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laceyspencer · 4 years ago

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Economics and Culture-Juniper Publishers

Introduction

Following the tradition of the marginalist school, abstraction in economics received a big push during the late 19th century led by Stanley Jevons and Auguste Walras. This happened despite Adam Smith’s strong feeling for the significance of culture and Malthus’ deep sense about how culture affects the dynamics of population. David Ricardo was the most instrumental in reducing economics to a culturally free abstraction. Alfred Marshall, at least judged from his early work, was another culprit although his subsequent Industry and Trade shows an increased awareness towards the complex cultural reality behind the abstraction of supply and demand, inserting a strong institutional flavor in the analysis.

This is rather puzzling because the core part of economics is exchange, and the terms that permit the exchange is called the terms of trade, the ratio of the price producers are willing to receive and consumers to pay for the exchange. Indeed, while exchange is a fundamental part of economic behavior, perhaps except for game theory and transaction cost theory, remarkably little attention has been given in the economic literature to analysis of processes of exchange. Thorbecke & Cornelisse [1]. argued that the item exchanged, the actors engaged in the decisions, and the physical, social, technological, and legal environment within which the actors operate in the exchange, matter in understanding the different transactions and outcomes. The combination of those elements, the formation process of the exchange, and the resulting transaction is considered an exchange configuration.

Mainstream economists contend when there is a divergence between the equilibrium price and the actual price at which the exchange takes place, either excess demand or excess supply will be eliminated by price changes. But the actual process of adjustment in the exchange is not satisfactorily explained despite the fact that in reality the whole process captures the satisfaction of those who trade, which is a complex subject to understand but is necessarily an integral part of any set of cultural relations involving things like trust, regret, deception, persuasion, and learning process.

In this paper, I intend to show the deficiency of mainstream economics that overlooks the role of culture and institutions. The latter should be an integral part of economics. Aside from the difficulty to identify the relation and causality between culture, institutions and economic performance, some work has been done in this area although much of it still fell on deaf ears among mainstream economists.

Mainstream and Cultural Economics

Despite their arguments that clearly foreshadow the cultural economics, it is unclear why institutionalists like Thorstein Veblen (in the US) and Max Weber (in Europe) failed to influence the mainstream of economics during the time. Indeed, one of the critical questions in cultural economics is about the extent to which a system of institutions that produce changes in culture will survive or fail precisely because of such changes. Theoretically, it is the institutional system of legitimacy that will survive and dominate, not the dynamics of power and wealth; without legitimacy neither power nor wealth can be preserved.

Perhaps nothing more obvious than in monetary economics where the use of formalistic mechanical models is prerequisite and with almost a complete lack of interest on the cultural aspects within which the institutions of money and banking operate. The models are filled with statistics and causation (often confused with correlation) with little attempt to open the lid to see what the actual processes are. This is irrespective of the fact that one cannot really learn about what is going on in the banking sector unless we treat bankers as human beings and try to understand how they really think. The same applies to players in the capital market.

The departure from partial equilibrium to general equilibrium in economics is another example of a neglect of cultural dimension. While the overall quantities produced and consumed are correctly not taken as the result of individual producers and consumers’ decisions, rather the result of the interactions of such decisions, it is often assumed in the corresponding models that the choices of diverse agents can be represented by the choices of one “representative” utility-maximizing individual whose choices coincide with the aggregate choices. The heterogeneity in behavior and culture is considered irrelevant. This is clearly unjustified and ill-suited for studying problems involving coordination failures such as unemployment, under-utilization, financial instability, etc.

For most mainstream economists, when things get more complex, and interdependence amplifies, new variables, parameters and equations are added, and non-linearity is introduced, expecting that the model’s predictive power will strengthen. Little efforts are made to delve into the changing patterns of behavior as part of the possible mutations in social system where the process of selection may involve increased vulnerabilities, bankruptcies, crisis, or simply a loss of legitimacy.

Even in taxation where the system emerges from the interaction of different governmental subcultures, and where the tax system itself is the result of a long historical process involving changing culture of governments, members of parliament, and the constituents, the efficiency of “one-way transfer” depends not only on the perception of threat (sanctions of the law if failing to pay tax) but also the culture of tax collectors. The mass of individuals paying taxes with a fair degree of fidelity itself is clearly a cultural phenomenon. Yet, most research on tax issues tends to be exclusively financial and economic-based, void of any cultural context.

The picture could be less grim as some fields of economics have come close to cultural economics, although they are more of the business schools’ domain, e.g., marketing, industrial organization, and labor economics where there is a long tradition in the study of collective bargaining, labor unions, culture of the factory, etc. The bad news is, even in these fields mechanistic approaches have encroached the analysis to the point where no collaborative work with sociologists, anthropologists, and psycho-sociologists is considered necessary.

Yet, in the supply-demand theory, for example, when excess supply occurs, producers may alter their preference by staying away from efficiency efforts, and consumers may not follow the standard law of supply-demand as they do not raise consumption despite the downward pressure on the price. In such circumstances, preferences should not be taken only as the determinant of the economic process like in a standard optimization model, instead it should be learned during the process of cultural transformation. Thus, the culture-affected learning process could generate outcome different from a standard solution.

The emphasis on learning is the most crucial difference between mechanistic economics and cultural economics, implying that cultural economics is evolutionary in nature. Learning is part of social evolution that is more complex than biological evolution. It occurs more slowly because people, let alone societies, are not easily willing to change due to their realistic appraisal of the uncertainties arising from such a change, which is a standard problem in economic development.

In contrast, mechanistic economics relies on its predictive power based on the derived parameters (assumed stable) of difference or differential equations, which contradicts with the fact that in any dynamic process, when strain increases the parameters in the system change. More importantly, the implied adjustment may create further strain in the same part or in other parts of the system. If a crisis eventually occurs, the absence of stability (order) with constant parameters may not tell us much about the stability that is absent. Even if no adjustment is taking place, something important about the social system may have been generated by the absence of such adjustment: what does not happen can be more interesting than what does.

Which Causes Which

Like in any relation between two components, the third, fourth and other components may have some roles as intermediate variables. This applies to the link between culture and economic performance as well. Then there is a common problem concerning the direction of causality.

On the first issue, at the outset one needs to define what is culture and what is economic performance. Various narratives for culture have been proposed, from which the following elements are relevant: customary beliefs and values, preferences, long duration of consistency in cultural traits and groups, be it social, ethnic or religious-based. The relevant elements in economic performance are level and growth of output or income, savings, and income distribution. In some cases, the probability of something positive to emerge is also used, such as having a greater number of entrepreneurs.

Intermediate components relevant for identifying the link between culture and economic performance include priorbeliefs, religions, ethnicities, preferences, and trust. Individually they may not have an independent role, but they can function as a coordinating device to make societies play the same “game” to different conditions and focal points.

The importance of prior beliefs cannot be overstated as many decisions-thus the corresponding outcome and performanceare based on such priors (e.g., which technology to use, what measures to mitigate the effects of climate change, how to deal with different economic shocks, what strategy to cope with ageing population). Here culture plays a major role in forming individual beliefs even in the new environment and several generations later. Thus, prior beliefs can be an important channel of culture influence on economic performance. Yet, economists generally do not have much say about priors. They typically assume that individuals have common priors.

Trust is considered an important component arising from priors. Many even believe that it is through the concept of trust that culture enters the economic discourse. Several researches have been done to demonstrate the contribution of the level of trust of a community to economic performance [2-4], although most do not elaborate the mechanism through which measured trust is positively correlated with economic performance. What remains debatable is whether trust is an inherited cultural variable or is developed through the adoption of a proper legal system. Some also argue that trust is the outcome of individuals or societies’ interactions.

The significance of trust in economics is made clearer by Arrow [5]. “Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust, certainly any transaction conducted over a period of time.” International trade is an example of area where trust matters a lot. But it was the seminal work of Putnam [6,7] that put trust at the center of the discussion by considering it as a form of social capital capturing the value and relationships of resources where social networks play a central role in the production of public and common good. The constituent elements of social capital, over which people have more control than over culture, are trust, norms, and networks.

In the current era of information technology (IT), priors including trust can be influenced or enhanced by the availability of information (‘big data,’ ‘internet of things’ and all that). Examples of on-line trade and transactions abound where reviews and reputation may alter the beliefs of people or customers. Even in political elections the use of ‘big data’ combined with complex algorithm has been widespread, and it proves effective.

The problems with causality are no less critical than the definitional issue. The first problem is the difficulty to separate culturally based beliefs from rational expectations. Whether trust is culturally driven or rational prior driven by environment with a prevailing degree of trustworthiness is not easy to determine. It is generally the case that the idiosyncratic component of trust tends to increase when societies share the same cultural trait (e.g., religion), and decreases with the genetic distance in terms of ancient cultural aspects. The level of education also matters: the role of inherited cultural aspects in the formation of priors tends to diminish as society gets more educated (reduced dependence of trust on cultural variables).

Even if cultural variables and measures of economic performance are highly correlated, that does not necessarily mean one causes the other. Two events occur simultaneously does not imply causality.

Another serious conundrum is with regards to the direction of causality, or what econometricians label endogeneity problem: “which affects which.” The debate about whether culture affects economics or vice versa has a long history. Some proposed that technology determines the type of social structure and dominant culture. In supporting the argument that steam-mill produces capitalism, Karl Marx [8] held that view. In contrast, Max Weber [9] and Polanyi et al. [10] had the opposite line of thinking. To the extent the cultural aspect like religion is considered important to the establishment of markets as well as in moderating market excesses, they argued that culture-in this case religion--played a critical role in the development of capitalism. Their explanations are powerful, and the examples provided are quite persuasive. Yet, they fell on deaf ears among mainstream economists.

As expected, each camp attempted to get their idea vindicated. Economists of the Chicago school tried hard to endogenize beliefs and preferences [11]. Some went further by showing that religious and social norms are the result of a group-level optimization. Others extended the theory of human capital by emphasizing investment in social skills and social interactions. Those who were more econometrically inclined emphasized the use of proper econometric techniques to identify the direction of causality, among others by employing a set of intermediate variables as the “instrumental variables,” or by looking at historical exogenous shocks in their models. But the existence of complementarities between culture and economic performance often hinders identification.

While differences between the two camps may never been reconciled, active debates on the link between culture and economics continue. Most of the debates put the emphasis on the interaction between culture and institutions.

Role of Institutions

Institutions are meant to facilitate human interaction by providing patterns that will regulate society’s behavior [12-14]. It is the “rules of the game in a society” by promoting certain behaviors and prohibit other behaviors. There are formal institutions (e.g., bank regulation, tax system, accounting rules) and informal institutions (e.g., codes of conduct, habits, traditions, norms). While most analyses focus on the former, the latter can be more important for understanding its role to shape economic performance. Enforcement is another critical component of institutions. Even well-established rules and regulations can be rendered ineffective if enforcement is weak. Two systems with similar institutions may produce different economic performance because of different enforcement.

To the extent formal and informal institutions are shaped by ideas and ideologies, not created in a vacuum, culture enters the equation. Through culture-affected ideas, individuals use their subjective mental constructs to interpret the world around them and make choices. Arguably, institutions determine the extent that ideas and ideologies, hence culture, matters.

Informal institutions come from ‘socially transmitted information’ and are part of the heritage or culture. In the case of formal institutions, they are also linked with the prevailing political system. For example, in federalism markets are fostered through competition for economic organizations at the sub-national level. In other systems, the room for pleasing powerful interest group may be more ample. The resulting economic performance under different systems (hence different institutional arrangements) is likely dissimilar. In this respect, the resulting economic performance can be associated with the efficiency of the outcome.

Contrary to the neo-classical economic theory, negotiations required to reach an efficient outcome are not costless. For example, there are costs for learning (by consumers) about the quality--and eventually the price--of goods to be exchanged. It may take some time before the actual exchange occurs. There can be also a bargaining process as part of negotiations. This also entails costs.

The problem of information asymmetry can make the observed costs deviate from the true costs, making them more difficult to measure. Even if both parties are honest, there is always something with respect to enforcing the agreement that still needs to be specified either implicitly or explicitly. This is also not costless. When a dispute arises and a settlement (requiring lawyers) is needed, the costs can further multiply.

All the above costs are known as the transaction costs, usually high and not always reported (not internalized) especially in many developing countries. In some cases, personalized transactions are still the rule rather than exception. High transactions costs lead to unfavorable economic performance. Since only at zero transaction costs an efficient outcome can prevail [15], attempts to lower transaction costs are preferred, a most common of which is through establishing clear property rights (also often deficient in many developing countries) to facilitate the smooth functioning of markets.

High transaction costs can also be linked to the size of the unproductive informal sector. Small business operations and poor individuals including poor migrants are “forced” to remain small and informal. The transaction costs for entering the formal sector are too high, i.e., getting permits which also requires paying bribery, not to mention time-consuming. Unsecured assets and a lack of formal documents also diminish their incentives to expand, and bank credits are difficult to get under such circumstances. Thus, informality persists. So do inefficiency and low productivity [16].

In a dynamic context, an institutional framework ensuring that technology can be advanced (‘creative destruction’) is also frequently absent in developing countries. Free-entry and free-exit hardly prevail. Firms with a privileged access to those in power survive by patronage through monopoly rights, soft budgets, or special concessions. For them no innovation is needed to survive. More seriously, they resent any policy measures intended to enable innovation to raise productivity when those measures threaten their survival. Power influence enables them to do so and to keep away from potential competitors.

In short, culture-influenced institutions can affect transaction costs, and in turn economic performance in a static and a dynamic sense. The latter works through organizations’ decisions about technology and innovation [17].

