anew by each success; of an aggressiveness for its own sake, as reflected in such terms as "hegemony," "world dominion," and so forth. And history, in truth, shows us nations and classes -- most nations furnish an example at some time or other -- that seek expansion for the sake of expanding, war for the sake of fighting, victory for the sake of winning, dominion for the sake of ruling. (Schumpeter, Imperialism/Social Classes [pb. ed. 1974], p.5)
He continued:
Expansion for its own sake always requires, among other things, concrete objects if it is to reach the action stage and maintain itself, but this does not constitute its meaning. Such expansion is in a sense its own "object," and the truth is that it has no adequate object beyond itself. Let us therefore, in the absence of a better term, call it "objectless".... This, then, is our definition: imperialism is the objectless disposition on the part of a state to unlimited forcible expansion. (Ibid., p.6)
Schumpeter went on to note, among other things, that an "inner necessity to engage in a policy of conquest" could be translated into action only when a "war machine stood ready at hand" (p.61). Schumpeter, as Michael Doyle notes in Ways of War and Peace (1997), exonerates capitalism of any responsibility for imperialism more or less by definitional fiat, and then proceeds to argue that "democratic capitalism leads to peace" (Doyle, p.245).
***
The idea of a Schumpeterian 'objectless' expansion may seem odd, but in The Reactionary Mind (ch.8, "Remembrance of Empires Past") Corey Robin portrays American neoconservatives as, in effect, proponents of such a thing (though he doesn't put it quite that way).
Robin describes the distaste, even disgust, with which the neocons viewed the Clinton years. These writers (the Kagans, Kristols, and Robert Kaplan, for instance) saw Clinton's foreign policy, with its emphasis on free trade agreements and globalized markets, as "proof of the oozing decadence taking over the United States" (p.172) after the Soviet Union's dissolution.
Robin summarizes the neocons' perspective as follows (p.174; emphasis in original):
What these conservatives longed for was an America that was genuinely imperial -- not just because they believed it would make the United States safer or richer, and not just because they thought it would make the world better, but because they literally wanted to see the United States make the world.
The neoconservatives were indeed repelled by what they viewed as Clinton's lack of virtú (cf. p.173) and 'vision' (not that George H.W. Bush or Reagan had an especially coherent vision either, but that's another story). However, the casual reader (and probably even the non-casual one) could come away from this essay (and one or two others in The Reactionary Mind) with the impression that only conservatives have been strongly attracted to an imperial and/or militarily assertive role for the U.S. Robin is aware, of course, that this is not accurate, but his argument that conservatives' attraction to war and imperialism is qualitatively different from that of non-conservatives can result in glossing over the fact that support for an imperial or expansionist or, at minimum, 'pro-active' U.S. foreign policy has not been the sole preserve of the Right.
Most obviously, Cold War liberals supported and/or designed many of the interventions of the 1950s and 1960s, including but not limited to the Vietnam War; and the aura of macho toughness cultivated by some members of JFK's inner circle is well known.
To go back further, one finds, for instance, at the turn of the twentieth century that support for an expansionary U.S. foreign policy crossed the ideological and partisan lines of domestic politics. (There was also, of course, an anti-imperialist movement at the time, though it wielded, on the whole, less influence.)
