In the post just before me, Chris writes:
Yesterday I was listening to BBC Radio 4, and they were remembering the people who died, shot by East German border guards. It doesn’t seem to occur to our official voices of commemoration that there are parallels today with the thousands who die trying to escape tyranny, war or poverty and who drown in the Mediterranean, perish from thirst in the Arizona desert, or with those who the Australian government turns back at sea or interns offshore.
He’s right. Years ago, I reviewed two books on migration, immigration, and exile—one by Caroline Moorehead, the other by Seyla Benhabib—for The Nation. Here’s a factoid from that review:
Between 1994 and 2001, at least 1,700 migrants from Mexico died trying to reach the United States. Throughout its entire existence, by contrast, exactly 171 people died trying to cross the Berlin wall.
And that, mind you, was under the Clinton regime, before the last decade and a half of agitation around the extension and elaboration of a security wall between Mexico and the United States.
And just in case anyone missed the parallels between the Berlin Wall and the separation wall in Israel, Palestinian activists are on the case (not that anyone in the Western media noticed them, as Chris notes).
Here’s another relevant bit from that Nation review:
Australia has been the leader of this trend, as Moorehead shows, establishing “one of the most exclusionary immigration policies of any democracy” in the world. Where most countries sell their beaches, nightlife or mountains to potential tourists, the Australian government has distributed a video depicting an island continent “inhabited by poisonous snakes, fearsome crocodiles, and man-eating sharks.” In 2001 the government instituted “the Pacific Solution,” in which trespassers would be intercepted at sea and deposited in Indonesia or transferred to “off-shore processing centers.” Under no circumstances would they be allowed on Australian soil and thereby gain access to the courts. Deprived of all hope–and traditional implements of self-destruction–detainees have been known to sew up their lips or drink whole bottles of shampoo.
On the Mexican border, US officials have built sharp slopes along canals separating the two countries, making it difficult for anyone to climb out on the American side. The Clinton Administration launched a succession of militarized endeavors–Operation Blockade, Operation Hold the Line, Operation Gatekeeper–in the name of “prevention through deterrence.” As a result, migrants and refugees now swim across rivers teeming with typhoid, cholera, and hepatitis, “holding their breaths under submerged bridges and along a twenty-foot culvert.”
It’s been years since I (and probably anyone) read that Nation review, so I thought I’d re-post it here. If anything I suspect what I had to say then is even truer now.
• • • • •
Nathan Berzok, son of Joseph and Mollie, was born in Odessa on October 7, 1905. A multicultural metropolis on the Black Sea, Odessa was home to some 138,000 Jews–and the site, eleven days after Nathan’s birth, of a four-day pogrom that took at least 400 of their lives. The Berzoks survived; Mollie hid Nathan in a stove. But like many of Odessa’s Jews, they took the pogrom as a sign that it was time to pack their bags. On March 1, 1908, Nathan, his two older brothers and Mollie arrived at Ellis Island. Joseph was there waiting for them, having already left Odessa to scout out New York. When he spied his wife and three sons inside the immigration center, Joseph rolled them oranges under the railing–the sweetest of signs that they had permanently left Odessa and its pogroms behind.
Nathan Berzok was my grandfather. But it wasn’t until I had nearly finished Human Cargo, Caroline Moorehead’s book about contemporary refugees and migrants, that I even thought of these stories, which he told me while I was growing up. I hadn’t forgotten them. They just didn’t register as I read Moorehead’s harrowing tales of people fleeing persecution, warfare and destitution, traveling thousands of miles in search of a new and better life.
Despite the efforts of postmodern theorists to convince us that exile is the emblematic condition of modern life, when it comes to immigrants and refugees we still seem incapable of the barest gesture of recognition, much less empathy. We remember Oedipus Rex: lover of one parent, killer of another. We forget Oedipus at Colonus: exiled king who wandered twenty years in search of “a resting place” near Athens, “where I should find home” and “round out there my bitter life.” We feel Medea’s rage over Jason’s betrayal, driving her to kill their two sons. We scarcely notice her equally poignant–and more frequent–lament that she is “deserted, a refugee,” with “no harbor from ruin to reach easily.”
Even those of us who for reasons of personal background, religion or politics should be most sensitive to the suffering of refugees can be astonishingly indifferent to their plight. “Four hundred years of bondage in Egypt,” Cynthia Ozick has written, “rendered as metaphoric memory, can be spoken in a moment; in a single sentence. What this sentence is, we know; we have built every idea of moral civilization on it. It is a sentence that conceivably sums up at the start every revelation that came afterward…. ‘The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.'”
Fine, even beautiful, words, both the original and the gloss. But where are we to find them in Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, from the exile it thrust upon them in 1948 to the ongoing hostility to their return–or, for that matter, in Ozick’s anti-Arab fulminations? From one vantage, the story of Israel and Palestine can seem the most idiosyncratic of ironies: A people forced to wander thousands of years forces another people to wander for who knows how many years. From another vantage, the story is sadly universal: the refusal to see or imagine oneself in the pain of another, even–or particularly–when one has suffered a similar ordeal. If exile has any larger import, then, it is not that we all share in its status. It is that it occasions the most sacred and sublime of obligations–“love him as yourself”–and the most wretched of betrayals.
Consider two points often made in debates about refugees and immigrants. Writers and politicians, in this country and in Western Europe, have long complained that immigrants and refugees do not conform to the rules and norms of liberal democracy. Arabs and Africans, we are often informed, do not accept the rights of women; Muslims are more loyal to their religion than to the state (something said of Europe’s Jews not so long ago); immigrants carry, along with their luggage and food, the conflicts and violence of their countries of origin to their new homes. Since 9/11 writers and politicians have grown increasingly apprehensive about the security threat posed by Muslims and Arabs. Worried about insufficient assimilation and potential terrorism, many commentators now believe that Western countries need to reconsider their open immigration policies.
What’s most interesting about these claims is not their truth or falsity but the terms of the debate, in which even the most right-minded men and women feel free to toss off one or two adjectives as a complete account of an entire people. When a Dutch vegan murdered the gay right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn, the distinction between a criminal and his dietary tastes remained sharp. But when Mohammed Bouyeri, a Muslim with dual citizenship in the Netherlands and Morocco, murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, a leap was instantly made from a lone assassin to an entire religion and region. Debates about immigration not only turn newcomers into outlaws; they also transform native-born citizens into a church of unsullied virtue. Start an argument in France about Muslim women wearing the hijab, and suddenly every Frenchman is a feminist.
What is it about immigrants and refugees that frees us from the stricture against guilt by association and the duty to treat individuals as individuals? Perhaps it is simply because we can. It is in the nature of immigration regimes, after all, to classify each arrival or departure as an instance of a larger whole. And because the immigrant’s entry into or exit from a society is a question of choice–sometimes his or hers, always ours–there’s a tendency on the part of host countries to assume that vexing social issues can be resolved merely by removing a distasteful ingredient from the mix.
It would be a mistake, however, to view the immigrant–or the exile or refugee–as simply a symbol of our fallen humanity, forever standing outside the gates of time, accusing us of hypocrisy and disregard. Exiles, refugees and immigrants are the subjects and objects of history and politics: in their countries of origin and destination, in the economies that push and pull them, in the global conflicts between contending state powers. And it is Moorehead’s sensitivity to these historical circumstances and political contingencies–not to mention her considerable skills as a writer and storyteller–that makes her book such a vital contribution to debates over migration.
Moorehead is a British writer who has been reporting on human rights since the early 1980s. Working in an already crowded genre, she differs from those showy journalists of alarm who view the distress of others as an opportunity for overwrought prose and self-display. Though a vital presence on the page–indeed, we occasionally see her intervening in the lives of the refugees she profiles–she is devoted to the quiet narration of disquieting fact. Each of Moorehead’s chapters focuses on a different set of migrants trying to make their way across a different border. Wherever they are–in Sicily, northern Britain, Finland, Tijuana, Australia, southern Lebanon, Cairo or Guinea–she is with them. If her brief is universal, her eye and ear are local, attuned and affixed to the toll of state policies and their historical context. Inevitably, she brings to mind the great Martha Gellhorn, the subject of her last biography, whose “small, still voice” carried a “barely contained fury and indignation at the injustice of fate and man against the poor, the weak, the dispossessed.”
In the past century, Moorehead argues, no historical force has had more immediate effect on immigration politics than the cold war. Throughout that conflict, exiles and refugees were treated as political gold, especially in the West. Eager to expose the tyranny of the Soviet Union and its allies, the anti-Communist powers spearheaded international conventions and institutions that firmly established the refugee as a victim of repression, unable to go back to her native land because of “a well-founded fear of persecution.” The persecutors were presumed to be “totalitarian Communist regimes, and the refugees were therefore, by definition, ‘good.'” Whether Soviet scientists or Vietnamese boat people, refugees were happily received by the United States, Western Europe and other countries. Indeed, during the 1970s, some 2 million people from Indochina found a home in the West. (Though the United States, it should be pointed out, never rolled out the red carpet to the victims of its interventions in Central America.)
With the end of the cold war, millions of people living under former Communist rule could move more freely, whether out of fear of repression and civil war or in the hope of economic opportunity. Mass migration, free and forced, has always been a central element of capitalism, from the Europeans who colonized the Americas in the seventeenth century to the Indians who settled in Africa in the nineteenth. Once the Communist world succumbed to the free market, that economic migration accelerated–though not, Moorehead writes, as much as we might think. “Most people today, as in the past, are not mobile. Somewhere between 2 and 3 percent of the world’s population can be counted as international migrants…the proportion is no higher and no lower than at any time in the last fifty years.” Still, the promise of economic betterment–and the need for cheap labor–remains a potent lure, reinforced by the threat or reality of persecution and violence in the Third World.
Released from the constraints of the cold war, prosperous nations have devised more elaborate measures to control, limit and regulate this movement of peoples. (Ironically, for all the recent talk of global flows, the cold war may have paved wider lanes of traffic.) Racism and xenophobia are, of course, permanent fixtures of immigration politics, albeit in varying degrees of intensity. But the end of the cold war allowed Western governments to indulge an image of the refugee as an economic and cultural parasite–crawling across or burrowing beneath the border in order to sap the nation’s affluence and identity. September 11 and the “war on terror” have only hardened this impulse. “The whole notion of security, once seen as a matter of keeping refugees safe…has shifted. Now it is the refugees themselves who are seen to pose the danger.”
Australia has been the leader of this trend, as Moorehead shows, establishing “one of the most exclusionary immigration policies of any democracy” in the world. Where most countries sell their beaches, nightlife or mountains to potential tourists, the Australian government has distributed a video depicting an island continent “inhabited by poisonous snakes, fearsome crocodiles, and man-eating sharks.” In 2001 the government instituted “the Pacific Solution,” in which trespassers would be intercepted at sea and deposited in Indonesia or transferred to “off-shore processing centers.” Under no circumstances would they be allowed on Australian soil and thereby gain access to the courts. Deprived of all hope–and traditional implements of self-destruction–detainees have been known to sew up their lips or drink whole bottles of shampoo.
On the Mexican border, US officials have built sharp slopes along canals separating the two countries, making it difficult for anyone to climb out on the American side. The Clinton Administration launched a succession of militarized endeavors–Operation Blockade, Operation Hold the Line, Operation Gatekeeper–in the name of “prevention through deterrence.” As a result, migrants and refugees now swim across rivers teeming with typhoid, cholera, and hepatitis, “holding their breaths under submerged bridges and along a twenty-foot culvert.” Between 1994 and 2001, at least 1,700 migrants from Mexico died trying to reach the United States. Throughout its entire existence, by contrast, exactly 171 people died trying to cross the Berlin wall.
For all its pretensions to liberalism and openness, Western Europe has hardly been more welcoming. (Moorehead cites the case of one refugee in Britain leaving a suicide note that read, “You have to kill yourself in this country to prove that you would be killed in your own country.”) In response, many Africans have attempted to sail surreptitiously across the Mediterranean in vessels the Phoenicians would have scuttled long ago.
On a stormy night in September 2002, to cite just one of Moorehead’s examples, a boat built to carry fifteen people went down less than 100 meters off Sicily’s southern coast. As tourists danced unknowingly at a popular bar on the beach, thirty-five of the 150 Liberians on board drowned and twenty more disappeared. Watching the bloated bodies float to shore over a period of days was gruesome enough. But what truly haunted Vera Sciortino, a local resident, was the thought of hungry fish feeding on the corpses. The inverse of little Oskar Matzerath’s mother in The Tin Drum–so filled with disgust upon seeing a horse’s head writhing with eels that she begins to eat fish obsessively–Vera was never able to eat fish again.
It would be some comfort if we could confine the misery of life on the move to Western Europe, North America and Australia. But as Moorehead reminds us, 90 percent of all refugees remain in the region of their birth, and Iran, Pakistan and Tanzania receive the most refugees of any country in the world. Not surprisingly, these and other governments are just as reluctant–and certainly less able, economically–to absorb people from abroad.
Cairo, the mise-en-scene of Human Cargo, is “a staging post” for “Africa’s displaced people…a step on a journey that should, but seldom does, move from terror to safety.” As they wait for the gates of Fortress Europe or North America to open, refugees and migrants from Liberia and Sudan are hassled and beaten by the Egyptian police, robbed in the streets and forced to stand in lines at immigration centers that would make the most harried holiday shopper blanch–only to find at the end of the day that the store has closed or run out of goods. For many migrants, homelessness turns out to be a kind of salvation: Only in Cairo’s uncharted slums and squats can they be somewhat assured of protection from the police.
In southern Lebanon Palestinian refugees suffer from the racism of their hosts, which keeps them out of jobs and power, and from the fear among the Lebanese that this largely Muslim refugee population will upset the country’s delicate confessional balance. Forbidden to expand their refugee camps “outward,” Palestinians are forced to build Manhattans of misery out of cinder blocks and scraps of tin: “Much of the inner camp [of Shatila] is almost completely dark, the daylight reduced to a pale glimmer by the overarching buildings and the canopy of wires that dangle not far above the head. Windows open onto walls.” Where migrants to New York City like my grandfather could look out such windows and see the world, Palestine’s refugees gaze out on a road to nowhere.
Like Moorehead, Seyla Benhabib, a professor of political science and philosophy at Yale, writes out of a moral concern for the rights of refugees and migrants and the wrongs done to them. To this she adds a refreshingly cosmopolitan vision of travel and association between and among different peoples. Unlike Moorehead, though, Benhabib is a political theorist, whose profession requires a certain abstraction from the concrete and often ugly details of the refugee experience. If Moorehead’s credo is no ideas but in things, Benhabib’s, by necessity, is no things but in ideas.
Lest readers assume that the first enterprise is more to their liking, Benhabib’s The Rights of Others shows–unflinchingly, astutely and bravely–that immigration remains such a pitched battle in the West because it is part of a larger war of ideas, fought between two contending, even morally attractive, ideals. On the one side are the rights of democratic polities to govern themselves. On the other are the rights of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants to enter, remain and ultimately join those polities as full and equal members.
In many ways, this conflict is a version of the old debate between liberalism and democracy, between a commitment to universal rights, which cannot be challenged or overturned, and a vision of mass participation, which puts everything, even rights, up to a vote. But when liberal universalists–or libertarians and free marketers–square off against populist democrats over immigration, seemingly innocent moral positions can assume toxic political form. One side bends toward the dissolution of all borders, toward an international regime that would protect rights everywhere, inviting charges of despotism and imperialism. The other slouches toward national chauvinism, insisting that the people have a right to preserve “their way of life” from intruding others.
Benhabib argues that the second camp–which includes a surprisingly wide array of defenders in academia–makes a series of mistakes. Beyond ignoring the fact that most nations have already committed themselves, by treaty, to welcoming refugees and asylum seekers (though not economic migrants), many populists assume that the nation has a fixed identity, that its mix of customs, habits and history is indivisible and unchanging rather than conflicted and in flux.
Immigrants and refugees, in this view, threaten rather than renew or enrich a people. But “peoplehood,” Benhabib reminds us, “is an aspiration; it is not a fact.” A list of titles from the past three decades–Eugen Weber’s Peasants Into Frenchmen, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White and Rogers Smith’s Stories of Peoplehood–echoes her argument that nations are made, not born, and that stories and myths, laws and institutions, are the necessary instruments of their making.
The most noxious element of the populist position, according to Benhabib, is that it dissolves the ideal of democracy in the illusions of blood, ethnicity and sameness. As all of us learned in high school or college, early Americans–like Americans today–were fundamentally divided about questions of power and authority. It was not their common racial stock but divisive conflicts among them, and between them and those who did not share their ethnicity or heritage, that set the nation on its faltering and unsteady march toward greater freedom and equality. Democracy is thus a political art, Benhabib observes, not a cultural or racial inheritance. Just as nothing in the literature or veins of a nation predisposes it to democracy, nothing in the immigrant precludes him or her from contributing to democracy.
In fact, one could argue–and Benhabib does–that immigrants sustain and expand democracy by fighting for rights and broadening popular notions of “we, the people.” This point was brought home to me one Saturday eight years ago, when I was organizing in Los Angeles around several items on the ballot: a referendum on bilingual education, another on the political contributions of labor unions and a city council election. Walking door to door with a Spanish-speaking hotel worker from Guatemala, I listened to her explain to her neighbors the ins and outs of American electoral law, the powers of local versus state governments and the US Constitution. The irony was not lost on me: Not only do immigrants deepen democracy; they sometimes understand its substance and procedures better than its native proponents do.
But if Benhabib refuses to join the second camp, she is also wary of the first. Though she finds the notion of a world without borders morally attractive, she fears that its political embodiment could be dangerous. Inherent in the idea of democracy, she argues, is that the authors of the law should be its subjects and that the subjects of the law should be its authors. Unless we imagine a world government or international-rights regime–which would radically dilute the power each individual exercises over and through her national government–we have to accept that democracy requires a territorially bounded space. As she points out, where “empires have frontiers,” extending as far as the metropolis can rule, “democracies have borders.”
Benhabib’s understanding of democracy as a territorially bounded unit does pose some problems, which she herself acknowledges. On the one hand, she favors a liberal immigration regime of “porous” but not “open” borders–where, first, asylum seekers and refugees, and second, migrants (in that order of preference) would be allowed to enter a country and, after a specified period of time, offered the opportunity to join it as citizens. But given her commitment to democratic deliberation–and the likelihood that many people would reject her preferred regime–how can Benhabib insist upon that regime, over and against the expressed wishes of the people? On the other hand, if those who are subject to a nation’s laws should be its authors, why shouldn’t immigrants have a say in formulating those laws? Surely no one is more subject to those laws than they.
Benhabib’s solution is to insist that all nations, particularly democracies, must ground their immigration policies in standards of argument and justification that everyone–including the immigrant–would accept as reasonable. These are standards that “you would accept if you were in my situation and I were in yours” and that treat men and women as individuals capable of rational debate and justification. Because these ideals of reciprocity and rational justification are the moral underpinning of liberal democracy, such democracies must not stray from them in their immigration policies.
What this means in practice is that no democracy can bar people from entering or, if they have already entered, from becoming citizens, because of their “race, gender, religion, ethnicity, language community, or sexuality.” Criteria like these would not be acceptable to all peoples. Nor do such criteria treat an immigrant or potential immigrant as someone who can enter a rational discussion with us.
At the same time, nations can require immigrants to “show certain qualifications, skills, and resources.” Because everyone can understand why a nation would need or want people with those skills or resources, these criteria would be acceptable to everyone. Nations can also establish “language competence” and “a certain proof of civic literacy” as conditions, where applicable, for entry or citizenship. Such criteria “do not deny” an immigrant’s capacity for dialogue or rationality. On the contrary, their very premise recognizes that capacity. Democratic debate over immigration may not be a free-for-all, then, but it does leave room for disagreement.
From Benhabib’s earliest work on Habermas and the Frankfurt School, her high standard of argument and justification has always been the best advertisement for a certain kind of cosmopolitan liberalism. There is likewise much to admire in this book, not least her willingness to give sound reasons for her positions. But The Rights of Others raises questions, at least for me, that need to be answered.
For starters, why should linguistic competence be a factor–or acceptable as an item of democratic debate–in determining citizenship? As my comrade for a day in Los Angeles would attest, a non-English speaker in the United States not only can get and hold down a job; she can also turn out the vote. Why should a non-English speaker be allowed to mobilize for American democracy but not to join it as a citizen?
Conversely, why should we require “a certain proof of civic literacy” for immigrants seeking to become citizens? I know a great many native-born Americans who could not pass such a test. Why should immigrants have to prove that which the native-born need not–and, in some cases, could not–prove? Doesn’t this double standard assume the very view that Benhabib so skillfully takes apart elsewhere in her book, namely, that Americans take in democracy with their mother’s milk?
While the economic criteria Benhabib accepts–“qualifications, skills, and resources”–avoid the ascriptive criteria of race and gender she rejects (though the two may be more closely linked in practice, a point I shall return to shortly), it’s not clear that these criteria stand the test of reciprocity she favors. Would a poor immigrant really accept the stringent economic qualifications that a middle-class citizen has voted for? Would she accept the underlying reasons for those justifications? Would an unemployed worker in a rich country accept the liberal immigration regime that a wealthy employer in that same country has lobbied for? Could each of us–citizen and immigrant, rich and poor, employer and employee–find a position that all of us would accept? I doubt it.
And what would such economic criteria look like in practice? Only people with advanced computer skills or a college degree need apply? Only those who have held down a job for five years can stay and become citizens? (The more likely scenario, of course, is that the employing classes of a prosperous country will favor liberal immigration policies–or allow, with a nod and a wink, millions of undocumented workers to cross the border in order to staff the bottom tiers of the economy.) It’s ironic that a regime implementing Benhabib’s criteria of “marketable skills” could prove more restrictive than the United States that allowed my grandfather into this country a century ago.
Benhabib could reply that yesterday’s United States is not today’s, that America in 1900 required millions of uneducated workers from Eastern and Southern Europe and East and Southeast Asia in order to build its expanding industrial economy. She might be right, but that only raises a deeper, more troubling, question: Has Benhabib offered a critique of society or–in some important respects–merely reflected it? How far does her theory, with its stringent opposition to policies of ascription and mild toleration of economic exclusions, depart from contemporary norms? Though I doubt that Benhabib personally would favor economic exclusions–she claims that democracies can institute them, not that she would support them–it says something about our moment that they can be accepted, without much argument, as the inevitable price of democracy.
There was a time when nothing so vexed left-liberals as how to justify such economic distinctions–not in the realm of immigration policies but in capitalism’s distribution of resources. Facing worker activism at home and then communist insurgencies abroad, theorists from John Stuart Mill to T.H. Marshall to John Rawls were forced either to defend the inequalities of capitalism or to offer some program for their amelioration and gradual abolition. Through their efforts, classical liberalism was nudged, ever so slowly, toward something approaching social democracy.
Benhabib has neither forgotten nor abandoned this heritage. In one section of her book, she discusses the inequalities of the international political economy, arguing that prosperous nations often accumulate their wealth through the misery of poorer nations–a fact, as she points out, that Rawls never confronted in his discussions of global economic justice. But the inferences Benhabib draws–and doesn’t draw–from this discussion suggest the contemporary weakness of that heritage. In countering the claims of Rawlsian leftists that the globe’s resources and assets should be redistributed in order to benefit the world’s “least advantaged,” Benhabib writes that we lack “clear and non-controversial judgments about who is to count as ‘the least advantaged’ member of society.” Yet even more controversy surrounds the ascriptive identities she wishes to take off the table. (Controversy would also surround, were they subject to genuine international debate, the economic criteria that Benhabib argues everyone would accept.) Why does one controversy inspire her to push and another to pull?
More important, Benhabib derives no moral conclusion about immigration policy from these international inequities. Distinguishing between economic and ascriptive criteria in theory, she overlooks how they are intertwined in practice–in part because of the very history of slavery and imperialism that she discusses. Race and class have made a witch’s brew of inequality in the United States, and many of the poorest classes in today’s Europe hail from its former colonies in Africa and the Middle East. If I understand Benhabib’s criteria correctly, it would not be unreasonable for Europe to refuse entry or deny citizenship to these men and women and their families on economic grounds, even though the motivation or effect of such refusals could be entirely skewed by the color of their skin.
