Marxism without revolution: Class

Interesting post. I’ve noticed that this doesn’t just happen in academia, but in politics too. What few socialist politicians we have here seem to form a criticism of government/other party positions, and then just protest. They don’t engage in existing political structures or compromise to actually do anything (an understandable, if pointless way to proceed). They then enjoy an untainted “well-earned cafe latte”, as you say.

Out of interest, how is this different from the arguments which led to many Marxists shifting over to social democracy?

“no sensible definition of the working class is going to satisfy all four conditions.”

Are we talking globally? The working class may not satisfy all of those conditions in one place at one time. But is such parochialism essential to a “revolutionary working class”? Wouldn’t it be possible for different tasks of the revolution to be completed by different groups of people at different times and in different places but for those achievement to eventually meld in some greater whole?

Sorry to be so way off topic so early in a thread, but can anyone tell me the difference between compton and coherent X-Rays. i.e. Is one safer than the other? Not my expertise and my Google powers have failed me.

Thanks. If I may, a follow up – it would appear what the Tories in the UK are seeking to do in terms of “firewalling” retail banking is a good example of one part of the 1% taking a step towards your first bullet because of their own particular electoral interests. Perhaps seeking to emphasise these divergent interests within the top 1% or 20%would be a more effective strategy than attacking the top 1% or 20% as a whole, which might lead them to close ranks.

Yes, same here, voyou. Working people make the stuff, deliver the services, end up with nothing, at risk of poverty at the whim of fate. I suppose ‘needy’ and ‘exploited’ are arguable terms. Actively harmed and made miserable by the system their labour makes possible – yes, obviously.

I’m a bit less puzzled than voyou, but only a bit. Those who work for a wage rather than profiting from the labour of others are the majority in every nation, with a handful of bizarrely atypical exceptions; that’s how capitalist economies work. Wage-workers produce the wealth in every economy, with a handful of b.ly a. e.s; again, that’s capitalism for you. Point 3 is a bit trickier: wage-workers are, always and everywhere, exploited, but they’re not the only people who are exploited, nor is the wage the only nexus of exploitation. And not all wage-workers are needy, and not all needy people are wage-workers – although we could save point 4 to some extent by arguing that all needy people are either workers or people who have been excluded from waged work.

It could be that when you say ‘working class’ (or even when Gerry Cohen said it) what’s being referred to isn’t the set of all wage workers but the set of all semi-skilled or unskilled workers in factories and farms, or words to that effect. But I don’t think the Marxian model of class assumes that or needs to assume it.

Incidentally, I do think revolution is both desirable and inevitable, even if only in the long run (and you know what they say about the long run), so I’d welcome that other thread.

In regards to the points of others: I agree with shah8 that religion has some desirable social effects and think the left needs to be more friendly towards it. I winced when everyone was laughing at the end times prediction, knowing that at least half of the American public takes that stuff seriously, so if you alienate them, you have to get *everyone* el;se on your side and could still lose.

Religion is also the typical way to the empathic concern Scriven wants, and its typical expression is charity, not political change. I’m all for charity, but it won’t change the system.

Gaspard, yes, you could argue for the likes of Rowling and Jobs – and Jobs is an industrial capitalistic, so if you except him, your beef with capitalism as such must at least be qualified. Again, right now, I think we need to zero in on the financial industry.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/LE22Cb01.html

…Some insight into working conditions at Foxconn is provided by a diary written by 22-year-old Liu Zhiyi, who spent 28 days working in Foxconn’s main factory while an intern for Southern Weekly, a Guangzhou newspaper. She said the production lines at Foxconn started at 4 a.m., with thousands of uniformed workers, all dressed alike, having to stand as they worked at least eight hours a day.

“With a basic salary of just 900 yuan, they spare no effort to work overtime … But only reliable workers and those who have good relations with department heads are offered such overtime opportunities,” said Liu’s diary, published by the weekly. Ten workers shared one dormitory, but many did not know each others’ names, she wrote.

One striking feature of Foxconn employees is their young age, with 85% of the 420,000 workers in Shenzhen born in the late 1980s and early 1990s, according to Foxconn.

I’d love to say lots here. But I’m in Chicago with internet access on my phonEe only .

Angela Merkel has been pushing for private debtholders to assume at least some of the losses in the current crisis. She has a clear electoral incentive to continue to make this case. Yet this week she announced unconditional surrender.
I know you have views about why this happened, and I look forward to ‘Marxism without revolution: Capital’ to see if you can get beyond defeatism on that one too.