It is important to note that one cannot claim the superiority of causality direction between institutions and culture because the two interact and evolve in a complementary way. The relation also involves mutual feedback effects: depending on the type of institutions culture may evolve in differing ways, and different culture may cause institutions to function differently [18,19].

In this context, a more relevant economic performance is productivity. While it is less directly observable compared to standard variables like output and income, productivity involves attributes highly relevant to cultural traits and cultural capital, particularly the social capital.

In The prosperous communities, Putnam (1993) argued that social capital is like “physical capital and human capitaltools and training that enhance individual productivity.” He went on to describe that social capital refers to “features of social organization, such as networks, norms, and trust, that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit.” The description is unarguably loaded with important implications [20].

By giving the ‘same status’ like other traditional inputs (capital and labor), social capital contributes to productivity through a production-function setting used extensively by economists. It also highlights the significance of individuals’ “participation” that will form group’s ability to work jointly through “collaborative effort” as capital. Failure to do so will result in a disappointing “productivity performance.” Absent of trustful relation, the system tends to focus on “short-term self-interest” and individual transactions, eliminating the potentials and opportunities for accumulation and “innovation” process like in a standard capital theory. While networks of institutions are important, their presence in no way assures collaboration when “commitment and coordination” is limited. This translates into obstacles for many developing and emerging markets where weak capacity, including the State capacity to from a “coalition building” needed for “institutional upgrading” to support innovation must face a “growing and diverse power of influence among social groups and business communities.”

All the above requisites and conditions (in quotation marks) reflect the institutional quality and social capital, which, through the implied transaction costs will determine the extent to which a country is able to sustain productivity growth to improve society’s welfare [21].

Summary

Culture and economics are closely linked. Yet, economists have long been reluctant to study the interrelation between the two. This is partly because a testable hypothesis with measured data that can be proven or disproven is hard to construct, let alone the difficulty to define the term ‘culture.’ This is unfortunate as it reflects the notion that something cannot be measured does not exist.

Faced with reality of more complex relations and growing interdependence, mainstream economists opt for adding new variables, parameters and equations. When pressed further, they introduce non-linearity in the model. Little efforts are made to delve into the behavior that reflects the outcome of social learning—a central concept of culture--where a set of cultural relations involving learning process as part of social evolution, which is more complex than biological evolution, matters. The emphasis on learning implies that unlike mechanistic economics the cultural economics is evolutionary in nature.

The role of institutions is at the center of the link between culture and economics, particularly on the direction of causality. Institutions and culture interact and evolve in a complementary way, not a one-way causality. Culture-influenced institutions can affect transaction costs, and in turn economic performance. In a dynamic setting, through organizations’ decisions about technology and innovation, a set of requisites reflecting the institutional quality and social capital has an important role to influence productivity growth hence society’s welfare. One of such requisites is individuals’ participation that will form group’s ability to work jointly through collaborative effort. The required trustful relation is in sharp contrast with the short-term selfinterest driven transactions.

Although more and more work has been done to understand better the interrelation between economics and culture, albeit deficient of the mechanism, most fell on deaf ears among mainstream economists. It is mind-boggling how economics can be reduced to a culturally and institutionally free abstraction when abundant evidence indicates real world cases have shown otherwise.

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argyrocratie · 7 years ago

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The London Great Dock Strike, of 1889

Here are the facts:

Following a short but busy propaganda campaign, the casual laborers of London docks, numbering in the region of 50,000, organized themselves into a union and quickly came out on strike. Casuals are jobbing workers who report to the gates of the yards each morning and, if there is work for them, are employed for the day or indeed for just several hours at a stretch. These are poor laborers living in cramped and fetid slums, feeding themselves or rather keeping their hunger at bay with waste food and tainted spirits, and dressing in rags. Living day to day, their work always uncertain, exposed to competition from all the starvelings pouring in from every part of England and the rest of the world, well used to vying with one another for a bit of work, scorned by workers from the better-off trades, they certainly satisfied every condition necessary to be regarded as unsuited to organization and a conscious revolt against the exploiters. Yet it took only two years of propaganda carried out by a handful of willing men capable of addressing them in intelligible terms for these men to prove that they are well able to join forces, stand straight, and command the attention of the entire civilized world. Which just goes to show that the people are actually more advanced than some would believe, and that a slow but dogged elaboration is under way among the masses of the people, all unbeknownst to the philosophers, preparing them for the great day that will alter the face of the world.

The strikers were demanding six pence an hour (rather than five) for a day’swork; and eight pence an hour for labor before 8 o’clock in the morning and after 6 o’clock in the evening; the abolition of the arrangement whereby work was sub-contracted to second-level exploiters who, in turn, often sub-contracted further; a minimum of four-hours work for those hired on, and a few other regulatory changes.

The strike of the casual workers had scarcely been declared when all the other unions connected with the loading and unloading of cargo ships—stevedores, coal porters, lightermen, carters, etc.—also stopped work, some of them not even seeking any improvements but just out of solidarity with the casuals. They rejected all compromise and any concessions until the casuals got what they wanted.

Carried away by example, other unions unrelated to the docks simultaneously tabled their own demands and went on strike.

And London, that great capital of monopolies, witnessed as many as 180 thousand people on strike, and impressive demonstrations by men with gaunt faces, dressed in rags, whose severe glowering struck terror into the souls of the bourgeoisie.

But there was more:

Workers employed in the gas plants offered to come out on strike. London would have been left in darkness come nightfall and the homes of the bourgeois would have been exposed to grave danger. The same offer was made by the tram-drivers, the steelworkers, and the woodworkers.

In short, there was quite an upsurge in enthusasm, a rapture of solidarity, a reawakening of dignity that looked like bringing about a general strike; with production, transport and public services brought to a halt in a city of some 5 million inhabitants!

Other cities in England felt the impact of the example set, and more or less large strikes were erupting here and there. At home and abroad, the proletariat realized that the London workers were fighting in the common cause, and extraordinary assistance flooded in from everywhere.

The strikers were to be admired for the steadfastness with which they endured the harshest privations, and for the fortitude with which they rejected any suggestion of compromise, for the intelligence they displayed in anticipating what would be needed for the struggle, and for the spirit of solidarity and sacrifice that prevailed in their ranks.

They strove to feed a population, women and children included, of upwards of half a million people; to raise subscriptions and collections across the city; to keep up with vast correspondence by letter and telegram; to organize meetings,demonstrations, and talks; to keep an eye out, put pen to paper, and stay alert lest the bosses successfully trick English or foreign poor into blacklegging; to monitor all the docks’ entrances to see if there were people going to work and how many. All of this, stunningly well done by unsolicited volunteers.

There was one noteworthy incident: a shipload of ice arrived and a rumor was rife that this ice was meant for the hospitals. The strikers raced in such numbersto help unload it without a care for whether they would be paid for the job or not.The sick—and especially the patients in the hospitals—were not to suffer on account of the strike.

No doubt about it; such folk deserve to and are capable of looking after their affairs for themselves and, if free, would be guided in their labors by this care for the general good—something entirely absent from the bourgeois system of production!

Those workers possessed a wide-ranging, often instinctive, cognisance of their rights and their usefulness to society, and had the combative mentality required to make a revolution; they felt a vague yearning for more radical measures that might end their suffering once and for all, and erase from production all the bosses and go-betweens who, though they produce not a thing, claim the greater part of what is produced, and turn work, which should be an obligation—something to glory in and derive satisfaction from—into a hell of pain and a badge of inferiority.

The city was in uproar, provisions had largely been exhausted, many factories had been closed down due to coal shortages or lack of raw materials, and with the growth in discomfort, irritation was on the rise. On the street corners, talk was beginning to turn to raiding the wealthier districts.

A blast of social revolution was blowing down the streets of the great city.

Unfortunately the masses are still imbued with the authority principle and believe that they cannot and should not to do anything without orders from above. And so it was that the strikers were swayed by a committee of men who certainly deserve praise for the part that they had played in the laying of the groundwork for the strike or for previous services, but who were plainly not suited to the position into which they had been hoisted by circumstances. Faced with a brand new situation that had moved beyond anything they had aspired to and for which they had no heart, they could not grapple with the responsibilitiesincumbent upon them and drive things forward, and they did not have the modesty and intelligence to stand aside and let the masses act. They began by hobbling the strike with an anti-general strike demonstration, and carried on doing all in their power to keep the peace and keep the strike within the parameters of the law. Later, after the moment of opportunity had passed, and weariness had begun to undermine the enthusiasm, they pressed for what they had previously rejected and issued a call for a general strike, only to retract it due to fresh fears and pressures.

The city’s mayor and high clergy, who had been standing idly by, caring nothing for the workers’ suffering, poured back into the city once they saw that things were dragging out too long and that business was in difficulty and facing ruination. Overcome as they were by tender feelings for the dearly beloved good folk, they offered to mediate... And after five weeks of heroic effort, the whole thing ended in a compromise, in the wake of which the workers returned to work with the promise that their demands would be met beginning on 4 November.

***

Behold how easily a revolution may come about and, alas! How easily the opportunity can be allowed to slip away.

If only in London the general strike had been encouraged and allowed to proceed, the situation would have become very problematic for the bourgeoisie,and revolution would have quickly occurred to the people as the simplest solution. Factories closed; railways, trams, buses, carriages and cabs brought to a standstill; public services cut off; food supplies suspended; nights spent without gaslight; hundreds of thousands of workers on the streets—what a situation for a group of men, had they but had a little grey matter and a modicum of gumption!

If only a little plain and clear-cut propaganda on behalf of violent expropriation but been mounted beforehand; if some gangs of valiants had set about seizing and handing out foodstuffs, clothing, and the other useful items with which the warehouses were so packed and of which proletarians were insuch dire need; if only other groups or isolated individuals had forced or tricked their way into the banks and other government offices in order to set them alight,and others had entered the homes of the gentry and billeted the people’s wives and children there; and if others had only given their just deserts to the most grasping bourgeois and others put out of action government leaders and anywho, in time of crisis, might take their places, the police commanders, the generals and all the upper echelons of the army, taken by surprise in their beds or as they set foot outside their homes: in short, if only there had been a fewthousand determined revolutionaries in London, which is so huge, then today thevast metropolis—and with it, England, Scotland, and Ireland—would be facing into revolution.

from “ About A Strike” by Errico Malatesta (1889)

#long post #strike #Errico Malatesta #london #socialism #anarchism #communism

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impressivepress · 5 years ago

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Leon Trotsky in New York

New York City has seen its share of revolutionary figures. But some have been literally revolutionary, like Leon Trotsky, a major figure in the Russian Revolution who was exiled to the U.S. for a few months during which he lived in the Bronx and worked at a communist newspaper in the East Village.

Лев Троцкий в Нью-Йорке

Leon Trotsky, born in Ukraine, was one of the leaders of the Communist Revolution and the founder of the newspaper Pravda. The revolutionary life can be a difficult and even dangerous one. He was arrested and exiled into Siberia twice during Tsarist days. He was in western Europe working as a journalist when World War I broke out, going first to Switzerland to avoid arrest by Austria-Hungary. He moved on to France, which deported him to Spain because of his anti-war activities. Spain soon deported him to the U.S., where he lived and worked in New York for a few months. He returned to Russia after the February Revolution of 1917 overthrew Tsar Nicholas II.

By the end of 1917 he was second only to Lenin in the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, and so he was very influential in the newly formed Soviet Union. But in the power struggle after Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin portrayed Trotsky as an enemy of the party and sent him into exile. He spent a year in Kazakhstan, four years in İstanbul, two years in France, two years in Norway, and finally ended up in Mexico City where he lived with the painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and then moved into a house of his own nearby. Just over a year later, one of Stalin's assassains killed him with an ice ax.

Trotsky was born Лев Давидович Бронштейн or Lev Davidovich Bronshtein in Yanivka, Ukraine, in 1879. He changed his name during Czarist days to Lev Trotsky, with Троцкий or Trotsky derived from Trotz,the German word for "defiance". For some reason we English speakers usually replace his native and actual name Lev or Лев with Leon.

Symbolic name changes were a big thing with the Bolshevik revolutionaries. Vladimir Lenin was originally Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. In 1870 he attempted to illegally publish the newspaper The Workers Cause and the Tsar exiled him to Siberia, near the Lena River. Vladimir adopted the pseudonym Lenin,based on the river's name. Iosif Stalin or "Joe Steel" was born with the unwieldy Georgian name Ioseb Besarionis Dze Jugashvili.

Trotsky's father was a well-to-do farmer who sent his son at the age of nine in 1888 to Odessa for schooling. Odessa was a cosmopolitan port city, very atypical of the Russian Empire. The atmosphere of Odessa led Trotsky to adopt an international outlook.

In 1896, when he was just sixteen, Trotsky had moved from Odessa to Nikolayev and become involved in revolutionary activities. He was initially a народник or narodnik, a populist revolutionary. He was introduced to Marxism, a philosophy which he initially opposed but then gradually came to adopt.

Trotsky helped to organize the South Russian Workers' Union in Nikolayev in early 1897. Two hundred members of this union, including Trotsky, were arrested in January 1898. Trotsky was imprisoned for two years waiting for his trial. During this time the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was formed. Trotsky became a member of this party, he married fellow Marxist Aleksandra Sokolovskaya, and he studied philosophy. He finally got his trial in 1900, at which he and his wife were sentenced to four years of exile in the Irkutsk region of Siberia.

