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sciencespies · 3 years

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Love And Sex With Many: Research On The Health And Wellness Of Consensual Non-Monogamy

https://sciencespies.com/news/love-and-sex-with-many-research-on-the-health-and-wellness-of-consensual-non-monogamy/

Love And Sex With Many: Research On The Health And Wellness Of Consensual Non-Monogamy

If Charles Darwin was right, human love and sex are rooted in the same reproductive imperative that makes animals mate. We want to send our genetic material into subsequent generations. Mind you, cats, dogs, Tasmanian devils, insects, fish, birds, and even Big Foot may not be thinking “Babies!” when they have sex. Gay men and lesbians aren’t trying to reproduce. Heterosexual people buying birth control supplies at drug stores aren’t. Regardless, the healthy, animalistic instinct to create progeny may be what makes most of them — most of us — suckers for sex and fools for love. It’s health and wellness in action.

And it’s all fun. But does biology dictate that mating has to be a forever kinda thing? Darwin never expressed an opinion. As it turns out, most animals who seem to be monogamous aren’t. Even so, some big religions dictate monogamy for humans. Many marriage and divorce laws do, too.

For large mammals, anyway, monogamy doesn’t add to the probability that a species will survive. The opposite may be the case. In 2003, biologist Justin Brashares of the University of British Columbia examined 30 years of data for 41 mammal species on six separate preserves. Publishing in the peer-reviewed journal Conservation Biology, he reported that loyal mating ranked second as the cause of death for populations of primates. (Of course, humans are primates.)

New human sexology research from two groups of researchers has produced results not quite as dire. Even so, their data suggest that long-term monogamy may not always be ideal.

Wellness and Consensual Non-Monogamy

“The Vices and Virtues of Consensual Non-Monogamy: A Relational Dimension Investigation” is the dissertation of graduate student Thomas R. Brooks III. Published by the peer-reviewed journal Psychology and Sexuality and written by Brooks* in partial fulfillment of his Ph.D. from the Department of Psychology and Special Education at Texas A&M University-Commerce, it compared various measures of relationship quality, conflict resolution style, and individual well-being as self-reported by 555 heterosexual participants. Some of the participants were in monogamous relationships and some were in consensually non-monogamous (CNM) relationships. (CNM means an open relationship with full disclosure. The non-monogamous encounters can range from casual and low-stakes to intimacy that is both emotionally and sexually long-term and loving.)

Thomas R. Brooks III. Photo used with permission.

Photo credit: Texas A&M University

The study participants completed standard questionnaires about well-being and conflict resolution. They also numerically rated the satisfaction, commitment, intimacy, passion, and love that they experience in their romantic relationships. They generally scored as psychologically healthier and more content. In the rated measures of satisfaction in sex and love, people in CNM relationships generally outscored people in monogamous relationships. Perhaps not incidentally, people practicing CNM reported using positive problem-solving with their intimate partners, while those practicing monogamy more often reported that they emotionally withdraw from conflict with their relationship partner.

Was it the multiplicity of partners that made people in CNM relationships the high scorers on measures of well-being and happiness? Perhaps not. Brooks surmised that the increased satisfaction and psychological health measures may have been due to consensually non-monogamous people having negotiated “ways to keep sexual and romantic variety a priority in the relationship.” This is to say that it may not be sexual or romantic variety that’s the spice of life. It may be the value that people place on keeping honesty and intimacy alive.

CNM and Polyamory in History

One month before Brooks’ paper was published, the peer-reviewed journal Archives of Sexual Behavior published a paper by archivist-historian Brian M. Watson and Oxford University historian Sarah Stein Lubrano. In their study the two researchers investigated the passionate CNM attachments of a large handful of historical figures. “‘Storming Then Performing’: Historical Non-Monogamy and Metamour Collaboration” peeked at the love lives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists and intellectuals. (“Metamours” = “partner(s) of partner(s).”)

Brian M. Watson.

Photo credit: Brian M. Watson. Used with permission.