Whether or not Benhabib’s distinction holds up in reality, shouldn’t the mere fact that the United States has ravaged its neighbors to the south play some role in its decisions about whether to accept economic migrants from that region? Shouldn’t the misery that Western Europe imposed upon Africa and elsewhere figure in the moral calculus of its immigration policies? Shouldn’t these histories of exploitation at least mitigate the “qualifications, skills, and resources” that wealthier countries require of newcomers? As South Asians and Caribbeans in Britain used to say, “We are here because you were there.”
Benhabib and Moorehead both show that people flee not only persecution and civil war but also poverty and destitution. That this reality–and the contributions of Western Europe and the United States to it–is not reflected in our contemporary immigration regimes or in the work of our best theorists is a problem. I wish I could say that it was Benhabib’s alone. Sadly, I think it’s ours, too.
{ 284 comments }
Watson Ladd 11.09.14 at 5:41 pm
Here in CA, we’ve abandoned the idea of “Americanizing” Mexican immigrants. The foundation of national myth-making has been replaced by a multicultural education that invites Spanish-speaking residents not to see themselves as citizens of an empire of liberty, but rather as a having multiple, equally important identities. How does this affect the idea of nation-making today?
Expanding legal immigration would benefit a lot of people. We should do it. But that remains true even if Mexico tolerates corruption not because of the US, but because the Mexican state doesn’t understand how to end corruption. The most worrisome part of the anti-immigration argument is that this might be due to cultural factors that will resist change, just as the Mafia survives in the US today. To me this is outweighed by the economic benefits. But I can’t say that the process of assimilation that took place for European immigrants then will work today.
hix 11.09.14 at 6:07 pm
The strange thing about Australian asylum policy is that refugees who make it onto Australian territory do get granted asylum in 90% of the cases, at least according to Handelsblatt.
Bloix 11.09.14 at 8:52 pm
It is common ground that people have a fundamental right to travel and to live in any country that is willing to have them. There is no such agreement that people have a right to travel to countries that do not want to admit them.
That is, it’s universally accepted in law and custom that a state that doesn’t permit its people to leave is an illegitimate police state, but it’s just as broadly accepted that control over entry is a fundamental right of all nation-states. There is a narrow exception in international law for certain types of refugees, but in the main the right to control entry is as well-established as the illegitimacy of restrictions on exit.
A tiny number of people, represented by some of the bloggers on this blog, argue that international law and time-honored custom are immoral and that there’s no principled way to distinguish between entry and exit. Which is fine – I accept that the issue is up for argument. And you may even be right!
What’s not fine is the failure to acknowledge the difference between a universally accepted principle and one that, however much you personally may believe it, is widely rejected by people of good faith.
Germany, for example, exercises strict controls on non-EU immigration. Would anyone like to argue that Germans are being hypocritical in celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall?
novakant 11.09.14 at 9:08 pm
I find the parallels between the Berlin Wall and current border regimes rather strained to say the least. There is no need to weaken worthwhile and important arguments regarding immigration policy with such facile historical comparisons.
engels 11.09.14 at 9:16 pm
Would anyone like to argue that Germans are being hypocritical in celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall?
Somewhat tangential but fyi not all of them are celebrating:
http://www.pewglobal.org/2009/11/02/chapter-5-views-of-german-reunification/
js. 11.09.14 at 9:20 pm
Hypocrisy is a weird charge that I have trouble understanding—I almost never level it. But yes, it seems inconsistent and problematic. What would be the problem with arguing that?
Sebastian H 11.09.14 at 9:22 pm
The analogy between the Berlin wall and Israel/Palestine is hard to see. Most people can distinguish between the walls of a prison and the walls of one’s house. Even if you believe the Palestinians really own the house and Israelis should leave, the problem isn’t with the walls but rather with the inhabitants. Believing that you shouldn’t run such a shitty country that you need to build walls to keep your people in doesn’t obviously translate into the idea that you can’t ever keep anyone out. Strangely the cited article and this post seem to assume that everyone will agree both ideas are identical (all walls bad).
engels 11.09.14 at 9:26 pm
It is common ground that people have a fundamental right to travel and to live in any country that is willing to have them. There is no such agreement that people have a right to travel to countries that do not want to admit them.
.Cuba Travel Restrictions: A brief overview of the U.S. government’s longstanding ban on most travel to Cuba
engels 11.09.14 at 9:38 pm
Sebastian rehearses the libertarian catechism. There are good walls and bad walls, guns that put you in danger and guns that make you safe, prisons that make people unfree and prisons that make people freer…
Brett Bellmore 11.09.14 at 9:41 pm
I guess the liberal catechism would be that all walls are bad, but I very much doubt that liberals habitually leave the doors to their homes unlocked.
Sebastian H 11.09.14 at 9:53 pm
Libertarianism is a pretty minor sub-philosophy with very few adherents, though some of its insights seem to be catching on (see the end, we hope, of the drug war).
If your philosophy can’t support the distinction between good walls and bad walls you’ve written off pretty much all of the human race. I suspect the idea that all walls are bad has fewer believers even than libertarianism…
Passing By 11.09.14 at 9:53 pm
East Germany was such an ugly society that it needed fences and guards to keep people in. The U.S. is such an attractive society that it needs fences and guards to keep people out.
Yep … parallel situations
Mdc 11.09.14 at 10:00 pm
Open borders are still…borders. Once they are granted, the rest is inside baseball.
Rich Puchalsky 11.09.14 at 10:00 pm
“East Germany was such an ugly society that it needed fences and guards to keep people in. The U.S. is such an attractive society that it needs fences and guards to keep people out.”
Actually, no. A large majority of people are more comfortable living in their home society than anywhere else. There generally won’t be large-scale migration unless their home society is highly dysfunctional. So I wouldn’t say it’s that the U.S. is doing so well, it’s that Mexico and many places in Central America are doing very badly.
js. 11.09.14 at 10:09 pm
The distinction between constraints on entry and constraints on exit is not terribly relevant here. Here’s what CB wrote (and Corey quoted)—and note what’s being remembered:
Am I then to take it that if the people shot were people trying to enter DDR, Bloix, Sebastian H, et al. would be praising the valor and bravery—or at least the moral dedication—of the East German guards?
Robespierre 11.09.14 at 10:47 pm
I wouldn’t say Germans are being hypocritical, because the situations are different. As analogies go, the wall was a prison, borders are international apartheid.
Omega Centauri 11.09.14 at 11:02 pm
Interestingly East Germany was worried about a potential brain drain, i.e. a small but important subpopulation with irreplaceable skills might preferentially leave. That differs from situation of experiencing a mass exodus of people. Now often (but not always) immigration controls strive to do the opposite -give me your economic superstars, leave your economic losers at home.
In reality there are hoards of reasons, which make the issue difficult in practice. In some sense the residents of a given jurisdiction benefit from local infrastructure which has been built up over decades to centuries. Who has a legitimate claim on a portion of that infrastructure? Is legitimacy given because of place of birth, citizenship of ones parents, payment of services or ??? What happens if the immigration demand greatly exceeds the ability of the society to accept it? Do we let a liberal policy prevail until the political penduleum swings dangerously nativist, or do we try to constrain the social pressures at some level the body politic considers unthreatening? Do we let a society that has reached sustainability be overwhelmed by those that haven’t?
From the standpoint of an individual any controls are arbitrary. Take the Austrailian situation as an example, get intercepted at sea, and you have virtually no rights, put a foot ashore and you have high a probablity of being allowed to stay. Obviously that change of status has little correlation to individual merit.
engels 11.09.14 at 11:06 pm
Palestinians break open illegal apartheid wall 25 years after Berlin Wall fall
cassander 11.09.14 at 11:20 pm
@Rich Puchalsky
>actually, no. A large majority of people are more comfortable living in their home society than anywhere else.
this is generally true, which is why the story of the berlin wall is so remarkable and so terrible. there were only about 19 million people living in east germany in 1950, and more than 3.5 million of them fled before the wall went up. people have a massive status quo bias, which is why when fully 1/5 of them flee, you know the situation is extremely terrible.
Dave Heasman 11.09.14 at 11:20 pm
“You glance away, your house has disappeared..”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzmlGz8hmaY
otoh I’d rather the population of the UK wasn’t enlarged by the entire number of people who would like to migrate here.
Tabasco 11.09.14 at 11:23 pm
Mexican border guards are shooting Mexicans who want to go the United States? You really do learn something new every day.
Tabasco 11.09.14 at 11:31 pm
Cassander 19
The numbers fleeing East German were a special case, because they were fleeing from one part of Germany to another. They were hardly fleeing to an alien environment. In fact in many if not most cases they were fleeing from one part of Berlin to another. It wasn’t even fleeing from Brooklyn to Manhattan; it was more like fleeing from 5th Avenue to 6th Avenue.
gianni 11.09.14 at 11:34 pm
You silly liberals. Don’t you realize that we have to send Central American children back to their homeland warzones, and let the African migrants capsize and drown in the Med Sea? Anything less would writing off the whole human race.
I support the forcible deportation and/or jailing of migrants for humanitarian reasons.
Don’t you people lock the doors to your car when you go to the grocery store? Well then how can you take issue with our immigration policy!?! Hypocrites! I see that white picket fence in your front lawn “to keep ToTo from getting into the street”. A likely story!
Do you live in a house, or just a lean-to? Houses have walls idiots! CHECKMATE HAAHHAHA!
christian_h 11.10.14 at 1:27 am
Bloix’s contention that it is “universally accepted” that a state that does not allow people to leave is “an illegitimate police state” is demonstrably false. It was false historically just about everywhere in the world; it was false during the time the DDR (a state I am not shedding a single tear for, in case it has to be said) existed since it – in the usual liberal move – declares the particular behind Western liberal ideology to be universal; and it is false today even for the so-called liberal democracies themselves that are regulating travel of their citizens as we speak.
Also js. points out correctly that Bloix, Sebastian et al are missing the point of this post, which is to question the use of deadly force (by commission or omission) to interdict the movement of people.
christian_h 11.10.14 at 1:33 am
As for Sebastian H, Israel does manifestly control travel abroad of the Palestinian populations whose fate it controls, in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem – whether by preventing people from leaving altogether (as in Gaza) or by keeping them from leaving by making it impossible for them to return (the DDR called this “Ausbürgerung”, taking away citizenship of citizens who left illegally) as is routinely done to Palestinian residents of Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Ronan(rf) 11.10.14 at 1:43 am
I would say the comparison between East Germany and Israel/Palestine is pretty apt, except that it underplays the amount of control the Israeli state/security services exert over Palestinians (which makes East Germany look like a walk in the park, afaict)
engels 11.10.14 at 2:18 am
Interview with Ex-Stasi Agent: ‘The Scope of NSA Surveillance Surprised Me’
engels 11.10.14 at 2:21 am
Businessweek: ‘the economic performance of the former Eastern bloc has been[,] for some countries, worse than under communism’
bianca steele 11.10.14 at 2:57 am
On the numbers: the quote from Benhabib above seems to include only those shot crossing into West Berlin. The border was, obviously, much longer than that:
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin wall [as of 2011], there is no consensus about the number of people who died or were killed attempting to flee the GDR. The number of fatalities ranges from 270 (with 136 in Berlin alone) to over 1,000. After the fortification of the Hungarian border in the mid-1960s, only 300 people managed to escape the East bloc to Austria, and over 13,000 were detained by Hungarian authorities attempting to do so. (from Johnson, Central Europe)
The numbers also don’t show how many got across the US/Mexico border successfully, as opposed to how many were killed by US forces, how many died of natural or unnatural causes, and how many were detained and sent back alive. Sorry to be pedantic. I’m just a sucker for the eye-catching but misleading factoid that in fact has nothing to do with the argument but sidetracks debate entirely.
And somewhat like Rich, I think, it seems to me odd to celebrate, here, the depopulation of the Mexican countryside and its transplantation to dispersed points in a different country. The idea that the countryside can be allowed to become uninhabitable, but it’s okay if there are jobs of some sort in the city, however bad that city life might be, has a long history, but I didn’t think it was considered a positive one.
bianca steele 11.10.14 at 2:57 am
Oops, the second paragraph was supposed to be a blockquote.
Bernard Yomtov 11.10.14 at 3:14 am
Rich Puchalsky,
A large majority of people are more comfortable living in their home society than anywhere else. There generally won’t be large-scale migration unless their home society is highly dysfunctional. So I wouldn’t say it’s that the U.S. is doing so well, it’s that Mexico and many places in Central America are doing very badly.
Isn’t it actually the gap, the voltage, so to speak, that causes migration?
Corey Robin 11.10.14 at 3:17 am
Bianca: “the quote from Benhabib above seems to include only those shot crossing into West Berlin. …Sorry to be pedantic. I’m just a sucker for the eye-catching but misleading factoid that in fact has nothing to do with the argument but sidetracks debate entirely. And somewhat like Rich, I think, it seems to me odd to celebrate, here, the depopulation of the Mexican countryside and its transplantation to dispersed points in a different country.”
Sigh. If only you were as pedantic as you think you are:
1. It wasn’t Benhabib who had that statistic; it was Caroline Moorehead.
2. Re “seems to include only those shot crossing into West Berlin.” Yes, that’s why the text plainly says, in black and white, “Berlin Wall.”
3. Even if you include the entirety of East Germany, for the entirety of the period under discussion, the number of deaths of those fleeing that regime is still much less than the number of deaths of those fleeing Mexico during a much shorter period of time. The numbers I cite stop in 2001. According to Wikipedia, in 2012 *alone*, the US Border Patrol found the bodies of nearly 500 migrants along the border. You want to compare casualties border to border for comparable units of time? Be my guest.
4. As for celebrating the depopulation of the Mexican countryside, if you read through to the last four paragraphs of my piece, you’d see how groundless that claim is.
bianca steele 11.10.14 at 3:41 am
Corey:
1: You’re right, sorry.
2 & 3: I guess whether my comment was relevant depends on the point the statistic was initially intended to support, which I’m not sure I grasp. Was it that people who want to migrate are being turned back, or that people who want to migrate are being turned back by force? In either case, those isolated numbers don’t prove much. I suppose I also don’t know how many people who die crossing the border–the numbers include those who die before they reach the border, though, don’t they?–are dying because the border is closed. People didn’t die crossing the Hungarian-Austrian border in part because the climate wasn’t as harsh, the roads were better, there was clean water and safe food en route, and so on. If people fleeing East Germany tended to starve on the road, other people would be less likely to flee. That doesn’t stop people leaving Mexico because the conditions there are worse. The same bad conditions result in more deaths. I’m not clear on what people are envisioning as an alternative: buses to line up in the villages and transport everyone who wants to get on, gang members and all, to the barrios of LA? The border to stop working the other way, and US corporations to buy up Mexican land, and US courts and US police also? Neither of those seems like a great solution.
4. I’m not accusing you of celebrating the depopulation of Mexico. I am, however, surprised by the idealization of mobility. My grandparents and great-grandparents were immigrants, too. Yet they were, strangely, happy to see their children and grandchildren continue to live within a few dozen miles of where they’d grown up.
Herostraus 11.10.14 at 3:45 am
Although I get the point that many commenters are making, that there are walls and then there are walls, I’d like to push back a little against the idea that it’s a universal, assumed, and natural right in history for a country to admit only those individuals it actively vets and permits.
In history, you can usually live wherever you want. A case could be made that that’s a natural human right. Obviously you’re subject to the local laws. (And customs, and if a local custom is to kill people of your tribe, that’s a problem, but not the the kind of problem we’re discussing here.) Banishment is a valid sentence, but only as punishment for actual crime or misdemeanor and (I think) applying as much to natives as foreigners.
In the United States, anybody from anywhere could come live here until the first immigration laws were passed, not much over a century ago. And that’s been the general rule in most places in most times, I think. There just wasn’t the the structure of papers and permits and border posts and whatnot, I don’t think. (Mass immigrations, as of whole tribes, might be treated differently, as with a battle, I suppose.)
As a practical matter, just recently in the modern world, with modern travel technology and modern population sizes and so forth, maybe things need to be somewhat different. Maybe. Somewhat. But people have have always flowed like water and are as hard to stop, and to the extent that we are now forced to try to end that, we are rolling back a natural human right established throughout history. So we shouldn’t be all to sure of ourselves, there.
Corey Robin 11.10.14 at 3:49 am
“I am, however, surprised by the idealization of mobility.”
In an article that begins with an anecdote about my grandfather and his family fleeing a pogrom in Odessa? That talks about Liberians drowning off the shores of Sicily? Of immigrants to Australia sewing up their lips and downing bottles of shampoo?
Corey Robin 11.10.14 at 3:57 am
Herostraus: “In the United States, anybody from anywhere could come live here until the first immigration laws were passed, not much over a century ago.”
My colleague at Brooklyn College, Anna Law, is writing a book showing that this is a common misconception. States had tremendous control over immigration throughout the nineteenth century. And of course, there’s the whole problem of Native Americans for your claim.
bianca steele 11.10.14 at 4:05 am
I had in mind largely Chris Bertram’s post, which you linked to (and seemed to wish the freedoms enjoyed by the rich and middle class to be available as well to the poor), and the history of discussions on CT of migration policy in general, as possibly did js. @ 15 and christian_h @ 23, to go back only that far.
The problems in Mexico and the fraughtness of its relationship with the US almost certainly seem mostly independent of Central American policy. It would be nice if the victims of Pinochet could get asylum in the US, but I didn’t think that was the issue w/r/t open borders, is it?
Corey Robin 11.10.14 at 4:12 am
In between Mexico and Chile are nine countries. A fair number of them are in Central America. Many of their citizens live terrible lives, in part due to the history of US involvement in that region, and many of them seek to flee north. (I mention one such individual in my article.) How do you think they get to the US? By flying Jet Blue?
Corey Robin 11.10.14 at 4:20 am
“I had in mind largely Chris Bertram’s post, which you linked to (and seemed to wish the freedoms enjoyed by the rich and middle class to be available as well to the poor),…”
Whereas you think justice requires that freedoms enjoyed by the rich and middle class should be denied to the poor?
Chris M 11.10.14 at 4:26 am
The killings at the Berlin Wall had to with the state’s desire to force people to stay inside the state. If you see another state or organization doing this, I think it’s fair to draw parallels between the two situations. However, if you draw parallels between the Berlin Wall deaths and deaths that occur for other reasons at the border of two countries, I don’t think there’s any substantive similarity.
bianca steele 11.10.14 at 4:27 am
Yes, it’s late, and I’m still sick (and this will be my last post tonight), and I read “US involvement” and thought “Pinochet.” ISTM that the problems in Central America, are only in part due to direct US intervention, even if you include the war on drugs and US demand for drugs which encourages the growth of narcocartels. Some of the problems are similar to those in Mexico, probably: the US can’t intervene in a positive way because imperialism and even if there were an alternative, it would probably involve low-level hostility with the US from a position of disadvantage. Also, I’ve only heard of people coming from CA through Mexico, entirely by a ground route, in large numbers fairly recently–before that I thought potential refugees did often arrive on tourist visas or otherwise by other routes. Maybe that’s not the case. Either way, if the state is failed to the extent that nearly everybody would qualify for refugee status–I mean, from what I’ve heard, a gang takes over a town and everybody else becomes a victim, and if they leave, that’s a bonus–even if the place they want to go isn’t thousands of miles away, I don’t see an easy solution that can be solved by being more compassionate in how we define the right to refugee status.
@38 Really, is that what I said?
Nine 11.10.14 at 4:28 am
Corey Robin@35 – “My colleague at Brooklyn College, Anna Law, is writing a book showing that this is a common misconception.”
Bernard Bailyn says in “The Barbarous Years” that several jurisdictions in England and continental Europe promulgated laws constraining or outright forbidding the migration of “skilled labour”, such as it was at the time, to America.
ZM 11.10.14 at 4:47 am
Corey Robin,
“Whereas you think justice requires that freedoms enjoyed by the rich and middle class should be denied to the poor?”
I fund Chris Bertram’s posts challenging as he seems to favour as a solution to global inequality not having borders between countries. I am not quite sure if this is your opinion too.
For holiday and business mobility I am always saying rich and middle class people are too mobile – airplane trips are not sustainable and should be banned for ghg emissions. If people travel they should go be train or boat instead.
For residential mobility rich and middle class people’s mobility is also a problem as once they decide they like an area it becomes gentrified and the house prices become too expensive for poor people, which makes poor people have to move elsewhere (often to new suburbs) where there is less amenity and they might be distant from their family . The governments at least in Australia refuse to provide infrastructure and services in new suburbs equivalent to that provided in established suburbs.
I don’t see how open borders is a solution to global inequality myself. It seems like it would be quite chaotic and I am not sure if poor people would be better off or not. Poor Migrant labourers are often not treated well, I don’t know that open borders would make this treatment better.
rich and middle class people’s freedoms often come at other people’s expense – so saying since rich people are mobile and like it, therefore poor people should be mobile too, leaves out that the experience is likely going to be qualitatively different. And rich and muddle class people’s freedoms are doing too much damage to the environment – so it us better to constrain these harmful freedoms that to extend them in a chaotic way to everyone.
Inequality between countries would likely be better addressed through transnational redistributive measures similar to redistribution within countries.
Chris Bertram 11.10.14 at 7:06 am
The various people insisting on an important moral distinction between walls that keep people from leaving a country and ones that keep people from entering, presumably therefore believe that if escaping Easterners had been shot by Western border guards, that would have been ok, or, at least, less bad. I have a hard time persuading myself of that proposition.
maidhc 11.10.14 at 7:24 am
The US had very restrictive immigration laws applying to Chinese and other Asians during the second part of the 19th century.
Mexican immigration to the US increased considerably since NAFTA started affecting the Mexican economy. That was before the rise of criminal gangs that have made things in Mexico even worse since.
When the US/Mexican border was more open, people would go back and forth. They would come across to work for a few months, then go back home for a while. A lot of Mexicans would prefer to live in Mexico, but in the old days they would work in the US to earn enough to build a house, buy a truck, etc.
Now the border has been tightened up, once you get across you have to stay because it would be so hard to return. That means people go for years without seeing their family.
Jake 11.10.14 at 7:44 am
44 ignores the fact that governments generally don’t need to shoot people trying to get into your country as they can just arrest and deport them. The CBP isn’t shooting large numbers of Mexicans trying to cross the border.
But the DDR was trying to prevent its citizens from going to West Berlin at which point they would be beyond it’s control; when they wer about to cross the line shooting was the last way to stop them.
See also: prison breakouts vs breakins.
This seems obvious given a moments thought.
david 11.10.14 at 7:58 am
Does the CBP really not shoot at fleeing crossings?
5 cases per year is essentially identical to the Berlin wall’s deaths/year rate (4.8~), and the US figure is only for vehicles!
gianni 11.10.14 at 8:54 am
Regarding interior vs exterior facing walls.
I wonder – if Mexico started themselves preventing people from crossing the border north into the US, and we accept the proposition that ‘interior-facing’ walls are especially evil, what is the proper response then?
Do we continue to post our own guards a couple yards north of theirs, vigorously criticizing their border security as moral monsters while giving our own a decent job and benefits? I guess that is fine, but in practice, on the human level, the two groups of guards are doing the same thing so it probably takes a fair bit of philosophical gymnastics through social contract theory and the like to sort this one out into reasonable coherence.
Or maybe we are now obligated to open the border, because the citizens of Mexico are, per our theory, clearly subject to some sort of authoritarian control now that the extra bad type of wall is in town. Would people be on board with this? Would the apparently common sense distinctions here lead the American public to this position? If this Mexican side wall went up, would US voters be morally at fault for not supporting more liberal immigration policies? Any aspect of the US fence still laying around would seem to be augmenting the effectiveness of the new Mexican fence, which is clearly advancing evil, so by extension the parts of the US border control helping it achieve its aims are complicit with that evil. So the US fence (etc) must go, right?
And none of these even touches on the possibility – what if Mexico (etc.) secretly aspires to East Berlin style containment, but they just don’t have the state capacity/resources. Luckily for them, we are already on the job! Would it change the moral status of Wall X, preventing people from travelling from A –> B, if we one day learned that secretly A is happy that B put up a wall because it helps them contain their citizens?
If someone else can sort these kinds of situations out cleanly, please do. But after thinking a bit more in depth about this presumably simple and natural distinction between the inside facing walls and the outside facing walls, I have to say that I don’t feel like it does much to clarify the moral questions involved.