Leon and Aleksandra had two daughters in Siberia, but they soon separated and divorced. Meanwhile the party was splitting into factions. One side argued that the party should concentrate on improving the lives of industrial workers. The other, which Trotsky sided with, said that the most important thing was forming a well-organized and disciplined revolutionary party with which to overthrow the monarchy.

Trotsky escaped from his exile in Siberia during the summer of 1902. He moved to London to join the editors of Искра or Iskra, the newspaper of the monarchy-overthrowing faction. Trotsky took the pen name Перо or Pero(meaning feather or pen), becoming one of the paper's leading editors along with Vladimir Lenin, Georgi Plekhanov and Julius Martov. Trotsky met Natalia Ivanovna Sedova in late 1902. She soon became his lover, and they married in 1903.

No one should ever claim that left-wing political movements are simple. They split and squabble in a fractal fashion. The six editors of Iskra were equally split between Plekhanov's "Old Guard" and Lenin and Martov's "New Guard". Lenin expected Trotsky to side with his "New Guard" and give it a majority. So, Plekhanov opposed making Trotsky a full member of the editorial board.

In 1903, Iskra convened the party's 2nd Congress in London. Soon after that the pro-Iskra group split into two factions. Lenin's Bolsheviks wanted a smaller but highly organized party, while Martov's Mensheviks wanted a larger and less organized one. In case you aren't confused yet, the namebolshevik or большевик refers to larger size while menshevik or меньшевик refers to smaller size — the opposite of those factions' desired party sizes! But the idea was that большевик or bolshevik referred to the "majority" and меньшевик or menshevik referred to the "minority". Meanwhile most of the Iskra editors (the majority!), including Trotsky, sided with the mensheviki. For a recent example of political abuse of language and logic, see the American right wing's confusing insistence that they're a Moral Majority.

Trotsky gave up on this confusing mess in September 1904 while the Mensheviks were insisting on an alliance with Russian liberals and opposing reconciliation with Lenin and his Bolsheviks. Trotsky described himself as a "non-factional social democrat" from 1904 until 1917, during which he spent most of his time trying to reconcile the various factions within the party. In his spare time he was developing his theory of Permanent Revolution.

In January 1905 a group of unarmed demonstrators were marching through Sankt-Peterburg to deliver a petition to Tsar Nicholas II. The petition called for improved working conditions, a reduction of the working day to eight hours, and increased wages, along with an end to the Russo-Japanese War and the introduction of a universal right to vote. They were approaching the Winter Palace from several directions when they were gunned down by the Imperial Guard in the Bloody Sunday massacre.

Maybe about 1,000 people were killed — the Tsar said just 96, anti-Tsarist sources said over 4,000 — and disorder and looting broke out. This led to the Revolution of 1905, which would in turn lead to the 1917 Revolution.

Trotsky returned to Russia in February, the month after Bloody Sunday, initially writing pamphlets for an underground press in Kiev but soon moving to Sankt-Peterburg. He worked there with both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. However, the Mensheviks were infiltrated by a secret police agent. This forced Trotsky to flee to rural Finland until a national strike in October 1905 allowed him to return.

The Mensheviks had come up with the same idea Trotsky had, a Soviet or Совет (or "Council") of Workers, an elected non-party revolutionary organization. The Sankt-Peterburg Soviet was up and running by the time Trotsky returned from Finland. Trotsky joined the Soviet and was elected its Vice-Chairman under yet another pseudonym, "Yanovsky". The chairman was arrested in November, and Trotsky took his place.

On December 2, 1905, the Sankt-Peterburg Soviet issued a proclamation criticizing the Tsarist government. To no one's surprise, the Soviet's office was promptly surrounded the next day by troops loyal to the Tsar's government. Trotsky and other leaders of the Soviet were arrested and then tried in 1906 on charges of supporting armed rebellion. Trotsky delivered what are considered to be some of his best speeches at his trial, but he was convicted and sentenced to deportation and exile in Obdorsk, Siberia.

While on the way to Siberia in January 1907, Trotsky once again escaped. He made his way to London, arriving in time to attend the 5th Congress of the RSDLP (or Russian Social Democratic Labor Party). In October he moved to Vienna for what ended up being seven years, an unusually long time of stability for Trotsky. While in Vienna he participated in both the Austrian Social Democratic Party and the German Social Democratic Party.

In October 1908 Trotsky founded the newspaper Правда (or Pravda), whose name meant Truth. Pravda became a party-financed "central organ" in 1910, and Trotsky kept publishing it until April 1912. The very same month, the Sankt-Peterburg Bolsheviks started a new labor-oriented newspaper and also called it Pravda. This co-opting of the name greatly upset Trotsky. He sent a letter to the Mensheviks denouncing the newspaper-title-stealing Bolsheviks in general and Lenin in particular. Unfortunately, the police intercepted the letter and kept a copy in their archive. The letter was found in the archive in 1924, soon after Lenin's death, and it was used to portray Trotsky as an enemy of Lenin.

Trotsky continued to write articles for radical Russian and Ukrainian papers. These included Kievskaya Mysl, which in 1912 sent him as their correspondent to cover the two Balkan Wars.

World War I broke out in late July of 1914 after the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. This eventually globe-spanning conflict pitted Austria-Hungary against the Russian Empire, and so within a week Trotsky had to flee to neutral Switzerland to avoid arrest in Vienna as a Russian. Once there he worked with the Swiss Socialist Party and quickly cranked out an anti-war book, The War and the International.

He moved on to France in November 1914 as a war correspondent for the Kievskaya Mysl. In January 1915 he began editing Наше Слово or Nashe Slovo, "Our Word".

The French put up with Nashe Slovo and Trotsky's anti-war activities for just three months. At the end of March they deported Trotsky to Spain. The Spanish didn't want him either, although they let him stay for over a year and a half. Around Christmas of 1916 they deported Trotsky to the United States.

Trotsky in New York

Trotsky arrived in New York on January 13, 1917. He was there for not quite three months. He lived in the Bronx, at 1522 Vyse Avenue.

Take the #2 or #5 train to Freeman Street. Walk a block and a half east to Vyse. Turn south and walk two long blocks south to #1522, on the corner where Vyse crosses East 172nd Street.

This is a "site-of" now. The Mildred, the building you see today on the corner of Vyse Avenue and East 172nd Street, was constructed in 1931. It replaced whatever tenement Trotsky occupied during his New York exile in 1917.

Trotsky worked for Новый Міръ or Novy Mir (that's New World in English), where he worked alongside Nikolai Bukharin and Alexandra Kollontai. Bukharin went on to be a member of the Politboro and Central Committee of the Soviet Union, and editor in chief of Pravda (the post-revolution Soviet one), Bolshevik, Izvestia, and the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Then he opposed a number of Stalin's policies and fell victim to the "Moscow Trials" and purges of the late 1930s.

Notice the spelling of the paper's name, it uses the pre-revolutionary Міръ instead of the sleek revolutionary Мир.

Trotsky also wrote articles that were translated into Yiddish for publication in Der Forverts, "The Forward", a Yiddish radical publication.

Novy Mir was published at #77 St Marks Place in what today is called the East Village. St Marks Place is east 8th Street, it's one of the small set of numbered streets with a name.

Trotsky Returns to Russia

Russia's February Revolution of 1917 overthrew Tsar Nicholas II, and Trotsky left New York by ship on March 27th. He reached Russia on May 4th and joined the Mezhraiontsy, a regional social democratic organization in Sankt-Peterburg. The city was also known as Petrograd around this time. He was elected a member of the first All-Russian Central Executive Committee (ВЦИК or VTsIK) at the First Congress of Soviets in June.

Trotsky was arrested, again, after an unsuccessful Bolshevik uprising in August. He was held for 40 days and then released. The Bolsheviks then gained the majority in the Petrograd Soviet, and Trotsky was elected the Bolshevik party chairman on October 8th.

By the end of 1917 Trotsky had clearly become second only to Lenin in the Bolshevik Party.

Stalin wrote a summary of Trotsky's role in the events of 1917. This piece was published in Pravda and included in Stalin's 1934 book The October Revolution, but then it was cut out of Stalin's Works of 1949:

All practical work in connection with the organization of the uprising was done under the immediate direction of Comrade Trotsky, the President of the Petrograd Soviet. It can be stated with certainty that the Party is indebted primarily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid going over of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and the efficient manner in which the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee was organized.

The Bronx Home News was more straightforward with their headline:

BRONX MAN LEADS RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Trotsky was named the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs. He resigned that position on March 13th, 1918, to become People's Commissar of Army and Navy Affairs and the chairman of the Supreme Military Council. The position of military commander-in-chief was abolished, granting Trotsky full control of the Red Army subject only to the oversight of the Communist Party leadership.

Trotsky was a party theorist and he seems to have been closer to the original intent of Marx than any other prominent Bolshevik figure. Lenin probably would have named Trotsky as his successor.

However, Lenin had three strokes between May 26th, 1922 and March 10th, 1923. These caused paralysis and loss of speech, denying him the ability to transfer leadership to Trotsky. Lenin died on January 21st, 1924. Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev formed a troika to make certain that Trotsky would not succeed Lenin, despite his official public position as second only to Lenin.

Then they pulled that unfortunate 1912 letter out of the archives. Trotsky lost all his official positions and political power in 1925. He was then expelled from the Central Committee in October, 1927, and soon after that, expelled from Russia.

Trotsky was initially exiled to Alma Ata in Kazakhstan on January 31st, 1928. Just over a year later, in February 1929, he was expelled from the Soviet Union to Turkey. Trotsky and his wife and son lived on the island of Büyükada near İstanbul for four years.

French Prime Minister Édouard Daladier offered Trotsky asylum in France in 1933. Trotsky moved there from Turkey and lived in Royan and Barbizon. But in 1935 the French authorities told him that he was no longer welcome in France. He lived near Oslo, Norway for two years, at which point he was put under house arrest. Norwegian officials arranged his transfer to Mexico by cargo ship.

Trotsky in Mexico

Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas welcomed Trotsky when the cargo ship docked at Tampico. Cárdenas then arranged for a special train to carry Trotsky to Mexico City.

Trotsky initially lived at the home of the painter Diego Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo. Trotsky had an affair with Kahlo, which led unsurprisingly to Rivera kicking Trotsky out of his house. Trotsky moved in May 1939 to a house a few blocks away on Avenida Viena.

Meanwhile, in 1936 the first "show trial" had been staged in Moscow. Zinoviev, Kamenev, and over a dozen others had "confessed" to having joined Trotsky in a plot to kill Stalin and other Soviet leaders. They were all found guilty and sentenced to death, the sentence was passed on Trotsky in absentia.

A second "show trial" in 1937 of seventeen others connected Trotsky to more supposed conspiracies and crimes. Trotsky was now under a death sentence.

In May of 1940 a group organized by NKVD deputy director Pavel Sudoplatov launched an assassination attempt. The group was led by GPU agent Iosif Grigulevich, the Mexican painter David Alfary Siqueros, and Vittorio Vidale. They disguised themselves as police officers and overpowered Trotsky's guards. They set up machine guns in the inner courtyard of the home and began firing. Everyone inside hid underneath bedroom furniture as the attackers fired into the various rooms of the house. Trotsky's grandson was shot in the foot, and Robert Sheldon Harte, one of Trotsky's assistants and bodyguards, was abducted and later killed. The other guards eventually repelled the attack.

Ramón Mercader, a Spanish-born NKVD agent of Stalin's, was living in Mexico City with a Canadian passport. He had gone through a series of identities including "Jacques Mornard", a Belgian; "Frank Jacson", a Canadian; and "Jacson Mornard", who may have been Belgo-Canadian for all I know. He had managed to become the lover of Sylvia Ageloff, Trotsky's personal secretary, living with her on and off over a period of two years and gaining access and trust within the Trotsky household.

Leonid Eitingon, a GPU agent who had operated in Spain, planned a second attack. Mercader, as either Frank Jacson or Jacson Mornard, started meeting with Trotsky in the guise of a sympathizer.

On August 20, 1940, Mercader showed up at Trotsky's house with a mountaineering ice axe hidden under his coat. Why an ice axe? Because you can casually walk around Mexico City carrying an ice axe and no one will notice? That can't be it. Because Mercader was an expert with ice axes? That doesn't seem to have been the case, either.

Eitingon and Mercader's mother, Caridad, were waiting outside behind the wheels of two getaway cars. Nothing like joining forces with your mother in an assassination.

Mercader went into Trotsky's study and asked him to read something that he had written. While Trotsky was reading, Mercader pulled the ice axe out from under his raincoat and hit Trotsky in the back of the head. Perhaps due to Mercader's lack of experience swinging ice axes, the blow did not kill Trotsky immediately.

There was a struggle. Trotsky's bodyguards nearly killed Mercader but Trotsky told them not to, saying that the assassin should be made to answer questions. Trotsky was taken to the hospital, where he died the next day from blood loss and shock. The getaway drivers had gotten away, and both fled the country.

Mercader was convicted of murder and spent twenty years in prison in Mexico. He and his mother were awarded the Order of Lenin in absentia by Stalin. Mercader was released from prison in 1960 and moved first to Havana, Cuba, and then moved on to the Soviet Union in 1961. He was then awarded the USSR's highest decoration, Hero of the Soviet Union.

As for the Trotsky family, his great-granddaughter Nora Volkow became the head of the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse. She grew up in the Trotsky house in Mexico City.

by Bob Cromwell · May 2020.