As Walter McDougall observes:
Historians stress the dynamic crosscurrents in turn-of-the-[twentieth]-century American society. Foster Rhea Dulles thought the era "marked by many contradictions." Richard Hofstadter identified "two different moods," one tending toward protest and reform, the other toward national expansion.... But the contradictions are only a product of our wish to cleanse the Progressive movement of its taint of imperialism abroad. For at bottom, the belief that American power, guided by a secular and religious spirit of service, could remake foreign societies came as easily to Progressives as trust-busting, prohibition of child labor, and regulation of interstate commerce, meatpacking, and drugs. Leading imperialists like [Theodore] Roosevelt, [Albert] Beveridge, and Willard Straight were all Progressives; leading Progressives like Jacob Riis, Gifford Pinchot, and Robert LaFollette all supported the Spanish war and the insular acquisitions. Even academic historians of the time applauded the war and colonies (except, in some cases, the Philippines), and elected A.T. Mahan [author of The Influence of Sea Power upon History] president of the American Historical Association. (McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State (1997), p.120)
Mahan was far from the only intellectual supporter of expansionism, but his book on the influence of sea power, published in 1890 (it was followed by a sequel), had a wide impact. Fareed Zakaria notes:
In the first chapter, which was the most widely read part of the book, Mahan clearly stated his central thesis: as a great productive nation, the United States needed to turn its attention to the acquisition of a large merchant marine, a great navy, and, finally, colonies and spheres of international influence and control. Not only was this necessary, Mahan asserted, it was inevitable, an inexorable step in the march of history. Mahan had expounded on these themes in his lectures at the Naval War College in the late 1880s, and he continued to propagate them through articles, books, and speeches throughout the 1890s. (Zakaria, From Wealth to Power (1998), p.134)
It was not only in the U.S. that Mahan was influential. His book became, in Michael Howard's words, "the Bible of European navies at the turn of the century," from which they took his teaching that the "task of naval power [in war] was to gain 'Command of the Sea,' which made it possible to use the oceans as a highway for one's own trade and a barrier to that of the enemy; and that command was the perquisite of the strongest capital fleet." (Howard, War in European History (1976), p.125) [For more on Mahan, see, e.g., Philip A. Crowl, "Alfred Thayer Mahan: The Naval Historian," in Makers of Modern Strategy, ed. P. Paret (1986); J.T. Sumida, Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching Command (1997).]
***
Is there, as some of the preceding might suggest, a close connection between attachment to a big navy and support for a far-flung, 'forward-deployed', quasi-imperial global role? This is perhaps a less obvious question than one might think. A big navy, for an 'insular' power like the U.S., is probably a prerequisite (necessary but not sufficient) for the maintenance of a global network of military bases such as the U.S. now has. But one might favor a big navy and advocate limiting its use to helping keep sea lanes open and assuring 'command of the commons,' while opposing the network of hundreds of bases (as well as the present and/or future military operations they might facilitate). Another position, of course, would simply be not to support a big navy, or at least not one of the current size. But this opens up a bigger subject, a question for another occasion.
The observation that "mature" or "consolidated" democracies virtually never fight each other, a/k/a 'the democratic peace', has been linked by some researchers to (among other things) patterns of trade among democracies. However, the democratic peace is not usually connected to the changing global division of labor and global North-South inequalities. Nicholas Lees's article in the June issue of Millennium -- "Structural Inequality, Quasi-rents and the Democratic Peace: A Neo-Ricardian Analysis of International Order" [abstract here] -- explores "the causal connections between global inequality, class formation and the democratic peace" through the lens of the neo-Ricardian idea of quasi-rents (p.492). I won't try to summarize all the details of the article; rather, this post will cover some of the piece's key points while offering some related thoughts.
To begin, it will be helpful to rehearse a bit of recent history. Starting in the early or mid-1970s, 'the Keynesian accommodation' and the Fordist economic model, which together produced several decades of strong economic growth and economically secure working classes in the developed capitalist countries, broke down. In tandem with, among other things, the end of fixed exchange rates, increased capital mobility, and the relocation of manufacturing to parts of the global South, the breakdown of Fordism marked the end of capitalism's 'golden age' (the phrase is from Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, who in turn borrowed it from a 1990 book, The Golden Age of Capitalism, edited by Marglin and Schor). The result was increased inequality, wage stagnation, the weakening of organized labor, and a decline, to use the language of Lees's article, in workers' ability to bargain for a share of quasi-rents [for the short definition of quasi-rents, see the note at the end of this post]. As Lees writes: "The defeat of organised labour in much of the advanced industrialised world, combined with the dispersion of productive capacity to the new semi-peripheries, seems to have eroded the quasi-rents of workers in tradeable sectors in the North" (506).