“it seems clear, as Cohen says, that no sensible definition of the working class is going to satisfy all four conditions.”

Given common sense, lots of people, even on this thread, arrive at the opposite conclusion. So, for the benefit of the discussion, can you summarize Cohen’s arguments that you found persuasive, or your own?

Trying to overcome pain of typing on this thing ….
Jus to say that the original version of the relevant Cohen essay anticipates some objections put here. Eg Sandwichman on global scope of WC. In his Self -ownership book.

The single overriding flaw in this analysis is point 4:
they are the primary obstacle to meeting a wide range of social needs

This point is the crux of where class based analysis fails. The 0.1% or less of the population that can live for a generation off its own capital is not nearly enough of a problem to be the primary obstacle to meeting social needs. The primary obstacle to meeting social needs is in fact the human nature of the 100%, not the greed of 1%, 0.1% or supervillains living in dormant volcanoes – or, for that matter, in the bottom 5% in terms of income, where certain other political forces go looking for the ‘other’ to blame for everything.

Making good things out of corruptible and crooked people is a challenge; blaming everything on the very rich is a pathetic and intellectually deficient strategy. Marxism fails every time because it is nothing more than a rhetorically sophisticated strategy for shifting blame away from some people, onto others, in the end unveiling the culpability of the group that remains following the horrific purges and torture.

We cannot in good conscience ever be a party to the horrors that accompany Marxism, either the violence of the gulag, or in fact other kinds of coercive violence. The rich have proven themselves perfectly capable of squandering their own wealth; and, for that matter, of donating it to charities which create public goods no government or local community group would ever construct. By using the rich as scapegoats for the failings of everyone (themselves included), the Marxists show themselves to be envious arrogant narcissists.

There are two observations to be made here, I think, which in my reading I don’t see being made very often:

1) Maybe Marx was right after all. Maybe the long arc toward social democracy was as much an illusion as the revolution of the industrial proletariat has seemed to those of us born in the West after WWII. Certainly things like the NHS in Britain, or the GI Bill in the U.S., would be hard to conceive of in any but the post-war context, as would the rebound in consumption which occurred just when so much of U.S. industry had acquired so much idle capacity. The post-war imperialism of the U.S. which began — at least in the minds of people like George Kennan — as a sort of global management problem, also played a large role in obscuring what was in fact taking place in the political economy of our age. Even those at the highest levels, who thought they knew what the story was, didn’t in fact know much of anything. If they had, the sense of dread that came of trying to face down the Russian bear might have been seen for the silly diversion that it was.

2) The management problem is still with us. You might say that democracy and Fukushima don’t mix. Or democracy and nuclear missiles, democracy and NSA-style security states, democracy and industrial agriculture, democracy and Three Gorges dams. Small-minded people have vastly increased their power over us and everything else on the planet since 1945, and the necromancy that arose out of propaganda, advertising, miniature cameras and Internet garbage collection on the scale practiced by the NSA et al, may in the end prove more fatal to children and other living things than thermonuclear warheads per se ever could have been.

Whether you call it revolution or not, we have to figure out a way to manage post-industrial economies as well as our remaining cultural animosities without ending up with a dismissive autocracy of either the Koch brothers on the one hand, or the party apparatchiks of the Chinese Central Committee on the other. Decentralization is the key, it seems to me — a decentralization which is more friendly to political democracy than what we’ve been pleased to call Social Democracy up till now. We can’t put the genie back in the bottle, but maybe, with the help of computers, we can break it up into more rational pieces, — more rational in the sense of allowing us to grapple collectively with the real failures of capitalism, which may otherwise turn the capitalists’ arrogant dismissals of externalized cost into the end of the world as we know it.

@30 – Pointing to longitudinal studies, without more, makes it difficult to know what exactly you are pointing to. But there seems some obvious answer to your question, including less economic security, less retirement security, a weaker and smaller union sector, continued wage stagnation pared with ever rising health care costs, a series of speculative bubbles bursting, the shifting of the burden of taxation downward, and a present assault on the last vestiges of government action that create the opportunity and security necessary for a middle class.

As for your claim that the middle class is shrinking because more are moving up than down, I must simply ask – what on earth are you talking about?

There is no obvious political vehicle for such a movement.
No? Really? The objection that existing revolutionary socialist organisations are too small to fit the bill seems to be cut from the same cloth as the one to the possibility of revolution that no revolution has been successful yet.