#history article #leon trotsky #cromwell-intl

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thetrumpdebacle · 7 years ago

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For those who believe in liberal democracy, it is sobering to review the events of the past quarter-century. Twenty-five years ago, liberal democracy was on the march. The Berlin Wall had fallen; the Soviet Union had collapsed; new democracies were emerging throughout Europe, and Russia seemed to be in transition as well. South Africa’s apartheid regime was tottering. Even though China’s government had brutally repressed a democracy movement, it was possible to believe that a more educated and prosperous Chinese middle class would eventually (and irresistibly) demand democratic reforms. Liberal democracy had triumphed, it seemed, not only in practice but also in principle. It was the only legitimate form of government. There was no alternative.

Today, the global scene is very different. Liberal democracy faces multiple external challenges—from ethnonational autocracies, from regimes claiming to be based on God’s word rather than the will of the people, from the success of strong-handed meritocracy in places such as Singapore, and, not least, from the astonishing economic accomplishments of China’s market-Leninist system.

But there is also an internal challenge to liberal democracy—a challenge from populists who seek to drive a wedge between democracy and liberalism. Liberal norms and policies, they claim, weaken democracy and harm the people. Thus, liberal institutions that prevent the people from acting democratically in their own interest should be set aside. It is this challenge on which I wish to focus.

There is also an internal challenge to liberal democracy—a challenge from populists who seek to drive a wedge between democracy and liberalism. Liberal norms and policies, they claim, weaken democracy and harm the people.

Across Europe and North America, long-established political arrangements are facing a revolt. Its milestones have included the Brexit vote; the 2016 U.S. election; the doubling of support for France’s National Front; the rise of the antiestablishment Five Star Movement in Italy; the entrance of the far-right Alternative for Germany into the Bundestag; moves by traditional right-leaning parties toward the policies of the far-right in order to secure victories in the March 2017 Dutch and October 2017 Austrian parliamentary elections; the outright victory of the populist ANO party in the Czech Republic’s October 2017 parliamentary elections; and most troubling, the entrenchment in Hungary of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s self-styled “illiberal democracy,” which seems to be emerging as a template for Poland’s governing Law and Justice party and—some scholars believe—for insurgent parties in Western Europe as well. This revolt threatens the assumptions that shaped liberal democracy’s forward march in the 1990s and that continue to guide mainstream politicians and policy makers of the center-left and center-right.

When I began writing about this emerging revolt a few years ago, I believed that economics lay at its core. Contemporary liberal democracy, I argued, rested on a tacit compact between peoples on the one hand and elected representatives together with unelected experts on the other. The people would defer to elites as long as they delivered sustained prosperity and steadily improving living standards. But if elites stopped managing the economy effectively, all bets were off.

This compact began to weaken with growing competition from developing nations, which put pressure on policies designed to protect the citizens of advanced democracies against labor-market risks. The erosion of the manufacturing sector and the urbanization of opportunity—the shift of economic dynamism away from smaller communities and rural areas toward a handful of metropolitan centers—destabilized geographic regions and political structures. Inequality rose. A globalized economy, it turned out, served the interests of most people in developing countries and elites in advanced countries—but not the interests of the working and middle classes in the developed economies, which had done so well in the three decades after World War II.

Against this backdrop, the Great Recession that began in late 2007 represented a colossal failure of economic stewardship, and political leaders’ inability to restore vigorous growth compounded the felony. As economies struggled and unemployment persisted, the groups and regions that failed to rebound lost confidence in mainstream parties and established institutions, fueling the populist upsurge that has upended U.S. politics, threatens the European Union, and endangers liberal governance itself in several of the newer democracies.

In recent years, however, I have come to believe that this is only a portion of the truth. A structural explanation that places economics at the base and treats other issues as derivative distorts a more complex reality.

The United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union all failed to deal with waves of immigration in ways that commanded public support. Not only did immigrants compete with longtime inhabitants for jobs and social services, they were also seen as threatening established cultural norms and public safety. Postelection analyses show that concerns about immigration largely drove the Brexit referendum, the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and the gains of far-right parties across Europe.

In government, the media, and major metropolitan areas, technological change has spurred the growth and consolidation of an education-based meritocracy, giving rise to new class divisions. For citizens with less formal education, particularly those in rural areas and smaller towns, the dominance of this new elite has led to feelings of marginalization. Too often, individuals who have prospered in this meritocracy are seen as harboring a sense of superiority to their fellow citizens. Denying the equal dignity and worth of others is self-defeating: Insult does even more than injury to fuel resentment, one of the most dangerous of all political passions.

With these developments, divisions among citizens based on geography, formal-education levels, and value systems are growing sharper. Supporters of dynamism and diversity increasingly clash with proponents of stability and homogeneity, beneficiaries of technological change with those harmed by the resulting economic shifts. As the British analyst David Goodhart vividly puts it, democratic citizenries are being divided into “Anywheres” (individuals whose identities are professional and who can use their skills in many places, at home and abroad) and “Somewheres” (individuals whose identities are tightly bound to particular places).1 A college degree, it turns out, not only expands economic opportunities but also reshapes an individual’s entire outlook.

As I wrote in the Journal of Democracy in April 2017, “elites’ preference for open societies is running up against growing public demands for . . . economic, cultural, and political closure.”2 All too often, liberal democracy is conflated with the spread of a cultural liberalism at odds with custom and religion. The combination of economic dislocation, demographic change, and challenges to traditional values has left many less educated citizens feeling that their lives are outside their control. The national and international governing institutions they thought would step in to help seemed frozen or indifferent. In the United States, partisan polarization gridlocked the system, preventing progress on critical issues. In Europe, the opposite phenomenon—a duopoly of the center-left and center-right that kept important issues off the public agenda—had much the same effect.

In light of this apparent inability to address mounting problems, governments across the West face growing public ire. Many citizens, their confidence in the future shaken, long instead for an imagined past that insurgent politicians have promised to restore. As popular demand for strong leaders grows, rising political actors are beginning to question key liberal-democratic principles such as the rule of law, freedom of the press, and minority rights. The door seems to be opening for a return to forms of authoritarianism written off by many as relics of the past.

What Is Liberal Democracy?

To clarify what these developments may mean for liberal democracy, it is helpful to distinguish among four concepts—the republican principle, democracy, constitutionalism, and liberalism.

Author

By the republican principle I mean popular sovereignty. The people, this principle holds, are the sole source of legitimacy, and only they can rightly authorize forms of government. This idea is at the heart of the most American of all documents, the Declaration of Independence, which famously asserts, “Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”3 Consistent with the Declaration, James Madison wrote: “We may define a republic to be . . . a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people.”4

Democracy, at the most basic level, requires both the equality of all citizens and broadly inclusive citizenship. A society in which all citizens are equal but only 10 percent of all adults are citizens would not, today, count as a democracy. Together with equal and inclusive citizenship, the other key pillar of democratic governance is majority rule. This means, first, that public decisions are made by popular majorities of citizens whose votes all count equally; and second, that democratic decision making extends to a maximally wide range of public matters. Majoritarianism is limited only by the imperative of preserving the liberties and powers—freedom of speech, assembly, and the press, among others—that citizens need to influence public decisions.

In this conception of democracy unmodified by any adjective, there is nothing essentially undemocratic about majoritarian decisions that systematically disadvantage specific individuals and groups or invade privacy rights. If it wishes, a democratic public may embrace the maxim that it is better for ten guilty individuals to go free than for one innocent individual to be found guilty—but it is no less democratic if it adopts the opposite view. Nor is it undemocratic per se to conduct judicial proceedings in the same manner as legislative affairs. The Athenian assembly that condemned Socrates may have been wrong, but it was fully democratic.

The third concept, constitutionalism, denotes a basic, enduring structure of formal institutional power, typically but not always codified in writing. This codified structure is “basic” in that it provides the basis for the conduct of public life. And it is “enduring” because it typically includes some mechanism that makes it harder to change the structure itself than to amend or reverse decisions made within it.

In addition to organizing power, constitutions also establish boundaries for the institutions that wield it. These limits can be horizontal, like the familiar “separation of powers” and “checks and balances.” They can also be vertical: Through federalism, public power is divided among different levels of jurisdiction (national, regional, and so forth). These limits need not constrain public power in the aggregate. If the national government has limited police powers but subordinate jurisdictions are free to regulate what the national government may not, then in principle there is nothing beyond government’s reach. This is why the decision to limit public power in all its aspects marks the line between constitutionalism in general and the specific type of constitutionalism we call liberal.

This bring us to the fourth and final concept: liberalism. Benjamin Constant famously distinguished between the “liberty of the ancients” and the “liberty of the moderns.” For the ancients, liberty entailed “active participation in collective power”—that is, in direct self-government. The sheer size of modern political communities, however, makes this impossible, even for those communities founded on republican principles. One might conclude, then, that the liberty of the moderns consists in the selection of representatives through free and fair elections in which all may participate on equal terms. But this is only part of the story. In fact, Constant presents the “peaceful enjoyment of individual independence” as the modern alternative to direct participation in government.5 The exclusion of most citizens, most of the time, from direct self-government opens up a large sphere of nonpolitical life—economic, social, cultural, and religious—that citizens expect to conduct on their own terms.

We have now reached the core idea of liberalism: recognizing and protecting a sphere beyond the rightful reach of government in which individuals can enjoy independence and privacy. In this spirit, the U.S. Declaration of Independence not only invokes but also limits the republican principle. If all human beings are endowed with “certain unalienable rights” that governments do not create and individuals may not surrender, then the republican principle can authorize only forms of government that uphold these rights. Governments, the Declaration reminds us, are created to “to secure these rights,” not to redefine or abridge them.

We can now venture a more precise characterization of liberal democracy. This type of political order rests on the republican principle, takes constitutional form, and incorporates the civic egalitarianism and majoritarian principles of democracy. At the same time, it accepts and enforces the liberal principle that the legitimate scope of public power is limited, which entails some constraints on or divergences from majoritarian decision making. A liberal order can use devices such as supermajority requirements or even unanimity rules to limit the majority’s power, or it can deploy constitutional courts insulated from direct public pressure to police the perimeter beyond which even supermajorities may not go.

How Does Populism Challenge Liberal Democracy?

These distinctions also shed light on the populist challenge to liberal democracy. Populism is not merely, as some observers have suggested, an emotion-laden expression of disappointment over frustrated economic expectations, resentment against rigged rules and special interests, and fear of threats to physical and cultural security. Even if it lacks the kind of formal theoretical underpinnings or canonical texts that defined the great “isms” of the twentieth century, populism nonetheless has a coherent structure.

Even if it lacks the kind of formal theoretical underpinnings or canonical texts that defined the great “isms” of the twentieth century, populism nonetheless has a coherent structure.

It might seem, then, that the aim of contemporary populism is what many scholars and at least one national leader (Orbán) call “illiberal democracy”—a governing system capable of translating popular preferences into public policy without the impediments that have prevented liberal democracies from responding effectively to urgent problems. From this perspective, populism is a threat not to democracy per se but rather to the dominant liberal variant of democracy.Of our four key concepts, populism accepts the principles of popular sovereignty and democracy, understood in straightforward fashion as the exercise of majoritarian power. It is skeptical, however, about constitutionalism, insofar as formal, bounded institutions and procedures impede majorities from working their will. It takes an even dimmer view of liberal protections for individuals and minority groups.

Indeed, some observers contend that populism, so understood, is not without merit: It represents “an illiberal democratic response to undemocratic liberalism,”6 and thus is less an attack on democracy than a corrective to a deficit thereof. These observers argue that elites, by taking important issues such as economic, monetary, and regulatory policies off the public agenda and assigning them to institutions insulated from public scrutiny and influence, have invited precisely the popular revolt that now threatens to overwhelm them.

But to stop here would be to leave half the story untold—the more important half, in my view. Because populism embraces the republican principle of popular sovereignty, it faces the question inherent in this principle: Who are the people? When we say “we,” what do we mean?

This may sound like an abstract theoretical question. It is anything but.

Today, “we the people” is understood to mean all citizens, regardless of religion, manners and customs, and length of citizenship. The people is an ensemble of individuals who enjoy a common civic status. During the founding period of the United States, however, a thicker understanding prevailed. In Federalist 2 John Jay wrote, “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.”7 We may wonder where this left African Americans, not to mention Catholics and those for whom German was the language of daily life. How, if at all, did Jay’s understanding of the American people differ from the understanding of peoplehood in today’s Hungarian constitution, whose preamble “recognise[s] the role of Christianity in preserving nationhood,” praises “our king Saint Stephen” for making Hungary “a part of Christian Europe,” and speaks of “promoting and safeguarding our heritage, our unique language, [and] Hungarian culture”?8

Historically, right-leaning populists have emphasized shared ethnicity and common descent, while left-leaning populists have often defined the people in class terms, excluding those with wealth and power. Recently, a third definition has entered public debate—the people as opposed to cultural elites. In its U.S. version, this definition sets “real people” who eat hamburgers, listen to country and western music, and watch Duck Dynastyagainst “globalist” snobs who do whatever PBS, NPR, and the New York Times deem refined.

When populists distinguish between the “people” and the “elite,” they depict each of these groups as homogeneous. The people have one set of interests and values, the elite has another, and these two sets are not only different but fundamentally opposed. The divisions are moral as well as empirical. Populism understands the elite as hopelessly corrupt, the people as uniformly virtuous—meaning that there is no reason why the people should not govern themselves and their society without institutional restraints. And populist leaders claim that they alone represent the people, the only legitimate force in society.

This approach raises some obvious difficulties. First, it is divisive by definition. In the context of popular sovereignty, splitting a country’s population into the people and the others implies that some parts of the population, because they are not really part of the people, do not deserve to share in self-government. Individuals outside the charmed circle of the people may therefore be excluded from equal citizenship, violating the principle of inclusion that is essential to democracy.