The end of capitalism's post-1945 golden age was noteworthy, however, not only for what it entailed but for what it did not. First, it did not wipe out the structural advantages enjoyed by the economies and firms of the developed world. A large amount of manufacturing relocated to the semi-periphery (or the 'newly industrializing countries'), but more "sophisticated" activities, involving the interplay of innovative technologies and highly skilled workers, remained concentrated in the North. The global trade regime, as administered by the World Trade Organization, generally continued to favor the richer countries, notably though not exclusively in the area of intellectual property. Moreover, as Lees notes (summarizing Raphael Kaplinsky), buyer-dominated global supply chains allow "large buyers located in the North...to bargain down producers of generic manufactures," such as textiles and furniture (500). Thus, while "within-nation inequality has increased almost worldwide" over the past thirty years, "population-weighted between-nation inequality of purchasing power-adjusted incomes has decreased," but only decreased "slightly -- largely as a result of moderate increases in per capita incomes in China and India" (502; emphasis added).
Secondly, the end of capitalism's golden age was not accompanied by a collapse in the framework of international politics and specifically not by the outbreak of a major war involving the great powers. On the contrary: in the late 1980s and early '90s the Cold War came to a (relatively) peaceful end, while the phenomenon of interstate war went into decline, as did, albeit more unevenly, armed conflict in general. This conjunction might seem surprising: some might have expected a period of considerable economic turmoil in the 'core' states of the system to have led to a breakdown of order in international politics, or at least to have engendered more violent conflict rather than less.
But perhaps the decline in armed conflict, of which the democratic peace is the most theorized aspect, is only temporary; perhaps the democratic peace rests on or presupposes a degree of economic security in the 'advanced' countries rooted in the now-vanished political economy of Fordism, which, among other things, afforded workers access to quasi-rents through strong labor organizations. If so, the end of Fordism, and the concomitant decline or disappearance of the relatively widely shared prosperity in the 'advanced' countries that Fordism underwrote, could be expected eventually to erode the democratic peace.
That, at any rate, is a possible implication of Michael Mousseau's argument about (to quote the title of one of his articles) "the social market roots of democratic peace." In brief, Mousseau's argument, as Lees presents it, is that economic development in 'contract-intensive societies' (i.e. those based mainly on impersonal market exchange rather than patron-client arrangements) produces non-belligerent values that undergird such societies' lack of hostility toward each other (509-510). By contrast, patron-client networks promote "strong in-group identification and hostility to out-groups -- values which Mousseau argues are externalised in the foreign policy of states" organized on clientalist, neo-patrimonial lines (511).
"In the contemporary world, contract-intensive societies have tended to be social market democracies in which the benefits of economic development are distributed fairly widely" (510). However, as these benefits become less widely distributed in developed capitalist economies (see above), the logic of Mousseau's argument suggests that the values supporting the democratic peace could be undermined (512). 'Advanced' democracies have not hesitated to depart from their professed liberal values when such a departure has been deemed necessary "to maintain the global political and economic status quo," and "[i]f the socio-economic foundations of this status quo were to come under more serious strain, actors within the core might actively reject these liberal values" (513). Lees wisely avoids any predictions about a resumption of interstate conflict in the North, however, observing that several factors may work in the opposite direction (513).
Lees makes a strong case that a combination of Mousseau's approach with structuralist theories of class formation and the North-South divide sheds light on the deep foundations of the democratic peace. But if the democratic peace is seen as merely one aspect of the broader decline in armed conflict, Mousseau's perspective may be less helpful. Mousseau's 'social market explanation' of the democratic peace, which roots both democracy and peace in a particular kind of social and economic development, conceivably could be extended to cover the decline of armed conflict in general. But here it might run into problems: perhaps one could show a connection between 'contract-intensive' economic development and the overall decline in armed conflict, but such a connection is not immediately obvious.