Vanya 11.10.14 at 9:04 am
Most of Western society is grounded explicitly in the right to exclude people. We have “private” property, and in many parts of the West we are even allowed to use violence to keep people out of our homes and off our property. Even our “public” schools can exclude students based simply on where they live, to say nothing of the importance of our more selective “private” schools, which make a virtue of being exclusive. We organize our labor in such a way that the owners and managers of the company decide who gets to join the company and who does not, workers can’t simply show up and begin working. We worship sports teams that select only the fittest individuals. Our whole lives are organized around trying to gain acceptance to various micro-societies, and then keeping other people out of them. Is it surprising that people who grow up in this society have difficulty with the idea of an inclusve nation state?
areanimator 11.10.14 at 9:31 am
During the Cold War period, refugees and asylum seekers were considered political gold. Anyone braving the border that separated the second World from the First was paraded around as proof of the superiority of the political and ideological system of destination. For East Germany, and the East Bloc in general, each person fleeing to the West was a political defeat, which made restrictions on international movement an issue of vital importance. For the West, each refugee (especially high-profile defectors like athletes, scientists and intellectuals) was a victory.
Nowadays, refugees and asylum seekers have lost this coveted status and are seen as a burden on the economy of the recieving country. There’s no Second World anymore, and thus, no need to pretend like there’s anything else on the line than whether the incoming migrants can support themselves financially and whether “we” can afford to house “them”. Of course, atavisms of the old world order remain, like various conventions on human rights and the obligations of each nation to accept a certain amount of asylum seekers, but I expect them to be made redundant shortly. As Australia has demonstrated, these conventions can be rendered moot if refugees are intercepted in international waters.
areanimator 11.10.14 at 9:35 am
Also, the celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall isn’t celebrating a wall being torn down as much as it is a celebration of the defeat of the socialist bloc. Of course the end of a system of brutal repression and surveillance is something to be celebrated. The subsequent establishment of global neoliberal hegemony (with its concurrent devaluation of the status of the refugee), not so much.
J Thomas 11.10.14 at 10:37 am
#33 Bianca Steele
I’m not clear on what people are envisioning as an alternative: buses to line up in the villages and transport everyone who wants to get on, gang members and all, to the barrios of LA? The border to stop working the other way, and US corporations to buy up Mexican land, and US courts and US police also? Neither of those seems like a great solution.
A long time ago Leo Szilard wrote a short story “The voice of the Dolphin” in which the USA made a deal with Mexico. We let Mexico elect one US senator and a couple of representatives, and Mexico similarly let Americans elect a similar fraction of their legislature. Then with every election the proportions changed, until eventually each Mexican state was represented in the US government like a US state, and the USA had similar representation in the Mexican government. Ignoring the details, the two nations would gradually become one.
I kind of like it. Why To the extent that democracy works, why not use it?
ZM 11.10.14 at 10:45 am
It was in 1989 that current Australian harsh policies towards asylum seekers actually turned in this harsh direction.
Vietnamese boat people had been politically welcomed into Australia previously.
In 1989 Cambodian people fleeing in boats after the Vietnamese army left the country following UN elections were met more hard heartedly, with detention provisions in the 1958 migration act being invoked by the government to detain Cambodian asylum seekers for up to 5 years (tussles between parliament and the judiciary followed, with the government winning by changing the Migration Act to have mandatory detention ).
This was also when the political rhetoric about asylum seekers changed to calling them “economic migrants” with Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke and Senator Gareth Evans calling the Cambodians “economic migrants”.
I wonder if the decision to take this new hardline was in part due to events like the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet world.
The Prime Minister (who you might not know always liked to be filmed crying on television whenever possible) cried on television about Tiananmen Square and then gave protection to 30,000 Chinese people in Australia. But he had no sympathy for Cambodians.
novakant 11.10.14 at 11:11 am
Also, the celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall isn’t celebrating a wall being torn down as much as it is a celebration of the defeat of the socialist bloc. Of course the end of a system of brutal repression and surveillance is something to be celebrated. The subsequent establishment of global neoliberal hegemony (with its concurrent devaluation of the status of the refugee), not so much.
Indeed, amazingly one can celebrate the disintegration of the GDR wholeheartedly, while being highly critical of current neoliberal policies – no hypocrisy here and the comparisons are lame at best.
Nick 11.10.14 at 12:48 pm
Borders that keep people out are wrong, but wrong in a somewhat different way than borders that keep people in. Its a bit like the difference between a shop that refuses to serve Jewish customers, and a law covering a whole district banning any shop from serving Jewish customers. Both wrong, different level of wrongness. If there are only two or three shops and they have the same policy, then they can be functionally equivalent. For example, Egypt and Jordan COULD do much more to permit Palestinians to move in and out of their territory, but since they don’t, Israeli policy imposes the same cost as a no-exit border.
engels 11.10.14 at 1:10 pm
MI5, MI6 and GCHQ ‘spied on lawyers’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29939192
Mass surveillance of social media profiles perfectly legal
http://www.positive-digital.co.uk/who-we-are/our-blog/mass-surveillance-of-social-media-profiles-perfectly-legal-say-reports/
Ze Kraggash 11.10.14 at 1:29 pm
I’m sure someone must have already noted in the comments above that the Berlin Wall didn’t exist in a vacuum; it was a symbol of the Cold War. That’s the context. The cold war had two sides, both imperfect, each producing megatons of their ubiquitous propaganda. This is how preventing people from leaving their state has become, in some people minds, a “universally accepted” manifestation of “illegitimate police state”, while, say, chronic homelessness just a minor characteristic of a perfectly legitimate free-liberal-democratic-etc one.
engels 11.10.14 at 1:35 pm
‘Indeed, amazingly one can celebrate the disintegration of the GDR wholeheartedly, while being highly critical of current neoliberal policies – no hypocrisy here and the comparisons are lame at best.’
Indeed one can oppose everything equally whilst denying that anything is in any way comparable to anything else- I’m sure it gives one a tremendous sense of well-being.
Barry 11.10.14 at 1:40 pm
Sebastian: “Even if you believe the Palestinians really own the house and Israelis should leave, the problem isn’t with the walls but rather with the inhabitants. ”
D*mn, but you contradict yourself in the same sentence. At least put a period in between.
hix 11.10.14 at 2:09 pm
East Germany was not entirely wrong about one thing: There was a substanical risk of education effort* free riding in an open border situation. Consider just how geographic close and cultural similar those 2 countries were in that context. And the west sort of conceeded that by “buying” some easterners for differing price tags depending on their formal education type.
*No, life expectancy in east Germany was not higher, it was a lot lower, but one thing is true: Their school and University system delivered far supirior results compared to the west.
Jesús Couto Fandiño 11.10.14 at 3:18 pm
Seeing lots of comments that make me wish many people find themselves in the near future trapped with a hopeless situation in a country going to the toilet, fast, and a humongous barrier, both physical and of hatred and callousness, to have to jump to have a hope of a chance of giving their families and loved ones a decent life.
I bet you 100 $ that you would not be caring one single bit about anything like the legality of it or the fact that you are “not wanted” (funny, somehow nobody wants you but everybody is willing to hire you for a pitance…) or how you are a carrier of an inferior culture or whatever once the choice is between legal hopelessness and illegal hope.
Rich Puchalsky 11.10.14 at 3:23 pm
maidhc @ 45: “When the US/Mexican border was more open, people would go back and forth.”
Yes. One need not approve of “all walls are bad” to see that the problem is not only in restricting permanent immigration.
(Paging Bruce Wilder) one might think that part of the job of the left-of-center coalition in the U.S. should be protecting the U.S. working class from labor competition from countries with cheaper costs-of-living, for electoral reasons if nothing else. But in that case, going along with that protection has to be barriers to free movement of capital and barriers to “free trade”. Allowing the elites to walk their assets freely across the border and poor Mexican or Central American workers not to does not seem to me to be a moral or sustainable state of affairs.
engels 11.10.14 at 3:24 pm
1 in 3 Americans are on file in the FBI’s criminal database
http://factually.gizmodo.com/1-in-3-americans-are-on-file-in-the-fbis-criminal-datab-1649101073
Bloix 11.10.14 at 4:12 pm
#61 – the argument on this thread is on the level of eat your spinach, don’t you know there are children starving in Africa?
MPAVictoria 11.10.14 at 4:47 pm
I keep going back and forth on this issue and really have nothing intelligent to add. So I will just say that I have enjoyed all the comments and feel like I am learning something.
So thank you.
Map Maker 11.10.14 at 5:00 pm
I dunno, +170 dead trying to cross the Berlin wall during its 30 years vs. +170 killed or wounded at Disney World in the past 30 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidents_at_Walt_Disney_World
bianca steele 11.10.14 at 5:01 pm
J Thomas @ 52: Really? We should rewrite the laws to fit a whimsical science fiction story written by a physicist who’d lived in the US . . . how long? By a Hungarian who proposed that the US treat Mexico the way Austria (eventually) treated his country?
I do suppose that the idea that nationality functions like class is true, to the extent that people living in a rich country get to stay in their homes and on their farms, and so on, while the people living in poorer countries “get to” travel far from home to live in slums and work in poorly regulated factory jobs, with no chance to achieve the same status as the “native” residents. The alternative, where poor people living in the rich country get poorly regulated factory jobs, until they get uppity and are thrown out of work by new immigrants, who in turn get uppity and are thrown out of work by newer immigrants, doesn’t seem like that much of an improvement, though. What did happen to all those posts at CT on globalization and the fetters to worldwide labor mobility?
JimV 11.10.14 at 5:17 pm
Re: slaves in Egypt for 400 years.
I appreciate the poetry of it, and the moral lesson that has been drawn from it, but I don’t like to see it mentioned as if it were a historical fact, unless those who do so actually believe that to be the case and can cite supporting evidence. The whole Moses story seems unbelievable to me, and I don’t know of any archaeological evidence for it. Still, people mention it and make movies about it as if it were true, in much the same way some conservative ideology is promulgated (invidious as that comparison may seem).
Nick 11.10.14 at 5:42 pm
This is a brilliant article, and I won’t forget its organizing point that a wall to keep people out is not that different from a wall to keep people in. I’m not going to get into the debates in the comments, but I’d like to offer my own observations of how economic migration works out of rural Thailand, where my father-in-law is a village moneylender.
1) Without an education, there is no career in Thailand (rural or urban) that can support a middle-class life. Farming is a joke, and any type of trade, skilled or not, will pay minimum wage. Working in local government requires connections and payments. Going to Bangkok to work in a factory makes life more interesting (villages are boring), but no easier. Working abroad is the only way to save money.
2) Rural Thais can’t find jobs abroad themselves. They have to go through an agent — the agent charges between 3 and 7 thousand dollars. They get this by mortgaging their land, the standard rate is around 2-5% per month, from a village moneylender.
3) They can’t use a bank — the process from a bank takes several months, and the agent needs their money now.
4) The agent doesn’t give them a contract — that is received when they land in Taiwan or the Middle East. Sometimes there is no contract, or job, on the other end — when this happens, they return to Thailand and drive a taxi in Bangkok; their land is gone, and they’ve become city-dwellers.
5) From the contract, they lose wages for their room and board, which is usually wretched. It is normal that the amount they save, over the period of the contract, comes out to be quite a bit less than the amount they borrowed, plus interest.
6) Why do they take the contract? Three reasons: 1) they hope for overtime. 2) They hope that when the contract is finished, they can sign a second one, this time without the intercession of the agent — if they can do this, then that one will finish repaying their land and they can start saving money. 3) working in rural Thailand is a matter of saving pennies a day — this contract is the only chance they will have in their lives to experience large sums of money moving through their hands. They understand that this increases the chance that a bit of these sums will stick to them.
7) They work for several years — the first of these are essentially working for free, since they go towards paying back the money that they borrowed in order to work.
8) Most of these are men (unlike, for example, the Philippines) — often their families break apart, and they return home to find that their wife has left them, sometimes with their savings.
9) In an ideal situation, they return home after 5-6 years with a few thousand dollars saved up. If they can avoid wasting it (for their experience gives them no insight into managing chunks of money), or giving it to family (they are now important people), then they can become moneylenders themselves and make a pretty good living.
And looking at this, there is a certain similarity to the whole process to the educational system here, where you have to borrow huge amounts of non-dischargeable debt in order to get a college degree that may or may not be useful . . . But that’s another story — my point is just that everything about this system, particularly the lack of legal protection between the point of paying the money to the agent and signing the job contract, depends on the existence of a border.
PatrickinIowa 11.10.14 at 5:45 pm
#61 nails it, in my view.
Let’s add this: the conditions that cause Mexicans, Central Americans and Latin Americans to flee to the US are largely (not exclusively) our doing. Between NAFTA, drug-taking and our support for authoritarian and frankly genocidal governments, I think we own people on our southern border a fairer shake.
Legal immigrants join unions. Undocumented workers, not so much.
By the way, I’m an immigrant. One thing that makes me sick to my stomach is that I, a white guy, have always been perfectly welcome, when brown people have been vilified and rousted. It’s disgusting.
Roger Gathmann 11.10.14 at 5:45 pm
Casualty counts don’t, by themselves, make good arguments in my opinion. The number of border crossers killed should, I think, be historicized by looking at how the US has, for a century, done its best to make Mexico and Central America bad places to live. I very much doubt, for instance, that the drug war that has now decimated at least 60 thousand people in Mexico since President Cardenas in an operatta military uniform declared it on tv would have occurred if it weren’t for US encouragement – or US leaning on Mexico. Nafta, a trade agreement negotiated between a Harvard trained Mexican elite and a Harvard trained American one has had negative effects on American workers and devastating effects on the Mexican agricultural sector, one of the results of which is the flood north. As for Central America, the American support of death squads and overthrowing supposedly leftist-leaders at its whim is too well known to go into.
In the East German case, the people fleeing obviously wanted to get into a more prosperous country, right next to them. The East German government and the Soviet Union were the larger causes of their impoverished state. In the case of Mexico and the Central American states, it was a similar mix of malign, US backed governments and US policies forced down the throat of these societies that were the larger cause of their impoverished states. That is the analogy that is important.
And speaking of economic policies forced down the throat of vulnerable states: Branko Milanovic has a balance sheet of the post soviet states that prospered after the fall of the wall and those who didn’t. Ukraine, according to Milanovic, will need fifty more years, going at the rate it is going, to catch up with the level of prosperity it had under Brezhnev. http://glineq.blogspot.com/2014/11/for-whom-wall-fell-balance-sheet-of.html
His summing up is good:
“Most people’s expectations on November 9, 1989 were that the newly-brought capitalism will result in economic convergence with the rest of Europe, moderate increase in inequality, and consolidated democracy. They are fulfilled most likely in only one country (Poland), and at the very most in another, rather small, two. Their total populations are 42 million, or some 10% of all former Communist countries. Thus, 1 out of 10 people living in “transition†countries could be said to have “transitioned†to the capitalism that was promised by the ideologues who waxed about the triumph of liberal democracy and free markets.”
JW Mason 11.10.14 at 6:09 pm
This topic came up in my macroeconomics class today, in response to that Tyler Cowen piece in the Times. Interestingly, the students — mostly from immigrant families themselves — were pretty universally against the idea of open borders. Interestingly, nobody seemed to buy the idea that immigrants compete with natives for jobs. They seemed to mostly take it for granted that mass immigration was good for rich countries; the reason they were against it was that it was bad for the poor countries that immigrants came from. From their point of view, encouraging immigration was just another way the rich countries took advantage of the poor ones.
OK, I said, let’s take the example of a doctor in Honduras who comes to the US and drives a cab. We can agree that Honduras needs doctors more than the US needs cab drivers. Is it fair to tell that doctor that he can’t try to raise his standard for living, provide more security for his family, by moving to the US, because he is needed more in Honduras? Several people immediately raised their hands to say, yes it is. Again, I would say at least three quarters of the students are immigrants or the children of immigrants themselves.
A couple also objected to starting from the premise that it’s impossible to make a living as a doctor in Honduras. Shouldn’t the goal be to change that, not to just let the doctors all leave? Shouldn’t the focus be on changing US policies there, on not supporting corrupt governments and so on, not immigration?
Just one anecdote but it is interesting that among this particular group of young immigrant New Yorkers, the moral intuition was the opposite of CT commenters: inward facing walls are more morally legitimate than outward facing ones.
Roger Gathmann 11.10.14 at 6:13 pm
ps – I’ve always thought that there was something ironic about the idea that East Germans were trying to escape because of their ardent desire for freedom. Freedom? East Germany takes up territory formerly called East Prussia, which was the first state to vote for the Nazis – whose leadership was heavily Prussian. Doubtless there was a massive anti-bolshevik group in East Germany, but I’m not sure that 1945 brought a huge appreciation of Jeffersonian democracy. In west Germany, Adenauer’s government was notoriously rife with ex Nazis, and no doubt that exerted a larger pull. Plus of course, West Germany was getting rich, and East Germany was mired in economic planning that would have been a marvel in the 19th century, but was a crime in the 20th.
Bruce Wilder 11.10.14 at 6:14 pm
I don’t see “fix that” as the same as inward walls or outward walls. “Fix that” is fixing highly dysfunctional societies. The problem for a doctor in Honduras is not that he cannot earn a NYC taxi drivers’ wage or live well enough on the wage he can earn; the problem is that he cannot be sure he or his children won’t be be murdered.
Bruce Wilder 11.10.14 at 6:16 pm
What was East Prussia is Russia or Poland now.
J Thomas 11.10.14 at 6:17 pm
#67 Bianca Steele
J Thomas @ 52: Really? We should rewrite the laws to fit a whimsical science fiction story written by a physicist who’d lived in the US . . . how long? By a Hungarian who proposed that the US treat Mexico the way Austria (eventually) treated his country?
I don’t think it’s practical now, but I think it’s a good idea for the future.
The border is a problem. So get rid of the border. There are reasons why Americans refuse:
1. A lot of Americans don’t want a bilingual nation, they want everybody here to speak American. Similarly, they don’t want a multicultural nation but want every American to be culturally like them.
2. There are a lot of poor people in Mexico, and Americans don’t want to put them on welfare and don’t want them having a reasonable chance at US jobs. This would not be a problem if Mexican investment opportunities got a lot of US financing which paid off, that would potentially be good for a lot of people. But they don’t expect that would happen, or usually even consider the possibility.
3. Mexico has a lot of problems — crime, poverty, unempoyment, underemployment, drugs, etc — and a lot of Americans believe they have enough problems of their own.
Apart from these, doesn’t it seem like a very good idea? The border is a problem so get rid of the border. Mexico’s southern border is much shorter than the northern one, and then if Guatemala joins it will be shorter still.
Mexico of course has their own reasons not to join, including national pride. But here’s a strong argument to join — would you rather stand inside the tent, pissing out? Or right outside the tent getting pissed on?
Szilard’s general idea, which in his story he applied to several other situations, was a trick to help that sort of thing happen. Part of it was to make it slow enough to iron out the problems, and slow enough that old people who don’t want much disruption would die off before it got too disruptive for them.
Corey Robin 11.10.14 at 6:40 pm
Thanks for that story, Josh. It’s why I love teaching at CUNY.
Chris Bertram 11.10.14 at 6:54 pm
JW Mason. Sure, but there’s little reason to believe the premise that those students shared, namely that “brain drain” emigration hurts poor countries. It seems intuitively plausible that it might, but the evidence isn’t there (and there’s contrary evidence too, in terms of incentives to train, cash flows in remittances from richer countries.) But suppose it were true. Would those students favour building, say, a wall, to keep those people in?
Chris Bertram 11.10.14 at 6:59 pm
Incidentally, people who are interested in the topic will want to look out for Michael Blake and Gillian Brock, Debating Brain Drain: May Governments Restrict Emigration? forthcoming from OUP. (Similar for and against format to the Wellman and Cole volume on immigration.)
Rob 11.10.14 at 7:19 pm
Excellent article.
The horrors of these walls speak loudly and I would like to see a great number of walls torn down.
But I have a question: are there any communal goods that you would see as sufficiently important to justify controlling entry into a country’s territory?
Kant has a nice bit in Perpetual Peace where he praises the Japanese for being selective about the manner in which Europeans can have access to their country. They had leaned a lesson from the 17th-18th centuries that once you let Europeans in, there goes the neighbourhood…
JW Mason 11.10.14 at 7:20 pm
Chris B.-
Not arguing the students are correct, factually or morally. Just pointing out the diversity of intuitions.
Rich Puchalsky 11.10.14 at 7:35 pm
I remember anecdotes that are similar to JW Mason’s. For instance, someone being an immigrant from Mexico / Central America to the U.S. in L.A. could not really be counted on as a sure vote against local anti-illegal-immigrant measures. If they were there legally (often after an extended and painful process) then new illegal immigrants generally competed directly with them for employment.
Parenthetically, this is why I often question the whole concept of leftist solidarity, now that it’s no longer underpinned by a pseudoscientific class-based-on-means-of-production system of discerning true interests. Even if they aren’t simply looking out for themselves, people can most identify with the interests of their particular family, their particular country, their ethnicity, their class however defined, or with some variant of cosmopolitan leftism. You can’t look at someone’s circumstances as a ready guide to how they think or how they’re supposed to think. Solidarity then becomes something like “have people in that group actually done anything specific for the people who I care most about?” and the answer is most often no, especially in circumstances where people are dislocated.
bianca steele 11.10.14 at 7:48 pm
@72: I would add, myself, that it seems awfully patronizing to have the attitude to other countries that there’s nothing there worth staying for, that only the highly capitalistic countries are worth living in. This is often a right-wing talking point. But not always. I don’t see why it would be right-wing to see things from the point of view of poor people in other (non-liberal) countries. As ZM says, it’s the kind of argument that says people who live in poor neighborhoods ought to be happy with gentrification/slum clearance, because where they lived was worth less than nothing.
It’s also sometimes a right-wing talking point that it can be easier to be indigent in the country than in a city, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.
Ze Kraggash 11.10.14 at 8:00 pm
@82: just a matter of indoctrination. Internationalist marxist indoctrination doesn’t exist anymore; nationalist and liberal (individualist) kinds are out in full force. In abstract, I don’t see why one has to be more potent than another.
Rich Puchalsky 11.10.14 at 8:12 pm
“In abstract, I don’t see why one has to be more potent than another.”
In abstract, what made international Marxist indoctrination more potent was that it had an immense intellectual superstructure that very few people could really understand that addressed the exact question of which mass interests were true in some pseudoscientific sense and which were false consciousness. People on the left often seem to assume that there’s some overriding reason that e.g. recent immigrants might agree on some general moral intuition about anti-immigration measures, but once this framework went, the basis for this kind of general moral intuition went too.
The Temporary Name 11.10.14 at 8:13 pm
A friend of mine described “getting the red ribbon” which is a set of documents you need to assemble to be allowed out of The Philippines at all. It seemed like a cash grab, largely because people who can get out of the country are exactly the people who’ll pay that fee.
She talked about it in her description of a film about Filipino nurses in Israel. They’ve displaced the Palestinians as medical help. Naturally, though, if a Filipino has a child while in Israel, the child is deported.
It’s hard for me to believe (and of course I am intuiting and asserting research) that there isn’t meaningful and harmful brain-drain in Iraq and Afghanistan. Up next: Syria. Those are more or less catastrophes and maybe aren’t part of run-of-the-mill brain-drain complaints.
Nick 11.10.14 at 8:17 pm
I hate the brain-drain argument — it’s a variant of the idea that people have a duty to work where they are most useful. It’s never applied to Westerners, only to people in developing countries; and it’s rarely applied by people who understand the specifics of the systems these people work in. There’s a huge leap of faith between the statement “Zambia needs nurses” and the statement “Zambia will be hurt of Ms. –, RN, has the opportunity to work in London.”
bianca steele 11.10.14 at 8:21 pm
Nick: I have heard it applied to first-generation college students in the US.
Brett Bellmore 11.10.14 at 8:35 pm
4. The “you are what you eat” theory: If a lot of people immigrate to your country from another country, especially if they’re not encouraged to assimilate, your country becomes more like their country. And who in their right mind wants their country to become more like Mexico?
Barry 11.10.14 at 8:45 pm
“The “you are what you eat†theory: If a lot of people immigrate to your country from another country, especially if they’re not encouraged to assimilate, your country becomes more like their country. And who in their right mind wants their country to become more like Mexico?”