Second, the populist definition of the people is inherently counter-factual. According to Jan-Werner Müller, a leading scholar of populism, populists “speak and act as if the people could develop a singular judgment, a singular will, and hence a singular, unambiguous mandate.”9 But of course they cannot. In circumstances of even partial liberty, different social groups will have different interests, values, and origins. Plurality, not homogeneity, characterizes most peoples, most of the time.

Populism is the enemy of pluralism, and thus of modern democracy. Imposing the assumption of uniformity on the reality of diversity not only distorts the facts but also elevates the characteristics of some social groups over those of others. To the extent that this occurs, populism becomes a threat to democracy, which, as Müller puts it, “requires pluralism and the recognition that we need to find fair terms of living together as free, equal, but also irreducibly diverse citizens.”10 Whatever may have been possible in classical republics, no form of identity politics can serve as the basis for modern democracy, which stands or falls with the protection of pluralism.

Equally counterfactual is the proposition that the people are uniformly virtuous. They are not, of course. Political movements based on this premise inevitably come to grief, but not before disappointment gives way to a violent search for hidden enemies. Populist leaders attack “enemies of the people” in moralistic terms, as corrupt, self-seeking, and given to conspiracies against ordinary citizens, often in collaboration with foreigners. Populism requires constant combat against these enemies and the forces they represent.

In this way, presuming the people’s monopoly on virtue undermines democratic practice. Decision making in circumstances of diversity typically requires compromise. If one group or party believes that the other embodies evil, however, its members are likely to scorn compromises as dishonorable concessions to the forces of darkness. In short, populism plunges democratic societies into an endless series of moralized zero-sum conflicts; it threatens the rights of minorities; and it enables over-bearing leaders to dismantle the checkpoints on the road to autocracy.

How Serious Is the Threat?

On the one hand, this is no time for complacency. Liberal democracy faces clear and present dangers. On the other hand, I must underscore a less fashionable point: This is no time for panic either. The best stance is reality-based concern, as detached from fear and foreboding as we can manage.

The best stance is reality-based concern, as detached from fear and foreboding as we can manage.

History offers a valuable corrective to myopia. A recent study of politics in the wake of financial crises over the past 140 years finds a consistent pattern: Majority parties shrink; far-right parties gain ground; polarization and fragmentation intensify; uncertainty rises; and governing becomes more difficult.11 Economic historians tell us that the effects of financial crises, unlike cyclical recessions, typically take a decade or more to abate. It was not until this year that middle-class families in the United States regained the level of income they enjoyed prior to the onset of the Great Recession in late 2007. They have not yet regained the wealth they lost during this period. The lag in Europe is worse.

We may also gain perspective, and a measure of comfort, from a cross-national survey released just a couple of months ago. Although there is widespread discontent with how democratic institutions are performing in the European and North American countries included in the survey, median support for representative democracy across these countries stands at 80 percent. By contrast, only 13 percent support a system in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from the legislature or the courts. Even fewer support military government. That said, while publics are not turning their back on representative democracy, they are willing to consider other forms of decision making. Seventy percent favor referendums in which citizens vote directly on major national issues, and 43 percent believe that allowing experts to make decisions about what is best for their countries makes sense.12

Over the past year, I have been part of a bipartisan Voter Study Group that has been working to understand not only the 2016 presidential election, but also Americans’ views of their democratic system. The news is mostly good. Among respondents, 78 percent believe that democracy is preferable to any other form of government, while 83 percent think it is very important to live in a democratic system. Nonetheless, 23 percent are open to a strong leader who does not have to bother with Congress and elections, and 18 percent would countenance military rule. Openness to undemocratic alternatives was most pronounced among voters who combine economic liberalism and cultural conservatism—the policy profile most characteristic of U.S. populists. It was also evident among voters who favor one primary culture over cultural diversity, believe that European heritage is important to being an American, and harbor highly negative views of Muslims. Nearly half the voters who supported Barack Obama in 2012 but switched to Donald Trump in 2016 favored a strong, unencumbered leader and declined to endorse democracy as the best form of government.13

It is not clear that these findings represent a break with the past. Overall support for a leader who can act unchecked by Congress and the courts is no higher than it was two decades ago. Readers familiar with Seymour Martin Lipset’s scholarship will recall similar themes in his 1970 text The Politics of Unreason and in the work he did on working-class authoritarianism in the 1950s.14 Nonetheless, there are grounds for concern, not least because our system allows aroused political minorities to exercise disproportionate influence.

In practice, not every manifestation of populism threatens liberal democracy. While the Brexit vote, as a policy decision made by referendum, raised some issues in terms of parliamentary sovereignty, its outcome ultimately pivoted on policy concerns. In systems where liberal-democratic institutions are strong, disputes about trade, immigration, and even national sovereignty can still take place. In the long run, the effort to place such issues beyond the pale of political contestation will do more to weaken liberal democracy than robust debate ever could.

But sometimes the populist challenge does directly threaten liberal democracy. Left unchecked, moves to undermine freedom of the press, weaken constitutional courts, concentrate power in the hands of the executive, and marginalize groups of citizens based on ethnicity, religion, or national origin will undermine liberal democracy from within. Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán is frank about his antipathy to liberalism. The country that gave birth to the Solidarity movement is following his lead. We dare not ignore these developments, which may well be harbingers of worse to come. As Abraham Lincoln once said as the clouds of crisis darkened, “If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do and how to do it.”15

What Is to Be Done?

In the space remaining, I can only gesture toward the elements of a liberal-democratic response to the populist challenge.16

1) The defenders of liberal democracy must focus relentlessly on identifying and countering threats to liberal institutions. An independent judiciary, freedom of the press, the rule of law, and protected space for civil associations (secular and religious) represent the first line of defense against illiberalism, and they must be safeguarded. At the same time, political reforms are needed to restore the ability of liberal-democratic institutions to act effectively. Gridlock frustrates ordinary citizens and makes them more open to leaders who are willing to break the rules in order to get things done.

2) We should distinguish between policy disputes and regime-level threats. Populist parties often espouse measures, such as trade protectionism and withdrawal from international institutions, that challenge established arrangements but not liberal democracy itself. In a similar vein, it is essential to distinguish between the liberal element of liberal democracy and what is often called cultural liberalism. Liberal democrats can adopt diverse views on issues such as abortion, same-sex marriage, local traditions, and religion while remaining true to their political creed.

3) Liberal democrats must make their peace with national sovereignty. Political leaders can assert the right of their nations to put their interests first without threatening liberal-democratic institutions and norms. Again, this is a policy dispute within liberal democracy, not about liberal democracy. The defenders of liberal democracy should likewise acknowledge that control of borders is an attribute of national sovereignty, and that liberal democrats can have a wide range of views on the appropriate number and type of immigrants to admit. In recent decades, as public concerns about population flows across national borders have intensified throughout the West, this issue has done more than any other to weaken support for liberal-democratic norms and institutions.

To some extent this trend reflects anxiety about economic displacement; the “Polish plumber” became a trope in the Brexit debate. Worries about the increased demand for social services, too, have played a part. But darker fears are also at work. The threat of Islamist terrorism has made Western populations less willing to absorb new immigrants or even refugees from Muslim-majority countries. Citizens increasingly fear that Islam and liberal democracy are incompatible and that a clash of civilizations is inevitable. National identity is taking on increasing prominence in politics, and those who believe that liberal democracy draws strength from diversity have been thrown on the defensive.

Large population flows, finally, have triggered concerns about the loss of national sovereignty. During the 2016 Brexit referendum, the EU’s unwillingness to compromise on the question of movement across its member nations’ borders made it far more difficult for Britain’s “Remain” forces to prevail. In the United States, Donald Trump’s famous promise to build a “big, beautiful wall” along the Mexican border became a powerful symbol of sovereignty regained.

But the concern extends beyond illegal immigration. Since the passage in 1965 of reforms that liberalized U.S. immigration policy following four decades of restrictive legislation, the country’s demographics have been transformed. In 2015, first-generation immigrants made up 14 percent of the population, just shy of the peak slightly over a century earlier.17 It should not be surprising that this latest cycle of immigration, like its early twentieth-century precursor, has evoked support for more restrictive policies among many U.S. citizens—this time including descendants of the previous wave’s immigrants.

One may speculate that any country (even a self-styled nation of immigrants) has a finite capacity to absorb new arrivals, and that bumping up against this limit triggers a reaction that detractors condemn as nativist. But denouncing citizens concerned about immigration as ignorant and bigoted does nothing either to address the issue in substance or to lower the political temperature. As Jeff Colgan and Robert Keohane put it, “It is not bigotry to calibrate immigration levels to the ability of immigrants to assimilate and to society’s ability to adjust.”18 No issue has done more to spark the rise of contemporary populism, and finding a sustainable compromise would drain much of the bile from today’s liberal-democratic politics.

4) It is time to abandon a myopic focus on economic aggregates and work instead toward inclusive growth—that is, the kind of economic policies that improve well-being across all demographic lines, including those of class and geography. As recent decades have shown, no mechanism automatically translates economic growth into broadly shared prosperity. Allowing the well-off strata of society to commandeer the lion’s share of gains is a formula for endless conflict. So, too, is allowing the concentration of economic growth and dynamism in fewer and fewer places.

The second half of the 1990s was the last time that the incomes of all economic groups from top to bottom progressed together at roughly the same rate. It is no coincidence that during this period the labor market reached and then sustained full employment, improving workers’ bargaining power and bringing previously neglected individuals back into the workforce. That history suggests that full employment should be a focus of economic policy. This is a moral as well as an economic imperative. In modern societies, work provides more than a livelihood; it gives our lives structure and purpose, and is a key source of self-confidence and social respect. It promotes stable families and healthy communities and strengthens the bonds of trust between individuals and their governing institutions. Conversely, we know all too well the consequences of long-term unemployment: diminished self-respect, increased strife within families, epidemics of substance abuse, blighted neighborhoods, and a corrosive sense of helplessness.

The challenge is not only work for all, but also reasonable compensation. In the long run, workers cannot spend more than they are paid. As wage growth slowed in recent decades, middle-class families kept up their living standards via women’s entry into the workforce and by taking on additional debt, in part drawn from the equity they had accumulated from rising home prices. When the housing bubble burst, these families suffered an economic shock that drove many into bankruptcy. The recovery since the end of the Great Recession has been the weakest of the entire postwar period largely because household and family incomes have remained flat. Only wage increases can generate more vigorous growth, and if market mechanisms fail to produce higher wages, public policy should step in.

The principle of inclusive growth applies across lines of geography as well as class. Throughout the market democracies of the West, remote and less densely populated regions are losing ground to metropolitan centers. Agricultural areas can still do well when prices are high, but the light industries that once thrived in smaller communities have weakened in the face of competitive pressure. More than that, it appears that the modern knowledge-based economy thrives on the density and diversity found in larger cities, where concentrated professional networks spur innovation. For this reason, public policy cannot fully eliminate the rural-urban gap. But by investing in transportation infrastructure that enables people who work in cities to live further from their places of employment, governments can help small towns participate in the fruits of metropolitan growth. Information technology can also be an asset: Expanding internet access today, like rural electrification during the New Deal, could help to bring isolated communities into the national economy and society.

Agency Within History

Liberals are anti-tribal, cherishing particular identities while subordinating them to broader conceptions of civic and even human solidarity. But citizens often crave more unity and solidarity than liberal life typically offers, and community can be a satisfying alternative to the burdens of individual responsibility. Preferring those who are most like us goes with the grain of our sentiments more than does a wider, more abstract concept of equal citizenship or humanity. So does the tendency to impute good motives to our friends and malign intent to our foes. Antipathy has its satisfactions, and conflict, like love, can make us feel more fully alive.

The appeal of populism—with its embrace of tribalism, its Manichean outlook, and the constant conflict it entails—is deeply rooted in the enduring incompleteness of life in liberal societies. This vulnerability helps explain why, in just twenty-five years, the partisans of liberal democracy have moved from triumphalism to near despair. But neither sentiment is warranted. Liberal democracy is not the end of history; nothing is. Everything human beings make is subject to erosion and contingency. Liberal democracy is fragile, constantly threatened, always in need of repair.

Liberal democracy is not the end of history; nothing is. Everything human beings make is subject to erosion and contingency. Liberal democracy is fragile, constantly threatened, always in need of repair.

But liberal democracy is also strong, because, to a greater extent than any other political form, it harbors the power of self-correction. Not only do liberal-democratic institutions protect citizens against tyrannical concentrations of power, they also provide mechanisms for channelling the public’s grievances and unmet needs into effective reforms. To be sure, the power of self-correction is not always enough to prevent liberal democracies from crumbling. As we learned in the 1920s and 1930s, the combination of public stress and strong undemocratic movements can be irresistible, especially in newer democracies. But the oft-heard analogy between those decades and our current situation obscures more than it reveals. Today’s economic ills pale in comparison to the Great Depression of the 1930s, and today’s autocratic regimes lack the ideological attraction that fascism and communism held at their peak.

Still, there is no cause—and no excuse—for complacency. The current ills of liberal democracy are deep and pervasive. Surmounting them will require intellectual clarity and political leaders who are willing to take risks to serve the long-term interests of their countries. Human choice, not historical inevitability, will determine liberal democracy’s fate.