John Mueller's obsolescence-of-major-war argument (see, e.g., here) and/or Douglas Gibler's 'territorial peace' argument (see, e.g., here) might well be better explanations of the overall decline in war. Mueller, in contrast to Mousseau, takes a more constructivist and elite-oriented view, arguing that great-power war has become so normatively unacceptable that it is no longer part of the set of options that decision-makers have in their heads. In Mueller's view, peace among 'developed' countries rests less on the material circumstances of their populations than on most leaders' and publics' conviction that war has none of the positive features that were once attributed to it, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (i.e. pre-1914). In their different ways, Mueller and Gibler view the democratic peace as one part of a larger trend, one that may be strongest in but is not limited to the rich countries of the North, and Mueller does not draw the tight connections Mousseau does between material conditions, liberal values, and peace. (Gibler may not do so either, but I'm less familiar with the details of his work.)
In the opening of The Age of Empire, published in 1987, Eric Hobsbawm wrote that "the question of the origins of the First World War...has remained alive, because the problem of the origins of world wars has unfortunately refused to go away since 1914" (p.6). Although the upcoming hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of WW1 has occasioned a renewed flurry of interest in its origins, one wonders whether, from the standpoint of 2013, the origins of world wars is an issue of anything more than purely historical concern. It has been argued that with each further year of great-power peace it becomes more likely (not certain, but more likely) that the two world wars of the twentieth century represent a phenomenon -- i.e., 'hegemonic' or great-power war -- which has now ceased to exist. If that turns out to be correct, future historians looking back probably will see the end of hegemonic war as the main development, beside which the democratic peace may figure as little more than a footnote.
This leads to the speculation that the research program on the democratic peace may have run its course. Scholars of international security will continue to find things to write about, and one can expect an ongoing stream of publications on civil war, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, enduring rivalries, R2P, and other matters. Increasingly, though, it appears that the most serious threats to planetary survival will not come directly from these war-and-peace issues, important as they are, but from the environmental and economic problems and crises that the capitalist world economy continues to generate. Admittedly, whether those economic forces will result in a resumption of great-power conflict, or whether the decline of interstate war is a phenomenon basically independent of trends in the global political economy, remains an open question. In any case, Lees's article deserves attention for, among other things, the thoughtful way in which it links issues and literatures that are not usually considered together.
----
Note: Rent "refers to an economic return on a resource greater than the opportunity cost of the use of that resource," and quasi-rents "are temporary rents which arise where the supply of a resource [such as technology] is fixed over the short term but not over the long term" (495).
-- Nick Turse's book on the Vietnam War has an attention-getting title. The Amazon summary of the book refers to a general "obsessed with body counts." That's one lasting effect (there was more than one, of course) of the Vietnam War on the U.S. military: it does not do body counts today. In fact, the U.S. military makes no effort, AFAIK, to keep track of numbers of enemy combatants or of civilians killed in the course of operations in Afghanistan (that was the case for Iraq also). Turse on Moyers, here.
-- Richard Wolff, also on Moyers, here. (h/t)
Apart from its content, i.e. considered purely as a piece of oratory, Pres. Obama's speech at his second inauguration was a beautifully crafted address, beginning with the central pillar of the national creed -- the single most famous sentence Jefferson ever wrote -- and ending in precisely the same place, with a reference to citizens' obligation to lift voices "in defense of our most ancient values and enduring ideas."
The basic conceptual content of the speech is firmly rooted in two major strands of the American political tradition: Enlightenment liberalism on the one hand and civic republicanism on the other. The former's emphasis on individual freedom is linked with the latter's emphasis on civic duty: thus "we have always understood that... preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires
collective action." And as citizens "you and I...have the power to set this country’s course."
The speech was seen by many commentators as an expression of full-throated liberalism (or progressivism). Richard Norton Smith called it "the most ideologically assertive" speech since Reagan's first inaugural, "this being the un-Reagan." Harold Meyerson (with whose politics I am more likely to agree) also made the Reagan contrast. Yet one should not overlook that there were certain parts of the speech, notably the emphasis on support for democracy abroad and the line about one person's freedom being inextricably linked to everyone's in the world, that would have been perfectly at home in a speech by Reagan or George W. Bush. The big difference from Reagan is in how Obama sees the role of the government, as an enabler and protector of, rather than threat to, individuals -- but this distinction is of course nothing new. And what some commenters called a "communitarian" emphasis in the speech is perhaps better seen, as I already suggested, as an expression of civic republicanism.
