Theory Tuesday

I guess I’ll be the first to offer the obvious/simplistic explanation for Agamben’s popularity. His notion of the “state of exception”, the sovereign as the one who can declare the law to be suspended indefinitely without formally abrogating it & etc. seem to presciently describe the Bush/Cheney regime.

Also the centrality of “the camp” and “bare life” seem especially germane to the post 9/11 political situation (Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, & etc.).

Homo Sacer was published in 1998, and I’m not sure anyone else was as focused as he was on those particular themes at the time.

Why Schmitt? Because people are looking for a simple answer, I suppose. Marx as least had root-theories that attempted to explain the actuality of complex economic events. Schmitt’s ideas are simply propaganda for fascism, and are, therefore, simple. Take the friend-enemy distinction as the basis of the political. The enemy is “in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible.” But as soon as you’ve phrased the political in this way, of course it becomes evident that conflicts with enemies are what it’s all about. Unlike any sort of actually existing democratic politics, which is based on coalitionism and all sorts of other messy things that the Western Marxists spent the last half of the 20th century failing at.

But beyond Schmitt, the whole search for root-theories is inherently questionable. Root-theories in politics immediately harden into ideology and doctrine, and then fail at the general purpose of theories, that of predicting what will happen, because they can’t be changed in response to new information.

“How to live up to this aspiration after having long ago abandoned, or never held, the idea that the struggle between classes or the labor theory of value was the explanatory root of society, politics, and history?”

Sorry to double-comment, but — isn’t that the core problem of Western Marxism right there? It’s not just that they had a bad reaction to historical events. It’s that if the struggle between classes or the labor theory of value are actually wrong, then Marxism is wrong. You can be a social democrat, or have vague feelings about the importance of social justice, and the labor theory of value can be completely unimportant to you. But if your politics is based on a theory, and the theory just doesn’t work, well…

the Soviet system involved bureaucracy and one-party rule but not totalitarianism

Stalin was pretty damn total, Gorbachev, less so . . . .

“if it’s the Bush/Cheney regime you’re (i.e., one is) interested in contesting […]”

I never understood this part. As far as I could see, Schmitt offers no basis on which to challenge Bush/Cheney. And if “Agamben turns it into the perfect tool for denouncing whatever aspect or action one might want to criticize in the modern state by tracing it implacably, logically, back to the root in violent arbitary will,” then logically this must apply to any action of any modern state, including socialist states. But this cluster of theories don’t appear to be used as a justification for anarchism, so what’s left, throwing up your hands? The liberal reasons why Bush/Cheney is bad at least differentiate some more-bad from some less-bad things and suggest that improvement is at least possible.

“who’s the next gory German to get grad students through generals?”

Coulda been Hannah Arendt, but she liked Schmitt too much.

Liberal capitalism really is an unfalsifiable theory, isn’t it?

Actually, Strauss believed in Truth. But not Popper’s way of approaching it.

Welcome back, Michael!

This may not be what you’re looking for but, for me, what leaped out from the passage you quoted was this:

When the Soviet system collapsed and the Cold War ended, Western Marxism had to face two uncomfortable truths: state socialism had never been reformable, and democracy has no intrinsic affinity with socialism or even social justice conceived in egalitarian terms.

That teleological language of necessity seems entirely unearned to me. Yes, the Soviet system collapsed without being reformed, but how does this indicate that it had never been reformable? And, no, democracy has not developed in the direction of socialism or even social justice, but how does the fact that it hasn’t happened to do so prove that it has “no intrisic affinity” with these things?

The answer, at least as far as the history of left political theory goes, is that Marxism is essentially teleological. So, naturally, Marxists would be prone to see history as unfolding, even in the short run, in ways that indicate the playing out of some iron law of society. If Western Marxism didn’t bear fruit, it couldn’t bear fruit. QED.

When I look at history I see a lot more contingency, which I suppose is one of the many reasons I’ve never really been a Marxist.

…as long as it doesn’t lead to the “I don’t have to read the book, because I read a few blog posts” phenomenon I encountered with What’s Liberal?