I have two (partly unrelated) observations:
1) In italian, we have two words that reflect the english “class”: “classe” and “ceto”.
When I was in high school, my (self described marxist-leninist) philosophy teacher explained that “classe” referred to the economic position of an individual, whereas “ceto” (wich I think comes from some translation of Max Weber) refers to the cultural habits that are associated to the various classes, so that, for example, a financial capitalist that is born by working class parents would be of capitalist “classe” but of working class “ceto”, thus displaying “new rich” and somehow vulgar tastes. It seems to me that when you say that there is no more a “working class” in marxist sense you mean that there is no more a “working ceto”, which is more a problem of false consciousness than a real change in the structure of society: for example the student of engeneering might believe that he is a small burgoise and that the world will smile to him, but when he will go on the job market he will realize that he’ll get a crappy job and he is really a proletarian.
2) to those that say that we should differentiate between “real economy capitalists” and “financial capitalists”, and to BenK at 27: you are very wrong IMHO. In a capitalist world, “real economy capitalists” don’t pay workers enough to buy all the products they produce (or they would have no profits), and don’t use all the profits they have for personal consumption, because they have very obvious incentives to increase their amount of capital. As a consequence, an underconsumption crisis would arise, but the growth in leverage in the system can counterbalance this tendence for a while (until a Minsky moment happens), so many governments encouraged the overgrowth of the financial system to keep recession away. Thus: “capitalism” is disfunctional beyond the “excessive share” of products consumed by capitalists, because it constrains the growth of the whole pie via crises of underconsumtion, and “financial rents” are a direct consequence of “real economy capitalism”. And, by the way, both Steve Jobs and J. K. Rowling most likely put most of their hard earned money in some sort of financial product, so that they will have their fair share of “financial rents”.

At the very least, decentralization is a requirement for organic experimentation, natural evolution; the alternative to technocratic arrogance.

Steven Attewell @ 37

I agree with you about the roots of post-war U.S. foreign policy, although I can see that my terminology is at fault for appearing to disagree. What I meant by a global management problem was that Kennan saw the contest with the Soviets in terms of containing a disruptive force that might wreck the goal of a U.S. led, globally integrated economy. He didn’t see it as a political or ideological competition in the narrow sense, but he did make it clear, in the long telegram (as I remember it, at least) that we might have to bear the burden of some otherwise irrational expenses, not to mention ambiguously evil deeds, to keep the Soviets at bay.

Not everyone understood the undertaking in that way, of course, and consequently the Marshall/Kennan axis, if you can call it that, lost out early in the game to the cold warrior-morons who ranged in sophistication from JFK to Curtis LeMay.

Either way, after 1948 the thwarted aspirations of the common folk anywhere in the world outside the U.S. didn’t even register in our technocratic war rooms, and by the time our war machine arrived in Vietnam, similar aspirations inside the U.S. didn’t matter either. I can imagine Noam Chomsky and George Kennan engaged in a dialogue about what was best for everybody. Sadly, I can’t imagine anything of the sort occurring between Chomsky or Bill McKibben and, say, Sam Nunn or Newt Gingrich.

My point about decentralization certainly doesn’t refute yours, but as Henri implies, what we’ve got now is almost certainly not going to work, and for the first time, we have the purely technological tools to give the lie to the idea that centralized political monopolies are essential to the proper management of complex economies. What we do about that — human nature being what it is — is precisely what’s on the table.

William Timberman – agreed on the cold war issue.

However, I don’t see any evidence for the superiority of decentralization either from you or Henri – only an assertion about the “organic” and “natural” -ness of the local, which I consider really suspect romanticism. Mayor Daley and Bull Connor were local pols, after all.

Generically Marxist theories of society, history, and economics supposedly emphasize conflict; but a teleological bias persists in them as if it were a given that there is at least the possibility of some sort of more or less stable resolution to class struggle. It seems to me that this view is fundamentally wrong. It will probably always be in the interest of minorities to oppress the rest, and periods of relative social peace and general prosperity will continue to be exceptional and temporary unless there really is some sort of technological omega point that fundamentally changes the subject. That doesn’t mean that individuals and groups can’t make progress in any given situation any more than the fact that walking is in the last analysis a protracted stumble means that you can’t go to the store. It does imply the need for something like methodological pessimism.