For now, democratic publics want policy changes that give them hope for a better future. Left unmet, their demands could evolve into pressure for regime change. The partisans of liberal democracy must do all they can to prevent this from happening.

via The Trump Debacle

#IFTTT #The Trump Debacle

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archiveofprolbems · 7 years ago

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Aesthetics of Resistance? Artistic Research as Discipline and Conflict by Hito Steyerl

What is artistic research today? At present no one seems to know an answer to this question. Artistic research is treated as one of the multiple practices which are defined by indefinition, constantly in flux, lacking coherence and identity. But what if this view were indeed misleading? What if we actually knew more about it than we thought? In order to discuss this proposition, let’s first have a look at current debates around artistic research. It seems as if one of their most important concerns is the transformation of artistic research into an academic discipline. There are discussions about curriculum, degrees, method, practical application, pedagogy. On the other hand, there is also substantial criticism of this approach. It addresses the institutionalization of artistic research as being complicit with new modes of production within cognitive capitalism: commodified education, creative and affective industries, administrative aesthetics, and so on. Both perspectives agree on one point: artistic research is at present being constituted as a more or less normative, academic discipline.

A discipline is of course disciplinarian; it normalizes, generalizes and regulates; it rehearses a set of responses, and in this case, trains people to function in an environment of symbolic labor, permanent design and streamlined creativity. But then again, what is a discipline apart from all of this? A discipline may be oppressive, but this is also precisely why it points to the issue it keeps under control. It indexes a suppressed, an avoided or potential conflict. A discipline hints at a conflict immobilized. It is a practice to channel and exploit its energies and to incorporate them into the powers that be. Why would one need a discipline if it wasn’t to discipline somebody or something? Any discipline can thus also be seen from the point of view of conflict.

Let me give an example: a project I recently realized, called The Building. It deals with the construction history of a Nazi building on the main square in Linz, Austria; it investigates its background, the stories of the people who actually built it, and also looks at the materials used in the building. The construction was performed by partly foreign forced laborers and some of the former inhabitants of the site were persecuted, dispossessed and murdered. During the research it also actually turned out that some of the building stones were produced in the notorious quarry of concentration camp Mauthausen, where thousands of people were killed.

There are at least two different ways of describing this building. One and the same stone used for the building can be said to have gained its shape according to the paradigm of neoclassicist architecture, which would be the official description given on the building itself. Or it can be described as having probably been shaped by a stone mason in concentration camp Mauthausen, who was likely a former Spanish Republican fighter. The conclusion is obvious: the same stone can be described from the point of view of a discipline, which classifies and names. But it can also be read as a trace of a suppressed conflict.

But why would this very local project be relevant for a reflection about artistic research as such? Because parts of this building also coincidentally house the Linz Art Academy. This building is a location, where artistic research is currently being integrated into academic structures: there is a department for artistic research inside this building. Thus, any investigation of the building might turn out as a sort of institutional metareflection on the contemporary conditions of artistic research as such.

In this sense: where is the conflict, or rather what are the extensive sets of conflicts underlying this new academic discipline? Who is currently building its walls, using which materials, produced by whom? Who are the builders of the discipline and where are their traces?

Discipline and Conflict

So, what are the conflicts, and where are the boundaries then? Seen from the point of view of many current contributions, artistic research seems more or less confined to the contemporary metropolitan art academy. Actual artistic research looks like a set of art practices by predominantly metropolitan artists acting as ethnographers, sociologists, product or social designers. It gives the impression of being an asset of technologically and conceptually advanced First World capitalism, trying to upgrade its population to efficiently function in a knowledge economy, and as a by-product, casually surveying the rest of the world as well. But if we look at artistic research from the perspective of conflict or more precisely of social struggles, a map of practices emerges that spans most of the 20th century and also most of the globe. It becomes obvious that the current debates do not fully acknowledge the legacy of the long, varied and truly international history of artistic research which has been understood in terms of an aesthetics of resistance.

Aesthetics of Resistance is the title of Peter Weiss’ seminal novel, released in the early 1980s, which presents an alternative reading of art history as well as an account of the history of anti-fascist resistance from 1933 to 1945. Throughout the novel Weiss explicitly uses the term “artistic research (künstlerische Forschung)” to refer to practices such as Brecht’s writing factory in exile. He also points to the factographic and partly also productivist practices in the post-revolutionary Soviet Union, mentioning the documentary work of Sergei Tretjakov, among many others. Thus he establishes a genealogy of aesthetic research, which is related to the history of emancipatory struggles throughout the 20th century.

Since the 1920s, extremely sophisticated debates about artistic epistemologies were waged on terms like fact, reality, objectivity, inquiry within the circles of Soviet factographers, cinematographers and artists. For factographers, a fact is an outcome of a process of production. Fact comes from facere, to make or to do. So in this sense the fact is made or even made up. This should not come as a surprise to us in the age of poststructuralist, metaphysical skepticism. But the range of aesthetic approaches which were developed as research tools almost 100 years ago is stupefying.

Authors like Vertov, Stepanova, Tretjakov, Popova and Rodchenko invent complex procedures of investigation, such as the cine-eye, the cine-truth, the biography of the object or photomontage. They work on human perception and practice and actively try to integrate scientific attitudes into their work. And scientific creation is flowing as a result of many of these developments. In his autobiography, Roman Jakobson describes in detail how avantgarde art practices inspired him to develop his specific ideas on linguistics.

Of course throughout history many different approaches of this type of research have existed. We could also mention the efforts of the artists employed by the FSA (Farm Security Administration) of creating essayistic photojournalistic inquiries during the Great Depression in the US. In all these cases, the artistic research is ambivalently co-opted into state policies – although to a different extent and with completely different consequences. Around the same time Tretyakov got shot during the Stalinist terror, Walker Evans had a solo show at the MoMa.

Another method of artistic inquiry, which is based on several related sets of conflict and crisis is the essayistic approach. In 1940, Hans Richter coins the term film essay or essay film as capable of visualizing theoretical ideas. He refers to one of his own works already made in 1927 called Inflation, an extremely interesting experimental film about capitalism running amok. Richter argues that a new filmic language has to be developed in order to deal with abstract processes such as the capitalist economy. How does one show these abstractions, how does one visualize the immaterial? These questions are reactualized in contemporary art practices, but they have a long history.

The essay as filmic approach also embraces the perspective of anticolonial resistance. One of the first so-called essay films is the anticolonial film-essay Les statues meurent aussi, by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, about racism in dealing with African art. The film is commissioned by a magazine called Presence africaine which counts as its editors people like Aimé Césaire or Leopold Senghor, main theoreticians of the so-called negritude movement in the 1930s. Only a few years later Theodor Adorno’s text, The Essay as Form, appears in which he ponders on the resistant characteristics of the essay as subversive method of thought. To Adorno the essay means the reshuffling of the realms of the aesthetic and epistemological, which undermines the dominant division of labor.

And then we enter the whole period of the 1960s with their international struggles, tricontinentalism and so on. Frantz Fanon’s slogan: “...we must discuss, we must invent...” is the motto of the manifesto Towards a Third Cinema, written by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in 1969, in a context of dictatorship in Argentina. The relation of art and science is again explicitly mentioned in Julio Garcia Espinosa’s manifesto For an Imperfect Cinema (1969). Other methods of artistic research include situationist derive and workers inquiries, constructivist montage, cut-ups, biomechanics, oral history, deconstructive or surrealist anthropology, the diffusion of counterinformation as well as aesthetic journalism. Some of these methods are more easily absorbed into the art mainstream than others. Especially strongly dematerialized practices with pronounced modernist features are quickly absorbed into information capitalism because they are compressed, quick to absorb and easily transmitted.

It is no coincidence that many of the practices mentioned here have been dealing with classical problems of documentary representation from very different perspectives: its function as power/knowledge, its epistemological problems, its relation to reality and the challenge of creating a new one. Documentary styles and forms have forever grappled with the uneven mix of rationality and creativity, between subjectivity and objectivity, between the power of creation and the power of conservation.

It is no coincidence either that many of the historical methods of artistic research are tied to social or revolutionary movements, or to moments of crisis and reform. In this perspective, the outline of a global network of struggles is revealed, which spans almost the whole 20th century, which is transversal, relational, and (in many, though far from all cases) emancipatory.

It is a coincidence, however, that Peter Weiss´ Aesthetics of Resistance also mentions the main square of Linz: the site of The Building. He describes a scene in which members of the International Brigades in Spain listen to a broadcast of the enthusiastic reception for Hitler and the German troops on Linz’s main square in March 1938. But Weiss’ protagonist notices a very small (and entirely hypothetical) moment in resistance pointed out by the radio journalist: some of the windows on the square remain unlit, and the journalist is quick to point out that the flats of the Jews are located there. Actually, during the research it turned out that one of the Jewish families living there had dispersed to three different continents and two members of the family had been murdered. One of the latter was a person called Ernst Samuely who was supposedly a communist. After many ordeals, he joined a Jewish partisan group on the Polish border before disappearing. So, if we look at the Linz building from this point of view, we see that it dissolves into a network of international routes and relations, which relate to oppression but also to resistance: it relates to what Walter Benjamin once called “the tradition of the oppressed.”

The Perspective of Conflict

If we keep applying the global and transversal perspective to the debate around artistic research, the temporal and spatial limitations of contemporary metropolitan debates are revealed. It simply does not make any sense to continue the discussion as if practices of artistic research do not have a long and extensive history well beyond conceptual art practices – which is one of the very few historical examples to be mentioned, although very rarely. From the point of view of social struggles, the discontinuous genealogy of artistic research becomes an almost global one, with a long and frequently interrupted history. The geographical distribution of artistic research practices also dramatically changes in this perspective. Since some locations were particularly affected by the conjunction of power and knowledge, which arose with the formation of capitalism and colonialism, strategies of epistemic disobedience had to be invented.

A power/knowledge/art, which reduced whole populations to objects of knowledge, domination and representation, had to be countered not only by social struggle and revolt, but also by epistemological and aesthetic innovation. Thus reversing the perspective and focusing on discipline as an index of conflict also reverses the direction in which art history has been written as an account of peripheral artists copying and catching up with Western art trends. We could just as well say that many contemporary metropolitan artists are only now catching up with the complexity of debates around reality and representation that Soviet factographers had already developed in the 1920s.

Specific and Singular

In all these methods, two elements collide: a claim to specificity clashes with a claim to singularity. What does this mean? One aspect of the work claims to participate in a general paradigm, within a discourse that can be shared and which is manufactured according to certain criteria. More often than not, scientific, legalistic or journalistic truth procedures underly this method of research. These methodologies are pervaded by power relations as many theorists have demonstrated.

On the other hand, artistic research projects in many cases also lay claim to singularity. They create a certain artistic setup, which claims to be relatively unique and produces its own field of reference and logic. This provides it with a certain autonomy, in some cases an edge of resistance against dominant modes of knowledge production. In other cases, this assumed singularity just sexes up a quantitative survey, or to use a famous expression by Benjamin Buchloh, creates an aesthetic of administration.[1]”

While specific methods generate a shared terrain of knowledge – which is consequently pervaded by power structures – singular methods follow their own logic. While this may avoid the replication of existing structures of power/knowledge, it also creates the problem of the proliferation of parallel universes, which each speak their own, untranslatable language. Practices of artistic research usually partake in both registers, the singular as well as the specific; they speak several languages at once.

Thus, one could imagine a semiotic square*, which would roughly map the tensions which become apparent during the transformation of artistic research into an academic and/or economic discipline. Of course, this scheme is misleading, since one would have to draw a new one for every singular point of view which is investigated. But it shows the tensions which both frame and undermine the institutionalization of artistic research.

Artistic Research as Translation

The multilinguality of artistic research implies that artistic research is an act of translation. It takes part in at least two languages and can in some cases create new ones. It speaks the language of quality as well as of quantity, the language of the singular as well as the language of the specific, use value as well as exchange value or spectacle value, discipline as well as conflict; and it translates between all of these. This does not mean that it translates correctly – but it translates, nevertheless.

At this point, one should emphasize that this is also the case with so-called autonomous artworks, which have no pretense whatsoever to partake in any kind of research. This does not mean they cannot be quantified or become part of disciplinary practices because they are routinely quantified on the art market in the form of pricing and integrated into art histories and other systems of value. Thus, most art practices exist in one or another type of translation, but this type of translation does not jeopardize the division of labor established between art historians and gallerists, between artists and researchers, between the mind and senses. In fact, a lot of the conservative animosity towards artistic research stems from a feeling of threat, because of the dissolution of these boundaries, and this is why artistic research is often dismissed in everyday practice as neither art nor research.

But the quantification processes involved in the evaluation or valorization of artistic research are slightly different than the traditional procedures of quantification. Artistic research as a discipline not only sets and enforces certain standards but also presents an attempt to extract or produce a different type of value in art. Apart from the art market, a secondary market develops for those practices which lack in fetish value. This secondary value is established by quantification and integration into (increasingly) commodified education systems. Additionally, a sort of social surplus embedded into a pedagogical understanding of art comes into play. Both combined create a pull towards the production of applied or applicable knowledge/art, which can be used for entrepreneurial innovation, social cohesion, city marketing, and thousands of other aspects of cultural capitalism. From this perspective, artistic research indeed looks like a new version of the applied arts, a new and largely immaterial craft, which is being instituted as a discipline in many different places.

Radiators

At the end, let me come back to the beginning: we know more about artistic research than we think. And this concerns the most disquieting findings of the project around The Building in Linz. It is more than likely, that after the war, radiators were taken from the now abandoned concentration camp Mauthausen and reinstalled into the building. If this plan documented in the historical files was executed, then the radiators are still there and have quietly been heating the building ever since. A visit with an expert confirmed that the radiators have never been exchanged in the Eastern part of the building and that, moreover, some of the radiators had already been used, when they had been installed around 1948. The make of those radiators corresponds to the few radiators seen in contemporary photos of concentration camp Mauthausen. Now, of course, radiators were not in use in the prisoner's barracks. They were in use in some workrooms, like the laundry room. They were in use in the prisoner's office and the prisoner's brothel, where female inmates from another concentration camp had to work.