Is there some third way here? Has Chris Clarke stepped forward to do the graphic novelization of The LAW?

In regards to the U.S., it might also have something to do with the demise of the post-WWII grand bargain between capital/labor engineered and maintained by the state and the rise of neoliberalism. By the 1980s it was clear that the state no longer was playing (as it had briefly) a managerial role, mediating between capital and labor. Rather, as neoliberal policies took hold,the state power was now aligned more directly with the interests of capital. Often this involved something that looked like Marx’s primitive accumulation (see David Harvey on accumulation by dispossession) whereby the state, vis-a-vis violence or the threat thereof, began privatizing previously public/common goods. Moreover, it often did so by circumventing or dissolving democratic processes via declarations of states of exception — a prime example is the fiscal crisis of the 1970s in NYC, where capitalists and politicians declared a “time out” from normal democratic processes in order to impose a neoliberal austerity regime. Thus Schmitt seemed useful to lefty analysts: the violence at the root of the modern state (and the power to declare the state of exception) was now being deployed in a far more straightforward way than had previously been the case towards the end of enhancing the process of capital accumulation. This also made democratic procedures look pretty damn good; thus the turn to democracy in a lot of Marxist/critical scholarship.

I’ve always had trouble with this. Whenever I raise questions about Schmitt, the answer seems to be “look how well his theory works for Guantanamo Bay”. But how does this make him any different from, say, John Yoo? Not that we shouldn’t study either Yoo or Schmitt, but in the same way as we would study, say, the HIV virus.

One of the Straussians called Arendt and Sartre proxies for Heidegger. I’ve wondered whether Strauss hasn’t been a proxy for Schmitt. Some of the Straussians are backing away from the neocons and Bush.

Of course, I’ve also wondered whether the Neocons are the American Jewish followers of Franz Fanon, a shrewder and more successful version of the Black Panthers.

This is excellent news for Jonah Goldberg.

And, John, that I have great difficulty espousing alternatives to liberalism is kinda the point. I am a liberal in a world consumed by a liberalism that has appropriated all possible thinkable forms of political action.

How do we get back the bonuses from the investment bankers, who almost certainly acted within the law? It is not only practically impossible, it is most likely theoretically impossible in a just liberal democracy.

How do we keep Bush from bombing Iran tomorrow? The consensus is that we can’t, but liberals would say that any means to do so would cost more than it’s worth. The process and ideals are themselves worth millions of lives.

Looks very close to a totalitariaism or theocracy to me. Foundational principles cannot be questioned.

I haven’t read Agamben (feel free to disregard remainder of comment) but from the description here, it seems to me that I encounter his disciples or fellow travelers literally every day in the comments threads at Megan McArdle’s blog, and they don’t come from the left. Check how long it takes on a right-libertarian blog before someone objects to any measures aimed at, oh, encouraging public transit as “forcing them” to do something “at gunpoint”. (Notably, most such commenters are less hostile to measures which involve government agents literally, rather than metaphorically, forcing people to do things at gunpoint. But that’s not always true; there are a fair number of intellectually consistent right-libertarians out there.)

It seems to me that the Cold War sustained interest in Western Marxism, making the conflict between different sorts of states and labor-capital relationships the central social question. So I’d argue that Western Marxism didn’t do anything “wrong” after the Soviet Union collapsed, it never really justified its popularity in the first place. It may be valuable as a perspective, but its weaknesses as a school of thought had been visible for quite some time.

Into the breach stepped theorists like Foucault, Agamben, etc, because they focused on the abstract “state”, rather than the capitalist, democratic, or socialist state, and “society” rather than more specific societies. I haven’t really read enough Agamben to comment on his nuances. But Bob–the passage you quote doesn’t appear to have any uniquely Agambenian concepts. His most distinct ideas, I would argue, lie in concepts such as “bare life” rather than his arguments about the intermingling of politics and other areas of society.