In the paper, details of the intimate heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual lives of novelist Virginia Woolf, painter Frida Kahlo, poet/essayist/dramatist Victor Hugo, physicist Erwin Schrödinger, poet/playwright/suffragist Edna St. Vincent Millay, sociologist/historian Maximilian Karl Emil Weber, and Wonder Woman comic book author William Moulton Marston and all of their metamours were revealed. The paper’s view of love lives gone by showed that positive problem-solving of the sort described in Brooks’ Psychology and Sexuality paper can extend beyond the relationship among sexually and romantically intimate partners into throughout their entire metamour network.

Sarah Stein Lubrano

Photo credit Melissa Barber. Used with permission

Watson and Lubrano use the term “polycule” (“polyamorous” + “molecule”) to describe a network of partners and metamours. Frida Kahlo is the only black- or brown-skinned person whose polycules their paper examined. Volunteering that information, Lubrano quipped in a group Zoom call, “In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, rich white people did a really good job of saving their correspondence and leaving it to be found.”

With access to such correspondence and with the help of other archival material and secondary sources like biographies, Watson and Lubrano reframed non-monogamous behaviors that might once have been described as immoral and sketched portraits of polycules that were deeply caring in important material, social, and psychological ways.

That being said, matters weren’t always tranquil in historical CNM polycules, certainly not during a polycule’s early days.

Virginia Woolfe was lucky enough to enjoy a long, largely peaceful polycule with her husband, journalist and publisher Leonard Woolfe, and author/garden designer Vita Sackville-West. However, that may be because Sackville-West’s explosive and dishonest behavior within a previous polycule had been a momentous learning experience for her.

Max Weber’s CNM relationship with his lover Else Jaffe erupted early on when he learned that his metamour was his own brother. After he got over that surprise, things settled down. Another of Weber’s partners was his wife, the feminist scholar and activist Marrianne Weber. She and Else together took care of Weber as he succumbed to pneumonia in 1914, leaving Marianne with her dead sister Lili’s four children, which she and Weber had intended to raise. Else stepped in and raised the children with Marianne. According to Watson and Lubrano, when Marianne died in Heidelburg in 1954, it was in Else’s arms.

When Erwin Schrödinger’s partner Hilde March had a little girl by him and developed post-partum depression, Schrödinger wife, Anny, took care of the baby until Hilde recovered. Later, Anny cared for Schrödinger’s baby by another partner. Schrödinger, meanwhile, relied on a metamour — Anny’s partner Peter Weyl — both emotionally and academically.

And so on. Watson and Lubrano’s paper featured several more polycules of the rich and famous.

Why Study CNM Satisfaction?

The polycules profiled by Watson and Lubrano give social context and history to a way of living that is still stigmatized in America. As the two researchers said in the Zoom call, they wrote the paper to normalize CNM, and also to make clear that the idea that healthy, non-competitive relationships among metamours constitute a potentially emancipatory way of loving and living. Watson said, “We want people contemplating or already in CNM relationships to know that they’re not the first ones to want this. They are not alone in history. There are good role models. We hope that looking at the past can make people confident about structuring their lives in a way that’s fulfilling.”

Indeed. The wide variance in the current estimates on how many adult Americans have participated in CNM in their lifetime (anywhere between 4% (2013) and 22% (2016)) suggests that CNM remains so stigmatized that some people are too ashamed to admit the truth of their romantic and sexual selves even to an anonymous survey. Data collected and reported in 2016 by researchers at the Kinsey Institute reflect the high estimate (22% lifetime incidence). The Kinsey researchers also noted that men as well as people who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual were more likely to testify to previous engagement in CNM.

If indeed the Kinsey researchers’ estimate is correct, CNM may not be the “new normal.” It may, however, be one of the several new normals, and it may be one that marital law and communities should prepare to accommodate.

*Brooks’ co-authors for “The Vices and Virtues of Consensual Non-Monogamy: A Relational Dimension Investigation” were Jennifer Shaw, Stephen Reysen, and Tracy B. Henley, all of the Department of Psychology and Special Education at Texas A&M University-Commerce.

