Fraser, Harris, and the memory holes of contemporary history

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.         

Loomis on Debs

In a post from yesterday, E. Loomis reminds us of the great American socialist Eugene V. Debs, his June 16, 1918 speech in Canton, Ohio, and its consequences.

Documents of the Arab left

Kal at The Moor Next Door (which I visited recently for the first time in a long time) has started a series of translations of statements, communiques and so on from Arab left-wing parties, especially in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, and Mauritania. The first post in the series, consisting of three statements from the Tunisian Communist Workers Party (PCOT), is here. A main point of the series seems to be to counteract the impression in some quarters that Islamist parties monopolize the organized political space in Tunisia, Egypt, etc.

The post is careful to note it is not endorsing the views of PCOT, which is described as a Marxist-Leninist party with Hoxhaist (as in the former leader of Albania) and Stalinist tendencies, strongly opposed to normalization of relations with Israel. One hopes the full series will include statements from, e.g., social democratic (or democratic socialist) parties as well.

Schooled

This morning I e-mailed a friend who follows French politics: "What does it say about the French Socialist Party that an IMF chief has been its leading presidential prospect?" whereupon he replied, inter alia, that it's been a long time since the SP, "in France or anywhere else," is where one went looking for the "true left" (however defined). Allowing some leeway for a bit of hyperbole, I think that's true. Still, as I mentioned in my reply to his reply, there is something symbolic about the IMF, inasmuch as it stands for many as the institutional embodiment of neoliberalism. I should add that I know virtually nothing (that mantra again) about Strauss-Kahn's career.

Labor coverage

If interested in this, see here.

Morgenthau once more

An interesting post on realism (by dptrombly at Slouching Towards Columbia) raises the question of realists' attitudes toward public participation in, and influence over, foreign policy. The post suggests that Hans Morgenthau (1904-1980) and Henry Kissinger shared an elitism and a wariness about the participation of mass publics:

For the European realists who emigrated to the United States, mass politics was potentially the gateway to disorder and horror. Morgenthau’s “hidden dialogue” with [Carl] Schmitt is evident in both of their major works, and Kissinger’s admiration for Spengler and Metternich hardly lends itself to favorable opinions towards liberalism. Both thinkers acclimated themselves to their new homeland’s political traditions, but not without criticism. These German Jewish intellectuals inherited the Weimar-era sense of Verfallsgeschichte [history of decline] that seems rather lacking in the chastened internationalists and skeptical social scientists who practice and debate realist foreign policy today.

There is clearly some truth in this. In Morgenthau's case, however, Carl Schmitt was only one of several important influences on him; other influences, notably his mentor Hugo Sinzheimer, were on the left in Weimar's politics. (Sinzheimer was a prominent lawyer at the center of a circle of young leftist intellectuals.)

Fast forward to Morgenthau in his later years: From the late 1950s on, he developed a critique of American politics and society which informed his later strong and vocal opposition to the Vietnam War and which has been well analyzed by William Scheuerman in Hans Morgenthau: Realism and Beyond (2009). This critique, as expressed for example in The Purpose of American Politics (1960), drew on, among other things, a Tocquevillian concern about the threat of conformism and "the prospect of a novel form of mass-based or democratic despotism" (Scheuerman, p.189). This theme, which perhaps also reflected the wave of concern in the 1950s with the dangers posed by "mass society," does reflect a wariness of mass publics, and yet elitism does not seem quite the right word for it. Morgenthau in The Purpose of American Politics was also critical of capitalism in its consumerist guise and called for an expansion of the welfare state (Scheuerman, p.191).

Perhaps more significantly, in the 1960s a good deal of Morgenthau's writing about civil rights and other U.S. domestic issues strongly suggests that he thought too little democracy, not too much, was at the root of the country's problems. For example, in an essay published in Commentary (the old Commentary) in January 1964, Morgenthau began by declaring (echoing his Purpose of American Politics): "The unequal condition of the black American has been an endemic denial of the purpose for the sake of which the United States of America was created and which, in aspiration and partial fulfillment, has remained the distinctive characteristic of American society: equality in freedom." ("The Coming Test of American Democracy," reprinted in Morgenthau, Truth and Power [1970], pp. 209-210)