The emergence of the Agamben phenomenon doesn’t appear that strange–he’s an interesting think after all. Sort of like Zizek. When a thinker says interesting and controversial things, and appears to offer an account of current events, their popularity doesn’t require much explaining.

“How do we keep Bush from bombing Iran tomorrow? The consensus is that we can’t, but liberals would say that any means to do so would cost more than it’s worth.”

Here you wander into the realms of the absurd. GWB is POTUS. To prevent him exercising the powers inherent in that role, including that of military command, if he was indeed determined to whack the ayatollahs, requires either a) a coup d’etat by military or civilian elements opposed to bomb-crazed plans; b) mass resignation/sit-down strike of the US armed forces; or c) mass political mobilisation of the civilian population on a scale such as to provoke real fear of civil war.

Of the three, all are unlikely [and I discount other even more unlikely suppositions, such as a realistic threat by France, e.g., to use a nuclear strike in defence of Iran…]. Their unlikeliness derives from a multitude of factors, not least of which is the unwillingness of ordinary individuals to risk their lives and positions to defend people they don’t know and probably wouldn’t like.

What I can’t see in all of that is what blaming token generic ‘liberals’ for the problem has to do with it. They didn’t vote for the f*cker. Or are you saying that the very concept of a constitutional republic is so bad, compared to your unspoken alternative, that everyone all the way back to Ben Franklin has to take the rap for GWB? Everyone, that is, except you, apparently.

@34, that is not my thesis, though. My thesis is simply that contraposing American capitalism and Soviet socialism as democracy vs. totalitarianism is nonsense, dogmatic nonsense. Framing imposed by indoctrination; framing that doesn’t help you discover that illusive “explanatory root of society, politics, and history”. Rather it obscures it.

And that’s the whole book, all she wrote.

Regarding totalitarian societies: One shouldn’t overuse this word. Dictators and autoritarian governments were after all not a new thing in the 20th century. Not any old dictatorship aspires or achieves the status of totaliarism.
I remember that even in the eighties it was discussed if the Soviet Union and China were developing from totalitarian to authoritarian societies. And in a way it happened in both societies. Freedom House, that old commie institution at the end of the eighties did upgrade Hungary from unfree to half free status. And Hungary was until 1956 as good a totalitarian society as any other.
The political history of Italy on the other hand from the march on rome until the early thirties can be described as a development of an authoritarianto a totalitarian state.

So it can be argued that the SU wasn’t a totalitarian state from the sixties or so

I, for one, welcome our dangeral overlords!

I was responding to Bob’s assertion that liberal capitalism is unfalsifiable. My point was about the same as yours, that falsification is not relevant to the debate. “That’s why” was an overstatement.

Novakant, ideologies tend to contain descriptions too, and in theory those could be falsifiable. In practice it’s harder, of course.

So for example the capitalist ideology says, in my own words:

Capitalism contains feedback loops. Therefore anything in a capitalist society which is not optimal will be optimised. Furthermore, capitalism’s feedback loops are the best feedback loops — no other system can optimise as well.

This claim is potentially testable, given the resources to do controlled experiments. Of course, the claim that capitalism does not optimise its feedback loops because of government, and in an ideal anarchy it would optimise its feedback loops far far better than it does anywhere in the world today, is probably not testable.

Similarly the claim that Jesus will come back and bring wondrous events by 1000 AD or by 2000 AD has been tested. There has been no comet that poisoned a third of the water of the earth etc. It hasn’t happened yet. At best they got the dates wrong.

The prescriptive things are not falsifiable. If capitalist economists say that the optimal economy includes a business cycle with perodic recessions that are necessary to drive marginal businesses into bankruptcy and free up resources, and this is a good thing, then there’s no falsifying it. You can have opinions whether it’s a good thing. You can’t falsify those opinions.

I’m afraid meme theory fits better. People hold political views until they get compelling reason not to. The existence of the USSR validated socialist opinions, because there were nations that officially held those beliefs and that made them somehow respectable in ways that libertarian notions are not. No libertarian society has ever functioned anywhere. That gives it a crackpot status. While there were large well-armed officially-socialist societies, it made socialism more respectable than libertarianism. Even though those societies did not actually fit socialist doctrines.