But what do we make of the fact that the Department for Artistic Research (its coordination office is located in The Building, according to the website) could soon find itself being heated by the same radiators, which were mute witnesses of the plight of female inmates in the concentration camp brothel? To quote the website of the Linz art academy, “artistic-scientific research belongs to the core tasks of the Art University Linz, and artistic practice and scientific research are combined under one roof. The confrontation and/or combination of science and art require intense research and artistic development in a methodological perspective, in the areas of knowledge transfers and questions of mediation. Cultural Studies, art history, media theory, several strategies of mediation as well as art and Gender Studies in the context of concrete art production are essential elements of the profile of the university.” What are the conditions of this research? What is the biography of its historical infrastructure and how can reflecting on it help us to break through the infatuation with discipline and institutionalization and to sharpen a historical focus in thinking about artistic research? Obviously, not every building will turn out to house such a surprising infrastructure. But the general question remains: what do we do with an ambivalent discipline, which is institutionalized and disciplined under this type of conditions? How can we emphasize the historical and global dimension of artistic research and underline the perspective of conflict? And when is it time to turn off the lights?

SPECIFIC

SCIENCE / PUBLIC DEBATE / ART HISTORY COUNTERINFORMATION

DISCIPLINE RESISTANCE

ART MARKET / AESTHETIC AUTONOMY CREATIVE INDUSTRIES

SINGULAR

This text appeared first in mahkuzine 8, winter 2010, http://www.mahku.nl/download/maHKUzine08_web.pdf

[1] Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions”, in: October, Vol. 55. (Winter, 1990), pp. 105-143.

Source: http://eipcp.net/transversal/0311/steyerl/en

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expatwhisperer · 8 years ago

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DECONSTRUCTING FEMALE EMPOWERMENT

If America advocates women's empowerment, why is it so hard to achieve? The message from both government institutions and private enterprise to women publicly encourages them that You can do it. Then Facebook CEO, Sheryl Sandberg tells women to lean in from her eponymous book. In a Presidential Proclamation, President Barack Obama said, “Across the globe, there are girls who will one day lead nations, if only we afford them the chance to choose their own destinies.” While the word “women” was mentioned 82 times in a 2013 State of the Union Address -- more than any other -- the overall reaction to the speech on Twitter was negative.

I can’t help but wonder, if women aren't achieving socioeconomic parity with men in the Anglo cluster countries (USA, Canada, Australia, England, and New Zealand) is it any wonder they struggle in China, India, and the Arab world?

The answer seems unclear at first to the untrained eye. After all, Women's Suffrage seemed unstoppable in late 19th century America. In the 1970’s, American women fought for the equal pay for equal work and made great strides. Today, the women’s movement calls for a greater influence in politics. True, the pay gap has narrowed significantly for Millennial women who are the first generation in the USA to start their work life at near parity with men at 93% to the dollar. Yet, overall women continue to struggle for their equal rights, their reproductive and human rights against domestic violence, maternity leave, sexual harassment, and sexual violence. So if, after nearly 100 years of struggle and protest, the most Western woman in the world can't achieve the desired level of socioeconomic equality with men, is it any wonder that honor killings, forced abortion, sex trafficking, and child labor still exist in China, India, Northeast and Northwest Africa, and parts of the Arab world?

These reproductive and human rights issues continue to be a catastrophic concern to the World Health Organization. What’s more, there is continued opposition to female genital mutilation. This World Mapper shows how populations rate on the Gender Empowerment Measure.In many countries, women own nothing, inherit nothing and earn nothing. Three out of four of the poorest billion people of the world are women.

The Gender Empowerment Measure is an indicator of opportunities for women. It takes into account the female share of parliamentary representation; proportions of legislators, senior officials, managers, professional and technical employees who are women; and the ratio of female to male earnings. By this measure, women have the most opportunities in Western Europe. The fewest opportunities for women are in the Middle Eastern territories of Yemen and Saudi Arabia. There was no data for any territory in Central Africa.Male child preference is deeply rooted in patriarchal cultures of India and China producing what’s been called the Asian Male Surplus. Traditional practices foster it like the dowry system in India (bride price) reduce the humanity of women to a disposable commodity resulting in fetus sex selection (or selected abortion), violent dowry deaths over “inadequate dowry” mental trauma, bride burnings, induced suicides, physical and mental torture the husband, or in-laws, despite the unenforced “Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005”.

In China, it’s perpetuated in two ways: a strong traditional preference by parents for boys plus the One Child Policy. The result is female infanticide and child trafficking to ensure female brides for boys. So, while American women may be quick to sympathize at the detriments of harmful traditional cultural practices, we would be wise to take a closer look at our own hidden patriarchal cultural values prevent us from achieving real liberation. Cultural values may be the culprit for the hindrance of women’s empowerment.Cultural values affect our every waking moment. They are the unconscious drivers responsible for determining what we think and do in ways we never dreamed of. They have little to do with evident culture like food, clothing, customs, or accents. Rather, they are hidden values; the implicit values and assumptions that lie beneath the “cultural iceberg” that account for how we think, process information, view time and relate to others. Understanding them will enable you to not only steer around the unseen and profound dimensions of culture, but understand dilemmas like gender inequalities.

To shed some light on the status of women in the USA and elsewhere, it’s useful to apply the Five Dimensions of Culture Index (5-D) – a cross-cultural benchmark index that describes the effects of a society's culture on the values of its members; and, how these values relate to behavior using a structure derived from factor analysis. The theory has been widely used in several fields as a paradigm model for research, particularly in cross-cultural psychology, international management, and cross-cultural communication.

This “lens” demonstrates cultural differences in comparison to others. They are spectral tendencies, so while people are unique, social control ensures most people don’t deviate too much from the norm. Knowing these tendencies provides practical insight into your own culture which can be applied to your daily life in a foreign country, when dealing with foreign clients, and so on.

If we take a look at the MAS Index highlighted above, there are clues as to why women are neither able to lean in from the West nor surmount horrific oppression from the East. MAS Index represents the area of Masculine and Feminine tendencies in cultures. In Masculine cultures, the differences between gender roles are more dramatic and less fluid than in Feminine ones, where men and women have the same values of modesty and caring. In Masculine cultures, the dominant values are achievement and success. It also represents a preference for achievement, heroism, assertiveness, and material reward for success. Society at large is more competitive. On the other hand, Femininity, stand for a preference for cooperation, modesty, caring for the weak and quality of life. Society at large is more consensus-oriented.According to the 5-D Model, the USA scores relatively high on the Masculine Values (MAS) index: 63 indicating an unequal distribution of emotional roles between the genders.

This is a real impediment to American women from achieving social and economic parity. Nordic countries, on the other hand, compared with the USA, score is extremely low: Norway scores 8 and Sweden only 5. In contrast, it’s very high in Japan (95) and in European countries like Hungary, Austria and Switzerland influenced by German culture. The implications of these high scores are enormous because the kind of values that are encouraged in America – by men and women, and understanding this is crucial -- are competitiveness, assertiveness, materialism, ambition and power; tendencies that do not reflect the norms of women. In the Far East (China), Near East (India) and Middle East (Pakistan) where harmful traditional practices and male preference are favored, the scores are as high as the USA. Young girls are killed, aborted, or abandoned simply because they are girls.

The United Nations estimates as many as 200 million girls are missing in the world today because of this so-called gendercide. Girls who survive infancy are often subject to neglect, and many grow up to face extreme violence and even death at the hands of their own husbands or other family members. The war against girls is rooted in centuries-old tradition and sustained by deeply ingrained cultural dynamics which, in combination with government policies, accelerate the elimination of girls.

It’s a Girl, a documentary shot on location in India and China, reveals the issue. It explores why this extreme version of gender disparity happens, and why so little is being done to prevent it. The answer is cultural. The film tells the stories of abandoned and trafficked girls, of women who suffer extreme dowry-related violence, of brave mothers fighting to save their daughters’ lives, and of other mothers who would kill for a son. Harrowing to watch, global experts and grassroots activists put the stories in context and advocate different paths towards change, while collectively lamenting the lack of any truly effective action against this injustice.

Desert Flower, a film based on the life of Somali-born model Waris Dirie, also seeks to change the harmful traditional practice of FGM. It’s about her journey from pastoral nomad in Somalia to a career in the West as a fashion model, to anti FGM activist. Organizations here in the United States such as the Pastoralist Foundation seek to address these issues too where there are an estimated quarter million women at risk for FGM.

Women’s rights are human rights. Cultures with a high masculine tendency and male preference violate both. Aggressive, suppressive, authoritative male values can be, if misguided and abused, more menacing than we can imagine – even in the land of free women. Our struggle to break the glass ceiling or efforts to lean in may look easier in the West because our obstacles don’t feel as injurious or fatal. However, unless there is a shift away from these severe MAS cultural tendencies in the United States, how can we begin to fathom empowerment of young girls and elsewhere?

#gender #women #empowerment #FGM

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therightnewsnetwork · 8 years ago

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Decline of Unions Under Right-to-Work Laws Levels Playing Field for Trump

Donald Trump prevailed where other Republican presidential candidates failed in Midwestern states in part because of new right-to-work laws that have diminished the power and influence of the teachers’ unions, according to labor policy analysts.

“Unions have been knocked silly in Wisconsin, thanks to the one-two punch of Act 10 and right-to-work,” @workerfreedom’s Matt Patterson says.

Final election results have Trump narrowly winning Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes by a margin of 47.9 to 46.9 percent over Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate. Trump had 1,409,467 votes to Clinton’s 1,382,210.

In Michigan, the margins were even closer with Trump winning that state’s 16 electoral votes with 47.6 percent against Clinton who had 47.3 percent of the vote. Trump had 2,279,805 votes to Clinton’s 2,268,193.

“Did the labor reforms enacted in Wisconsin and neighboring Michigan help Donald Trump win those states?” Matt Patterson, executive director of the Center for Worker Freedom, said in an email to The Daily Signal. “No question in my mind. Hard to fight when your bazooka’s been replaced by a squirt gun.”

Two teachers’ unions, the Wisconsin Education Association Council and the Michigan Education Association, both experienced a significant drop in membership since those states passed right-to-work legislation. Such laws prohibit employers from entering into agreements that make union membership and payment of union dues a condition of employment.

Wisconsin became a right-to-work state in 2015, Michigan in 2013. Since then, government figures show, the teachers’ unions in both states have lost thousands of dues-paying members.

The drop has been particularly precipitous in Wisconsin, where in 2011 Gov. Scott Walker signed legislation that reformed the state’s collective bargaining process. In fact, the Wisconsin Education Association Council has lost about 60 percent of its members since Walker’s reforms were implemented, an analysis of public records by the Education Intelligence Agency shows.

Under Act 10, also known as the Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill, most of Wisconsin’s government workers, including public school teachers, are now required to contribute more for their pension and health care benefits.

Act 10 also limits collective bargaining to wage negotiations, requires annual union recertification, ends the automatic deduction of union dues, and allows for public sector employees to decide whether they want to join a union and pay dues.

Wisconsin’s right-to-work law gives private sector employees the same right to decline union membership and payment of dues.

Diminished Union Clout

The Wisconsin Education Association Council had about 100,000 members before Act 10 passed; the latest figures show the union with 36,074. The decline reflects what has happened nationwide, the MacIver Institute for Public Policy, a free-market think tank in Wisconsin, reported.

The Wisconsin and Michigan unions are both affiliates of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest union for workers in public schools.

The 3 million-strong NEA lost more than 300,000 members in affiliated state teachers’ unions from 2010 to 2015, according to the analysis by the Education Intelligence Agency cited by the MacIver Institute. That’s a membership decrease of 10 percent.

So what is the political fallout?

“There’s no doubt that with the decline in union membership here in Wisconsin, the political clout of the union bosses and their ability to automatically turn out members for Democrats has declined dramatically,” Brett Healy, president of the MacIver Institute, told The Daily Signal, adding:

When we look at the decline in union membership and compare it to the recent political fortunes of the Democratic Party, you can clearly see that when people are given the ability to choose whether or not they want to join a union we are seeing less people voting for Democrats.

After the Wisconsin Education Association Council’s loss of tens of thousands of paying members, it has become evident that the teachers’ union’s ability to influence the outcomes of elections and public policy decisions has waned in the past few years, Healy added.

“The Wisconsin Education Association [Council] was the single biggest political player in the capital, but after the passage of Act 10 and right-to-work, their membership, which is where they derive their political power, has declined,” he said. “A majority of teachers in Wisconsin have decided that their money is better spent in other ways rather than turning it over to union bosses.”

Mary Bell, then president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, speaks to protesters crowding the State Capitol grounds in Madison as Wisconsin lawmakers discuss Gov. Scott Walker’s budget bill on Feb. 18, 2011. (Photo: Darren Hauck/Reuters/Newscom)

Trump’s Union Vote

Act 10 has been transformative not just politically, but financially.

A MacIver Institute analysis of the legislation’s budgetary impact found that it saved Wisconsin taxpayers more than $5 billion. Most of these savings were generated by requiring government employees to contribute more for their retirement, according to the analysis.

“Gov. Walker and the Republican legislature not only saved Wisconsinites an incomprehensible amount of money but they also fundamentally changed government in Wisconsin forever,” Healy said a year ago.

Trump benefited politically from right-to-work changes in Michigan just as he did in Wisconsin.