Brett, you aren’t even bothering to try to hide it, anymore.
The Temporary Name 11.10.14 at 8:47 pm
I should have said I was NOT asserting research on my part. I do have anecdoctal evidence of brain-drain in Afghanistan, it being really goddamned hard to maintain a set of contacts in-country when people keep leaving or shifting positions to fill a new vacancy.
And I agree with Nick: the brain-drain argument does nothing at all for an individual seeking a reasonable life, let alone a safe one.
Ze Kraggash 11.10.14 at 8:48 pm
“In abstract, what made international Marxist indoctrination more potent was that it had an immense intellectual superstructure that very few people could really understand that addressed the exact question of which mass interests were true in some pseudoscientific sense and which were false consciousness. ”
Intellectual superstructure is good, but not all that important for the practical purposes. What you need is some oft-repeated slogans and some bearded sages. Exactly the same as with loving your country, your ethnic kin, or your freedom. Moreover: marxism has the advantage of featuring, out of the box, a permanent clear enemy, the fat guy with a cigar and hightop hat sitting on a pile of gold; you don’t need to invent the new hitler every few years. It’s a good worldview, and I predict it’ll be back.
engels 11.10.14 at 9:47 pm
Good to check in here after a couple of years and see that Rich is still delivering the same sermon about ‘false consciousness’. Trouble is it’s a straw man as most Marxists don’t think this way. If anything it’s a critique of vanguardism or elitism (which is pretty common among US liberals imo.)
Matt 11.10.14 at 10:05 pm
I thought libertarians favored individual freedom of movement. National borders are a creation of the state, after all. One of the few people more obnoxious than a doctrinaire libertarian is a reactionary Republican who keeps calling himself a libertarian.
engels 11.10.14 at 10:08 pm
‘Would those students favour building a wall’
Possibly facile and/or false but don’t you only need build a wall when a la Germany both sides won’t put in a real effort to stop the drainage…
MPAVictoria 11.10.14 at 10:13 pm
“I thought libertarians favored individual freedom of movement. National borders are a creation of the state, after all. One of the few people more obnoxious than a doctrinaire libertarian is a reactionary Republican who keeps calling himself a libertarian.”
Liberty for me and not for thee.
Pretty much libertarianism in a nutshell in my experience.
Rich Puchalsky 11.10.14 at 10:39 pm
No True Marxist applies to any Marxist concept being criticized: it’s amusing that engels would disavow Engels. At any rate, I meant a critique of unthinking universalism, which engels is still apparently going strong in favor of. “Sebastian rehearses the libertarian catechism. There are good walls and bad walls, guns that put you in danger and guns that make you safe, prisons that make people unfree and prisons that make people freer…” I’m no U.S.-libertarian, but of all the things that you could have criticized Sebastian’s comment for (like the idea that the disputed area consists of an unchanging “house” that either Israelis or Palestinians can occupy), you picked a characteristic one.
Brett Bellmore 11.10.14 at 10:49 pm
“I thought libertarians favored individual freedom of movement.”
Libertarians favor free movement. Libertarians also favor a nightwatchman state without income redistribution. There’s more than a little importance as to which gets achieved first, unless you want the non-nightwatchman welfare state to bleed you dry and then implode.
Brett Bellmore 11.10.14 at 10:51 pm
“Brett, you aren’t even bothering to try to hide it, anymore.”
I never did bother to hide “it”, but I’m fairly certain we disagree about what “it” is. I’m talking about culture, what are you talking about?
Anderson 11.10.14 at 11:01 pm
Recent Comments: Brett Bellmore on Thoughts on Migration, Immigration, and Exile on the 25th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall
I think the technical term for that is “warning label.”
eric 11.11.14 at 12:06 am
My Arizona echo of Nick@69 re Thailand: “inside facing walls vs. outside facing” requires a broader perspective and consideration of more data points. Interesting fact: the cartels in Mexico now have fairly sophisticated network of armed border guards – weapons pointed inward at mexican would-be emigrants – there to charge an “exit fee” just south of the Arizona border. Also, take into consideration the degree of integration of the cartels with mexican state power at local and national levels. One interpretation of these facts: build your outward-facing wall, allow wealth/power differentials to adequately corrupt the corresponding “outside,” and presto, you have built an inward-facing wall. The error, of course, was drawing the distinction of outward-/inward-facing without recognizing that both side of the wall are part of a system.
Another E.G. Re @33: “buses … to transport … gang members … to LA.” Um … the gangs plaguing Central America were exported from LA !!!
mdc 11.11.14 at 12:19 am
“And who in their right mind wants their country to become more like Mexico?
I’m talking about culture, what are you talking about?”
Keep in mind that Brett has lived in Mexico for decades, speaks fluent Spanish, and is a close student of Mexican history, politics, and literary traditions.
J Thomas 11.11.14 at 12:33 am
#101 mdc
“And who in their right mind wants their country to become more like Mexico?
I’m talking about culture, what are you talking about?â€
Keep in mind that Brett has lived in Mexico for decades, speaks fluent Spanish, and is a close student of Mexican history, politics, and literary traditions.
What conclusions should we draw from this about Mexico, and/or about Brett?
Bloix 11.11.14 at 12:36 am
#86 – “A friend of mine described “getting the red ribbon†which is a set of documents you need to assemble to be allowed out of The Philippines at all.”
No. The “red ribbon,” a certification of documents by the Philippines Department of Foreign Affairs, is required by other countries of Filipinos who are seeking work visas because so many Filipino documents are forgeries.
#24 – “Bloix’s contention that it is “universally accepted†that a state that does not allow people to leave is “an illegitimate police state†is demonstrably false.”
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, states at Article 13, section 2:
“Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”
The UN International Convention on Civil and Political Rights states, at Article 12:
“Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own.”
There are no similar declarations of a right to enter any country.
It doesn’t bother me that people want to argue that there’s no principled moral distinction between barriers to exit and barriers to entry. I disagree with you, but hey! it’s an argument! You might be right!
What bothers me is the refusal to recognize that the illegality of barriers to exit is a firm principle of international human rights law, and that barriers to entry are not only legal but imposed by every country in the world. This is not a matter of opinion. It’s a fact. When you deny it, you’re arguing with reality, not with me.
The Temporary Name 11.11.14 at 12:49 am
I’m passing along what she said: I will ask again what her understanding of it is.
Bruce Wilder 11.11.14 at 1:06 am
Mexico has a vibrant, dynamic culture — when I have visited, I have found many people with skills and ambition, creating things — great food and ironwork and tile and wines and architecture. I have met many hardworking, ambitious people from Mexico and Central America working in Los Angeles.
What would trouble me is importing Mexican politics — the concentration of wealth in a few dozen families, the dearth of public goods spending, the low level of formal education, the authoritarianism and corruption. Unfortunately, a wall seems an ineffective policy in that regard.
engels 11.11.14 at 1:12 am
#97 Rich, I’m sorry, and I don’t mean this in a dismissive way, but I genuinely have no idea what you are talking about.
Engels used the term ‘false consciousness’, yes (although very briefly) but if you mean to critique the view that ‘we’ (enlightened elite with access to quasi-scientific theory) should know the real interests of the vast majority better which they are deceived about you are far more likely to find that kind of thinking among liberals in US than among Marxists (iirc it was common currency among disheartened Democrats eg. during the Bush years). There are exceptions of course. Just out of interest have you ever read the German Ideology?
engels 11.11.14 at 1:16 am
“Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.â€
William Berry 11.11.14 at 2:09 am
JT @102:
Irony meter . . . calibration, etc.
Rich Puchalsky 11.11.14 at 2:11 am
“Engels used the term ‘false consciousness’, yes (although very briefly) but if you mean to critique the view that ‘we’ (enlightened elite with access to quasi-scientific theory) should know the real interests of the vast majority better which they are deceived about you are far more likely to find that kind of thinking among liberals in US than among Marxists (iirc it was common currency among disheartened Democrats eg. during the Bush years). ”
I also criticize this sort of elitism as used by liberals — I think that you differentially notice the comments, unsurprisingly. But I think that historical Marxism relies on this kind of theory far more than U.S.-style liberalism, in which the elite (other than the neo-liberal economists) doesn’t even theorize why its views are correct, they just assume that they are. I don’t really see how much of Marxism is left if you give up on the idea that social classes have objective identities and interests.
But I think that you persistently mis-identify it as an elite theory. Lenin justified vanguardism based on these kinds of ideas, but I’m assuming that there aren’t many Marxist-Leninists left. I think that the foundational ideas of Marxism are inherent in even non-elitist, non-vanguardist Marxism.
engels 11.11.14 at 2:46 am
I don’t really see how much of Marxism is left if you give up on the idea that social classes have objective identities and interests
Marxism → ‘classes have interests’ ¬ ‘they don’t know those interests themselves and intellectuals have to tell them what they are’
gianni 11.11.14 at 3:09 am
I still think Matt @94 gets it right. The few good libertarian works I have read take care to make space for the whole ‘voting with your feet’. In a world where sovereignty has covered the map, this seems to require not only the allowance to leave a political unit, but the corresponding allowance that you enter another. This is not to level a charge of inconsistency or hypocrisy (I make efforts to rarely level that charge), but instead to just note that there seems to be, within libertarian theory, a solid case to be made for more porous national borders.
As for Rich P. on ‘class interest’ and the like. I don’t want to get deep into ‘what real Marxism says’ or anything, as I am sure no one cares for that conversation. But, if I may get a little pedantic (and none of you can stop me anyways):
Your comment above regarding legal immigrants (either recently legal or recently immigrated, I couldn’t discern but I think it works either way here) being no firm ally of the broader immigration movement reminded me of the similar finding concerning the minimum wage. People at the min wage and just ever so slightly above want it raised, but if you look at those getting a little but noticable sum more than the minimum wage, they tend to be very hostile to min wage proposals. The idea being, of course, that this margin represents the premium for their skills, such that raising the min wage threatens to put them at or nearly at the minimum, with the conclusion being that their skills are not particularly valuable. This is something I have seen in the polling data, but also just in conversations on reddit and the like over this topic, where the psychology behind it comes a bit more into focus. The immigration puzzle you noted struck me as very similar.
My tentative explanation is something along the lines of Freud’s old ‘narcissism of minor differences’, such that one’s social esteem as a valuable and skilled worked is threatened by the possibility that a raise in min wage will eliminate the quantitative distinction between their wage and minimum wage, which then eliminates the qualitative distinction between their (skilled) labor and unskilled labor, a distinction which is necessary for that person’s self and social esteem.
Marxism, as a theory, has encountered a host of like challenges, most notably those you note about the failure of members of class X to behave according to their ‘proper interests’. Now, this is a long standing problem, and from what I understand of the trajectory of the theory, this was one of the major conceptual issues that drove so many Marxists into an odd-couple style union with psychoanalysis (Freudian especially but then Lacan and other offshoots, seasoned to local tastes).
As for the more open question you and engels are debating – which to me comes to the issue of whether Marxism can be salvaged without making concessions to psychoanalysis (which Marx himself would probably have been hostile too and whose theory does not neatly fit into the orthodox Marxist account). From what I understand, many of the post-modern and post-structuralist authors were grappling with these issues, taking up Marxism and psychoanalysis, finding the latter especially problematic, but also realizing that the without recourse to it the Marxist account became implausible. I am thinking D&G specifically here but I think there a number of other examples as well. And, as I understand it, when the po-mo sorts were not(/no longer) willing to go to bat for Marxism, the ideology as a whole lost some key allies and fell out of favor.
All this to say – I think the problem you identify DID deal a major blow to Marxism, and is a major part of the story of its decline. But I do not think that invoking psychoanalysis is the only way to square that circle, there may be other sociological approaches that do a better job, and which can preserve some part of the Marxian approach, which I maintain still does a lot of work in clarifying contemporary issues, even as it complicates others.
As for whether contemporary US liberals oftentimes invoke a similar logic to that of the old Marxists – here we can summon up that old CT argument that public choice liberalism is eerily similar to Leninism.
christian_h 11.11.14 at 3:13 am
Bloix: there are all kinds of statements in the so-called “universal declaration of human rights” that are in no way universally accepted. Do you deny that? also the DDR did not in fact prohibit its citizens from leaving – it restricted where they could leave to. And as has been pointed out in this thread, such restrictions are very common and enforced among others by the US of A.
None of this to be clear is to defend the DDR, a shitty petty bourgeois dictatorship if ever there was one.
js. 11.11.14 at 3:37 am
I’m generally on your side but this is just confused. To say that classes have interests doesn’t imply anything about false consciousness. It doesn’t actually imply anything at all until you’ve given some characterization of what a class is supposed to be. And just off the top of my head, there are people like Allen Wood, a whole bunch of analytical Marxists, etc. who both differ in their accounts of class interests and still manage to do without to do without any appeal to false consciousness. You might think this is all wrong or useless or whatever. And that’s fine. But the idea that Marxism per se is committed to some robust false consciousness thesis and that any denial of this is a ‘true scotsman’ fallacy is simply wrong.
js. 11.11.14 at 4:35 am
Bloix@105:
Right, no one here is denying that there is an in principle distinction between rights of entry and rights of exit. It’s that its relevance in the present context is obscure at best. CB and I presented two complementary hypotheticals–you really want to hold that the killings would have been perfectly fine according to your preferred standard if the people killed were trying to get into DDR–to see their families say–or if the people had been killed by BRD guards?
js. 11.11.14 at 4:37 am
The last was a response to Bloix @103.
Rich Puchalsky 11.11.14 at 4:59 am
I’m not really sure why engels quoted one of Marx’ letters to Ruge, since I read it as supporting what I meant. “We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.” As if the world is fighting for one thing, really and implicitly, and has to be shown what that is. “The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions.” OK, Marxism involves explaining to people the meaning of their own actions. “Lastly, it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work”, “In order to secure remission of its sins, mankind has only to declare them for what they actually are” — etc., etc., but Marx wrote this when he was 25 and I’m not sure if it’s supposed to represent his mature thought.
gianni: “All this to say – I think the problem you identify DID deal a major blow to Marxism, and is a major part of the story of its decline.”
And part of the decline of the left as a whole, evidenced (to bring this back to this topic) in this confusion about walls and who they are supposed to protect and whether there is any moral protective purpose for a wall. For a long time, Marxism had a large part in defining what the left was, and even people who disagreed with it had a pretty good idea of what Marxist morality was. (Although it was carefully not called morality.) By the time whatshisname writes the liberal book “What’s the Matter With Kansas”, this is only repeating as farce. We’re horrified by people dying as they’re walled off from being economic migrants as well as by people getting shot as they try to leave an autocratic state because we have some kind of cosmopolitan morality that says that all people’s lives are valuable, but we no longer really agree on what that morality is.
js. “To say that classes have interests doesn’t imply anything about false consciousness.”
Well, I think that it does. False consciousness is pretty much implied by class consciousness. And as soon as you say that a class has an interest, that implies that it can be conscious of its interest or unconscious of it or incorrect about it. And Marxists really seem to me to have a better-defined description of what classes are than anyone else. (Better defined because defined a priori by relation to production rather than descriptive.)
I’m sorry for derailing the thread and I’ll try to get back to it if I comment more.
novakant 11.11.14 at 5:00 am
#112
So the 27 US citizens who wanted to emigrate to Cuba weren’t allowed to do so – that’s just like building a f@cking wall complete with tripwires triggering cluster mines to prevent millions of citizens from leaving. Or making the life of your citizens hell for years if they dared to apply for the legal route out, while using them as pawns to extort some Deutschmarks because your own money isn’t worth anything and your economy is a bloody joke. And of course these lucky people were free to move to all the other wonderful Warsaw Pact states where they would have had to face the same sh@t or worse, so what’s the big deal and anyway everybody does it.
js. 11.11.14 at 5:28 am
Well, I gave you actual boba fide references to people who affirm some version of class analysis without endorsing false consciousness. You can check out the relevant E.O. Wright stuff too.
js. 11.11.14 at 5:54 am
Also, forget the latter-day Marxists. You want to see real granular class analysis in action, check out the Eighteenth Brumaire. I mention this because you seem to think Marxism is necessarily committed to a sort of two classes-two class interests under capitalism thesis, which yes high theory, but any actual analysis would have to be more granular and sophisticated than that.
And with that, I’ll stop derailing this thread as well.
engels 11.11.14 at 5:58 am
Rich, I hope you’re not just objecting to the idea that it is possible for individuals and groups to be unclear or mistaken about their own interests, because that would be very silly indeed.
Brett Bellmore 11.11.14 at 11:24 am
I think it is quite possible for somebody, in somebody else’s opinion, to be mistaken about their best interest. Possible, and generally irrelevant, in as much as people are entitled to their own preferences even if other people think those preferences foolish.
However, when a relatively small group of people insist on claiming that a very large group of people are mistaken about what their best interests are, I think a considerable degree of arrogance and disdain for others’ autonomy are generally involved.
areanimator 11.11.14 at 12:04 pm
“What is ‘scientific’ about the marxist theory of politics is that it seeks to understand the limits to political action given by the terrain on which it operates. This terrain is defined, not by forces we can predict with the certainty of natural science, but by the existing balance of social forces, the specific nature of the concrete conjuncture.”
Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees”
Ze Kraggash 11.11.14 at 12:20 pm
“I think it is quite possible for somebody, in somebody else’s opinion, to be mistaken about their best interest.”
It’s not about individual interests, it’s about the class interests. A different category. That’s why they need the vanguard party, to ideologize and lead a collection of individuals, each one with his/her own private interests. And this is why, in a society where (unlike liberal societies) group interests take precedence over those of individual, restrictions on exit are par for the course. It’s a different paradigm.
Layman 11.11.14 at 12:25 pm
“What would trouble me is importing Mexican politics — the concentration of wealth in a few dozen families, the dearth of public goods spending, the low level of formal education, the authoritarianism and corruption. ”
Me, too! We don’t need to get that stuff from Mexico. We’re Americans, and we’re perfectly capable of doing all that for ourselves.
J Thomas 11.11.14 at 12:32 pm
However, when a relatively small group of people insist on claiming that a very large group of people are mistaken about what their best interests are, I think a considerable degree of arrogance and disdain for others’ autonomy are generally involved.
Which is why libertarians will always find themselves living in nations whose populations are mostly statist nationalists, and they will continue to respect those opinions.
passer-by 11.11.14 at 12:53 pm
On the whole entry / exit – good walls / bad walls debate: it strikes me as entirely disingenuous to ignore the reality that in practice, controlling entry does go hand in hand, to a great extent, with denied exit on the other side. FRONTEX is not only charged with actually controlling the entry to “Fortress Europe”; it is also implementing a comprehensive program of collaboration with non-EU states, mostly in Northern Africa, to stop the migrants from exiting those states. The dramatic rise of the number of migrants drowning while attempting to cross to Italy via sea is the direct consequence of Kadhafi’s demise: his police is no longer stopping and jailing the migrants attempting to cross (incidentally, the Egyptian revolution also had a similar impact on the Israeli border, by weakening the Egyptian control on exit, forcing the Israeli to strenghten their control on entry). Migrants are jailed, put in horrendous camps, and, yes, killed by the police forces of Mauretania, Marocco, Algeria, Egypt etc., when attempting to entry the EU. I’m pretty sure that Australia’s “Pacific solution” of denying entry at all cost would be largely irrelevant (or, at the very least, would require the massive use of deadly force on the part of the Australian government) if Indonesia et al. did not agree to efficiently deny exit to those that are not welcome in Australia.
The neat distinction made between entry and exit by many in the comments seems untenable in practice, though it sounds good in theory. Even within the EU, you get things like the ongoing Calais tragedy: the British, who do not want those migrants to cross the Channel, keep demanding that the French police be more efficient in making sure they don’t exit France. And on a more theoretical level, of course all states do put restrictions on exit as well as entry. Every time you cross an international border, you will have to show a passport (not just any ID, but a document granted by your state explicitly allowing you to travel – ask Snowden) to the border guards first for exit and then for entry. If states did not control exit, you would have no passport control in airports prior to boarding.
But I guess it’s ok for (hardly democratic, human rights abiding) Northern African states to be denying exit with extremely brutal methods, because they do it with the approval of Western Europe, while the DDR was only wrong to do so without their approval?
Anyway, that does not give any solution to the migration policy debate. But it ISdeeply disingenuous to deny that it is definitely possible to draw a parallel between people dying on the Berlin wall shot by East German border guards and people dying in the Sahara shot by the Maroccan, Libyan or Algerian police.
ZM 11.11.14 at 1:35 pm
“I’m pretty sure that Australia’s “Pacific solution†of denying entry at all cost would be largely irrelevant (or, at the very least, would require the massive use of deadly force on the part of the Australian government) if Indonesia et al. did not agree to efficiently deny exit to those that are not welcome in Australia.”
The Pacific Solution is 1. mandatory offshore detention on Nauru and Manus Island in PNG without prospect of resettlement in Australia (Cambodia has agreed to to some settlement there); and, 2. turn back boats to Indonesia.
1. had to be agreed to by Nauru and PNG, and agreement was negotiated by Australia.
2. the Liberal party just declared unilaterally they would turn back boats to Indonesia as their election policy, as it was Indonesia’s responsibility for letting them set sail.
Indonesia was not happy as this was a very rude demonstration of power by Australia. Also as they have large numbers of refugees that they don’t want to stay in Indonesia and other countries are not taking them. Indonesia would be happy for them to exit, but they don’t have other countries to go to.
Australia-Indonesia relations are currently at a fairly low point, and as well as this the last government was sprung electronically eavesdropping on the former Indonesian President.
Bloix 11.11.14 at 2:28 pm
“But it IS deeply disingenuous to deny that it is definitely possible to draw a parallel between people dying on the Berlin wall shot by East German border guards and people dying in the Sahara shot by the Maroccan, Libyan or Algerian police.”
I don’t believe that anyone (e.g. I) have denied that it’s “possible.” I think I’ve said repeatedly that it’s “possible.” I’ve also said repeatedly that principle of exit is a right recognized in international while the principle of entry is not recognized.
In response we get nits and look! There’s Halley’s Comet!
It would be nice if someone would say, “Yes, international law and most intelligent people of good faith who have thought about this issue make this distinction, but it’s wrong” instead of tossing out accusations that anyone who makes it is a knave or a fool.
Ronan(rf) 11.11.14 at 3:42 pm
I’m at a loss as to why anyone would take Brett’s 89 seriously. (I’m also at a loss, tbh, to see what it is Brett actually likes about modern, liberal western societies, but that’s a different story)
How, exactly, could immigrants (especially ones that are slow to integrate) change the society, institutions and politics of the country they migrate too ? How does this theory make any sense ? What mechanisms would this work through, where a group of people keeping to themselves in some isolated suburb would be able to so easily tranform their new society ? How could Mexicans ‘bring authoritatianism’ with them ? Has this ever happened ? Ever ? In an advanced society and economy, short of invasion or mass death by some plague ? I could, plausibly, see how this might work in some circumstances. Half of Nigeria moves to Luxembourg, for example, could lead to such an outcome. But in the real world, with immigration policy as it is (and will ever be) this line of argument seems so idiotic to me I’m surprised anyone has given it any credence.
This is the problem with ‘the immigration debate’, as it exists. There are real problems with migration (with integration, with strain on resources, with undercutting low wages, with brain drains in sending countries etc) but they get so blown out of proportion that the topic cant be spoken about sensibly. Out of all the things that a ‘left’ should be *worried* about , immigration should be pretty low. IMO. The effects (afaict) on recieving countries are trivial, at worst.
Ronan(rf) 11.11.14 at 4:36 pm
“I hate the brain-drain argument — it’s a variant of the idea that people have a duty to work where they are most useful. It’s never applied to Westerners, only to people in developing countries; and it’s rarely applied by people who understand the specifics of the systems these people work in. ”
People in sending countries (individuals, policy makers etc) do speak, and worry, about brain drain. My impression of what the evidence says about it is that in certain contexts it can be a negative on development, but as a whole the positives associated with emigration far outweigh the negatives. Though I am not an economist or social scientist, so who knows whether the methods and motivated reasoning behind alot of these studies stand up to scrutiny, but it sounds relatively plausible.