The commentators who stressed the speech's liberalism were using 'liberalism' in its contemporary U.S. political sense. Obama's speech, however, can also be seen as liberal in a more philosophical sense, as I indicated above. It is important here to distinguish liberal from radical. A very brief excursion into intellectual history may help.
We don't have to go back to the Enlightenment philosophes or to those writers, discussed in J.G.A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment, who carried the tradition of Florentine civic republicanism into the Atlantic world. We can go back instead just a half-century, to Louis Hartz's 1955 book The Liberal Tradition in America.
Hartz argued, among other things, that the U.S. had escaped many of the travails of the Old World because it had no indigenous feudal past. As Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis summarized it thirty years later, Hartz maintained that "the history of class antagonism in liberal capitalism is due not to inherent properties of the system itself but rather to its emergence from a system of feudal privilege...." (Bowles & Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism, 1986, p.30) Lacking a feudal past, the U.S., in Hartz's somewhat rose-colored view, had escaped the history of class conflict and violent social upheaval that characterized large parts of Europe; the U.S. was thus "the archetype" of liberal capitalism, which Hartz saw, in Bowles and Gintis's words, as "intrinsically harmonious" (ibid.). Bowles and Gintis, by contrast, saw liberal capitalism as marked by a conflict between "the expansionary logic of personal rights" and "the expansionary logic of capitalist production" (ibid., p.29).
The much remarked-upon passage in Obama's
speech in which he mentioned landmarks in the progress of civil rights for
oppressed groups -- Seneca Falls, Selma, Stonewall -- traces this "expansionary
logic of personal rights." But unlike Bowles and Gintis in Democracy and Capitalism, Obama sees no conflict
between the rising trajectory of personal (or group) rights and the imperatives of
capitalism, provided that it's a capitalism whose worst excesses (including
tendencies toward destruction of the environment) are curbed by state action, a capitalism enabled, not stifled, by legislatively enacted rules of the road.
On the basic issue of whether liberal democratic capitalism is inevitably prone to internal conflict and contradiction, Obama thus is closer to Hartz. This President clearly is a believer in the possibility of harmony, of reason, progress, freedom, and all the other keywords of the Enlightenment. He also made a point of saying, toward the end of the speech, that fidelity to the founding ideals "does not require us to agree on every contour of life. It does not mean
we all define liberty in exactly the same way or follow the same precise
path to happiness." But action cannot wait for these never-ending debates to be resolved, he went on, implying that the thought of a resolution of those particular questions is an illusion anyway. In all these senses, Obama is a liberal, not some kind of radical. But then, we knew that already.
P.s. (added later): There were some omissions, I thought; for instance, Obama should have acknowledged the unacceptably high incarceration rate in the U.S.