Morgenthau went on to argue in this piece (written shortly after John F. Kennedy's assassination) that the related problems of segregation and structural unemployment threatened a breakdown of democracy and a descent into violence. He observed that the governments of Southern states already were ruling by violence and decried the power exerted by Southern legislators in Congress. (pp. 213-214)

In the Epilogue to the 1970 collection Truth and Power, which is undoubtedly one of the most radical-sounding pieces Morgenthau ever wrote -- parts of it read as if they could have been written by, say, the authors of the Port Huron Statement (the founding document of SDS) -- Morgenthau saw the American student revolt as "a national manifestation of a world-wide revulsion against the world as it is," a world that "sacrifices human ends to technological means, as well as the needs of the many to the enrichment and power of the few," a world in which mechanized and bureaucratized institutions exercise unprecedented power over individuals, drain life of meaning, and confront the student with "a Kafkaesque [condition] ...of make-believe, a gigantic hoax where nothing is as it appears to be and upon which what he feels, thinks, aspires to, and does has no effect except to provide inducements for harassment and repression." (Truth and Power, pp.433, 434, 437).

American society, Morgenthau concluded here, had chosen preservation of the status quo over its original animating purpose. "Abroad, the United States has become the antirevolutionary power par excellence, because our fear of Communism has smothered our rational insight into the inevitability of radical change in the Third World. Our interventions in Indochina and the Dominican Republic are monuments to that fear. At home, our commitment to making all Americans equal in freedom has been at war with our fear of change and our conformist subservience to the powers-that-be." (ibid.,p.439)

And here is the last paragraph (p.439), which should be read in light of his belief that nuclear war under the then-prevailing trends was not only likely but virtually certain:

The extent of the repression in store for the dissenters will depend upon the subjective estimate of the seriousness the powers-that-be place upon the threat to the status quo. Considering the thus far marginal nature of the threat, society will need only resort to marginally totalitarian methods. The dissenters will people our prisons, our graveyards, our Bohemias, or -- as utter cynics -- our positions of power. Those last will not be unlike the Marxist-Leninists of the Soviet Union: They will mouth a litany of slogans which they not only do not believe in but which they also despise. Such a society can carry on for a while, like a body without a soul, but sooner or later it must either recover its soul -- that is, the purpose that has given it life -- or disintegrate from within. Perhaps, then, a new society, with a new purpose, will be built upon the ruins of the old; or perhaps nothing will be left but ruins for later generations to behold.

In sum, although Morgenthau was perhaps not an especially profound or original democratic theorist (his most acute insights lay elsewhere), he did come to insist that the normative core of liberal democracy ("equality in freedom" as he called it) had to be reflected in U.S. foreign policy, and that U.S. foreign policy, in order to be justifiable and effective, had to retain a very close connection to the country's moral foundations. If one still wants to label Morgenthau a classical realist, his version of classical realism is arguably quite compatible with an enlightened, egalitarian, and progressive version of liberal democracy.

P.S. It may be of interest to note that Morgenthau was an original trustee of the Institute for Policy Studies and served on its board of trustees for five years. (Source: Letter of Marcus Raskin in The Washington Post's Book World, Sept. 22, 1991)

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Note: I also discussed Morgenthau, in a different connection, in this post.

Update: Response by DPTrombly.

Noted

A new book collects interviews with Irving Howe from the last 15 years of his life, i.e., the mid-'70s to the early '90s.

P.s. (added 8/18): Some months ago I happened to run across a 1948 review by the young Howe of a book by Eric Bentley on Bernard Shaw. Published in the Trotskyist New International, the review contains some things Howe would not have written in later years, but it shows the skills as writer and polemicist that were evident throughout his career.

Has Obama "spread the wealth"?

Looking back at this old post and the comments attached to it, I was reminded of the ruckus that Republicans made during the 2008 presidential campaign about Obama's alleged redistributionist beliefs. The then-candidate's remark to 'Joe the plumber' about "spreading the wealth" became a club that Republicans wielded mercilessly until election day.