I am particularly skeptical of the notion that gradual movement towards social democracy, aka Fukuyama’s Denmark, is a practical replacement for Revolution, not because I have any particular love of Revolutions–I’ve read too much history for that–but because actual social democracies, Denmark included, came to be precisely because there was a revolutionary movement in the world. Does anybody really think that the emergence of the welfare state in Western Europe and the relatively peaceful end of traditional imperialism elsewhere would have taken place in the absence of a credible Red threat? I’m a most unlikely leftist, but I’ve come to believe that most of the world will move further and further right until and unless some political movement arises that puts fear back in the heart of ruling minorities. In the absence of some such perilous drama, the only plausible default case is oligarchy bolstered by legal terrorism, public relations, and superstition.

I’m a most unlikely leftist, but I’ve come to believe that most of the world will move further and further right until and unless some political movement arises that puts fear back in the heart of ruling minorities.

Yeah, that’s what it feels like, looking, in particular, at recent US history, but surely there could be other strategies, other equilibria, with higher levels of communitarianism and nationalism mixed in. The US started and evolved as an unusually libertarian society.

…how many of us it takes with it. Maybe I was thinking of Pogo’s We have met the enemy and he is us. That’s today’s excuse, anyway.

Sorry, that should be “not because the percentage in families who earn less than $40K has gone up.”

@47: The idea of a “good” Marxist revolution against the Blanquist coup ignores the way in which Lenin and Marx learned from their revolutionary experience. Marx excoriated the Commune for being hesitant to seize the gold reserves of the Second Empire and so openly challenge state authority, the state authority already committed to shooting down in the name of order those who had earlier called for its establishment. Lenin wrote State and Revolution on the eve of 1917, as though he had nothing better to do then to imagine the state he was about to seize wither away.

On the general point I don’t think one can imagine Marxism without a revolution anymore then one can imagine capitalism without crisis. The image of a soft reformist politics successfully changing the structure of the state ignores the way in which the New Deal and Fascism were both reconstitutive of capital, creating new but essentially capitalist institutions. Post New Deal US was still capitalist, still possessed the same commodification of labor, together with the inability to become a commodity through labor for some, that the pre-crash world had. Where I think Harvey goes wrong is in imagining the New Deal world as stable and destroyed through some political force, whereas it always had the roots of its instability within it.

If by Marxism we mean the worker’s movement as constitutive of capital and as potentially overcoming it, then Marxism today is dead because there is no workers movement. But this is not because the preconditions for such a movement do not actually exist, but because the subjective awareness of capital that exists today is universally degraded. Even here we see only a tepid defense of what came before, as though the success of Wal-Mart at feeding and clothing millions now did not indicate new possibilities to be reclaimed by the worker’s movement.

Steven Attewell, I think you’re misunderstanding me. If I thought the New Deal depended crucially on Jim Crow, I would think those who objected to Krugman’s valorization of the New Deal because of Jim Crow would have a point. I don’t, so I don’t. To the extent Jim Crowers opposed the New Deal, of course, this further weakens Jim Crow as an objection to valorization of some aspects of the 50’s.

Russell Arben Fox, yes, I think populism is where we need to be, and I think the postwar liberal demonization of it misguided.

William Timberman at 43 –
I need some clarification for decentralization, then, because I’m fairly convinced that without economies of scale, you can’t get employers that can pay decent wages and benefits. Small businesses are some of the worst tyrants – not because they want to be, but because they don’t have a choice.

Jim Harrison –

“Does anybody really think that the emergence of the welfare state in Western Europe and the relatively peaceful end of traditional imperialism elsewhere would have taken place in the absence of a credible Red threat?”

Yes. Post 1917, Social Democrats had to work to build political power – against organized Communist parties that genuinely threatened their political position – and in some countries this worked (Scandinavia, Low Countries) and in some it didn’t (Italy, Germany) (France being sort of a mixed bag).

Watson Ladd – The Popular Front in France or Spain?

Martin Bento – I see. Consider me adding on to your statement then. Jim Crow was a bug, not a feature.

StevenAttewell @ 56

Steven, almost 50 years ago, there was this:

The Triple Revolution: Cybernation, Weaponry, Human Rights

Reading it today is an exercise in nostalgia for some of us, and in quaintness, I imagine, for those who weren’t around at the time. Still, it was an honest effort, and the fundamental issues remain pretty much what they were then. If advanced capitalism can produce enough to provide everyone with a decent living, but won’t pay but a few enough to lay their hands on a piece of it, then we have to think about divorcing human well-being from employment in whatever current version of the dark satanic mills it is that tickles our capitalists’ fancy.