As a generality, the ‘everyone should stay where they are and develop their own economy’ argument doesnt really make any sense to me. The problems with development in poor countries are, generally, not that too many people are leaving. There are deeper issues; institutional, political, cultural etc. There also isnt , afaict – as a general rule, any plausible reason why a skilled worker staying at home is any more useful than a skilled worker living somewhere else (sending money back, developing political networks in their new countries, developing new ideas/new skills etc)
Lastly, a lot of people who leave a country become pretty dissociated from the politics quite quickly. Particularly second generation immigrants. I dont know why, for example, a second/third generation Brit of Pakistani ethnicity would be someone who would be assumed to have an insight into what Pakistan needs to do to develop. (unless they spend a lot of time there, are deeply tuned into the politics, or have some sort of expertise) There’s a whole lot of selection bias built into a classroom of recent(Id assume not too recent?) ,or second generation, immigrants in a seminar in North America saying everyone should stay where they and develop their own economy/society. ( I agree with Rich that there can be a lot of hostility from recent immigrants towards new immigrants, primarily if they are competing for jobs with them at the bottom. But from my experience (anecdotally) this really depends on the individual. I dont know what the polling says on it, but there are all sorts of contradictions (and qualifications) that people can have when opposing immigration – ie certain types of immigration, or immigration from this group but not that etc)
J Thomas 11.11.14 at 5:54 pm
It make a sort of sense that when someone makes a bigger contribution then he can be paid more for it. And if you make a bigger contribution, if you produce more wealth or goodness or something, then there’s more good stuff to go around.
One problem that can result from this is that whole industries, or regions, or nations come to seem second-rate. If they have mediocres houses because their builders are not very good, and bad traffic jams because their road designers and builders and traffic engineers are not very good, and sewage dripping because their sanitary engineers are not very good and don’t get the proper funding, etc etc etc, why would you want to live there and contribute to them when you could get a much better job working in a better place? People will think you couldn’t do better, that you aren’t very good either….
But the idea that the job that pays best makes the biggest contribution, is probably wrong. Probably society ought to be set up to make that true, but it isn’t. So, say that you are very good at decoding signals from noisy channels. There are lots of ways you could contribute to society with those skills, but the most important is teaching — we don’t have enough engineers with those skills and we need more. And the job that pays the best is stock market analysis, where you find ways to make millions of tiny profits off the less-skilled guys who run teacher retirement funds. It can be argued that this actually contributes to society. But to argue that this is the biggest contribution to society for those skills requires a special kind of economist, who does not mind being wrong.
J Thomas 11.11.14 at 5:57 pm
#109 William Berry
JT @102:
Irony meter . . . calibration, etc.
Did I miss out on some irony? Are you telling me that Brett Bellmore’s wife is not a Mexican citizen?
engels 11.11.14 at 6:39 pm
“I hate the brain-drain argument — it’s a variant of the idea that people have a duty to work where they are most useful. It’s never applied to Westerners, only to people in developing countries; and it’s rarely applied by people who understand the specifics of the systems these people work in.
BS. In UK in 80s ‘brain drain’ was synonymous with the issue of British academics moving to US for higher salaries. UK is a Western country and plenty of people who understand HE talked about it
Matt 11.11.14 at 7:18 pm
Is the “brain drain” argument actually a concern in the popular debate over immigration? Or at least the part of the argument in the receiving countries? It doesn’t seem to be so in the USA.
My perhaps-fogged memory says that I’ve never seen a “brain drain” anti-immigration argument on local TV news, in letters to the editor, or in conversations between neighbors. Even among technical field workers who dislike the H1B visa program, the objection is that imported workers erode native workers’ employment prospects, not that China and India desperately need skilled workers to stay at home.
It appears to me that my fellow Americans generally love immigrants from any nation if they are skilled and/or prosperous enough. It doesn’t matter how poor-on-average and stereotypically awful your home country is. If you are well credentialed in medicine, engineering, mathematics, or the sciences, or if you have at least 6 digits’ USD savings in the bank — welcome in, friend*! It’s only the groups mentioned on the Statue of Liberty’s inscription that Americans generally want to keep out. We already have enough wretched and homeless, thanks — give me your experienced nurses.
Since “brain drain is unfair to the sending countries” never seems to come up in a popular context in the USA, I have tended to read it as a xenophobic concern troll argument advanced by people who won’t admit their distaste more openly. But that’s awfully parochial of me. For all I know there are other immigration magnets where the major theme in public discourse is how the wonderful immigrants are sorely needed by their place of birth.
*Additional qualifications may apply for people who look or act too Muslim.
William Berry 11.11.14 at 8:00 pm
@JT:
I did not know that. I thought the original comment was intended ironically. I admit to often not paying close attention to some of the comments, especially those sub-threads involving BB and those who keep him fat and sleek by feeding him.
Anyway, if he has that much experience of Mexican culture and has a Mexican wife, then he is an even more vile POS than I had thought.
Wonder what his wife would think of the the chauvinist crap he writes here?
engels 11.11.14 at 8:25 pm
Since “brain drain is unfair to the sending countries†never seems to come up in a popular context in the USA, I have tended to read it as a xenophobic concern troll argument advanced by people who won’t admit their distaste more openly.
I had that suspicion too, and tend to about other-regarding arguments in politics generally. Maybe I’m cynical….
Barry 11.11.14 at 8:30 pm
engels: “BS. In UK in 80s ‘brain drain’ was synonymous with the issue of British academics moving to US for higher salaries. UK is a Western country and plenty of people who understand HE talked about it”
It was in use by the 1950’s, when some phenomenal proportion of British Ph.D.’s went to the USA (I think that it was 10% of the total population of Ph.D.’s per year).
J Thomas 11.11.14 at 8:40 pm
William Berry
I did not know that. I thought the original comment was intended ironically.
I don’t know either. He wrote something about his wife that I didn’t quite remember, I think she was black or asian or latino or something.
“You can’t tell the players without a program.”
Nick 11.11.14 at 8:41 pm
‘Brain drain’ is used very commonly in development circles — usually by Westerners who work in the NGOs that hire said Westerner to ‘coordinate’ programs at 30 times the pay scale of the locally-trained doctor who delivers them.
Ze Kraggash 11.11.14 at 9:08 pm
This is silly. Of course ordinary people in America aren’t concerned about the brain drain from Ethiopia, why would they. Most of them probably don’t know Ethiopia exists. But what about fucking common sense? When talented, ambitious, productive people are leaving, the country suffers. Do I have to be a xenophobic concern troll to understand it? Or is it that you have no answer, and not willing to admit it?
Matt 11.11.14 at 9:21 pm
Reality often fails to conform to common sense. You don’t have to be a concern troll to appeal to common sense instead of citing research, but doing so is more of a lateral move than a step up.
Ze Kraggash 11.11.14 at 9:59 pm
Right, I expected this. But I don’t feel I need to prove that the sun rises in the morning. Of course you’re free to believe whatever satisfies your ideological and emotional needs, however counter-intuitive. It doesn’t help your case, though, rejecting any possibility of a good-faith disagreement.
Matt 11.11.14 at 10:24 pm
You hadn’t made a single comment on brain drain prior to mine. I didn’t assume anything about your opinions or motivations regarding immigration policy until you accused me of having no answer to your “fucking common sense” assertion that you hadn’t previously asserted.
I skimmed the first 2 pages of “brain drain” results on Google Scholar and didn’t see a consensus of harm the way I would for, say, “climate change.” The effort I put in to investigating a claim is proportional to the effort made in supporting it. Cite a good review already. Vigorous repetition is not evidence.
Nick 11.11.14 at 10:51 pm
There are two main arguments in favour of letting skilled people from the developing world do what they want. The first of these is that the systems they work in are usually ineffective, and they aren’t doing work that benefits the ‘developing’ part of their developing home — they work for the rich. The second is that by requiring them to work within their own country, for small amounts of money, you are devaluing the value of their skill — it is, simply, a crappier career than if they could travel the world with it. How are you going to produce more nurses, for example, if the nurse earns a local wage and doesn’t do better than other non-nurses?
The third and most obvious argument, which doesn’t seem to register here, is that people in developing countries are people like the participants on this comment thread — has anyone here ever been told “With your skills, you could immigrate to Canada and earn 3000% of your current salary, but that would be immoral.”? I doubt it very much, Westerners choose their courses and travel the world with freedom; people elsewhere see this and envy it; and some of the Westerners they talk to lecture them about brain drain. Personally, I loathe it. We’re comfortable with people from developing countries working as muscle and labour, we should also be comfortable with them working in good careers and earning money.
Nick 11.11.14 at 11:10 pm
And just to sign out, I want to point out that this thread began attached to a post devoted to the principle of human freedom — the freedom of all people to move through the world — and it’s devolved into a discussion of whether poor, skilled people from the developing world have the right to do so. To me, this is a testament to the strength of the human urge to control other humans.
Matt 11.11.14 at 11:59 pm
To splice a tangent on a tangent… This is starting to remind me of the argument over how long parents whose children are in lousy public schools, and who can afford alternatives, should try to engage with the assigned public school vs. leaving it for a school with less bullying, less test-obsessed instruction, better student-teacher ratios, etc. 10 years ago I remember one of my tenured professors, teaching at a state university, talking very excitedly about the Montessori school with great robotics and music programs he had found for his 9 year old daughter in preference to the uninspiring district school. I was at first rather surprised, then not so much. I myself was studying out of state because I thought this other state’s school was better for my areas of interest. I didn’t stay near home to support my home state and the people who stayed there. That didn’t even cross my mind.
I wouldn’t criticize any parent who decided to stay and fight for the improvement of the public school. I wouldn’t criticize any parent who decided that improvement is too slow, and childhood too short, to keep their child in a dispiriting school for another year. I feel the same way about opining that skilled potential immigrants should or should not pursue better opportunities outside their nation of birth. It’s not for me to do.
Nick 11.12.14 at 12:13 am
Yes, I agree completely. It’s easy to see how other people are responsible for society, and harder to see their own personal needs.
engels 11.12.14 at 1:30 am
has anyone here ever been told “With your skills, you could immigrate to Canada and earn 3000% of your current salary, but that would be immoral.� I doubt it very much, Westerners choose their courses and travel the world with freedom; people elsewhere see this and envy it; and some of the Westerners they talk to lecture them about brain drain.
As stated above, this isn’t true, eg. UK academics.
geo 11.12.14 at 3:33 am
engels @121: it is possible for individuals and groups to be unclear or mistaken about their own interests
It seems to me that this is all the claim of “false consciousness” amounts to, and as engels points out, to object to it seems silly. You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, and that is exactly what every ruling class has always done.* What’s arrogant or undemocratic about pointing that out?
*Very much including our own — cf. the stellar <What's the Matter with Kansas?, which deserves better than to be dissed by Rich P.
dsquared 11.12.14 at 3:55 am
I think that a lot of the questions about “brain drain” can be answered by looking at New Zealand, which has rates of emigration among its qualified doctors and nurses right up there with the highest developing world countries. They have, unsurprisingly, done a lot of work on the subject and as far as I can tell, ended up concluding that all you can do is wear it, and that probably the worst thing you can do is mess around trying to do the modern equivalent of cutting the blacksmith’s hamstrings.
Ze Kraggash 11.12.14 at 7:40 am
“Personally, I loathe it.”
I doubt that you do, because it’s the common concept of balancing public and personal interests. The same one that forbids you to yell “fire!” in a crowded theater, or buy automatic weapons (you don’t loath that, do you). In your society, a nurse moving to Canada doesn’t harm the public, but in another one it might, or at least it may be deemed harmful. And if that’s the case, what to do about it is a matter of judgement.
Brett Bellmore 11.12.14 at 11:18 am
“Are you telling me that Brett Bellmore’s wife is not a Mexican citizen?”
Philippine. She could easily be mistaken for Mexican, though, if you didn’t notice the epicanthic fold, and didn’t hear her speak.
Brett Bellmore 11.12.14 at 11:20 am
A family picture, by the way.
J Thomas 11.12.14 at 1:25 pm
She is beautiful. You look almost exactly as I had pictured you in my mind.
Except without the fangs. ;-)
Brett Bellmore 11.12.14 at 1:46 pm
They were removed 20 years ago when I had orthodontics done.
J Thomas 11.12.14 at 1:48 pm
I never know when you’re joking….
Brett Bellmore 11.12.14 at 2:21 pm
That’s what makes the jokes funny, J.
No kidding, I did have orthodontics done about 20 years ago, and my canines were removed as part of it, to make room for the rest of my teeth. Ruined Halloween for me, I had to actually get costumes after that, instead of just tucking my lips in behind my fangs for the day.
Ronan(rf) 11.12.14 at 2:28 pm
Must we now be subjected to Brett Bellmore’s family snaps ? Really ? (I’m only joking Brett, it looks like you have a lovely family. Having said that, I think your wife deserves some sort of sainthood for putting up with you)
js. 11.12.14 at 4:59 pm
What is the matter with Kansas?
bianca steele 11.12.14 at 7:17 pm
I had a comment in draft prefaced with “since geo’s nowhere to be seen,” but I can delete it now.
Rich Puchalsky 11.12.14 at 7:20 pm
geo: “It seems to me that this is all the claim of “false consciousness†amounts to, and as engels points out, to object to it seems silly. You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, and that is exactly what every ruling class has always done.* What’s arrogant or undemocratic about pointing that out?”
When engels @121 can actually be answered by BB @122, perhaps that’s a sign that something has gone wrong?
In any case, obviously I’m not just objecting to the concept that people can be unclear or wrong about what their interests are as member of some group. But individuals are members of all sorts of different groups, often with competing interests. They also have ideology or just ideals that are often more important to them than material interests. Once you give up on the idea that they have a class interest and that it should be the more important determiner of their politics, are they being fooled, or are they throwing in with the elite by choice? After how many decades can you still use the “they are being fooled” descriptor for people adhering to a particular politics?
geo 11.12.14 at 7:33 pm
Rich: After how many decades can you still use the “they are being fooled†descriptor for people adhering to a particular politics?
For as many decades as the causes of the deception persist: e.g., media ownership is highly concentrated in corporate hands; tens of billions of dollars are spent on misleading political advertising and phony scientific “research”; and access to high-quality education is stratified by class.
Ronan(rf) 11.12.14 at 7:48 pm
Hasn’t, as js implies, the ‘what’s the matter with Kansas’ argument been strongly refuted though ? ie
http://themonkeycage.org/2012/06/18/the-party-of-the-american-working-man-and-woman/
generally(afaict) the research shows that people do actually vote their economic interests (not deterministically, but more often than not)
Rich Puchalsky 11.12.14 at 8:40 pm
geo: “For as many decades as the causes of the deception persist: e.g., media ownership is highly concentrated in corporate hands; tens of billions of dollars are spent on misleading political advertising and phony scientific “researchâ€; and access to high-quality education is stratified by class.”
So the whole Southern thing is about differential access to high-quality education?
You’re not using the words “false consciousness” here, although this is looking to me like a false consciousness theory. So I should ask at this point: is this a Marxist theory, and is it a false consciousness theory? I don’t want to go through this again only to have engels say that No True Marxist believes what you believe etc.
Ze Kraggash 11.12.14 at 9:07 pm
Obviously, their politics do reflect, in part, their circumstances. But the great advance of neoliberalism will undoubtedly create, sooner or later, that utopian/dystopian world where there is no countries, nothing to kill and die for, and, as they say, no religion too. Your class will remain your only identity. And then one day they run out of antidepressants, and voila – no more false consciousness. How does this sound?
Nick 11.12.14 at 9:47 pm
Ze Kraggash (@ #152), you obviously have some clever idea that explains why my simple statement (that I loathe castigating educated people for participating in the brain drain) is not true. Maybe you’re right, but that raises the question of why you spend your time conversing on the Internet with people so stupid that they’re not able to explain their thoughts, or even feelings, on issues. Since I’m one of them, apparently, why do you bother?
gianni 11.12.14 at 10:02 pm
@164
Yes and no. If you are thinking of Bartels’ work, it does a good bit of refuting T Frank’s contention, but iirc some of the refutation relies on mathematical manipulation as well. It isn’t like Frank has never spoken to anyone from Kansas before, and I would imagine each of us here is capable of amassing a dozen or so personal anecdotes that confirm Frank’s thesis.
But as a general pattern, the political science research I have seen (America specific) falls more on the ‘people vote according to interests’ side of things.
But who won among working class whites in 2012?
The Temporary Name 11.12.14 at 10:09 pm
Incidentally thanks to Bloix for some “red ribbon” correction to my comment above: it applies to work visas only. The distinction between what foreign governments want and what the government of The Philippines wants is kind of tricky in that Filipino authorities will prevent their own people from going places as a result of treaty agreements with foreign governments. I would guess that the Filipino government is more happy with people leaving given that those people send money back.
geo 11.12.14 at 10:12 pm
Ronan @164: I read the Bartels/Frank exchange way back when but remember only that plausible arguments were made on both sides. But I don’t think employed/unemployed or college degree/non-degree are the most useful distinctions for understanding the nature of class warfare since around 1980. It’s really been the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent; the rentiers/CEOs/financial managers vs. virtually everyone else. There are no good economic reasons for anyone except the 1 percent to vote against steep progressive taxation, single-payer health insurance, adequately funded universal free education, generous increases in Social Security allowances, draconian re-regulation of the financial industry, stringent enforcement of anti-pollution rules and limits on energy use, and strict limits on campaign spending. But plenty of people think there are and so, to the extent they allot their vote on economic rather than non-economic grounds, vote Republican. Of course, their mistake is not fortuitous; the Republican National Committee, the Business Roundtable, the US Chamber of Commerce, and dozens of industry groups and right-wing foundations spend vast sums to convince them that black is white, up is down, the earth is round, and the free market is infallible — to induce confusion or delusion or false consciousness. To show how they do this is one of the chief purposes of Frank’s book, which I think it accomplishes splendidly.
geo 11.12.14 at 10:19 pm
Rich: I’m not sure what we’re arguing about. I’m claiming that many people are bamboozled, hornswoggled, or, if you prefer, systematically misled by other people — publishers, politicians, and flacks of all sorts — who are hired by rich people to do so, for the purpose of getting them (the many) to vote for candidates and support policies that will fleece the many and enrich the rich. I mentioned some of their means and methods in@163 and 170. Whether this truism is “Marxist” or not I don’t know.
Rich Puchalsky 11.12.14 at 10:41 pm
geo, I basically think that your explanation fails with regard to the U.S. (I don’t know enough about UK politics or European politics generally to say whether it fails there.) It doesn’t have a good explanation for the highly geographic differences in the U.S. electorate. Basically, there were huge benefits from being white through most of U.S. history, and white people often prefer those benefits to anything that the left can promise them. The propaganda about the free market, global warming etc etc. all exists, but I think that it functions much more to give people plausible deniability on a tribalist basis than to actually convince. “Fleecing the many to enrich the rich” considers society as having two groups: “The elite supporting white and other forms of privilege in exchange for votes supporting the elite” models it as, roughly, three, with no large group of people in the process really being fooled about what they’re doing.
geo 11.12.14 at 10:54 pm
Rich: Yes, I agree that a lot of people don’t only decide their vote on economic grounds. There’s plenty of racial and cultural animus, as you say.
Ronan(rf) 11.12.14 at 11:08 pm
geo & gianni – fair points (and I probably overdid it with the ‘strongly refuted’ part)
Gianni – I dont know the answer to your question at the end (is it a rhetorical question ? no snark intended, just if so it’d lead me to assume the Republicans did? Is that true also when you account for regional differences ?)
Ronan(rf) 11.12.14 at 11:10 pm
relatedly, a semi interesting short review by Herb Gintis on this
http://www.amazon.com/review/R1R597U7PA681G/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm
gianni 11.12.14 at 11:22 pm
@174
Romney generally had more support than Obama among those groups, but yes, it is mostly rhetorical due to the fact that you can parse the categories in a variety of different ways to get different outcomes.
js. 11.12.14 at 11:50 pm
It might be worth noting that relative privilege and positional goods are real, actual things—not functions of ideology and not mirages of false consciousness. If you couple this with the Bartels piece Ronan linked to, you can begin to get a decent account of certain sorts of voting patterns, if that’s what you’re interested in. Why anyone would think that this sort of thought is verboten from a broadly Marxist perspective is still pretty unclear to me.
William Berry 11.12.14 at 11:58 pm
@Rich & geo:
Some of my friends believe in the Marxian concepts of alienation and false consciousness and some don’t.
My own position is unequivocal.
I stand by my friends.
engels 11.13.14 at 1:21 am
I don’t want to go through this again only to have engels say that No True Marxist believes what you believe etc.
Kindly direct me as to where the fuck I said that.
engels 11.13.14 at 2:32 am
Rich, you started out McCarthyite rant about ‘international Marxist indoctrination’.
immense intellectual superstructure that very few people could really understand that addressed the exact question of which mass interests were true in some pseudoscientific sense and which were false consciousness
I said that plenty of Marxists don’t put much weight on people being deceived about their interests (Js. gave you a list of them), that this hypothesis is far from unique to Marxism anyway. How is that a ‘No True Marxist’ reponse? It’s not, is it?
If could explain how you think Brett Bellmore or Sebastian have refuted something I have written rather than just cheering for them it would also be much appreciated.
engels 11.13.14 at 3:07 am
Once you give up on the idea that they have a class interest and that it should be the more important determiner of their politics, are they being fooled, or are they throwing in with the elite by choice?
Iow: once you give up on Marxism, you’ve given up on Marxism. Thanks for that profound insight…
geo 11.13.14 at 3:49 am
me@170: spend vast sums to convince them that black is white, up is down, the earth is round, and the free market is infallible
Thanks to everyone who was tempted to point out with a smirk that, unlike the other three propositions, “the earth is round” is true, but didn’t.
Bruce Wilder 11.13.14 at 4:20 am
spherical
engels 11.13.14 at 4:33 am
Rich, can you list some of the ‘huge benefits’ poor white Americans are getting in return for their calculated, informed and rational support of the American elite?
Rich Puchalsky 11.13.14 at 4:37 am
Wait, now you’re willing to admit that “the idea that they have a class interest and that it should be the more important determiner of their politics” is a fundamental tenet of Marxism? Isn’t that what “once you’ve given up on Marxism, you’ve given up on Marxism” means? Have we finally found something that you’re willing to defend as definitively Marxist? Or should I wait and see whether you’ll tell me that most Marxists don’t believe in it?
Last time I tried to get you to clarify this you quoted a letter from Marx to Ruge, which said exactly what I’d characterized Marxism as saying. What’s your point?
gianni @ 112 understood what I meant without any problem. Why does the working class keep not accepting that it has a particular interest that is supposed to be its most important one? Perhaps because that’s a BS 19th century foundational idea?
Rich Puchalsky 11.13.14 at 4:42 am
“Can you list some of the ‘huge benefits’ poor white Americans are getting in return for their calculated, informed and rational support of the American elite?”
The psychological wages of whiteness are real, as js. says @ 177. Why, is this thought verboten to you as a Marxist? He says it isn’t. How do they compare to whatever actual wages the left can deliver for them? Poor white Americans get the huge benefit of never being at the bottom of the social order, no matter how poor they are.
john c. halasz 11.13.14 at 4:46 am
@183:
Umm… not quite. Maybe gravitationally pumpkin shaped.
ZM 11.13.14 at 4:52 am
“Why does the working class keep not accepting that it has a particular interest that is supposed to be its most important one? ”
I think one reason is because the “working class” is international, whereas most people think in terms of their national economy.
I know “working class” people who periodically vote for the Liberal party because they think the Liberal party will make Australia have a stronger national economy compared to other countries, and so then with our unions and periodic Labor government (who differs little on international trade and investment policy) working people will get a reasonable share of this.
This reasoning is actually fairly right I would say .
I attended a talk by our economist Ross Garnaut yesterday evening and one thing he said was we can no longer think of other countries not developing to our advanced economy standards.
While this is right morally, I cannot see how there are enough resources for everyone in the world to live at lives of the same material standard as Australians presently.
So as far as I can tell you need to decrease material living standards in advanced economies and increase them in poor countries, while ensuring biodiversity, a safe climate etc
But for some people they already see their lives as precarious, they do not consume as much as middle class and wealthy people, and they have other various struggles. So they think what we need is for Australia to have a strong economy in the international order, and then for unions and the Labor party to make sure working people get reasonable wages.