But the billionaire developer’s personal appeal with blue collar union workers gave him an advantage other Republican candidates have not had recently, Vinnie Vernuccio, director of labor policy at the Mackinac Center, a free-market think tank in Michigan, said in an interview.

“The Michigan teachers’ unions, which have led the charge politically in the state, have been weakened in recent years and that certainly helped Trump,” Vernuccio said. “But don’t underestimate the union vote for Trump in key swing states. Exit polls show he did surprisingly well.”

Among union households (where at least one person is a union member), Trump’s margins improved significantly over those of Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who was the Republican presidential nominee in 2012.

When Michigan passed its right-to-work law in 2013, the Michigan Education Association had 113,147 members, the Mackinac Center reported. By 2016, the union had 90,609 members, a decline of about 20 percent.

Detroit public school teachers Mark Moran, second from left, joins fellow union members in a rally about contract talks on July 27, 2012. (Photo: Rebecca Cook/Reuters/Newscom)

‘Knocked Silly’

The Daily Signal sought comment from both the Wisconsin Education Association Council and the Michigan Education Association on the right-to-work laws in their states and the impact on their membership rolls and political activism. Neither union responded.

“Unions have been knocked silly in Wisconsin, thanks to the one-two punch of Act 10 and right-to-work,” Patterson, of the Center for Worker Freedom, a Washington-based nonprofit affiliated with Americans for Tax Reform, told The Daily Signal:

Give people the chance to leave their union, it turns out, and lo and behold there’s a stampede for the door. And these fleeing workers take their money with them, money that unions can no longer use to buy politicians.

John Mozena, vice president of marketing and communications for the Mackinac Center, said in an email that he sees a growing separation between rank-and-file union members and union leaders that worked to Trump’s advantage:

“In labor strongholds like Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana, West Virginia and Missouri, union leaders have failed to turn out enough voters to create notable electoral consequences for politicians who introduced, supported or voted for right-to-work or other worker freedom legislation.

That’s in part because union members have largely come to realize that these laws don’t actually hurt them or their unions. In fact, [the laws] give them as individuals more options than they had before.

Many union members also are voting against candidates that receive the lion’s share of their leaders’ support.

The contrast was most stark in the 2016 election, where almost all union leaders endorsed and used their members’ money to support Clinton. Yet in key states like Ohio, almost half of union members voted for Trump.

The only states to register significant increases in active membership in NEA-affiliated teachers’ unions over five years, according to the Education Intelligence Agency analysis, are Delaware (5 percent), Vermont (8 percent), Montana (16 percent), and North Dakota (19 percent).

Clinton won Delaware and Vermont, but Trump won Montana and North Dakota.

‘Unfortunate Situation’

After spending several months combing through the U.S. Department of Labor’s LM-2 financial disclosure forms, researchers with the Center for Union Facts found that unions directed about $530 million in membership dues to the Democratic Party and to left-leaning special interest groups from 2012 to 2015.

The Center for Union Facts is a Washington-based nonprofit that advocates transparency and accountability on the part of organized labor. Every labor organization that falls under the Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act must file an LM-2.

“An unfortunate situation has developed where unions are more focused on politics than on collective bargaining or workplace issues,” @Richard_Berman says.

Recipients of union donations identified by the Center for Union Facts include Planned Parenthood and the Democratic Governors Association. These donations fall within labor’s political advocacy budgets, which are funded by dues and “disguised as worker advocacy related to collective bargaining–separate from direct campaign contributions,” the center said in a release.

“I do believe a very unfortunate situation has developed where the unions are more focused on politics than they are on collective bargaining or workplace issues,” Richard Berman, the center’s executive director, said in an interview with The Daily Signal.

Since surveys show that about 40 percent of union households vote Republican, this means the dues of a substantial number of union members are directed toward political causes they do not support, Berman said.

But he said he sees a strong potential for the growing right-to-work movement to level the political playing field in future election cycles, as it did in 2016.

In the meantime, Berman said, the new chairman of the National Labor Relations Board should use the board’s regulatory powers “to provide enough transparency in the area of labor finances” to inform union members of leadership’s activities.

The post Decline of Unions Under Right-to-Work Laws Levels Playing Field for Trump appeared first on The Daily Signal.

from http://www.therightnewsnetwork.com/decline-of-unions-under-right-to-work-laws-levels-playing-field-for-trump/

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patriotnewsblogger-blog · 8 years ago

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Decline of Unions Under Right-to-Work Laws Levels Playing Field for Trump

New Post has been published on http://www.therightnewsnetwork.com/decline-of-unions-under-right-to-work-laws-levels-playing-field-for-trump/

Decline of Unions Under Right-to-Work Laws Levels Playing Field for Trump

“Unions have been knocked silly in Wisconsin, thanks to the one-two punch of Act 10 and right-to-work,” @workerfreedom’s Matt Patterson says.

Wisconsin became a right-to-work state in 2015, Michigan in 2013. Since then, government figures show, the teachers’ unions in both states have lost thousands of dues-paying members.

Wisconsin’s right-to-work law gives private sector employees the same right to decline union membership and payment of dues.

Diminished Union Clout

The Wisconsin and Michigan unions are both affiliates of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest union for workers in public schools.

So what is the political fallout?

Trump’s Union Vote

Act 10 has been transformative not just politically, but financially.

Trump benefited politically from right-to-work changes in Michigan just as he did in Wisconsin.

Detroit public school teachers Mark Moran, second from left, joins fellow union members in a rally about contract talks on July 27, 2012. (Photo: Rebecca Cook/Reuters/Newscom)

��Knocked Silly’

Many union members also are voting against candidates that receive the lion’s share of their leaders’ support.

Clinton won Delaware and Vermont, but Trump won Montana and North Dakota.

‘Unfortunate Situation’

“An unfortunate situation has developed where unions are more focused on politics than on collective bargaining or workplace issues,” @Richard_Berman says.

But he said he sees a strong potential for the growing right-to-work movement to level the political playing field in future election cycles, as it did in 2016.

The post Decline of Unions Under Right-to-Work Laws Levels Playing Field for Trump appeared first on The Daily Signal.

http://www.therightnewsnetwork.com/decline-of-unions-under-right-to-work-laws-levels-playing-field-for-trump/ %cats%

#conservative #republican

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nothingman · 8 years ago

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Much of the post-election analysis has focused on strategic fixes–what should have been done. But what can Trump’s win tell us about more fundamental theories of politics? In what way does the failure of an alliance based on labor, environmentalists and civil rights activists give us clues about our basic social power concepts?

Those three categories are fairly clear voting blocks (consider, for example, the very different constituencies that the AFL-CIO, Sierra Club, and Black Lives Matter represent), but they are also broad theory categories. Marxist theory predicts that working class voters will struggle to find a way to understand and represent their interests; environmentalists interrogate Western views of “dominion over nature”; and race theorists confront the structures of white supremacy. None of these theoretical projects occurred in a vacuum and there has been lots of good intersectional work across all three. But when it comes to praxis, history has lots of examples where these movements were pitted against each other or were incompatible from the start. Think of the 1930s labor strikes when black scabs were brought in to break all-white unions; the 1970s white activists who abandoned civil rights to start “Earth First”; and the 1980s loggers who found themselves pitted against the spotted owl.

We are, admittedly, painting these complicated and old social movements with a very broad brush but there are critical moments today when these basic incompatibilities have resulted in direct and immediate consequences. When Hillary Clinton said she would “put coal miners … out of work” it was not a misstep, it was an honest (if inadvertent) admission of our failure to articulate a fundamental political theory; to paint a coherent vision from the contradictory pallet of blue collar labor, green environmentalists and black and brown rights advocates.

An attempt to create exactly that vision is at the core of Teknokultura’s new special issue on “generative justice”. Generative justice is defined as “the circulation of unalienated value, under control of those who generate it”. The idea came out of a six year NSF grant that brought together community organizers with humanities, science and engineering scholars in locations ranging from rural west Africa to New York’s inner cities. As we looked over the best outcomes—a DIY condom vending machine, math lessons using fractals in cornrow braiding, solar ink production for local weavers—a common pattern began to emerge. In every case that counted as success—where the underserved communities we worked with were able to access or build something that improved their material conditions—there was a very direct connection between labor and its rewards, or, what Marx would have called “unalienated value.” But our successes (and our many failures) did not center on labor value alone: there was also a lot of value that non-human allies in nature were producing, and a third category that was more about “expression”: unalienated sexuality, free speech, spirituality and the like. Unlike Marx’s ideal in which value was extracted and centralized before redistribution, these forms of value remained in unalienated form and circulated in a commons. It was a kind of justice from the bottom-up: if those who generate value stay in control, they can share the fruits of their physical, ecological, and expressive activities in a kind of gift economy of reciprocity and commons-based production.

Many of these successes were innovations rather than inventions. Condom vending machines have existed for a long time, but with a bit of help from computer-aided design and rapid prototyping, we ended up with a DIY machine that can be made using tools and parts commonly available in West Africa. Rather than requiring mass production in a high tech factory, this would keep the financial value in the community of use, and also help sustain local artisanal groups and traditions. Back in the US we made a similar move using simulations of African American cornrow hairstyles for math and computing education. In contrast to the vending machine’s focus on keeping labor value local, circulating these “heritage algorithms” was about the expressive value of black cultural tradition, which made for less alienating STEM lessons in inner city classrooms. Some of those students have started to create 3D printed versions of their work (image above), and two of the hairstylists have offered to display them in their shops to see if this can bring in more customers, and our engineering students are working on a switch to recycled plastic. AI and robotics is generally about replacing workers and deskilling jobs, but a generative approach to STEM can use these technologies to amplify the abilities of artisanal labor, expand access to cultural expression and improve ecological sustainability.

How does all that apply to Trump’s election and destructive mismatch between labor, environment and civil rights? One of the Democrats’ greatest errors was promising that lost manufacturing jobs would be replaced by skilled labor in the tech sector or renewable energy in some soon-to-be-realized shiny future. None of the latinos laid off from Texas oil fields, white equipment installers without jobs in Indiana, or black auto workers replaced by the most recent wave of automation could see how this was going to get them a job next week. At best, it’s a promise that their children might get that education, but those sorts of promises have been broken more times than kept.

Generative justice, in contrast, gets at the fundamental issue at stake: unalienated labor means being in charge of the production process and seeing it directly benefit those around you. Building a political campaign with generative justice in mind actually has precedence. There are lots of real-world models for the sorts of value circulation that we call generative justice, but they are rarely gathered together under a coherent social analysis. Take for example the workers’ council movement in Czechoslovakia prior to the Soviet invasion of 1968. There were councils in 120 enterprises, for a total of about 800,000 employees–almost 1/6th of the national workforce who had a say in how labor was paced, managed and even what products were produced. These organizations ran much like a modern capitalist corporations but management and executive positions were democratically selected by and amongst workers. Each enterprise was independent, but interrelated, often inviting workers to sit as external members on hiring committees.

Such an arrangement does not neatly fit into state-controlled communism or capitalism. It derives worker protections, product quality standards, and other social welfare concerns from contracts and agreements between democratic bodies, not from government bureaucracies. Workers’ councils, like all practices that illustrate the generative justice concept —open source software, indigenous gift economies, commons-based land management, and so on— are best understood as lying on an axis which runs orthogonal to the conventional right/left political spectrum of state-protected capitalist or communist politics.

The same holds for the other two categories, unalienated ecological value and unalienated expressive value. Once you catch the fundamental concept of generative justice then any scheme for extraction becomes suspect, whether private enterprise, state bureaucracy, or other institutional domination. Trump’s scheme to help oil companies alienate value from nature runs in parallel to his plans to help homophobic institutions like the American Family Association alienate citizens from their own spiritual, sexual and cultural identities. But the record for protecting labor, the environment and civil rights is no better for socialist bureaucracies than it is for market economies. And “mixed” economies like the People’s Republic of China are no recipe for justice either.

So what does work in driving social structures closer to the ideal of generative justice? One of the common themes that shows up in the Teknokultura special issue is the importance of grassroots organizations that combined a social agenda with activities of “making”. Unlike political movements that aim for changes through policy or legislation, these groups make democratic action a part of mixing labor and raw resources into finished artifacts. To be clear generative justice is not only about making things, but some of its best illustrations are found in cases where unalienated value circulation is a deliberate expression of both politics and physical production.

Take for example open source software, maker spaces and other DIY-oriented sharing collectives. As several articles in the issue note, there are plenty of great generative justice exemplars in that category, ranging from Liberating Ourselves Locally (a “people-of-color-led, gender-diverse, queer and trans inclusive hacker/maker space in East Oakland”) to vast international enterprises like MakerHealth that allows nurses and others to create their own health care innovations. But none of these collectives happened through some kind of Adam Smith style “invisible hand” of self-interested competition. Rather they are all examples of a kind of hybrid between old fashioned grassroots organizing and new technologies of sharing (code, blue prints etc. shared via creative commons, github, instructables and other platforms).

Imagine, then, a political platform based not on asking “how will American workers compete against those in Asia” or “how will we defeat the coal lobby” but rather “how will value be returned to all workers? How will the ecological value created by non-humans be returned to them, sustaining their soil, water, air and biodiversity? And how will the shy, ineluctable aspects of our being–spiritual or atheist, gay or straight, artist or logician–be similarly circulated to nurture communities of our choosing?” We hope readers will take a look at the special issue and join this conversation.

Ron Eglash received his B.S. in Cybernetics, his M.S. in Systems Engineering, and his PhD in History of Consciousness, all from the University of California. His work includes the book African Fractals, and the online Culturally Situated Design Tools suite. He is currently a Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer.

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