The 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, which occurred last month, has occasioned much reflection about the war’s legacy. While many of the specific antebellum debates about slavery may seem somewhat remote, the persistence of race and racial inequality as issues in American life means that the collective ear is still primed, from time to time, to pick up certain echoes of those debates. Many other echoes, however, have grown very faint; for instance, few non-historians today recall the antebellum controversy over ‘free labor’ versus slavery. Some southern apologists for slavery argued, among other things, that free labor in the North amounted to ‘wage slavery’ and that northern factory workers and hired hands were actually worse off than African-American slaves in the South. In this respect these defenders of slavery, notably George Fitzhugh, "seemed to speak in Marxist accents," as Dennis Wrong notes.[1] But other defenders of slavery evinced a very un-Marxist contempt for manual labor in general. James McPherson draws attention to some revealing quotations (italics in original):
"The great evil of Northern free society," insisted a South Carolina journal, "is that it is burdened with a servile class of mechanics and laborers, unfit for self-government, yet clothed with the attributes and powers of citizens." A Georgia newspaper was even more emphatic in its distaste. "Free Society! We sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists?... The prevailing class one meets with [in the North] is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery, and yet are hardly fit for association with a Southern gentleman’s body servant." [2]
Abraham Lincoln and the new Republican Party of the time responded with a vigorous defense of free labor. However, as Eric Foner observes, Lincoln saw wage labor as a stepping stone that young men would take en route to becoming independent artisans, shopkeepers or entrepreneurs, rather than as a permanent feature of the American economy, though it was already becoming that in many cities in the mid-19th century, a process that would intensify after the Civil War.[3] The notion that work has an inherent dignity and overarching societal purpose–that, as William Seward said, "the free-labor system…brings into the highest possible activity all the physical, moral and social energies of the whole State"[4] – fit most comfortably with the world of Lincoln’s youth and young adulthood. It was more difficult to reconcile that notion with the working conditions and standardized production methods of mass manufacturing. What of the dignity-of-labor ideal in ‘post-industrial’ societies? In an economy dominated by services in which a relatively small proportion of the population is engaged in direct production of tangible goods, it is still possible to speak of people taking pride in their work, irrespective of its nature, even irrespective of whether it is remunerated. But the ideal of the dignity of labor has slipped out of public discussion. Competitiveness is the lodestar of contemporary political-economic discussion in the U.S., along with debt and deficits. Attention is paid to the high unemployment rate, but as much for electoral considerations as any others. An attack by a right-wing governor on the right to collective bargaining sent thousands of people into the streets in Wisconsin, but that action was framed (quite understandably) as a defense of rights rather than primarily as a defense of the dignity of labor. And all sides use the discourse of rights. Thus laws restricting the prerogatives of unions are called right-to-work laws, and states where they are in force are known as right-to-work states -- as if the primary motive of such laws were to guarantee rights rather than to weaken unions. Ultimately, the meaning of 'rights' is determined by political struggles. As Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis put it: "Elements of a political lexicon – such as the discourse of rights – do not…have essential meanings…. Making history is often a matter of making language. But discourses are more often borrowed or stolen than created de novo. Faced with a restricted political vocabulary, political actors appropriate and transform tools that even hostile forces have labored to develop." [5] Once slavery ceased to exist in the U.S., free labor had no polar antithesis to give it luster by comparison, and it tended to become, at best, just a fact rather than something to be widely celebrated. Critics of wage labor as exploitation could pursue their critique, secure in the knowledge that the surface similarities of their position to that of a George Fitzhugh probably would no longer be flung in their faces. This liberation, so to speak, of the critics of industrial capitalism arguably counts as one of the Civil War’s less-noticed consequences.
P.s. I had intended this post to have a broader, less U.S.-centric focus, but that proved beyond my capacities at the moment.
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Notes
1. Dennis H. Wrong, The Problem of Order (1994), p.32.
2. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (1988), p.197.3. Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial (2010), pp.115-16.
4. Quoted in McPherson, p.198.
5. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism (1986), pp.161-62.
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See also two books by Jonathan A. Glickstein: American Exceptionalism, American Anxiety: Wages, Competition, and Degraded Labor in the Antebellum United States (2002) and Concepts of Free Labor in Antebellum America (1991).
From Christopher Hitchens's review (Atlantic, April '09) of Francis Wheen's book on Marx's Capital:
"Sometimes...Marx did manage to illuminate the ways in which the industrial system really functioned. But very often he allowed sheer outrage to guide his pen.... In the first volume of Capital..., he has capitalism speaking in the words of Shylock; includes an extract from Timon of Athens wherein money is described as the 'common whore of mankind'; and offers still another denunciation of the cash nexus, from the Antigone of Sophocles. One of the most famous phrases of Marx's vast correspondence during the writing of the book expresses his hatred for having to work on 'the economic shit,' and one recalls Lenin's revealing opinion about gold -- that it was fit only to supply the flooring for public lavatories."
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