The current government is trying to cut social services and payments, which is causing people to be less in favour of it. But generally a lot of people see their own interests as linked to Australia’s interests as maintaining a place near the topic of the international economic pyramid, not making the international order fairer. Unfortunately this also ties into sentiment wanting to keep refugees out.
Rich Puchalsky 11.13.14 at 5:24 am
ZM: “I think one reason is because the “working class†is international, whereas most people think in terms of their national economy.”
Yes, I keep saying that too — people have a choice of which of their many group memberships, often with competing interests, they are going to treat as their most important one.
I recommend the following blog post: Material Interests Are Ambiguous Motives.
js. 11.13.14 at 5:36 am
@Rich Puchalsky:
I’ll try this one more time.
As far as I can tell, you seem to think that if one assents to the idea that there is such a thing as class interest, then a whole lot of shit automatically follows. Like, say, false consciousness. This is not true! Because, as I pointed out in my very first comment on this, the very notion of a class—and so also of class interests—is hugely contested within the Marxist tradition. Famously, Marx doesn’t give a clear and consistent account of the notion of a class. (I mean, yes, you can say “defined by relation to the means of production” or some such, but that’s practically a placeholder.)
Look, if you sat me and engels down, we would very possibly—maybe probably—end up disagreeing about classes, class interests, etc. This is not a point in your favor! What it shows is something that should be obvious anyway, viz. that ‘Marxism’ is a century and a half old tradition with lots of variants which sometimes give conflicting accounts of fundamental concepts. So when you say that, e.g., you can deduce a theory of false consciousness from Marxism per se, that’s actually a bit ridiculous.
This also makes nonsense of the ‘no true scotsman’ type charges, because again, I can point to actual Marxist theorists who disagree with the somewhat crude characterization you’re forwarding. And the point isn’t that they’re ‘true Marxists’ and the others aren’t. If anything, it’s just that I think their accounts are better developed and more plausible. But at a more basic level, it’s that Marxists can continue to be Marxists and give you quite different accounts of how classes and class interests are to be identified. (Others may disagree!) In any case, if you want to have nothing to do with any of this, that’s fine, but the position you’ve forwarded isn’t really defensible.
Corey Robin 11.13.14 at 5:37 am
My entire theory of conservatism rests upon the claim that it is perfectly rational for working class and non-elites to support conservatism as a project, and that commandeering that support has been an essential part of the project from the very beginning. You can read about it in these various links:
http://coreyrobin.com/2011/10/07/the-new-york-times-review-of-the-reactionary-mind-my-response/
http://coreyrobin.com/2011/10/17/1157/
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/files/raritan-essay.pdf
ZM 11.13.14 at 5:44 am
Corey Robin,
Something interesting in the UK was the High Tories who were the very most conservative of the conservative parties (although not conservative in the sense of Burke who was actually a Whig anyhow) were the parliamentary group most opposed to English colonialism and imperialism (although at some point I think even most of them realised this was about as much a lost cause in the UK as Royalism).
Rich Puchalsky 11.13.14 at 7:03 am
js., I’m sorry that I’ve hit your “one last time” threshold, but whenever I disagree with any aspect of Marxism, I’m told that I’m making a crude characterization that is invalidated by the existence of some advanced theorist somewhere. Of course Marxists disagree about the exact meaning and content of class interests. But to say that a majority of Marxists don’t think that class interests exist, or that they don’t think that they are definitionally more important than any other kinds of political interests, or that they don’t think that Marxism offers particular insight into what they are? Why are a majority of Marxists Marxists, again?
Fine, I’ll restrict myself to positive statements of belief. Those Marxists or people who hold to other political traditions who believe that the working class in America is consistently fooled into voting against its interests are wrong. The members of the working class who vote against their economic interests as described by the left are voting in favor of other interests that are just as real, and more important to them. And this is not some kind of unfalsifiable claim about how no matter how people vote they always must be voting for their interests: it explains particular American voting patterns.
engels 11.13.14 at 11:35 am
Apologies for intemperance and incoherence above. Js. is making a lot more sense than me so I should probably bow out in a minute (although we probably do disagree about various things as he says).
Corey, thanks for the links. #184 for intended as a serious request for elaboration from Rich, not a dismissal of the foundational premise of your lifework but sorry if it may have come across that way.
Personally: I think the concept of class is central Marxism (which isn’t to say it isn’t contested) the concept of ‘false consciousness’ is not (which isn’t to say it isn’t valid). That’s why I found your initial rant annoying, apart from the conspiratorial McCarthyite rhetoric about ‘international Marxist indoctrination’. (Also does sound a little like you’re accusing Marxism of being a system of indoctrination which indoctrinates people with the false belief that indoctrination exists…)
I can’t say I’ve really followed what you’ve been arguing since and don’t have time to respond properly but I will say that the claim that material class interests aren’t useful in understanding American politics really does not look as good in 2014 these as it did back in the 90s. Just on the last point, I wouldn’t deny that race and gender are important and independent axes of domination, conflict and privilege but I disagree that the benefits of being a white working class American over a black working class American are ‘huge’. Racist division is bad for both white and black workers.
And apologies also for hijacking the thread. I’ll leave you with Bernard Porter thoughts on ‘why the the fall of the Berlin Wall made me into a Marxist’:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2009/11/20/bernard-porter/come-back-karl/
engels 11.13.14 at 11:44 am
I disagree that the benefits of being a white working class American over a black working class American are ‘huge’
Sorry, that should say something like I disagree that the benefits of racism to white American workers are ‘huge’- the existence of racist diviosion harms white and black workers. Of course, there are material benefits to being white v. black in America whatever class or gender you are. Whetnyher any psyhcological benefits are ‘real’ or not seems like a more philosophical question. As I said though, I’ll bow out.
js. 11.13.14 at 4:06 pm
I get that this is what you’re trying to say. What I’ve been trying to say—tho perhaps not quite so bluntly—is that what you’re calling “other interests” can themselves be understood as a kind of class interest. Obviously, if one gave up on the notion of class/class interest/class analysis, etc., one wouldn’t have much left to call Marxism. What I’m suggesting one might do is to give up on the idea that late capitalist society can be neatly divided into two classes, and perhaps also give up on—or heavily massage—the thesis of increasing homogenization (at least as of the recent past/present).
There is a genuine problem here (and at least a few Marxists are likely to call bloody murder), but: (a) there’s just not that much empirical evidence for the 2 clear-cut classes thesis, (b) by giving it up you can do richer class analysis, and (c) if you want precedent, just see what Marx had to say about the petit bourgeois.
J Thomas 11.13.14 at 4:39 pm
The members of the working class who vote against their economic interests as described by the left are voting in favor of other interests that are just as real, and more important to them.
I want to point out that a surprising number of people have a strong concept of sacrifice for the community. They aren’t primarily interested in seeing how much benefit they can squeeze out of the government, they really want their society to work.
They may volunteer for their local fire department, not because they want the bennies but because they’re ready to risk their lives to help people who need help.
They may volunteer for the military or the national guard because they want to serve their country.
Some of them are really and truly christians. They tend to be poor or lower class or lower-middle-class because people who actually make sacrifices for the common good tend not to get ahead.
A lot of them vote GOP because the GOP has been good at persuading them that Democrats only want to transfer wealth to the undeserving. Not that they think the rich are necessarily deserving either, but it’s pushing the wrong buttons. They don’t want somebody who’ll get them a bigger share of the loot from DC, they want somebody who’ll do a good job for the whole community. When they see that a GOP legislator doesn’t do that, they’ll tend to vote him out and replace him with a new GOP legislator, and then another one.
It’s vital for the GOP to persuade them that climate change is not real, because if they believed it was real they would insist on doing something about it for real. (Except maybe for the ones who are sure the Rapture will arrive first.)
They are not working for their class interests. I tend to think that if the GOP ever loses their support, it will become a third party.
engels 11.13.14 at 5:23 pm
Quite a lot of people talk about 1% v. the rest now, don’t they, even in the US? Of course I’m sure they’re benighted fools who were indoctrinated by the international Marxist conspiracy…
christian_h 11.13.14 at 5:50 pm
Since this thread is already irredeemably derailed my two cents on the consciousness issue: class consciousness was never meant to be the consciousness of the individual of some objective interests he or she holds. It would be thoroughly un-Marxist to say that US workers are duped into voting against their interests, and the vast majority of those of us identifying as Marxists, do not in fact argue this. Class consciousness is something that the class possesses, as it is classes that are the actors in history – not individuals. The consciousness referred to is the consciousness of the working class of itself as a historical actor, and (unless one rejects the notion of classes as historical actors altogether) I think it quite clear that this consciousness is absent in the US.
engels 11.13.14 at 6:21 pm
Yes, I’ve always thought it was absent in the US (difference with UK, not in any way a centre of workers’ power is striking) but don’t you think something has been changing there ever so slightly in the last few years? Maybe it’s just me (I don’t live there).
Rich Puchalsky 11.13.14 at 7:44 pm
“The consciousness referred to is the consciousness of the working class of itself as a historical actor”
Yeah, I’m aware, but I didn’t want to get into the extra dispute of pointing out that this is a kind of consciousness that can not in fact exist. A class as a reified entity can’t be conscious of anything, except in a highly mystical way.
For the rest of this, this is heading firmly into the usual dispute in which nothing can be assumed to be Marxist because Marxists vary. Take js @ 196, with the idea of other interests described as a class interest. How is a Marxist class interest going to be described without exploitation, ownership of the means of production, workers forced to sell labor power, etc. etc.? Is all of that not central to Marxism any more? I guess not.
Marxism took a lot of its moral power (yes, we’re not supposed to say “moral”, I know) from the idea that workers created value, capitalists exploited workers and took part of the value that workers created, etc. A whole lot of the “other interests” referred to above just don’t fit into this framework at all. How much is it worth to a worker to have his or her son not shot for suspiciously carrying Skittles or while running away? From introspection, I’ll guess that the answer is most often going to be something like “it’s worth more money than I’m ever going to have”. If white workers assume that there are good guys and bad guys and the way that society works it that sometimes people are just going to get shot, can you say that it’s immoral for them to minimize this risk for their children while making it more likely for other people’s children? Of course you can say it’s immoral. But how are you going to fit that into Marxist class analysis?
geo 11.13.14 at 8:18 pm
Rich @193: Those Marxists or people who hold to other political traditions who believe that the working class in America is consistently fooled into voting against its interests are wrong. The members of the working class who vote against their economic interests as described by the left are voting in favor of other interests that are just as real, and more important to them.
Yes and no. Yes, people have a variety of interests, including, as you put it @186 “the huge benefit of never being at the bottom of the social order, no matter how poor they are.” Sometimes — often — they are so strongly influenced by racial or sexual or cultural animus that they disregard or misunderstand their economic interests. But sometimes — very often — they simply have mistaken beliefs about their own economic interests because they have been incessantly fed ruling-class propaganda. (For details, see Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent or Robert McChesney’s Dollarocracy, among many other books.) The widespread belief (which Krugman, for instance, is always citing and deploring) that government can’t do anything right, and the kindred notion that markets are always more efficient, are practically religious doctrines among scores of millions of non-rich voters, and is the reason — or one reason — why they consistently vote for pro-business candidates.
I can’t see any reason why there’s the slightest inconsistency in believing both that people are widely and deliberately misled about their economic interests and that people have other interests besides economic ones, to which they sometimes accord precedence. Would someone please explain why one can’t believe both?
Igor Belanov 11.13.14 at 8:20 pm
What about the 50% of the US electorate that don’t vote for their own or anyone else’s interests? Are we to assume they tacitly give their assent to be ruled by the elite, or is it that they can’t see a way for their interests to be articulated within the present system?
One thing that has been missing in this thread is the idea of identity or ‘weltanschaaung’ as a source of political action. This does not necessary correspond with a person’s interests, whether judged subjectively or objectively.
Brett Bellmore 11.13.14 at 10:38 pm
Testing…
Brett Bellmore 11.13.14 at 10:45 pm
One more try.
“If white workers assume that there are good guys and bad guys and the way that society works it that sometimes people are just going to get shot, can you say that it’s immoral for them to minimize this risk for their children while making it more likely for other people’s children?”
We white workers assume that the way to minimize the risk of our children being shot, is to raise them not to commit crimes. It seems pretty effective. We don’t figure that by doing so we’re raising the risk for other people’s children, because it isn’t as though there were some fixed number of children to be shot, a quota. Rather, we figure the way other people could lower the risk for their own children, is by also employing this same strategy.
We look at the news, and think, Michael Brown wouldn’t have gotten shot if he had refrained from robbing a store, and then attacking a police officer. We look at the news, his mother getting caught at armed robbery, and think, maybe that explains why he robbed a store, because he had a mother who wouldn’t teach him not to commit robberies, being inclined to commit them herself.
And we don’t think Marxist analysis has anything to contribute to this.
engels 11.13.14 at 11:00 pm
Those Marxists or people who hold to other political traditions who believe that the working class in America is consistently fooled
How many times does it have to repeated that this isn’t a common or characteristally Marxist position (which isn’t to say ‘no true Marxist’ may believe it) for you to stop saying this? You’re arguing with Geo, or Noam Chomsky, or Larry Bartels, which is fine- they’re all intelligent and reasonable members of the Left- but please stop pretending it’s an attack on Marxism, you’re just embarassing yourself and everybody here…
js. 11.13.14 at 11:18 pm
RP@201:
Frankly, I have neither the time nor the inclination nor the expertise to keep elaborating/arguing about this. I’ll just say that you infer too much too quickly. For example, nothing I’ve said implies that one would do without a concept of exploitation, or social relation to means to production, etc.
Rich Puchalsky 11.14.14 at 5:04 am
engels, I modified the statement so that it was only directed towards those Marxists who hold that particular belief. You say that some Marxists hold that particular belief. I think that another round of the Most Marxists Don’t game isn’t really called for.
js., I understand that you don’t want to keep elaborating, but I fail to see how the concepts of exploitation (in the Marxist sense), social relations to means of production etc. are really going to provide anything useful about the differences between the interests of white and black workers.
geo, I don’t think that I have room at the tail end of the thread to go through all of this. But I think that conservative white voters are not really voting for plutocrats who they have been fooled into thinking have the right policies: they consistently vote for people who promise racial recalcitrance. There isn’t always quite overlap between the two, and the cases where there isn’t overlap show, I think, that these people are not really taken in by free market rhetoric or any of the other propaganda. They simply accept it as a necessary part of the coalition that gets them what they care about. The economic elite doesn’t really care about racism and so on, but they in turn accept it as something that they have to provide to their base. I’m sure that some people are fooled, just by a law of large numbers, but I don’t think it’s really that important for domestic politics. Foreign politics is different, and that’s where I think that many of the strongest examples from _Manufacturing Consent_ come from.
Brett’s comment is a perfect example of racial privilege. Just don’t teach your kids to be criminals, and they will never get in trouble with the law. Just think of how much that tranquility must be worth to Brett.
gianni 11.14.14 at 5:53 am
I just want to add that although I am very sympathetic to much of the Marxist analytic perspective, I have never found the notion of class consciousness useful or necessary.
I first really encountered the idea in Lukacs, despite the fact that by that time I had already gone through much of Capital, the earlier manuscripts, and a many other canonical Marxist texts. You can argue that the germ of the idea is contained in the original Marx, or implied by the analytic perspective, and there is a solid argument for that, but I would challenge the notion that it is absolutely central to the ideas.
As presented in Lukacs, I do not see how the notion of class consciousness is useful or viable in these postmodern times. I read and studied Lukacs with a true expert on the subject – a committed Marxist professor whom you would all recognize and acknowledge as ‘knowing his stuff’ – and even with all his demonstrations to the contrary I could not see any value in the approach.
This is just, like, my opinion man… but I think that the idea is best abandoned. There is a lot of conceptual baggage tied to it that I find intellectually indefensible.
Ze Kraggash 11.14.14 at 9:19 am
Brett: “We look at the news, his mother getting caught at armed robbery, and think, maybe that explains why he robbed a store, because he had a mother who wouldn’t teach him not to commit robberies, being inclined to commit them herself.”
I am not familiar with the details of the story of the Brown family, but I assume she didn’t commit an armed robbery to increase her wealth from $10 million to 50. It seems likely that she committed that armed robbery because she felt (consciously or not) that she had been humiliated and robbed by various social, commercial, and government institutions over and over, every day of her life. And that is dangerous. That is something you and your children should worry about.
ZM 11.14.14 at 9:28 am
Brett Bellmore,
“We white workers assume that the way to minimize the risk of our children being shot, is to raise them not to commit crimes. It seems pretty effective.”
Not to be a busybody, but in that happy family photo you recently shared with us your wife was Asian and your little one was also not “white” . I do hope you don’t make these speeches about great white child raising methods at home since you would no doubt upset your family if you do.
Brett Bellmore 11.14.14 at 10:51 am
Well, I’m not the one who made this about race, am I? Who started talking about “white workers”? Was it me? No…
The point is, there are a lot of people in this country, likely a majority, who look at Ferguson, and don’t think “That could happen to my kid!”
The reason they don’t think this isn’t because they’re white. It’s not because they revel in heteronormative privilege. It’s not that they think their class gets special treatment. (They know damned well THAT isn’t true.) It’s because their kids don’t rob stores and attack cops.
And they don’t look at Ferguson, and feel guilty for displacing all that kid shooting from their children onto the children of other people, because, let’s face it, that’s nuts. Cracked. Insane. It takes a special sort of stupid to take notions like that seriously.
Rather, they look at Ferguson, and think, “Try not robbing liquor stores, or assaulting cops. It works, it really does!”
It’s all about the bourgeois values. Hard work. Studiousness. Honesty. Showing up. Keeping your hands off other people, and other people’s stuff. These values don’t guarantee you a good life, especially if you have the misfortune to live in a society where people who reject them have taken power. But rejecting them almost certainly guarantees you a bad life, unless you’re insanely lucky. Luck into some incredible talent, or get born into the ruling class, not the working class.
Now, in a sense I don’t blame Michael Brown for not demonstrating the bourgeois values. He wasn’t taught them in the first place. His mom certainly went out of her way to prove that, didn’t she? I’m not sure I even fully blame her for that lack, the reasons she doesn’t know the right way to live are complex, and yeah, slavery and Jim Crow had something to do with it, but so did the Great Society and the War on Poverty.
But Michael Brown didn’t get shot because he was black. And he certainly didn’t get shot because some “white worker” nefariously arranged for their own kid not to get shot, and SOMEBODY had to get shot. He got shot because he lacked the bourgeois values that would have saved him.
And if there is any sort of analysis that we don’t need to explain this, it is Marxist analysis. Might as well ask Typhoid Mary to help with public health.
ZM 11.14.14 at 11:01 am
“Well, I’m not the one who made this about race, am I? Who started talking about “white workersâ€? Was it me? No…”
Sorry I missed the earlier person’s post
“But Michael Brown didn’t get shot because he was black. And he certainly didn’t get shot because some “white worker†nefariously arranged for their own kid not to get shot, and SOMEBODY had to get shot. He got shot because he lacked the bourgeois values that would have saved him.”
Well we have these issues in Australia but not to the high degree they happen in the U.S.
We had a great spate of bushranging in the 19th C – this was when Australia had very high inequality.
Since the inequality was so high, people feel sorry for the bushrangers.
Now we have less inequality and more social services to help people, so we do not have a great bushranger issue any longer.
We had one mass shooting in the 1990s, then we changed the gun laws and have not had another one since.
Although I agree teaching people values is important you also have to try to make the social world one that holds values dear too and give people opportunity and assistance.
Brett Bellmore 11.14.14 at 11:34 am
“We had one mass shooting in the 1990s, then we changed the gun laws and have not had another one since.”
And, with just one mass shooting, that’s statistically significant. (Not that I wish Australia had enough of them for a good sample size. But one is not a good sample size.)
But, I would point out that the homicide rate in America varies by approximately 3 orders of magnitude from place to place, and under the same gun laws. So it’s pretty clear that what is driving that difference is not gun laws, or gun ownership rates. The rate of gun ownership simply can’t be a thousand times higher in the war zones we call urban hotspots, than they are in the peaceful communities where folks can’t remember the last murder. You’d need front end loaders for that many guns.
I really agree that we need to teach people proper values. And if you think people are getting shot because they’re black, and that the robbing stores and attacking people is just coincidence, has nothing to do with it, you’re not going to be concentrating on teaching people proper values. You’re going to be teaching them that they’re victims, and might as well join the Crips and do drugs. Even if you don’t think that’s what you’re teaching them.
We have a nightmarish cultural problem in the US. Not the whole US, mind you, because most of the country is nice and peaceful. But in some parts of it, and the sickness is spreading out into the rest of the country like a gangrenous limb poisoning your body. But you can’t amputate people. And you can’t solve cultural problems when you’re committed to denying that they’re cultural problems.
It’s an ugly situation, and I think the left is completely unequipped to deal with it. Because, “Marxist analysis”, seriously?
Ze Kraggash 11.14.14 at 12:03 pm
Try Bourdieu.
Rich Puchalsky 11.14.14 at 2:54 pm
“We have a nightmarish cultural problem in the US. Not the whole US, mind you, because most of the country is nice and peaceful. But in some parts of it, and the sickness is spreading out into the rest of the country like a gangrenous limb poisoning your body. But you can’t amputate people.”
Note the textbook eliminationist talk: people as disease. Also note the mechanical view presented: first, Trayvon Martin vanishes, and then for Michael Brown it’s if you “attack cops” then of course you get shot in the back as you run away. It’s like natural law, and complaining about it is as ridiculous as complaining about physics. Lastly, consider how the Ferguson Police Department operated in exactly the way I’ve described, its form determined by a century of segregation, with the wide support of the white community. I’ve talked about “votes” as shorthand, but of course the most responsive venues for these tradeoffs are local, not national.
Brett Bellmore 11.14.14 at 3:09 pm
Note interpreting explicitly ruling out elimination as “eliminationist”. If you don’t agree with the left, you could say “up”, and it would be interpreted as “down” if that put you in a bad light.
Also, note the falsification of reality: Michael Brown wasn’t shot in the back while running away. He was shot in the front while assaulting a police officer. The forensics have confirmed this, as well as witnesses.
Barry 11.14.14 at 4:26 pm
“He was shot in the front while assaulting a police officer. The forensics have confirmed this, as well as witnesses.”
Well, no, but thanks for playing.
Brett Bellmore 11.14.14 at 4:38 pm
Well, yes, but thanks for sticking to the narative even when it has been proven false.
Barry 11.14.14 at 5:16 pm
Thanks – I hadn’t seen anything which wasn’t a police/prosecution leak.
Is this the first time you’ve provided me with actual information, or the second?
Either way, it should be marked in the history books.
bianca steele 11.14.14 at 5:17 pm
Note interpreting explicitly ruling out elimination as “eliminationistâ€.
No, Rich gave an excellent deconstruction of the paragraph.
Brett Bellmore 11.14.14 at 5:20 pm
An excellent deconstruction, aside from taking the explicit rejection of elimination as “eliminationist”, and rotating Mr. Brown 180 degrees at the time he was shot.
IOW, an excellent example of a dubious genre.
J Thomas 11.14.14 at 5:24 pm
Well, yes, but thanks for sticking to the narative even when it has been proven false.
How does this story prove the other story false? I don’t see how it’s supposed to do that.
Rich Puchalsky 11.14.14 at 5:26 pm
I’ll be glad to correct my factual understanding of what happened in this case if it turns out that I had the facts wrong. That’s certainly possible.
“Eliminationist talk”, though, doesn’t become any less so if you add a disclaimer about not wanting to actually eliminate people. No one thinks that eliminationists are going to carry out a literal genocidal campaign.
Brett Bellmore 11.14.14 at 5:29 pm
“Thanks – I hadn’t seen anything which wasn’t a police/prosecution leak.”
Well, police/prosecution leaks aren’t any less credible than defense leaks, you know. As a general rule, that somebody who had just committed a robbery was wrongly shot by the police isn’t the way to bet, for all that it is certainly possible.
Brett Bellmore 11.14.14 at 5:45 pm
How does finding out he was shot leaning towards the officer, close enough to get powder burns, disprove the assertion that he was shot running away? I don’t suppose it does, if you assume he was running backwards. Strong-arm robbery AND moonwalking, he was multi-talented.