There are easy ways to do this, and bloody awful ways. Convincing the custodians of the status quo that this is so, not to mention the rest of us who are mired in the system without any effective say over how it works, is step 1. What I mean by decentralization, then, has to do with how we might manage things, if we were serious about doing so. That we aren’t in fact serious about doing so now, and might not ever be, even in the face of far more serious contradictions, is not something I’d be willing to argue. It is as it manifestly is, and that, of course is where some impatient sod will let slip the dogs of politics — and if we’re as unlucky as we always seem to have been, the dogs of war.

Isn’t there a different possibility here? I mean that (very briefly) sketched out by James Galbraith in Chapter 10 of “The Predator State”? I certainly think predator/prey has more psychological (and analytical) grip that bourgeoise/proletariat.

Successful black-governed towns were razed, periodically. Which then leads to the question of “What Part of White Supremacy Don’t You Understand?” There were fucking coups in the cities, post Reconstruction. Black people got frozen out of baseball for almost 80 years. There were neighborhood covenants that said black people couldn’t buy there. There wasn’t really a question of black people being allowed to self-govern, you know. Most toxic localities get that way–Japan wouldn’t be japan if there were no burakumin, just like India and the untouchables, and all the other issues with minorities that are mostly about resenting, using, and abusing them for profit. People really need that sip of power-trip KoolAid. If you’re an industrious beaver, you can look up all the groups Steven Attewell mentioned, and if you can, just check out how many years that org lasted, and specifically, what caused its end. You can also check out what was a pretty strong example of grass-roots activism that *couldn’t* be race-baited into irrelevance, The Wobblies. They got fuckin’ destroyed by the Wilson government and later by the Red Scare. And I think the Wobblies were working directly off of the experience of the Knights of Labor, Grange and other rural populist parties, etc…

1. rent and real-economy capital

The OECD have made it clear that a -fictitious- -imputed- ‘indirectly measured’ item (FISIM) has to be created in national accounts to dispel the ‘paradoxical’ appearance that the finance sector rakes off a huge quantity of money without producing anything much at all.

Suppose arguendo that real-economy capital, by contrast, ‘contributes’ more than it extracts. Still, producer surplus (to avoid all the ambiguities and confusions surrounding the term ‘rent’) may (and does) accrue to it. If it gets more than is required to motivate it to ‘contribute’, that is producer surplus.

At this point we get into issues of ‘normal’ profit and the choice of baseline for ‘opportunity cost’ accounting. In effect the standard n-c position here amounts to assuming that an overdetermined return is no real return at all. Simple case: I can invest in a or b and get 8% pa either way. In either case, I forgo the alternative, so that goes down as opportunity cost, so I make only normal profit. But such sophistry aside, the producer surplus is there all right.

Rowling (like Wilt Chamberlain) is a bizarre template for the capitalist, but never mind. Both she and Jobs would still have done whatever good they did for less reward. Rowling wasn’t doing a cost-benefit calc. featuring huge rewards at vanishingly low probability; Jobs might have being doing c/b, but his actual level of reward needn’t have figured in such a calculation of the prospects, even at a very low probability.

I think there’s some resistance to the idea that earned rewards are a function of required motivation rather than actual contribution, which is rather perverse in theoretical terms but useful in ideological ones to those who get themselves into the position of controlling the capital spigot. One way this gets through is based on a vague market-ideological assumption that all ‘benefits of exchange’ must be divvied up between the two parties engaged in the exchange. Then less producer surplus just means more consumer surplus, and neither is better than the other, so stop worrying and learn to love it. But the fact is that if there are windfalls, they should go to whoever needs them most. (And windfalls being motivationally inert, Laffer curve arguments don’t come into it.)

Cohen’s position, and the reason for including conditions 2 & 3 (productivity and expoitation) is that Marxists are committed to entitlement through labour (he unwisely follows Nozick’s tendentious terminology and calls this ‘self-ownership’). I would reject that conception and (leaving aside questions of irony/immanent critique/ad hominem argument) treat this earning idea as primarily a negative one – i.e. surpluses are not earned.

Then jettison the earning-based conditions 2&3 in the definition of the potential revolutionary cadre, and focus instead on the corresponding conditions in the characterisation of the ruling class. The call to revolution is then: they rake off huge surpluses, when such surpluses are the joint property of mankind (or some parochial subset thereof, if we must), to be distributed to the needy and/or by democratic decision. One key difference is that a general strike may no longer be a viable method of bringing about revolution (if it ever was).