If almost all the democracies were to collapse, perhaps through coup etc, most people would stop taking democracy seriously. “It seems like a good idea but it just doesn’t fit reality. Maybe good-hearted people could make democracy work at the end of time, but not in the real world.” “Democracy has been tried and it didn’t work. See, no democracies in the real world. It’s a beautiful theory but it can’t work in reality.”

Democracy gets legitimacy because there are nations that claim to be democratic. Same thing with the other doctrines. The memes spread easier from an established base.

I think it’s helpful to identify two parts of Marxism (more specifically, historical materialism): the methodology/explanatory part and the predictions. I think the methodology explains the existing phenomena reasonably well, and predictions, of course, is a speculative business. And so, I don’t see how the USSR disproves anything any more than, say, extinction of the dinosaurs disproves the theory of evolution.

Why would anyone want a Marxism which precludes prediction? It would seem to leave one with nothing to do except sit around and say “Ooh, look, capitalism, nasty!” That is, if you’re the sort of materialist who chooses to dislike capitalism. You could equally well be the sort who thinks it’s great, and says, “Hey, look, my class is acting it its own interests, and you’re f*cked, wahoo!”

A merely descriptive Marxism is surely just that, merely descriptive, and I’m sure Marx said that the point was to change the world, didn’t he? Not that I want to fetishise foundations, or anything.

Well, you have a methodology, an analytical tool. That’s already a lot. You’ve chosen your version of “the root of society, of politics, of history”, and if you’re satisfied that it gives you a reasonable explanation of the present, then you can even venture to make some predictions. Of a general nature. What do you want – a Crystal Ball?

“When I lived in the Soviet Union people freely and openly discussed and cursed their government virtually everywhere – at work, in a pub, on a bus – all the time.”

Abb1, it was not, by all accounts, at all uncommon to hear complaints about the government even in the thirties (‘if only comrade Stalin knew!’) and there were vigorous complaints made to the Nazi authorities by German citizens about abuses at home and abroad. But both regimes were, by most accounts, totalitarian. How often in your time in the USSR did you hear people publicly (on buses, in pubs, at work) discussing what they were going to do to remove or replace the government? Licence to do that would tell us more about its character, I think

In the 80s it wasn’t “if only comrade Brezhnev knew!”. It was mostly bitter sarcasm, if not pure hatred. Very much open.

discussing what they were going to do to remove or replace the government

What do you mean by “remove or replace the government”? It’s not the government we are talking about here, it’s the socio-economic system. I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed a discussion in the US about how to replace its socio-economic system.

Wait, sorry, I did hear people on DemocracyNow the other day saying “I personally believe that capitalism is a problem”. Those, I understand, were the fellows arrested in Minneapolis and charged with “Conspiracy to Riot”.

52: According to Strauss, Schmitt’s problem was that he was too close to Strauss on that point. If I understand Strauss correctly, government is to serve no utilitarian purpose, nor need it benefit or respond to the populace. It’s a thing in itself and the ultimate source of value, except that it ideally should serve the true philosophers.

I’m still waiting for a Straussian to come along and explain this all to us. You have to read between the lines, but I read between the lines differently than the true believers do. Straussians claim to have an enormous admiration for Lincoln, but I think that it’s just because he suspended habeas corpus. I can’t imagine what they’d make of “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

Michael, yeah I didn’t really expect you to change your mind. I’m somewhat baffled by the El Salvador example, though. The US did take a side – the wrong one. I maintain that an advanced capitalist state is fundamentally incapable to engage in the kinds of humanitarian missions you seem to envision.

To turn your favorite example on its feet, if Sweden was the US – it wouldn’t be Sweden anymore.

Meaning, your position sadly just supplies an excuse to keep all those shiny weapons that can, and will, then be used for decidedly non-humanitarian purposes…

How’s the good war going, by the way? Pakistan stabilized yet? The women liberated?

Those, I understand, were the fellows arrested in Minneapolis and charged with “Conspiracy to Riot”.