““Eliminationist talkâ€, though, doesn’t become any less so if you add a disclaimer about not wanting to actually eliminate people. ”
Yeah, actually it does, unless “eliminationist” is essentially content free, rejecting it as despicable as embracing it.
I am somewhat disparing about what we can do to solve the cultural problem Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin represent examples of. What I call the “bourgeois values” were not the result of changing the ways of adults, let alone en masse. They came about as a result of a Darwinian cultural evolution; They were a successful behavioral adaptation, people who exhibited them prospered, in prospering were enabled to have more offspring, and educated those offspring to carry on those values.
A key element of this process was that those who did NOT exhibit those values didn’t prosper, not prospering denied them the capacity to have numerous offspring who they would raise to share their less functional culture. Of course, we have rendered that Darwinian process non-functional, by extracting resources from the productive, so that the non-productive can continue to reproduce. And our culture degrades, just as any functional trait that is no longer linked to reproductive success declines in the face of entropy.
So, there are forces, if you want to call them that, causing our culture to degrade. How do we fight those forces with measures that aren’t morally objectionable? Planned Parenthood represented one approach, of course, but I expect you’d reject that approach even while embracing what they do.
Can we teach those virtues to millions of people who lack them? History provides no real example of this being accomplished, but it seems the only thing to do. Once we agree it needs to be done, of course, and that agreement is not advanced by fantasies about why Michael Brown met his end.
J Thomas 11.14.14 at 5:59 pm
How does finding out he was shot leaning towards the officer, close enough to get powder burns, disprove the assertion that he was shot running away? I don’t suppose it does, if you assume he was running backwards. Strong-arm robbery AND moonwalking, he was multi-talented.
Silly. They are saying that at least two shots were fired inside the SUV. He could have been shot in the thumb then.
If you were in an SUV getting shot by somebody in the SUV with you, any chance you’d try to run away?
If the report is right, his thumb was pointing toward the gun when it was shot, and he was close enough then to get powder burns. If he was farther away when he died, any chance he ran away after that nonfatal wound?
I don’t know what-all actually happened, and I don’t know how much of what is claimed in that newspaper report is actually false, but even if it’s all true you have a peculiar sense of proof.
But we all knew that.
Rich Puchalsky 11.14.14 at 6:02 pm
I should just keep poking Brett so that he keeps supporting the points I’ve been making in this thread. Moonwalking, huh? Darwinian cultural evolution: we should have taught people needed cultural lessons by making them not prosper if they had more offspring. I’ve focussed on the pseudo-rational rewards involved, but look at also the sadistic enjoyment that Brett gets from thinking about all that required punishment. Projection, too. Look at the paragraph about Planned Parenthood not being morally objectionable, then consider that Brett thinks that women who have abortions should be hanged.
bianca steele 11.14.14 at 6:11 pm
I should just keep poking Brett so that he keeps supporting the points I’ve been making in this thread.
Nah, I was about to complain that by just poking, you were allowing him to generate the only substantive argument anyone who looks at (this part of) the thread is going to see.
Your last sentence only supports my point. Resorting to pointing out niggling logical inconsistencies looks like you don’t have a strong argument.
Brett Bellmore 11.14.14 at 6:31 pm
“If you were in an SUV getting shot by somebody in the SUV with you, any chance you’d try to run away?”
Follow my reasoning here, J: I am concerned about why Mr. Brown got shot at all. I reason that without a first shot, there would be no subsequent shots. Therefore, the reason he got shot the first time is the reason he got shot at all, and the circumstances of subsequent shots have no bearing on this matter.
Mr. Brown would not have been shot if he hadn’t attacked the officer. Much like Trayvon Martin wouldn’t have been shot if he hadn’t assaulted Zimmerman. Not assaulting people is, admittedly, an inperfect strategy for avoiding being shot. But it still works fairly well most of the time.
Rich, I pointed out that Planned Parenthood was a conscious effort at eugenics, and suggested you would probably find that objectionable, even though you’d support what they were doing. But I don’t object to all abortion, only late term.
gianni 11.14.14 at 6:54 pm
Brett, even if you are 100% right regarding ‘cultural problems’, none of the people who you think need cultural re-education are likely to listen to more than 5 words of what you say before walking out.
If you really want to press this line, you are going to need to find a better way of stating your opinions. As you say, it is about teaching people – but prior to teaching anyone you need to get them to sit and listen.
Also, I don’t think Darwin would have included culture in the category of heritable traits. In fact, if you can teach these things, that basically excludes them from the Darwinian selection process entirely.
Of course, we both know that you don’t mean Darwin Darwinian. But the veneer of scientific truth can be hard to resist.
js. 11.14.14 at 6:57 pm
I see bianca steele’s point, but man, I so want more of this!
Rich Puchalsky 11.14.14 at 7:32 pm
“Nah, I was about to complain that by just poking, you were allowing him to generate the only substantive argument anyone who looks at (this part of) the thread is going to see.”
You think that he’s making a substantive argument? When we’re talking about a black kid being shot and suddenly Brett talks about him moonwalking? When he’s coming up with Darwinian cultural evolution and how we need to make people with the wrong culture fail to thrive if they have too many children, but how this isn’t eliminationist?
I really don’t get this. Brett isn’t arguing substantively or rationally, he’s kind of compulsively spitting out bits of his worldview, and he’ll keep on doing it as long as I keep poking him. You’re making a category error by thinking that Brett basically thinks the same way that you do and that he’s proceeding as you do when you want to make an argument. As Brett himself says, people really do vary more than most liberals are willing to imagine.
Ronan(rf) 11.14.14 at 7:36 pm
I think Brett gave his game away @204
bianca steele 11.14.14 at 8:02 pm
Rich, by substantive I mean (1) Brett’s offering propositions and deductions and such, and you’re objecting to them, apparently challenging him to offer new propositions to defend his initial argument, and (2) Brett’s telling us what he believes and you’re not, exactly, except that he’s wrong. Every time you answer him, you give him a platform and make it wider.
What do you mean by substantive, other than “not introducing new vivid details”?
Brett Bellmore 11.14.14 at 8:23 pm
“You think that he’s making a substantive argument? When we’re talking about a black kid being shot and suddenly Brett talks about him moonwalking?”
Why, yes, I was making a substantive argument. I was told that Michael Brown was shot while running away. I pointed out that he was, according to forensic evidence, shot *from the front*, and *at close range*. Unless we’re to presume that he was running away backwards, his running away at the time he was shot is precluded. I then made a sarcastic reference to moonwalking.
You then, in a rhetorical ploy which is quite characteristic of liberals, seized upon the term “moonwalking” to impute racism, and to divert away from the substantive point, which is that Michael Brown was shot not running away, but in VERY close proximity to an officer who was within his vehicle at the time. Which is entirely consistent with the officer’s account, and many of the witness accounts, that Brown was attacking the officer.
So, yes, I made a substantive argument, and you found a pretext upon which to avoid substance.
J Thomas 11.14.14 at 8:24 pm
Follow my reasoning here, J: I am concerned about why Mr. Brown got shot at all. I reason that without a first shot, there would be no subsequent shots. Therefore, the reason he got shot the first time is the reason he got shot at all, and the circumstances of subsequent shots have no bearing on this matter.
Mr. Brown would not have been shot if he hadn’t attacked the officer.
You’ve gone from some sort of evidence that didn’t prove anything much, to a collection of assumptions. Is it now you’re assuming he must have attacked the policeman or he wouldn’t have gotten shot the first time? And then you say if he didn’t do something wrong earlier he wouldn’t have gotten shot in the back?
You say it doesn’t matter whether he got killed, shot in the back when he was no immediate danger to anybody, because he must have done something wrong to deserve it?
I dunno. Maybe some of this stuff will come out at the trial. There will be witnesses. The guy who shot him. The guy who shot him’s partner. Other witnesses. Evidence. Things like that.
Maybe if he got shot in the back, running away, there will be a reason why it was better to shoot him than to catch him and arrest him. The report you quoted claimed it was only the last shot that killed him, he could have survived all the others. If there was some question about him getting away if they shot him less, they could have just arrested him in the hospital if it was true that he’d live.
Why do you feel like none of that matters? There are some Americans who believe the police can do no wrong, but I wouldn’t have thought it of you.
Brett Bellmore 11.14.14 at 8:39 pm
I think it matters very much for some purposes, but if we’re asking, “How can you avoid getting your children shot?”, which was the original point, the threshold between “not shot at all”, and “shot at least once” is the one that concerns us.
Like I say, if you don’t get shot the first time, you don’t get shot any extra times, either.
Ze Kraggash 11.14.14 at 8:56 pm
“How can you avoid getting your children shot?â€
You should make sure they are born into (at least) a middle-class family and not only behave but also look like middle-class people.
Rich Puchalsky 11.14.14 at 9:11 pm
bianca, if you don’t think that Brett’s statements are self-refuting, I don’t think I can really say anything that will change your mind. He made one substantive claim: that Brown wasn’t shot in the back. I acknowledged that I could have been wrong about this matter of fact. There’s a Federal investigation ongoing which is presumably going to come to some kind of conclusion, and I don’t see any reason not to wait and see what they say. Brett then completely gratuitously added the moonwalking bit. I don’t know whether you grew up in America? Are you familiar with what moonwalking is, the cultural history involved, and so on? Does Brett have to also ask whether Brown was shucking and jiving when he was shot?
Similarly, you really want someone to go through Brett’s Darwinian cultural evolution bit stage by stage and show why it’s incoherent? Like, complete with what “Darwinian” means, and what entropy means, and why cultural change doesn’t happen when people who have lots of children are materially discouraged from having children? The content of Brett’s statement is “I like to think about vicariously punishing black people.”
bianca steele 11.14.14 at 9:37 pm
Similarly, you really want someone to go through Brett’s Darwinian cultural evolution bit stage by stage and show why it’s incoherent?
No, and I wonder why you spend so much time replying to him. The intro to “Dragnet,” for some reason comes to mind. There are eight million wrong people on the Internet–maybe almost that many in CT comments–BB is one of them. If you think his posts are so self-refuting and repulsive that he ought really just to go away, why are you feeding him. Your own vivid details about me are getting intriguing and I’m almost curious to see what you’ll make up to accuse me of next, but I’ve learned from experience that that can be a dark place, so I’ll stop now.
christian_h 11.14.14 at 11:08 pm
Rich, you are replacing one simplistic explanation – one which you impute to “Marxists” or rather more strangely, “Marxism” – namely a version of economism so strong I personally have never met anyone who holds it (although I’d have to say of all the people I do know certain anarchists come closest if you want to go by labels), by another simplistic explanation – that it is all about racism. (I imagine that just like nobody is as strongly economistic as you claim, you probably do not believe either that racism is the one indispensable variable explaining American history and politics. But this seems to be what you are asserting here.) The evidence for which assertion is the correct observation that people are racist. True! But also, begging the question. I definitely agree that the peculiarly American form of racism that is a legacy of both continental conquest and slavery, and the difference between this racism and the European kind, is crucial in explaining differences between the US and European experiences. But I fail to see how this eliminates class and class struggle from the roster of concepts with explanatory power.
engels 11.14.14 at 11:27 pm
Also, it does somewhat deflate the democratic righteousness of Rich’s ‘you wanna claim the vast majority of people are helpless dupes’ when you realise his alternative is ‘the vast majority of people are racist arseholes’.
ZM 11.14.14 at 11:59 pm
Brett Bellmore,
“I am somewhat disparing about what we can do to solve the cultural problem Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin represent examples of. What I call the “bourgeois values†were not the result of changing the ways of adults, let alone en masse. They came about as a result of a Darwinian cultural evolution; They were a successful behavioral adaptation, people who exhibited them prospered, in prospering were enabled to have more offspring, and educated those offspring to carry on those values.
A key element of this process was that those who did NOT exhibit those values didn’t prosper, not prospering denied them the capacity to have numerous offspring who they would raise to share their less functional culture. Of course, we have rendered that Darwinian process non-functional, by extracting resources from the productive, so that the non-productive can continue to reproduce. And our culture degrades, just as any functional trait that is no longer linked to reproductive success declines in the face of entropy.
…
Can we teach those virtues to millions of people who lack them? History provides no real example of this being accomplished, but it seems the only thing to do….”
I do not think it likely that “bourgeois values” are a matter of evolution. Evolution goes very slowly except at certain points (for some reason). To make this argument you would need:
1. To investigate if there are biological determinants of virtuous behaviour in human beings.
2. Before conducting the above study you would have to decide on what counts as virtuous behaviour in human beings. This will be difficult since individuals and cultures and sub-cultures etc differ on what constitutes virtuous behaviour. It is a question that has gone on for thousands of years.
Going back to my example of how Australia used to have a problem like the U.S. problem in the 19th C with our bushrangers.
Our most famous bushranger Ned Kelly was Irish and the judge who hanged him, Redmond Barry, was also Irish. I think they would be similar in terms of biological evolution. The main differences were in their lives.
Redmond Barry grew up in a an anglo-irish military family from my memory, and did not get a military commission, then learned law through teaching himself, and became quite important in colonial Victoria.
Ned Kelly’s father was transported to Australia from Ireland as a convict (this is most likely because the UK was so unfair in those days that many people got transported to horrible gaols in Australia so wealthier people in the UK did not have to cope with looking at all the people they were driving to crime as well as being an especially cruel punishment as well as helping the UK with their strategic imperial aims by populating Australia as a colony ). Anyway eventually Ned Kelly turned to crime too and shot policemen. Then he was caught and Redmond Barry sentenced him to hanging saying “May God have mercy on your soul” and Ned Kelly replied “I will go a little further than that, and say I will see you there when I go.” The Redmond Barry died the next day.
As you can see from this story, Australia had the same sort of problems in the 19th C.
Your solution of “bourgeois values” people keeping poor people with a lack of housing and food and so on, so they will not have so many children as “bourgeois values” people is very similar to the U.K. in the 19th C. This was cruel and also did not work.
I put to you also since this is so cruel a method – these bourgeois virtues that you speak of are not very virtuous because being kind is a virtue, being cruel is a vice. Also, wanting to have all the resources and keep them from poor people is greedy, and greed is a vice too.
What is a step forward is having the government redistributing money by taxation from selfish bourgeois people who have the vices of cruelty and greed, to help house, feed, clothe, and educate poor people.
Redistribution can not be the entire solution. We had to read a book on inclusive city planning, and the other main things were making places and events for people to Encounter different people, and the next was cultivating Recognition so people will recognise each others struggles and hopes and needs and so forth.
If you are interested in this topic you should read social work books or similar, they probably are the books with the most ideas on this topic, and will have research on methods that have worked in some places, or have not worked in some places.
Rich Puchalsky 11.15.14 at 12:30 am
“But I fail to see how this eliminates class and class struggle from the roster of concepts with explanatory power.”
Well, I wasn’t trying to do that. I’ve said that I don’t think that the elite really cares about preserving racist, sexist etc. privilege at all, except instrumentally in that it’s a necessary part of their political coalition. If what you care about is why the elite’s policies are so bad for people outside of the elite, then economic concepts and class struggle may well provide a full explanation. But there’s a second question, which is “Why, if the elite’s interests / policies are so bad for working class people, do so many American working class people end up supporting them?” And that’s where racism comes in.
And I really don’t think that this is just me being crazy and simplistic. Here, I’ll requote a paragraph from a recent Chait article (yes, I know that quoting Chait is not a good idea: I’m doing it from the convenience of having it recently bookmarked):
As for democratic righteousness, that’s not really what I was going for. But isn’t there greater dignity in choosing something wrong than in being a helpless dupe? The difference between the two has a lot to do with how much agency you’re willing to believe that people have, doesn’t it?
ZM 11.15.14 at 1:06 am
“I am somewhat disparing about what we can do to solve the cultural problem Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin represent examples of.”
Also I forgot to mention one other point I thought of.
You shouldn’t be seeing this American “cultural problem” as only residing in poor/black/ individuals and groups – you should include your “bourgeois values” people in this analysis.
Studies on the integration process of migrants and refugees usually think of integration as a two-way street between the host group and the immigrant group.
They show that the favourable migrant settlement pathway leads to integration, but that hiccups can happen and in some cases these lead to social exclusion and marginalisation and alienation.
But it is not just the migrant responsible for these hiccups – host society people can be racist towards them through regular insults and exclusion, and not give them jobs, and so on.
And the government cannot fix everything in this integration scenario – regular people in the host society need to make large efforts as well.
Although I don’t think governments should cut spending so I am a bit ambivalent about this study, a two countries study in Europe found that in the cases it looked at (I think maybe Italy and a Scandinavian country?) integration that focuses on government actions and redistribution alone can be less successful than where the government doesn’t act as much and then the host society and migrants have to encounter each other more and work out what they have in common and their differences in a more ad hoc manner.
I think there could be important cultural differences between Scandinavia and Italy that could explain part of this difference though, not just how much the government acts.
engels 11.15.14 at 3:54 am
The difference between the two has a lot to do with how much agency you’re willing to believe that people have, doesn’t it?
As I said, I don’t believe this myself and I’m not going defend it but no, it has nothing to do with how much agency people have, it simply has to do with whether, as an empirical matter, lots of people (with free will, agency, a degree of intelligence and knowledge, etc) have as a matter of fact been misled by others who are more organised, more motivated and in control of most of the information pipelines. There’s no a priori reason why that’s impossible and the idea that there is is quasi-religious BS imho.
js. 11.15.14 at 4:15 am
What’s funny about this is that you seem incapable of imagining that precisely in places like this, class formations would map on to race distinctions, and that structures of exploitation would get a bit more complicated than the textbook case—for exactly the reason gestured at. Even still now. (And especially once you’ve granted that no one in this distinction is talking about class in the way that Larry Bartels would, or Chait for that matter.)
And since I suspect hackles going up in all directions, let me mention two clarificatory points (that might be too oblique to really clarify anything):
1. Go back to the classical treatment of the petite bourgeoisie. Is it supposed to join hands with the proletariat? Are the class interests of the two supposed to align?
2. For anyone not familiar with the US context, the group that gets called “the white working class” is not actually composed of poor white people. This group is, on average, relatively well-off, not rich but relatively well-off. A good number of them, according to classical doctrine, would be petty bourgeois! Would it really be so shocking if given the socio-historical context, even the ones that weren’t acted acted like they were?
Rich Puchalsky 11.15.14 at 5:55 am
js., I don’t know how much slippage you intend with “even the ones that weren’t acted like they were.” Here’s a clarifying anecdote: when I started out as an environmentalist, sometime back when I was in my 20s, I worked with some people from East Saint Louis who lived near various polluting factories. Being young and naive, I suggested that they cooperate with the unionized workers in these factories to pressure the companies from both inside and outside (because, of course, community exposure to toxins means worker exposure too). That’s when I found that while the surrounding communities were black, the workers were white, and the unions were perceived to have started out specifically to keep the good factory jobs for white workers and not let black workers in. The union leadership may well have changed since then — contemporary American unions were generally pretty good about racism — but the history of mistrust made cooperation unlikely.
So, a classic story about how racism harms both black and white workers, but benefits white workers probably more than they are harmed. But I don’t understand any narrative in which the people working at those factories would be petite bourgeoisie, or acting like them. They were factory workers. They were indeed a kind of labor elite, because they were unionized, had high paying manufacturing jobs, etc. But in Marxist class terms, they were proles. You seem to be wanting to apply Marxist analysis to cases in which what I understand about it really doesn’t seem to apply.
Robespierre 11.15.14 at 7:29 am
@246: I don’t know about Scandinavia, but here in Italy the police just reacted to a vicious episode of Italian citizens protesting against the presence of refugees in subsidised housing in a Rome neighbourhood by promising they’ll kick the refugees out (the refugees can join subsidised housing queues but can’t legally work) and in the past stood idly by as people set fire to Roma camps, while generally acting with a mixture of unenforcement of the law and occasional brutality in majority-immigrant areas.
Ze Kraggash 11.15.14 at 8:12 am
“They were indeed a kind of labor elite, because they were unionized, had high paying manufacturing jobs, etc. But in Marxist class terms, they were proles.”
In marxist class terms there are proles and there are lumpen. The lumpen are worthless, and need to be kept away, exactly for the purpose of preserving class consciousness.
Brett Bellmore 11.15.14 at 11:37 am
“I do not think it likely that “bourgeois values†are a matter of evolution. ”
I don’t think they’re a matter of evolution. I think they’re a matter of ‘evolution’.
By which I mean, if you make some not unreasonable assumptions, culture acts like genetics to a certain degree.
Assume people tend to pass on their culture to their children. Yes, by teaching, but they pass it on. Not unaltered, all the time, you could call that ‘mutation’.
Assume that culture has an impact on how successful people are at having more children.
Then culture will evolve, much as genes do, for the exact same reason genes do. Cultural values that enhance reproductive success will wax, cultural values that impede reproduction will wane.
Sure, cultural values can be transmitted to people other than your children. But, then, bacteria share genes in ways other than reproducing, (Look up “horizontal gene transfer”) but nobody would claim bacterial genes don’t evolve.
So, what I’m saying here is that the cultural values which lead one to have a good or a lousy life are subject to this process.
If circumstances are such that hard work, honesty, respect for others, result in you having more children than otherwise, (Your children being the people you transmit your culture to most effectively.) then over time these values will increase in frequency.
If circumstances are such that sloth, dishonesty, aggression, result in you having more children than otherwise, THOSE values will increase in frequency.
Now, here we are in a society where the hard working and honest have the fruits of their labor taken from them, and given to those who don’t exhibit such traits, (Like Michael Brown, who certainly was not a model citizen, or his mother, ditto.) so that those latter can reproduce, and pass on their depraved values to another generation. While prudence, one of those formerly promoted traits, counsels the responsible to scale back on their number of children.
What do you expect to result from such circumstances? A cultural renaissance? Incentives have their results whether or not you intended them.
Now, the thing is that Michael Brown, for all that he had been taught values that led to his death, was not genetically determined to hold those values. We humans are really, really good at “horizontal transfer” of culture.
So, maybe we need to make a real effort to get some “horizontal transfer” of positive cultural traits going, and in the RIGHT direction, so that the next Michael Brown will learn not to rob stores and assault people BEFORE it gets him shot.
Rather than looking at the people whose values aren’t ruining their lives, and asking, “What’s the matter with them???”
Yeah, what I’m saying is, if you’ve got one group doing well, and another group doing badly, stop assuming the first is hurting the second, and start trying to get the second to act more like the first, so they can do well, too.
Monstrous idea, I know.
ZM 11.15.14 at 12:27 pm
“matter of ‘evolution’. By which I mean, if you make some not unreasonable assumptions, culture acts like genetics to a certain degree . Assume people tend to pass on their culture to their children. Yes, by teaching, but they pass it on. Not unaltered, all the time, you could call that ‘mutation’.”
But this is not called ‘evolution’ – it already is given a name and is called enculturation.
“Cultural values that enhance reproductive success will wax, cultural values that impede reproduction will wane.”
There is a very high human population, so you can see people like to encourage small families. Some people say small families is linked to women’s education levels, some say it is linked to economic security.
But the idea of purposefully encouraging large families is now an outlier idea.
“If circumstances are such that hard work, honesty, respect for others, result in you having more children than otherwise, then over time these values will increase in frequency.
If circumstances are such that sloth, dishonesty, aggression, result in you having more children than otherwise, THOSE values will increase in frequency”
I am sorry, but I have never heard of studies linking family size to these virtues and vices. Also you are forgetting the Prodigal son. And you’re forgetting these virtues and vices are mixed in people .
what if someone is hard working and aggressive ? Do you want to encourage them to have a large family, or a small family?
And you would need lots of government committees if you are planning of investigating every couples virtues and vices before deciding on whether to encourage them to have large or small families.
I think you would get pretty cross if the government brought you before a committee to assess your virtues and vices – what if your local committee was made up of liberals?
“Now, here we are in a society where the hard working and honest have the fruits of their labor taken from them, and given to those who don’t exhibit such traits”
This is because we want society to be kind (a virtue) rather than cruel (a vice). And because we recognise not everyone has the same opportunities and abilities, but we should try to give people more opportunities and help develop their abilities.
“So, maybe we need to make a real effort to get some “horizontal transfer†of positive cultural traits going, and in the RIGHT direction, so that the next Michael Brown will learn not to rob stores and assault people BEFORE it gets him shot.”