2. Populism & Teh Paranoid Style

Not the same as localism, which I detest on grounds of economies of scale – which btw apply to e.g. criminal justice systems (and relatedly, jury members don’t know the defendant and complainant, etc.).

pace StevenAttewell @38; Martin Bento passim, I’d describe it as (or stipulate that it is, viably) a political rather than a substantive position, and in particular isn’t a matter of nationalism or It’s essentially a rejection of the entire political class including auxiliaries in academe, the meeja etc., with the added appeal of a ‘shrill’ insistence on using impolite terms like ‘corrupt’, ‘greedy’ and ‘conspire’. Which seems fair enough to me.

BenK @21 has plutocrats classified with supervillains living in dormant volcanoes – critique of the workings of the ruling class is assimilated to stereotypically lurid conspiracy fantasy. This gambit, with a modicum of polishing, works very well and (disavowals in the abstract notwithstanding) in practice has leftists retreating to a disembodied institutional approach, as mooted by bianca on the other thread, and scrambling over each other to peck at anyone suspected of the taint of ‘conspiracy theory’.

Another aspect of right-agnotology willingly indulged and encouraged by the left: BenK’s extended bout of confabulation about using the rich as scapegoats, envious arrogant narcissists, horrific purges etc. This is an especially crude example of a dominant strand of ‘moderate’ (Washington consensus, anti-populist/elitist) opinion, most famously in recent years expressed by Hofstadter.

It has serious types limiting themselves to the blandest terms of debate, and reinforces the taboo on anything describable, however tenuously, as a ‘conspiracy theory’ by conflating it with xenophobic scapegoating, pogroms, racism, and all the rest of the apparatus of conspiracy-denial. In fact xenophobic scapegoating etc. has historically tended to be exploited, encouraged and even manufactured by the visibly powerful, and is an entirely different phenomenon from subversive claims about conspiratorial and quasi-conspiratorial behaviour by elite actors (many such claims often being rather obviously accurate, modulo vocab).

While I get where he’s coming from and largely agree on other points, I think shah8 falls into this trap when he says populism is about your next door neighbor – it definitely isn’t. It’s about Washington and Manhattan. Also, no coincidence that his narcissism of petty differences echoes BenK’s invocation of narcissism – note the close connection between that psychological defect and paranoia properly so-called.

There’s no essential philosophical, political or psychological connection between ‘populism’/subversive conspiracy theory on the one hand, and xenophobic rabble rousing/the ‘paranoid style’ on the other. The idea that there is has been a persistent and pervasive motif in quietist propaganda since Hof. in the 50s – and indeed earlier, in Popper’s pulp works.

(Consider the second wave of the Red Scare – HUAC’s paranoid stylings, inquisition, the blacklist etc, were part of a top-down repressive campaign similar to the War on Terror. McCarthy took this in a populist direction, which was at first welcomed by his party while in opposition, but which soon became a nuisance – blowback – and he was accordingly censured, and his career ended.)

“The Redemption South is a perfect example of why localism doesn’t work – because local elites can and will murder and terrorize people into submission without any other force to check them. ”

You’re aware that such murdering and terrorizing people into submission has been done on rather non-local governmental scales, right?

It doesn’t have to be profound to be right. Simple works too. You can’t use the idea that “elites can and will murder and terrorize people into submission without any other force to check them” as a damning point against localism when the point offers literally no distinction between localism and nearly all of the non-local governmental schemes.

Both local and non-local governments can be despotic. Both can be semi-democratic. The history on local and non-local governments are very mixed in that respect. Using the idea that local governments can be despotic as an argument for non-local governments is just silly unless you argue that non-local governments have a built in tendency to be non-despotic or less authoritarian. And that, is a rather difficult argument to make in the face of the USSR, China, and some would say the US.

Sebastian – I’m sorry I wasn’t being clear; I was taking the Madisonian position in Federalist 10. A larger nation-state has too many competing groups to allow for total hegemony of the Cotton South type – not always the case, but often enough to be of some value.

Keep in mind what I was arguing against: “Decentralization is the key, it seems to me— a decentralization which is more friendly to political democracy than what we’ve been pleased to call Social Democracy up till now. ” on the one hand and “decentralization is a requirement for organic experimentation, natural evolution; the alternative to technocratic arrogance” on the other.

My argument was that decentralization is not more friendly to democracy or a requirement of any kind, but rather leads to domination by local elites. Yes, violence can happen at any level of government, but historically in the U.S, it was local and state governments that did the most violence to Social Democracy and national civil rights protections that gave it the most protection.

[sorry for not incorporating this into the last comment]

If you accept the Madisonian position, the question of the times is something like “where are we in the local/non-local balance?”. I’m not sure the answer is totally clear, but the trend has been toward massive centralization, so it seems plausible that some level of decentralization may be needed to restore a good balance.