St. Paul not Minneapolis. Amy Goodman was not ultimately charged with conspiracy to riot but with obstructing an officer. The video of her arrest does not support her version of events. It clearly shows the riot officer ordering her to the sidewalk three times. She ignored him and tried to break the line they had established. That’s when she was arrested. This was an illegal demonstration and the police were trying to keep it from becoming a full riot.

Here’s “Furtherance of Terrorism” link: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20690.htm

And noen: If I am the totalitarian State your curses are music to my ears.

Sorry, but you don’t know whatcha talking about.

“Michael, yeah I didn’t really expect you to change your mind. I’m somewhat baffled by the El Salvador example, though. The US did take a side – the wrong one.”

christian h. , I think Berube is talking about the response of the Amerian left. Ever heard of CISPES?

Well, I don’t mean to speak for Berube. I was only pointing out that intervention can mean more than bombs. Kofi Annan certainly has a different idea of what “humanitarian intervention” means than you do. Look at his recent foray into Kenya. I find it odd that you put forward the Bush Administration’s method as the only version possible. Are you so sure that all advoates of humanitarian intervention envision brining democray by tank to the world?
CISPES isn’t simply for nonintervention by the US governement. They support the FMLN. That’s certainly a form of intervention. Supporting a foreign political party in the name of a more humanitarian social order in their country sounds like “humanitarian intervention” to me.

According to wikipedia

Humanitarian intervention refers to armed interference in one state by another state(s) with the stated objective of ending or reducing suffering within the first state.

What’s the source of your definition? And what’s your term for “armed interference in one state by another state(s) with the stated objective of ending or reducing suffering”?

I call those “invasions”

Two days and a dollar short, but I want to chime in on the one-page history of western Marxism Berube led with.

I am not so sure that you can tie the end of Western Marxism to the collapse of State Socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. By the 1980s, western Marxism is decadent in the sense that all of its theoretical possibilities have played themselves out. So people try to revive the patient with liberal doses of Lacan, Foucault and Derrida. The result is a sort of hybrid “Marxism plus something else”, that really had moved away from the fundamental economic and political concerns that animated Marx himself a hundred and fifty years earlier.

More simply, I think Marxist theory was already irrelevant before 1989. It just took the Soviet collapse to give its western practitioners an opportunity to discard it. After that, why not consort with Nazis like Schmitt? The Nazis were radicals and a provocative challenge to the liberal capitalist order.

Well, I’d agree that the common usage of the term “humanitarian intervention” is itself overly narrow and propagandistic – nevertheless, that’s the way the term is being used, and the way I meant to use it, given that Michael did support the assault on Serbia in ’99 and the invasion of Afghanistan.

More simply, I think Marxist theory was already irrelevant before 1989.

How can a theory be relevant or irrelevant, and what do you mean by “its theoretical possibilities”? Either it does explain the world or it doesn’t. When will Newtonian mechanics become irrelevant?

Or do you mean that Marxism is something like the Ptolemaic model? Then who is its Copernicus, is it this Schmitt guy?

“I just get a tad annoyed at “leftists” who invoke Serbian sovereignty as an excuse for doing nothing in the Balkans (and thereby effectively siding with Milosevic and company, because, to cop a phrase from Howard Zinn, you can’t be neutral on a moving genocide)—something no US leftist would have done wrt El Salvador 25 years ago, or Spain 70 years ago.”

You’re probably right about Spain–lefties probably would have wanted military intervention by western governments, but I’m guessing they wouldn’t have expected it, so they went on their own. As for El Salvador, the idea of Western military intervention against the government was so far outside the range of possibility that I don’t know of anyone ever bringing it up.

Which supports what christian h says in post 79.

Marxism (and again, I’m talking about historical materialism, dialectical materialism) doesn’t say anything about capitalism being nasty, just like Newtonian mechanics doesn’t talk about quickly accelerating objects being nasty.

Marxism is talking about things like labor and capital and division of labor; productive forces and social relations, their evolution and dialectical connections between them.