Well, the Obama administration has been in office now for 15 months. Has it embarked on a concerted effort to redistribute wealth and income? Hardly. Rather, the administration's efforts on domestic policy have focused in large part on measures either to restore the status quo ante or to shore up safety nets in the face of the ongoing effects of the recession and the financial crisis. Health care reform as passed will, at some future point, raise tax rates a bit on upper-income taxpayers, and Congress I believe let the '01 Bush tax cuts, which primarily benefited the wealthy, expire. [Correction, 7/27/10: I was premature on this. They haven't expired yet.] But those are the only measures I can think of offhand which might be claimed to have some kind of redistributive effect. (Giving millions of more people access to health insurance, which the health care reform bill has as one of its main aims, is laudable but will not directly change the distribution of wealth or income much, if at all.)

In fact, it's the administration's relative lack of concern with redistribution, and its failure to move more aggressively to reduce unemployment and invest more heavily in public works, that has disturbed (to use a mild word) elements of the Left (or the progressive movement, if you prefer that terminology). For example, writing in the current issue of Democratic Left, Joseph M. Schwartz says:

"...the claim that the president's stimulus plan saved more than 2 million jobs...provides little solace to the some 25 million Americans either unemployed, underemployed, no longer searching for work or working far fewer hours than they need. Yet the administration is celebrating the creation of 140,000 (mostly temporary) jobs in March, when it would take job growth of 350,000 per month over the next 4 years (!) to replace the seven million jobs lost in the Great Recession (plus employ the 120,000 young persons who join the labor force each month)....

"President Obama fears that embracing the revenue-raising powers of progressive taxation opens him to charges of being a tax-and-spend, weak-on-defense and craven-on-terrorism Democrat.... Yet what good does the president's buffing his neoliberal credentials do when such policies won't lower unemployment rates? These rates virtually guarantee electoral defeat for his party in 2010 and for himself in 2012! Why not tell the truth: that amid a collapse in private investment and consumption, only massive counter-cyclical public investment in alternative energy, mass transit, and infrastructure can put Americans back to work and restore the consumer demand needed to spur private capital investment?"

So there you have it: far from Obama's having fulfilled right-wing fears that his "socialist" administration would embark on a massive redistribution of wealth, 15 months after Obama took office the leading theoretician of Democratic Socialists of America is complaining about insufficient "counter-cyclical public investment" in terms that he probably could have applied in the same way to every other president since FDR! Chances are that no president will ever favor measures that will satisfy Joe Schwartz and those (like me) who share his domestic-policy views, because structural forces constantly push presidents to the perceived middle of the political spectrum. In any case it was always clear that Obama, despite his remarks to Joe the Plumber, was not a committed redistributionist. The whole idea was preposterous, a right-wing fantasy cooked up in a desperate, futile effort to salvage McCain's presidential campaign.

Pedagogy of the not-so-oppressed

I just ran across, more or less by accident, this piece by Henry Giroux on Paulo Freire, best known as the author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. While reading quickly through some of the piece, I was struck by this passage:

"Too many classrooms at all levels of schooling now resemble a 'dead zone,' where any vestige of critical thinking, self-reflection and imagination quickly migrate [sic; this should read migrates -- LFC] to sites outside of the school only to be mediated and corrupted by a corporate-driven media culture. The major issue now driving public schooling is how to teach for the test, while disciplining those students who because of their class and race undermine a school district's ranking in the ethically sterile and bloodless world of high stakes testing and empirical score cards. Higher education mimics this logic by reducing its public vision to the interests of capital and redefining itself largely as a credentializing factory for students and a Petri dish for downsizing academic labor. Under such circumstances, rarely do educators ask questions about how schools can prepare students to be informed citizens, nurture a civic imagination or teach them to be self-reflective about public issues and the world in which they live."

The last sentence of this passage (the italics are mine) led me to wonder what Giroux would think of Michael Sandel's "Justice" course (which I've had occasion to refer to before, albeit briefly). After watching an hour or two of "Justice" online a while ago, it seems to me difficult to deny that Sandel's aim -- and probably, to some extent, his effect -- is precisely to help students become more informed, reflective citizens. But Sandel's politics are not radical, while Giroux's are, and I somehow doubt that Sandel is practicing the pedagogy of the oppressed as Giroux might construe it -- although Giroux does point out that Freire refused to identify his outlook with a particular method. I don't follow debates about education much, so I don't know what if anything Giroux has written about Sandel's course (yes, I could have done a search but I didn't). It does strike me as an interesting question, however.