I’ve been debating whether to get into this, but, for the record, here are some info and thoughts on the groups Atttewell mentioned.

Greenback Party Platform

1.pro fiat currency
2.pro women’s right to vote
3.pro 8 hour day
4.anti-monopoly
5.pro power to strike
6.anti private police and militias
7.government rather than bank control of currency, i.e., anti-privatization, also anti the current Ron Paul position
8.pro graduated income tax
9.anti speculation (in land primarily)

All would basically be regarded as left or liberal (American sense) views today. All or almost all are more progressive than Democratic Party positions of the time. 1, 2, 7, and 8 in particular, far from being reactionary, are major elements of 20th century political modernity, which would have to be called accurately futuristic from a 19th century perspective.

Where they ended up: The Greenback issue lost salience after the battle for that particular fiat currency had clearly been lost. Fused with Democratic Party in many states. Some ended up in People’s Party.

The Grange

1.Railroad regulation (I.e., anti-monopoly)
2.Pro-cooperatives
3.Pro regulation of private business in public interest (grain warehouses, but also an important court precedent for the principle)
4.Pro liberalized farm credit through government intervention.
5.Pro woman’s vote
6.Pro direct election of Senators
7.pro prohibition
8.Members included FDR and Truman

8 not an issue position, though telling. 7 not a left or right position intrinsically, but not well-regarded historically. Other positions clearly on the left. 5 and 6 very important for democracy.

Where they ended up: Still extant, but much diminished. More of a charity fraternity today. Also influenced Farmer’s Alliance and Greenback Party.

Farmer’s Alliance

1.Anti-monopoly
2.Pro partial government control of “free market” in public interest, especially banking and communications
3.Silver as well as gold standard (bimetalism)
4.Pro income tax

All but 3 leftist positions, 3 debatable, though the intention was anti-deflation, today an uncontroversial position, though how much inflation is desired is controversial within narrow but significant bounds.

Where they ended up: they were cobbled together from previous groups, some of which, primarily in the South, were racist, though the Alliance also had a large Northern anti-racist contingent. They were soon broken up by pressure from the economic elites they opposed, and by the desire for some but not all groups to form an alliance with the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance and Cooperative Union, as well as the more clearly left-wing Knights of Labor. Despite some racist elements, the fact that racism was controversial within this group, and many were actively fighting it, looks pretty favorable in contrast to the Democratic Party of the day, particularly in the South where this was a major issue.

The Knights of Labor

1.Strongly pro-labor though not socialist.
2.pro 8 hour day
3.Grew directly from labor movement and sometimes functioned as labor union.
4.After some reluctance, participated in strikes and boycotts
5.Anti child and convict labor
6.Advocated for black inclusion in politics in the North, but tolerated segregation in the South.
7.Excluded some professionals, as well as liquor makers, because considered unproductive members of society.
8.Inclusive of women.
9.Supported exclusion of and violence against Chinese, resulting in riots.

6 shows that racism again was an internal conflict. 7 is debatable as a left-wing position. Rest are left positions, other than 9, of course. This is the primary example of major racist action by one of the populist groups Attewell named, and there is no excusing it. Worth mentioning, however, that the Knights of Labor were also one of the groups that founded and gave many ideas to the Wobblies. Even the Wobbly slogan is derived from the Knights, and the Wobblies were the group endorsed as a contrast to the reactionary and ineffective forces of populism.

People’s Party (19th century edition)

1.Anti-gold standard, pro fiat currency or at least bimetalism (varied somewhat, bimetalism imposed by alliance with Democrat Bryan)
2.Regulation of business
3.Farmer chapters excluded blacks because of influence of South
4.Direct election of Senators
5.graduated income tax
6.8 hour day
7.government control of railroad, telephone, and telegraph
8.Allied with Democrats outside the South, but with Republicans within it. That is to say, with the most progressive party in either case, given local conditions.
9.Supportive of power for women
10.Many of its issues, which were also issues for the other populist parties, taken up by Democrats around the turn of the century.
11.Rallied behind Bryan, a Democrat who adopted some of their issues, after great internal debate. This destroyed the party in the South where it had been allied with the Republicans. Democrats used racist attacks on the Populists after this
12.Many members ended up in the Socialist Party as supporters of Debs.
How did it end up: In the 1892 election, they tried to form an alliance between Southern blacks and poor Southern whites as an electoral base. Some Southern whites resorted to racial violence to try to prevent this. In 1896, the party supported the Democrat William Jennings Bryan, who lost narrowly. After the failed alliance with the Democrats, the party disbanded, but Tom Watson, one of its leaders, later re-established another version of it, and ran for President under its banner. Although Watson had earlier fought Southern racism, arguing that the elites used race to divide the poor, he embraced it at this time. Leftists going to the right in later life is a familiar pattern. In any case, the reconstituted Party went nowhere and soon died.