And all the moral judgments are, of course, the sole responsibility of each individual practitioner.

I just get a tad annoyed at “leftists” who invoke Serbian sovereignty as an excuse for doing nothing in the Balkans (and thereby effectively siding with Milosevic and company, because, to cop a phrase from Howard Zinn, you can’t be neutral on a moving genocide)—something no US leftist would have done wrt El Salvador 25 years ago, or Spain 70 years ago.

Michael, you aren’t claiming that “not bombing Serbia” is the same as “doing nothing”, are you? After all, that, to quote you out of context, would be “silly”.

And no serious discussion should be had without the word “genocide”. It’s such a useful way to demonize those you intend to kill, and those who oppose said killing.

For example, if you took the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the displacement of millions, or the violent depopulation of whole cities like Fallujah as “genocide” just because these crimes dwarf the ones committed in Bosnia, then you might have to take sides (staying neutral is wrong, after all) and support those who resist, or even go out and call for Russia to bomb the US.

But that would be getting your hands dirty (it would mean supporting illiberal forces instead of those paragons of virtue, the US Air Force), and we can’t have that. So conveniently, it’s only the much smaller crime that will be labeled “genocide”.

I hope Michael’s book will have better arguments than simply shouting “genocide” at the top of his lungs, or it’ll be a waste of time. I was actually looking forward to it making al kinds of serious, thoughtful arguments with more care than ever…

I don’t think Agamben is saying it “twas ever thus” exactly. Yes, he is tracing his theory of sovereignty back to Roman law, but there is also a sense that there is something new–that the state of exception has become the rule, that Aristotle’s distinction between bios and zoe is no longer operative. So we are in this new era of biopolitics in which natural or bare life has become political. Power is no longer top-down. You get something very similar in Negri and of course they both emerge from the same Italian scene, but Agamben is the much darker prophet. For Negri this entails new forms of resistance no longer reliant on the state. For Agamben, resistance seems to lie only in some obscure poetic gesture. His prose is seductive. It’s like you are gathering pieces toward some puzzle that always remains elusive. And while I totally reject the Heideggarian equation on politics and power, his writing sometimes has the resonance of the best science fiction.

I hope Michael’s book will have better arguments than simply shouting “genocide” at the top of his lungs, or it’ll be a waste of time.

I’m sorry, was I shouting? My apologies. I thought I was just repeating a word used by the International War Crimes Tribunal, imperialist stooges though they be.

Jeez, everyone gets a reply except me when I argue with the actual text of the book that Michael is writing about this.

But Rich, I agree with you at 4, at 10, and even at 49 (I think you’re misreading my attempt at ventriloquism in “surely the radical-left critics are right”). So my reply is basically “yep.” It’s a kissing-the-velvet kind of thing, doncha know.

OK, yes, I did misunderstand the attempt at ventriloquism, and I wasn’t sure whether you agreed with 49 or not.

That particular syndrome has more general applicability in all sorts of political situations, not only those involving the radical left. Take, say, a conservative who talks about how scary China is. In order to think that China is really scary, you have to implicitly believe that democracy doesn’t work. That a country can do very well without it, and develop indefinitely under more or less autocratic control. The people who believe that Bush has been successful (as opposed to destructive) seem to think that the state of exception can become the rule, as milo puts it above, and that this can be a successful strategy for the people using it in a democratic society, as opposed to one that in the medium term either gets them replaced or leads to a major crash in that society.

Michael @ 69: you can’t be neutral on a moving genocide:

I don’t know whether Michael means to suggest by this that Serbian atrocities in Kosovo preceding the NATO intervention amounted to genocide. There were roughly 2000 deaths in Kosovo in 1998, the year before the NATO intervention, around half to two-thirds attributable to the Serbians, and many in response to Kosovo Liberation Army atrocities. Large-scale ethnic cleansing only began after the bombing, and, it can at least be argued, in response to it. There was no “moving genocide” to which the American bombing was a tragically necessary response. More, and more serious, American diplomacy might have prevented the worst atrocities, which, again, followed rather than preceded gthe American bombing.