Another take on liberalism (and the Left)

Alan Wolfe's The Future of Liberalism, which I reviewed earlier, is reviewed by Harold Meyerson, who also discusses Doug Rossinow's Visions of Progress. The latter deals with "the left-liberal alliance of the period from 1880 through 1940," with particular reference to the Farmer-Labor parties of the 1920's and '30s and the Popular Front (1935-39). Meyerson concludes, correctly in my opinion, that a weak Left in the U.S. hurts American liberalism; a stronger Left could help push through the "next generation of liberal reform."

If wishes were horses then beggars would ride

Economic crises, while bad for those living through them, are often good for the reputations of past radical thinkers. There has been some talk recently of the renewed relevance of Marx and perhaps also some talk about the old Marxist debates on "finance capital." The phrase came to mind when I read Jason Schulman's review of Robert Reich's Supercapitalism in the spring '09 issue of Democratic Left. Schulman writes:

"Today, capitalism is dominated by finance capital, abstract capital.... Subordinating productive capital to itself, finance capital makes the economy function on a short-term and unproductive basis. It is therefore fundamentally predatory and parasitic, increasing investment in circulation rather than production -- spending vast levels of resources on income property [sic], commodity, equity and bond speculation."

To the fairly standard complaint about excessive speculation, Schulman adds the morally charged epithet "parasitic," and he goes on to say that the U.S., where only 15 percent of the labor force "is directly involved in actual production," acts as "a parasite in the world economy."

While I happen to agree that it would be better if a larger percentage of people in the U.S. made things as opposed to pushing paper (or -- dare I say it -- writing blogs!), I'm not sure I entirely buy the notion that the production of tangible goods is non-parasitic and all other economic activity is parasitic upon it. This is a quibble, however, since I do not of course want to speak up in favor of short-term speculation (who does?).

Writing in a democratic socialist publication, Schulman asserts, not surprisingly, that Reich in his book displays the timidity characteristic of New Deal liberals. Reich notes trends but fails to explain them (Schulman says), and "Reich fails to understand...that the American state....is very much a capitalist state...part of an international state system, subject to the world market, through which capital reigns."

Oh boy. Anyone up for a re-run of the Miliband-Poulantzas debate? Hmm, not right now, I'm not even typing this at my home computer.

Moving right along, we come to the very end of Schulman's review (a longer version of which is apparently going to appear in the journal New Political Science). Here there is this sentence: "...the fight for economic democracy is intrinsically tied to the fight for greater political democracy than capitalists and their political representatives will ever be willing to accept: to go beyond the freedoms of speech, assembly, association, movement, etc., and onto democratic control of the economy and real control of the state."

Now, I agree with Schulman on the need for "democratic control of the economy." (I wouldn't be a member of the organization that publishes Democratic Left if I didn't.) There's just one little problem: leftists have been calling for democratic control of the economy for decades, with distressingly little to show for it in terms of results. Am I blaming the left for all the malign world-historical events, from the breakdown of the Keynesian accommodation to the rise of neoliberalism, that have occurred in the last 30 years? Of course not. But I do think that, as someone who read Michael Harrington as a teenager and joined DSOC when I was in high school, I am entitled to be just a little bit weary when, roughly 35 years later, I read yet another series of clarion calls for "democratic control of the economy," having read quite a few such calls in the intervening years.

Democratic control of the economy. Democratic control of investment. Genuine political and economic democracy. Transcending capitalism.

Great. I'm all for it. But I'm not holding my breath.

Gold on the floor

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."

History and "history"

"We [Americans] don't hide from history. We make history."
-- John McCain

"A man has nothing to fear, he thought to himself, who understands history."
-- last line of Robert Stone's A Flag for Sunrise (1981)

In these two quotations, "history" is, respectively, a prize and a consolation. In McCain's congratulatory usage, the power to make "history" is what Americans award themselves for being Americans. In Robert Stone's novel, the anthropologist Holliwell, having blundered around in an imaginary Latin American country and helped wreck more than several lives, consoles himself by taking the long view. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, or something like that.

When Francis Fukuyama wrote his famous article "The End of History," later expanded into the book The End of History and the Last Man, he was careful to point out that he was not talking about history but about History in the Hegelian sense, the ostensibly progressive development or unfolding of collective human consciousness, or spirit (Geist). Did McCain's speech writer have Fukuyama somewhere at the back of his mind? Maybe. Or maybe not.