Overall, the issues that seem common to most or all of these groups were:

1.An end to the gold standard in favor of fiat currency or bimetalism.
2.Greater government control of business, particularly speculators, natural monopolies like railroads and communications, and the financial industry.
3.Greater political power and participation for women.
4.Pro 8 hour day.
5.Pro labor rights.
6.Graduated income tax.
7.Government-directed monetary policy that opposed deflation.

Racism was generally controversial within all groups, save the Knights of Labor when attacking the Chinese, and the People’s Party when reconstituted. This compares favorably to the Democrats of the day, and anyone whose special concern is prejudice should give the populist groups due credit for their feminism. On most other issues, they were far more progressive than either major party. Far from being backwards, many of the things they advocated that seemed way-out at the time are accepted as modern today, at least by liberals – in particular, fiat currencies, women’s suffrage, graduated income tax, non-deflationary monetary policy, and government regulation of the market, particularly the financial industry and natural monopolies. Some did err by backing prohibition, but so did most of the other suffragists, and no one seems to hold it against them. There was certainly racism, but, there was also opposition to racism – for the most part, racism was more strongly the domain of the Democrats, late Watson notwithstanding. Otherwise, there is little here that is petty or vicious, and it is majoritarian in a good sense, unless you oppose the woman’s vote or the direct election of Senators.

As institutions of power and relevance, they were short-lived, other than the Grange, which was not entirely political. Given that much of their platform was eventually achieved, it is not clear that they can be called “failures” on this basis. As for how they ended, they mostly flowed one into another and into other leftist groups, such as Deb’s Socialists and the Wobblies, as the situation developed. Only the People’s Party can be said to have destroyed itself with racism, and that wasn’t even the original party, which destroyed itself by allying with Democrats.

For a long time, American politics had the odd feature that the party of Big Money was also the party that abolished slavery and opposed racism. This meant the ecological niche available for the other party included racism. So a new force emerges defined primarily by opposition to Big Money, or at least the unfettered liberty of such, but also including support for women, anti-deflation, labor rights, some other things. Logically, it is playing for the ecological niche of the Democrats (and expressly so in many cases), as the other is not available by virtue of its basic mission. So there is a strong structural impetus towards racism. Even stronger than the Democrats, in fact, as the major parties in those days largely succeeded over patronage, not ideology. The populists, of course, never acquired enough power for this, so they had to appeal with pure ideology. Despite all this, the populists were usually less racist than the Democrats.

Now, things are different. The racists have found their way to the Party of Big Money, and Big Money was always the primary populist enemy. Like the Democrats, populists no longer have to make such alliances, and basically no longer can. Big Money and racism share a home in the Republican Party, and, if you oppose Big Money, you will not find many racists flocking to you because they are thoroughly indoctrinated and already spoken for. A big part of the purpose of the Republican Party is to convince people who may be motivated by racism, militarism, religion or other things that pro-Big Money sentiment is essential to whatever they favor. The Republicans are very successful at this. And the Republicans are actively playing to the racists too, especially anti-Muslim and anti-latino sentiment, the current hits, but oldies like anti-black bigotry too, especially against Obama. They give the racists no reason to abandon them.

Note also that much of the classic populist platform leans socialist by contemporary standards. How many racists do you find these days embracing such ideas? You will also notice that the Tea Party platform, covertly corporate-funded and consisting basically of Republican cliches stripped of the veneer of reasonableness, has very little in common with “populism”. Even the Paulites, with their gold standards and deregulation do not fit at all with historical populism.

Martin Bento – good description. I’d add the “ever-normal granary”/”national subtreasury” as a critical innovation of the Grange/Alliance/People’s Party.

I see Populism as one of the most consequential ideological changes in American history – these were bred-in-the-bone Jeffersonians figuring out how to justify a central state in Jeffersonian terms. Without this, I don’t think you get an American Left that has integral links to the American political tradition. Instead, I think you would have gotten a total break and shift to Marxist socialism – even Debs never quite gave up his Jeffersonianism.

Watson Ladd – the stab in the back didn’t happen in France, nor did the Communist Party go with depoliticization. Not that I disagree with the overall point.