#News

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fuckyeahanarchistposters · 7 years

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Potzehne, Germany: War Starts Here Camp 2017

From the 31th of july to the 6th of August the War-Starts-Here camp will set up in Potzehne (close to Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt,Germany). For several years now the War-Starts-Here camp has brought together lots of different people close to the modern and important military training site in Germany, the “Gefechtsübungszentrum Heer”, abbreviated as GÜZ. Antimilitarist discussions as well as practical resistance left a persistent mark on both the participants of the camp and the surrounding region.

The images of refugees vanished from public perception. Though they are still existing: countless people have to leave their homes day by day, facing inhumane and life-endangering hurdles on their search for nothing more than a secure place to live. Still, hundreds of people drown in the Mediterranean. Hundred-thousands persevere under precarious conditions in camps beyond the borderline of Fortress Europe, almost without any prospect for change. They seem far away, too far for many to see their persisting distress and the inhumanity they face.

And here?

Many people became involved in welcoming arriving refugees and are still staying with it. The – especially in Germany – publicly invoked “Welcoming Culture” was politically thwarted in almost no time by further eroding the right of asylum to its de facto annulation. Instead, militarisation of Fortress Europe and agreements with dubious regimes on camps trapping refugees within the countries they are fleeing from are being put in place to prevent people seeking shelter here. More and more states are being declared as “safe” countries of origin, into which refugees can be deported easily, which is done on a daily basis. Refugees are enduringly trapped in a demoralising loop, persistently facing uncertainty and fear, while desperation and powerlessness reinforce their traumatising experiences of war, terror and flight.

Those who try to oppose, struggling for a human treatment of refugees and borderless solidarity, are confronted with harsh restrictions and repression by the state. And instead of abolishing causes of flight, governmental action in terms of defence exports, further armament and war deployments creates even more of them. By this, feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness may be intensified, but for us they also support our will to take action against this misanthropic policy.

It’s time to gather in order to develop new strategies of hands-on resistance, of how we can overpower together the paralysing powerlessness and of how to unite in solidarity – small steps of transformation, that reflect glimpses of another possible world.

With the War-Starts-Here Camp we’ll take a strong stand against the belligerent situation underlying war, terror, flight and migration. We’re struggling for a world in which no one is forced to leave one’s home due to war or wo*man-made devastation of one’s basis of life. For a world without borders, that’s worthy to live for everyone!

We gather to gain and share knowledge about wars and their preparation, to figure out the situation we are living in and to analyse its internal relationships. Perspectives in emancipatory movements are highly diverse – and so are the views on military and war. This in mind, we want to further develop common ideas of resistance, strengthen the local antiwar-initiatives grown over long years and also discuss our differences respectfully. It seems highly important to us, that we make a step towards the locals and talk with them about their experiences…and maybe more…

For this year’s camp we build on last year’s main issues. The motto “Krieg.Macht.Flucht.” is still up-to-date, saying “war causes flight” while making use of the ambiguous German word “Macht” (translating both as “makes”/”causes” and “power”). This time our focus will be the development of common anti-militarist and anti-racist perspectives of resistance. Let’s overpower our powerlessness – the camp in Potzehne wants to provide a space for that. We want to have discussions at a horizontal level with everyone sharing our radical refusal of the global destructive circumstances.

Training, exercise, preparation and export – war starts here! We want to make this deadly site publicly visible, since it is of crucial importance to war preparation. Through various antimilitarist actions we want to disturb the “normal” operation on the GÜZ, let’s mark, block, and sabotage this full-speed-running machinery of war!

The camp is self-organized and thus, in its existence, shape and impact depending on active participation. Do not miss anything you haven’t helped to organize! Together we create a social counter project: From a society deeply infiltrated by authoritarian structures, let’s set sails towards Utopia.