This is not, obviously (I hope), to “defend” Milosevic or to argue for doing “nothing.”

Hey, if 3/4 of the guys on the football field admit they’re playing football then it’s hard to argue that there’s no football game going on.

It could be the start of a Monty Python skit.

“We’re here in Britain looking for a class struggle, but so far we just haven’t observed one. Hello, here’s somebody, tell me fellow what are you doing?”

“Whya, I’m engaging in class struggle, and thank you for asking.”

“Hmm. How strange. Let’s talk to somebody else. And what do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m doin’ class struggle, guvner.”

“Huh. I’m not talking to *you*. You over there, you haven’t seen any class struggle, have you. No such thing around here.”

“I sure have. Him and him, they’re doing it. I’d be doing class struggle too but my back is bothering me and I’m sitting it out this weekend.”

“Hey you over there. You haven’t seen any class struggle. Right? No class struggle.”

“No, can’t say as I have. They call this class struggle, it’s nothing compared to the way we did it in my day. These younguns, they don’t know how to do it. You call this class struggle, back in the old days we’d call it more like class pattycake. You just can’t get up a good class struggle any more, it’s a generation of wimps.”

“As I was saying, we’re here in Britain looking for the class struggle and there just isn’t any. Nothing to see, move along, move along.”

Marxism as futile whinging? Let me think long and hard on that…

…

…

…

…

…

Yep, think that about sums it up, actually.

To be more precise, without either a clear moral goal or a predictive/prescriptive political element, Marxism is just another small variation on classical political economy. All the oh-so-very-clever people who wasted much of the twentieth century trying to make it more ‘sophisticated’ succeeded only in inserting their collective heads ever-further up their collective rectums, while solving precisely none of their surrounding societies’ pressing problems.

[and if it salves your pride, you can take that for John Rawls too – unless you have a long list of effective Rawlsian public-policy initiatives you can point me to?]

There are functional political parties today – that is, ones with MPs/deputies and a chance at forming a government – that are Marxist? Really, where? Outside of the occasional Indian state with its own local definition of terms…

Anyway, I believe my point was about ‘sophisticated’ Marxists, for whom we can take ol’ wife-strangler Althusser as our exemplar – what good did he ever do for anyone?

Suppose the western world is hit by a severe recession next week – in a few months you’ll see all the old Marxist ideas coming right back, with a vengeance.

That’s right! A whole lot of people feel like their theories are validated because there are systems that work.

It’s like believing that newtonian physics must be correct because the moon doesn’t fall out of the sky. But we had thousands of years of watching the moon not fall out of the sky before Newton ever explained it. If people tried to use newtonian physics to keep the moon from falling out of the sky and the result was that the moon did fall out of the sky, there would be reason to think something was wrong….

But then, if there was a severe recession then all kinds of crackpot theories would start sprouting. Lots of americans would say that it was because of government intervention. They believe there’s never ever a recession unless government intervention makes it happen.

Would we be better off with less government intervention? Well, homeopathic medicine got its start because doctors were doing things that killed their patients. Utterly ineffective homeopathic doses were better than standard treatment. Sometimes it’s that way with government too. I’m pretty sure the US economy would be better off today if Bush had spent 8 years doing nothing at all.

Oops — in the comment above “It doesn’t mean” should read “The absence of class struggle doesn’t mean”.

Rich, is there still labor and capital, work and rent? If so, is there a conflict between them, or, perhaps, due to the pension funds, government programs, widely available profit-sharing/shock options plans and so on it’s all mixed and mingled now?

J Thomas, let me suggest this metaphor: the moon was right there in the sky for a couple of hundred years, big, bright and obvious. Then in the last 15 years or so it got a little blurry and hard to see (at least from some places; if you care you’ll still find it shining bright a few miles to the South) – and so: the moon must be gone forever now.

Well, again, I’ll say: give it some time, let’s check again in 40-50 years or so.