Hegelians and Marxists, among others, believe that History has a veiled or hidden logic, one that their theories grasp. History unlocks its secrets to those in possession of the key: Spirit rising to consciousness of itself, or the inevitability of socialist revolution. Marxism is not about "spreading the wealth," contrary to what certain denizens of the right-wing blogosphere said or implied during the just-concluded U.S. election campaign. Marx himself had nothing but contempt for anyone who concentrated on distribution as opposed to the forces and relations of production. He asserted that redistribution was not possible without a change in the mode of production:

"Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves [Marx wrote in Critique of the Gotha Program].... Vulgar socialism...has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation [between distribution and the mode of production] has long been made clear, why retrogress again?"

When certain conservatives charged that Obama was a Marxist, they proved only that they had not read Marx.

This post seems to have wandered away from the rhetorical uses of "history." Perhaps that's just as well. When we get too serious about these things, we can count on Shaw to puncture the balloon. In Shaw's play The Devil's Disciple, set during the American war of independence, the British general Burgoyne, facing defeat at Saratoga, is asked by a horrified subordinate: "What will history say?" Burgoyne's answer: "History, sir, will tell lies, as usual."

P.S. A link to Critique of the Gotha Program.

May '68 (and all that)

This afternoon I saw Romain Goupil's 1982 film Mourir à 30 ans (To Die at Thirty), the last in a series of movies dealing with May '68 shown at the Nat'l Gallery (Wash. D.C.). The movie won prizes for its director, who was a high-school militant/activist at the time and later an apprentice to Godard and a moviemaker in his own right.

The movie, told retrospectively, is basically a group biography of Goupil and some of his friends, especially one Michel R (I'm not going to try to spell the last name), who was a leading activist, though still a high-school student in '68, then became a professional revolutionary, was imprisoned for several months after the Communist League was banned in summer '73, and committed suicide in March '78. He seems to have been charismatic and a skilled organizer; the movie touches on what might have contributed to his death, though it proceeds by indirection. Indeed, the whole movie is somewhat cryptic in effect, at least for someone (i.e. me) who in May '68 was about to turn eleven, did not live in France and thus did not directly experience the events in question, and knows something -- but not a huge amount -- about the history of the French left in this period.

In particular, it would have been nice to learn more about the backgrounds of the protagonists. Goupil seems to have been from a left-wing and working-class family and he is shown selling the Communist Party newspaper L'Humanité door-to-door as a young kid (before deciding the CP is too do-nothing and "establishment"), but although Vietnam is mentioned there's no real explanation of exactly where his politics came from, or of the specifics of his class/social background (father's occupation, e.g.). Then there are the mundane questions: if all the flashback scenes in which Goupil and his friends appear actually show them (which seems to be the case) as opposed to actors playing them, then who is holding the camera (they were the budding filmmakers, after all)? And why, when everyone in the movie obviously is speaking French, is Goupil's voice-over narration in English?

Finally, this movie, made in '82, underscores the psychic and political gulf that separates 1968 from 2008 by refracting '68 through a lens that itself now seems distant. In 1982, after all, the French socialists were in power, Mitterand had not yet made his U-turn away from his original program, and there was no firm indication that Reaganism/Thatcherism/corporate neoliberalism was going to triumph so definitively. The "second Cold War" had just begun, the nuclear freeze movement in the U.S. and Europe was about to go into high gear, and one could still perhaps see some of the flames of '68 flickering if one looked hard enough. There are people who think "the world revolution of 1968" (as I. Wallerstein calls it) had long-lasting effects in several crucial ways, and they are probably right. And of course mass demonstrations still occasionally occur (Seattle '99, Genoa '01, Feb '03 vs. the Iraq invasion, etc.). Still, 1968 does seem now like a very long time ago: in some ways it could be almost as far away as 1848; and the 1971 Paris celebration of the centennial of the Commune (as shown in the movie), with the banners of Lenin and the choruses of the Internationale, seems almost as distant as the Commune itself. To watch To Die at Thirty in 2008, in other words, is like reading a kind of double elegy, or walking through two sets of mirrors into a dim, even if not altogether vanished, past.