This is why I recommended you to read social work books. You could volunteer as a mentor to troubled youths in your town, and then you would learn about their situations as well as helping them with your knowledge .
“Yeah, what I’m saying is, if you’ve got one group doing well, and another group doing badly, stop assuming the first is hurting the second, and start trying to get the second to act more like the first, so they can do well, too.”
You should not really assume either of these, you should find out the circumstances.
Going back to bushrangers – morally bushrangers should not really be encouraged, because killing people is wrong and no one eould like to be out riding in a carriage only to find themselves held up by a bushranger.
On the other hand 19thC Australia was very unequal – some people did no useful work but got property or did trading and were vastly wealthy and galivanted around spending money extravagantly and wearing velvet and diamonds – but other people were very poor and when there was a good rush in my town they walked all the way from the city and drank water that was unclean and their little children and wives died on the long walk.
So as you can see, the velvet and diamond wearing people should have helped the other people, not fostered inequality and put poor people into such dire straits as they walk all the way from the city to my town and their family members die off one by one.
Brett Bellmore 11.15.14 at 12:39 pm
The one line you skipped over? “Incentives have their results whether or not you intended them.”
I think I’ll stand by that. The best motives in the world won’t prevent bad incentives from having their results.
Just because you didn’t intend that discouraging responsible people from having children, and giving their wealth to irresponsible people, would increase the proportion of irresponsible people in the next generation, doesn’t mean that isn’t the effect of such a policy. Of course it has that effect.
ZM 11.15.14 at 1:03 pm
Do you meant the unintended consequence of incentivising velvet and diamond wearing ahead of incentivising responsibly helping people so their families don’t die while they walk to the gold rush?
J Thomas 11.15.14 at 1:36 pm
#231 ZM
But this is not called ‘evolution’ – it already is given a name and is called enculturation.
BB is an amateur sociobiologist.
Since it’s come up, I’ll give my interpretation. Poor people have trouble getting good jobs, or any jobs. Poor black people especially. So the ones with the most initiative tend to use that initiative to get money in criminal ways because that’s how they can get money. Then they get punished or killed for it — an occupational hazard. In the long run this would tend to breed initiative out of the poor population. If there’s a genetic component that would tend to be lost, and if it’s cultural people can watch the punishments and see that isn’t for them. Also, with enough deaths the poor people would tend not to replace themselves and would have to be continually replenished by new people who have become poor.
However, poor people traditionally breed faster. They know that it’s a hard life, they’ll tend not to live as long, things kill them, so the ones who have more children pass on their genes and their values better. And the guys who take a lot of initiative get a lot of respect. They’re taking initiative, making money, and if you need protection in a place where the laws and the police don’t help anybody, they can be important friends. Not unlikely they start more than their share of pregnancies before they die.
One obvious solution would be to provide lots of legal business opportunities to poor people who will take the initiative to try. As they become respected members of the business community they will avoid crime. That would leave us with a lot of poor people who don’t take initiative, but they wouldn’t cause as much trouble. But we don’t know how to provide people with job opportunities, much less opportunities to take initiative. Hire a poor black male and chances are he’ll have trouble getting along with the other employees, he won’t have the cultural background to know how you like to be treated, and he might even have to be taught basic job skills. Then he may get in trouble, the police mistake him for a criminal and put him in jail to await trial and you have to hire somebody else. It just doesn’t pay, even when you pay him less you still lose out.
Anyway, with a strictly limited number of jobs, middle-class people don’t want to have more competition for those jobs and entrepreneurs don’t want more competition for startups, either.
Brett proposes another solution. If the poor people learn to behave just like middle-class people, they will be treated like middle-class people. Until they do that, we should kill the ones that act least middle-class to speed them along in that. Work out ways to get them to have fewer children so there won’t be so many of them. Also, the more efficiently we kill the ones who cause trouble, the quicker the lesson will be learned.
The less initiative the survivors take, the less of a problem they will be to society.
Brett’s approach is logical once you accept his assumptions. In evolving systems there must be winners and losers. Unless the losers lose, there is nothing to enforce the difference between winners and losers. Since we know what kind of society we want, it makes perfect sense to kill off the people who don’t behave the way we want them to. This is in fact the only way to keep society from changing into something that doesn’t work the way we want it to.
Some people get upset when the rights of criminals are violated. But why should society give away rights to criminals? If they were obeying the rules of society they wouldn’t be criminals in the first place. So when they happen to get killed without due process, it’s all for the best.
Brett has laid it out more explicitly than his sort usually do. I have laid it out a little more explicitly still.
Rich Puchalsky 11.15.14 at 2:19 pm
engels: ” it simply has to do with whether, as an empirical matter, lots of people (with free will, agency, a degree of intelligence and knowledge, etc) have as a matter of fact been misled by others who are more organised, more motivated and in control of most of the information pipelines. There’s no a priori reason why that’s impossible and the idea that there is is quasi-religious BS imho.”
It’s a good thing that I’m not arguing for it a priori then, but instead from evidence. I don’t see why you really care about this, because it’s supposedly a central part of Marxism that classes are the actors in history, that classes are the entities that have consciousness etc. etc. and you don’t really care whether individuals are fooled or why they are.
But for anyone who does care, there was something called the Southern Strategy, which involves tactics that have been the core of conservatism in the U.S. since overt racism became untenable. It isn’t designed to appeal to dupes, unless you think that all racists are a priori dupes. It’s designed to appeal to racists. There is no Plutocrat Strategy, as Mitt Romney found out when his 47% remarks didn’t go over so well. Here, from the wiki entry on dog-whistle politics, is what may be the most-quoted paragraph on American politics (from Lee Atwater):
Note where the concept of cutting taxes is involved in that paragraph. It’s not that free market propaganda convinces people that cutting taxes is good. It’s a proxy for racism. And academic work, like the study that I cited indirectly above, bears this out.
Ronan(rf) 11.15.14 at 2:37 pm
What the Sen et al paper quoted by Chait shows (IMO) is not neccesarily that racism is the great organising principle of American politics, but that society is a complicated web of social networks and so to understand voting patterns/interest formation/political preferences, you need to look at those relations as discrete, local, historically contingent realities embedded in larger political movements. As such any number of factors matter, dependant on time, place, person. We are social animals, molded by those around us and molding them in return. Nothing can be reduced to X (where X might be class struggle, racism, whatever)
Brett Bellmore 11.15.14 at 6:41 pm
J: I observe, not for the first time, and likely not for the last, that the standard rule of interpretation among liberals is that, if there is any disreputable meaning you could, even at a stretch, attribute to something said by a non-liberal, that’s the meaning you must go with. Because, I guess, it is simply inadmissible that somebody who disagrees with you would actually say something that wasn’t despicable, and so any non-despicable interpretation must, therefore, be wrong.
You have, of course, and unsurprisingly, completely misinterpreted what I had to say. But I’m not sure what the point of correcting you would be, in light of the above.
So I’ll simply say, that if somebody suggests that the way for people to avoid being shot while attacking police is, most simply, to not attack police, and this strikes you as objectionable, then you have nothing to contribute to solving the problem.
And, I think that’s more or less the case. The left really has nothing to contribute to solving this problem, but you’re hell on wheels when it comes to perpetuating it.
Rich Puchalsky 11.15.14 at 8:03 pm
Ronan(rf): “Nothing can be reduced to X (where X might be class struggle, racism, whatever)”
I’m really not trying to propound a one-dimensional explanation for everything, but there’s also a danger in emphasizing that everything is a complicated web that you miss the main causes of things.
I’ll review why I brought this up in the first place. It was about the good walls / bad walls thing. Why would the left be conflicted about immigration restrictions? Because, I suggested, we’ve passed out of a historical era in which Marxism largely defined the left — even the non-Marxist left was largely defined in opposition to Marxism. This then became bogged down in an argument about whether Marxism ever defined anything, whether a majority of Marxists believed this or that, whether I was misrepresenting Marxism, etc. At any rate, whether you think my whole digression was foolish or not, there are different lefts that focus on cosmopolitanism (all walls are bad), human rights (the horrible thing about walls is that people get shot for trying to cross them), democracy (walls are fine if voted in by those who they protect), protection of the national working class (walls are needed to reduce labor competition) etc.
Ronan(rf) 11.15.14 at 8:19 pm
I agree ‘everything is too complicated’ isnt particularly useful (more an excuse not to adopt a position on anything) I was more implying that I would see that complex web of relationships as the causal mechanism (rather than discrete classes, races, ideologies or whathave you ..though these all matter and interrelate)
I actually think you have a good point re Marxism, but I havent read enough (any really) Marx, or Marxist writers to have a worthwhile opinion on it. (that’s not to be dismissive, it’s more laziness on my part) I agree with those above who say ‘ideologically’ there has to be some room given for various Marxist interpretations, it should be seen as an evolutionary model, not static or caricatured. But I do think there comes a time when youve watered it down so much from it’s basic premises that it really cant hold as an explanatory theory anymore (though I dont know if that’s happened in this case)
Ze Kraggash 11.15.14 at 9:21 pm
Well, there is a reason for the “marxism as a method”, “marxism as a toolbox” interpretation. As a method of analysis it can be applied to economy, politics, culture, psychology, etc.; it can lead to authoritarianism or anarchism. It can turn into pretty much anything, as long as it’s materialistic and dialectical. Incidentally, it (or some branches of it) can also be viewed as a form of racism (or, rather, aggressively paternalistic eurocentrism).
js. 11.15.14 at 9:48 pm
No one’s really “watering down” anything. (Well, Ze Kraggash is spouting some nonsense I don’t understand, so maybe he is.) The point is that unless you want to plug your ears and stick your head in the sand, you have to grant I think that the proletariat as a broad-based class formation that could function as a historical agent—that the proletariat in this sense does not exist in the current American context. (This is my way of putting christian_h’s point @199—christian_h may disagree with this formulation.) Maybe this is changing, and maybe as inequality grows and its patterns harden, it will change significantly. But I don’t think we’re there yet.
This means that (a) if you start with an assumption like: unionized, predominantly white workers are part of the proletariat and poor black people are part of the proletariat, so they must have convergent class interests, you will get odd results, to say the least. (b) If you still want a plausible class analysis—or anyway a broadly materialist explanation—of patterns of political behavior and preferences, you’re going to have to do it without the above assumption. I don’t pretend to have a well worked out explanation of the latter sort, but it seems to me desirable.
Ronan(rf) 11.15.14 at 11:44 pm
js – I dont know what you mean by
“you have to grant I think that the proletariat as a broad-based class formation that could function as a historical agent”
though. And I don’t mean that disingenuously, this is just a result of not having read enough marx or thought in this frame. I can see moments when the working class was a meaningful political actor, particularly in specific contexts (highly stratified societies where class wasnt only an economic reality but also a cultural one. Where you knew your place, where people lived in smaller, homogenous communities organised around specific industries etc)
But this is still, to my mind, fundamentally a manifestation of local politics and micro level social ties. You grew up in place A, your father did B, your mother did C. You all voted D. There also has to be an organisational structure to enable you to vote for your ‘class interests’, which is primarily an outgrowth of being able to easier organise in these contexts (large homogenous communities built around specific industries)
I can understand what identifying as working class means here, and the method you have of achieving certain political goals are built into the political economy of your community and the larger political system. But why does this presuppose a ‘proletariat as a broad-based class formation that could function as a historical agent’ outside of this specific context ?
And so if you look at the US South which (afaik) was more rural, where race was much more the identity that society was divided on historically, and where local social ties and politics were more fundamentally built around a rural economy and racial exclusion, then the sort of breakdown in the above model doesnt really surprise me.
I don’t know if this really speaks to anything you’re saying though, which is why I stayed out of the conversation initially.
(And I do think, tbh, that the Afghani model of politics – valley to valley, village to village, house to house – still makes a lot of sense at explaining politics even in the west. Just (in the west) with a more complicated institutional arrangement and a more subtle elite. Afaict most people still vote on local issues – what am I buying with my wages, is the local hospital functioning, are the schools oversubscribed, do I feel safe in my neighbourhood – and long term political alliegances. I don’t see that as false conciousness or people not understanding their interests, but as rating their preferences differently (more concerned with factors that most directly affect their lifes)
Ze Kraggash – If I’m reading you right, then I agree. But Marxism as a ‘method’ or as a ‘toolbox’ is surely a much more caveated Marxism. Marxism not as a general theory, but as a way of explaining certain things under certain conditions.
Ronan(rf) 11.15.14 at 11:53 pm
..just to add, Im prob not fully committed to the above, and accept it might not even make a huge amount of sense.
ZM 11.16.14 at 12:32 am
Brett Bellmore,
“So I’ll simply say, that if somebody suggests that the way for people to avoid being shot while attacking police is, most simply, to not attack police, and this strikes you as objectionable, then you have nothing to contribute to solving the problem.”
You are reducing the complexity of the problem here and offering a simplistic solution.
people who work with young offenders and young people at risk already do try to discourage them from breaking laws and being violent etc.
but it is not a simple matter to change how people act , and programs are underfunded , and volunteers are overstretched.
My younger sister does a lot of paid and voluntary work with young people who have offended, are at risk of offending, are in state care, or are in very difficult circumstances such as having been abused or having to be the main carer in their families and other issues.
It is not a matter of just declaring to young people ‘do not attack police!’ and that fixes everything.
Often they have difficulty forming trusting relationships especially with figures of authority, have low self esteem, have learning difficulties or have missed a lot of school, lack a sense of stability, and so on. So you have to build a relationship and try to make them feel like they have some worth and make fun learning activities and so on before you can even start to deal with more difficult issues.
As well as this there is the wider society to look at and ask questions about why is there such a degree of inequality? What contributes to inequality?
engels 11.16.14 at 3:52 am
I don’t think Christian said the working class in America doesn’t exist, but that it lacks class consciousness- a class ‘in itself’, not a class ‘for itself’ is another way of putting it- at least that’s what I’d say.
Ze Kraggash 11.16.14 at 10:44 am
“This means that (a) if you start with an assumption like: unionized, predominantly white workers are part of the proletariat and poor black people are part of the proletariat, so they must have convergent class interests, you will get odd results, to say the least.”
Perhaps it’s because (arguably, depending on the details) neither groups is a part of the proletariat.
People in the first group are industrial wage workers, but they also own property and have plenty to lose besides their chains. And thus their class conscience is, in part, that of petite bourgeoisie.
And the second group, if they are anything like what we see in Wire, do have nothing to lose, but they are not wage-workers. They are a mixture of lumpen-proletarians and shadow-economy entrepreneurs.
Foxconn workers are proletarians.
Brett Bellmore 11.16.14 at 12:00 pm
I agree, and nothing I said suggests otherwise, that changing somebody’s cultural values after they’ve already been raised in them is devilishly difficult. Especially when they’re surrounded by people who share those values. Doesn’t mean it isn’t what we need to do.
But, way up the thread, this is what I was responding to:
” If white workers assume that there are good guys and bad guys and the way that society works it that sometimes people are just going to get shot, can you say that it’s immoral for them to minimize this risk for their children while making it more likely for other people’s children?”
And I needed to point out that the way we ‘white workers’ minimize the risk that our children are going to get shot, is by raising them to not do things that would get them shot. And this is a strategy which neither “mak[es] it more likely” for other people’s children to be shot, nor is unavailable to those other people.
Should I not have stomped all over the idea that I got Michael Brown shot by teaching my son not to rob stores or attack police officers?
I think the situation is both simple AND difficult. Many problems are both. I’m overweight, I need to eat less and exercise more. That’s not complicated, does it’s simplicity make it easy?
engels 11.16.14 at 12:58 pm
‘I’m overweight, I need to eat less and exercise more. That’s not complicated, does it’s simplicity make it easy?’
Maybe spending less time on the internet would help a bit…
christian_h 11.16.14 at 1:20 pm
Yeah I meant what engels said at 263.
ZM 11.16.14 at 1:32 pm
“And I needed to point out that the way we ‘white workers’ minimize the risk that our children are going to get shot, is by raising them to not do things that would get them shot. And this is a strategy which neither “mak[es] it more likely†for other people’s children to be shot, nor is unavailable to those other people”
Well the only thing you do might be to tell your child not to do things where they might be shot (although you do complain a lot about government regulations and taxing – both of which can help poor people and black people [although also the NSA and CIA and military etc]).
But other parents might do that and also take their children out of schools with a goodly proportion of black students, or they might tell their children not to associate with black people, or they might use racist language, or they might move suburbs, or they might not hire people because they are black, or they might pay back employees less, or treat them nastily etc etc.
These sort of actions would marginalise black people and then these parents would be contributing to social exclusion and the sort of alienation where someone might turn to crime.
Brett Bellmore 11.16.14 at 1:52 pm
“But other parents might do that and also take their children out of schools with a goodly proportion of black students,”
That would be rather difficult given that I live in the Piedmont region of S.C., in a community that’s 21% black according to the census, and my neighborhood is more like 70% black according to my eyeballs. And, you know what? I noticed that *before* I bought the house, and didn’t care a bit. I did care that the crime rate was low, and the house affordable, though.
bianca steele 11.16.14 at 5:29 pm
ZM: I think it’s fair to point out that the kinds of recommendations you make @272 can alienate white people as well. “Don’t go to places where you might be shot,” in practice, might mean, frequent neighborhoods with higher SES levels, which in fact might not be an option for them. Or it might mean, make your values more like those of the upper-middle class elite, so there won’t be even the shadow of a doubt whether you’re a criminal. It’s dismissive and creates double-binds for people without the resources to create a cocoon around themselves. It’s the same objection one can make to Brett’s notion above that people aren’t shot because they’re black, or because they’re poor, but because of what they do.
bianca steele 11.16.14 at 5:37 pm
I do see that some of what I’m talking about comes from Brett’s comment not yours, but I do think part of what drives white antagonism to what’s perceived as liberalism comes from that double-bind and their wish to have a simple way to distinguish themselves from “bad” people, and to assume everyone will recognize it automatically. They want to think the only reason a neighborhood is “bad” is because of the race of people living in it, and they resent not having the ability to be recognized as not-bad because their race is different.
js. 11.16.14 at 5:42 pm
Yes. And one of the many, many ways in which I tend to hold a minority view is that I don’t think you can really have one without the other. (So, in part, the class in-itself comes to be by constituting itself for-itself. That sort of thing.)
bianca steele 11.16.14 at 6:24 pm
Ze Kraggash: People in the first group are industrial wage workers, but they also own property and have plenty to lose besides their chains. And thus their class conscience is, in part, that of petite bourgeoisie.
There are plenty of criticisms that can be made of Marxism, or Marx’s writings, etc., but the ambiguity over whether the working class is the revolutionary class (don’t even ask what that means) because of its relation to the means of production (ditto), or because it’s kept entirely powerless, rootless, propertyless, and rightless, is a big one. So labor unions–bad–because they improve the status of the workers and increase their power without changing the nature of capitalism.
Ze Kraggash 11.16.14 at 9:46 pm
” So labor unions–bad–because they improve the status of the workers and increase their power without changing the nature of capitalism.”
If we accept the suggestion to use marxism as a method, then “good” and “bad” become meaningless. It is what it is (the labor unions in this case).
However, if you desire to end capitalism as quickly as possible, then ‘the worse the better’ seems like a good strategy, and so, yes, ‘labor unions are bad’ would likely be your conclusion from scientific (or pseudo-scientific, as Rich would have it) analysis.
Watson Ladd 11.16.14 at 10:30 pm
@bianca steele: Actually, Marx believed the working class was revolutionary because of its relation to the means of production. The belief in the wretched of the earth as revolutionary class is a 1960’s Maoist or Pabloist invention. Of course, Marx didn’t see classes as composed out of people, but closer to social roles: every worker is a capitalist over their own labor power.
Bruce Wilder 11.16.14 at 11:32 pm
The political psychology of authoritarianism might make a useful contrast to Marxist notions of class consciousness.
People, who are basically followers and socially and economically subordinate in society are prone to acquire a cluster of characteristic psychological attitudes. It has something to do with fear, restricted life experience, limited horizons and education. A high degree of adherence to conventional social norms and aggression toward deviants or outgroups are part of this cluster. There are certain characteristic cognitive errors and faulty reasoning, such as contradictory opinions from compartmentalized thinking, that correlate with these attitude clusters, as do racist attitudes and expressions.
Authoritarian followers are not necessarily good judges of the leadership they are offered. They are easily fooled by demagogues, and often manipulated by people, whose political attitudes are best categorized psychologically as exhibiting a social dominance orientation.
I do think that what passes for the Left in American politics since 1970 has largely abandoned and disrespected much of the lower “half” of the socio-economic spectrum, neither empathizing effectively nor bothering with trying to lead them. Only race and sex have remained admissible categories of oppression, with the result that many people, especially men, feel only disrespect from liberals. And on issues of race and sex, the Left tends to adopt doctrines — I won’t say dogmas — that specifically target conventional social norms and prejudices in a way that seems like both wilful denial of visible reality and disrespect for the experience of the great mass of Americans.
I will add that a cynical, sophisticated and well-financed propaganda operation drives the mass of American voters like cattle by manipulating the responses of authoritarian followers. Liberal efforts to turn them into something else are ill-conceived and the liberal failure to lead them, or at least contest their loyalties with the Right, pretty much explain the failure of the Left to take or use political power, despite the manifest policy failures of conservatives.
ZM 11.16.14 at 11:52 pm
bianca steele,
“They want to think the only reason a neighborhood is “bad†is because of the race of people living in it, and they resent not having the ability to be recognized as not-bad because their race is different.”
There is quite a lot of work in planning on “locational disadvantage” and the “neighbourhood effect” where neighbourhoods or larger areas become associated with crime or run-downness etc. the stigma applied to the neighbourhoods is often applied to residents wholesale , and they have trouble socially and in getting employment.
Urban regeneration and other placemaking approaches can help – but then neighbourhoods can start to gentrify and the disadvantaged residents might have to move elsewhere due to unaffordability.
It is a very difficult issue. I interviewed someone about locational disadvantage in a Melbourne suburb and they said Burmese refugees moving in had helped – because they were happy to be safe and housed and a number of families moved in so they supported each other and tended to want to make the houses and gardens nice and so on and the sense of community and belonging was better and the reputation was slowly changing.
You are right that locational disadvantage can affect white people as well. But my idea is that in much of the U.S. , or at least in the Southern states, it affects more black people. In Australia probably the communities with the worse locational disadvantage are indigenous communities.
You might be right that white people sometimes try to overcome locational disadvantage by trying to make it about race and blackness. And individuals might try to adopt behaviour of wealthy people instead to overcome it . I have also read that in job seeking people will use the addresses of family or friends in more middle class suburbs.
MPAVictoria 11.17.14 at 12:21 am
“And on issues of race and sex, the Left tends to adopt doctrines — I won’t say dogmas — that specifically target conventional social norms and prejudices in a way that seems like both wilful denial of visible reality and disrespect for the experience of the great mass of Americans.”
You mean like support for gay marriage? I think if you look at the polling the left gains from its social views these days. Basically I am not supporting any party that isn’t for equal rights for all citizens. That is my red line. And I am about as reliable left wing voter as there is.
Ronan(rf) 11.17.14 at 2:19 am
I would have thought though, if you wanted to create a class based political divide in the US you would be hoping that the Dems were appealing to the demographics they are ? (ie working class women, immigrants, African Americans and Mexicans) Have the Southern working class ever really cared about, or supported, the institutions (unions, laws etc) that a meaningful class based politics would have to build and maintain ? (that’s not a rhetorical question, my knowledge is limited on this, but my impression – particularly from reading people like Erik Loomis, who does know this area – is that working class political strenght *overwhelmingly came from* urban (Catholic and Jewish particularly) immigrants and their children.)
You’re probably never going to get a mass political movement that really cares about inequality, or a groundswell of support for a campaign against ‘the elite’, but if you wanted to improve peoples lives (economically) I would think these are the base you’d be looking for – rather than become a party of romanticised, anti corporation western farm hands (or whatever)
This is dealt with in the Bartels paper linked above, where he says – something along the lines of – ‘if you want a Democratic Party that appeals to the working class, then you have it.’
bianca steele 11.17.14 at 2:33 am
working class political strenght *overwhelmingly came from* urban (Catholic and Jewish particularly) immigrants and their children.)
In the Northeast, I think, this is true. In the West, to a much lesser extent. Also, the skilled trades I think were more associated with “native” white Protestants.
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