Just accepting for a split-second the validity of abb1’s view from eternity, even if it became fashionable again, for who knows what reason, to revive class struggle as an interpretation of reality, the last thing anyone would want to do would be to call it ‘Marxism’. In 40 years’ time the only thing anyone without a PhD in history will know about Marxism is that it helped Putin start World War V….

abb1, what you’ve written is an exact expression of religious faith. If the conflict exists, then it doesn’t matter how people organize — that’s an exact cognate to if God exists, then it doesn’t matter whether we ever can perceive Him or not.

And no, I for one don’t want to wait 40 or 50 years and then check again. In 40 or 50 years I will be dead. The people who want to sit and wait for the class struggle can join those waiting for the Second Coming.

. But do people seem to be organizing their political struggles around them [classes] in any concrete way? No. Not from either side. The right wing doesn’t care whether you’re a trust-fund heir or a capitalist entepreneur or a nativist factory worker, and the left wing doesn’t care whether you’re a prole or a poor person without a job or a song-writer. (Rich Puchalsky)

The End of Class Politics? Class Voting in Comparative Context, Geoffrey Evans (Editor), Faculty Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford

Abstract: […] This book presents a state-of-the-art analysis of the changing nature of class voting and the salience of class politics in advanced industrial societies. It combines broad ranging cross-national comparison with detailed country studies and empirical tests of key theoretical and methodological explanations of changing levels of class voting. The final section includes commentaries from distinguished scholars from the fields of social stratification, political science, and political sociology, followed by a general discussion.The strengths of the book are the following: (1)a combination of breadth and depth, which uses both comparative analysis of up to 16 countries and detailed analyses of several of the more critical cases; (2) methodological sophistication: a particularly high quality is attained in the measurement of class and voting, and in the statistical analysis of their relations through time; (3) an interchange of skills and knowledge from political science, social stratification research, and the sociology of politics; and (4) an international collection of established and in some cases extremely eminent contributors.On the basis of the evidence presented, it is argued that in many cases class divisions in voting have not declined. …

Social Class and Voting: A Multi-Level Analysis of Individual and Constituency Differences, Robert Andersen and Anthony Heath, Centre for Research into Election and Social Trends, Oxford

ABSTRACT This paper extends previous work on the changing importance of individual and contextual social class in Britain. We adopt a multilevel framework for analysis, linking surveys from the 1964-97 British Election Studies with Census data on the social class composition of constituencies. The goal of the paper is to test whether, net of individual social class effects, the social class composition of the constituency in which the voter lives has declined in importance over time. We found that contextual class effects were consistently significant and fairly constant throughout the period under study.

Class Voting in Capitalist Democracies Since World War II: Dealignment, Realignment, or Trendless Fluctuation? Jeff Manza, Michael Hout and Clem Brooks Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 21, (1995)

We conclude that despite the absence of a clear consensus in the field, theories asserting a universal process of class dealignment are not supported.

Lex, I think that “what good did A ever do for me?” is definitely an interesting standard of evaluation for a major philosopher, if perhaps not quite as good as “if he’s so smart, why ain’t he rich?”…

I’m sorry, was I shouting? My apologies. I thought I was just repeating a word used by the International War Crimes Tribunal, imperialist stooges though they be.

Yes, the ICTY. Who I never called “imperialist stooges” anymore than you called the US Air Force “paragons of virtue”. I guess when you make stuff up about people’s positions, it’s clever irony.

Anyway, as for the shouting: “genocide”, as defined in international human rights law (ie, in such a way it can apply for example, to a massacre of 8000 people in Srebrenica) is not what most people think of when hearing the word (the holocaust, the genocide in Ruanda, etc.). I therefore believe that in this context, employing the term amounts to shouting.

This is even more so, since there will not be any tribunal ever judging the (far larger) crimes committed by the US and allies in Iraq, thereby allowing you to say “a pox on both their houses” in that case. Let me ask you: if, by some miracle, a tribunal did come into existence and declare, say, the destruction of Falludjah “genocide”, would you then retroactively demand support for the resistance? After all, you claim one can’t stay neutral in the face of “genocide”.