Our acceptance has limits: nationalist, antisemite, islamophobic, racist and sexist attacks happen much too often. Exclusions based on characteristics as clothing, age or use of language happen much too often. We are trying to be aware of, question and change our own socialized way of thinking and our behavior and we expect everybody to do the same.

More information concerning the arrival, the program and the complete call out you can find at: http://www.war-starts-here.camp/startseite/appeal-english/

#war #germany #anti-war #krieg #militarism #anti-militarism #antimilitarism #anarchism #antifa #anarchismus

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spacetortilla · 5 years

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FROM: http://www.anothergaze.com/making-millennial-woman-feminist-capitalist-fleabag-girls-sally-rooney-lena-dunham-unlikeable-female-character-relatable/ THESIS: Pitfalls when marketing/media criticism prompts that white women ptag relatable/representative for all women. How double edged it ends up being for the work/person to now be read as a feminist icon when work not really about advocacy,etc. Marketing/media critique urging ‘’to see narratives of radical self-emancipation where there are none’’. This art revolves around an archetypical Young Millennial Woman – pretty, white, cisgender, and tortured enough to be interesting but not enough to be repulsive. Often described as ‘relatable,’ she is, in actuality, not. The term masks the uncomfortable truth that she is more beautiful, more intelligent, and more infuriatingly precocious than we are in real life. But her charm lies in how she is still self-hating enough to be attainable: she’s an aspirational identifier... Try as she might, her protest against the world always re-routes into a melancholic self-destruction. (((the marketing/media coverage grouping of multiple female creators’ works together under one FEMALE voice that’ll cover everyone))) But what stayed in my mind afterwards was not so much the show itself, but rather the predictable, frenzied public discourse it underwent. A hyperbole-drenched marketing cycle fetes shows like this through the language of relatable identification, and this sets them up perfectly for the inevitable backlash. Not everything is going to be loved by everyone, especially when this everyone has been told they have to on the basis that they’ll find reflections of themselves there. It’s happened to Lena Dunham and Girls, Sally Rooney and Normal People, Kristen Roupenian and Cat Person. Although these young women’s projects are distinct from each other, the ways in which they have been marketed all appear to follow this script. It has happened before and it will happen again. While this promotional approach isn’t misogynistic per se, it is a form of public speech that concedes to it. It’s an approach that hopes to pre-empt those sceptical of the value of the young female voice by framing this voice as an incredible, transformative feat of generational genius. Rather than ask whether these works of art deserve such praise, it may be more interesting to ask why the popular reception of them – even when positive – is so often bad. Headlines often praise how Girls and Fleabag have had the courage to break new ground in feminism, as if the history of western feminism itself hasn’t been marked by the elevation of upper middle class white voices to the level of unearned universalism. . The one-dimensional figures of the past – who could only either to be adored or reviled by men – have been replaced by ‘complex female characters’ who are able to unapologetically reject polite sociality. This can be powerful. But the praise that surrounds such figures also risks producing a premature celebration, a divestment of power that leaves us happy to pick at scraps and inoculate ourselves against the harder, messier mission of getting to a point where ‘unlikability’ is no longer a one-note punchline. It is rarely asked to whom these women are cruel, what engineered this cruelty, and what ends this cruelty serves. .... Womanhood, after all, is a deeply variegated class with its own histories of exclusions, violence, and domination. For some, the systemic cruelty of other women is not so much a neutral revelation, but a fact of life. women can be cruel, shitty, and narcissistic – has now been rebranded as a means of emancipating us ‘all’ under a common banner of womanhood, feels perverse, if not a stunning indictment on how parochial the current mainstream discourse on women’s emancipation really is. For every celebration of a rich white woman as carelessly destructive with her life as her privileged male counterparts, we should ask what it is that gives her the ability to be so brazen, and who is sidelined as collateral. Neurosis, often framed as a sign of powerlessness, can also be a sign of the opposite. To demand someone enter into and entertain your anxious mind-palace and reckon with your complicated and endlessly fascinating individuality can be an act of power. But who gets to be an individual to the Western public? Who gets to be complex? Vulgarity disqualifies some women from public life, or, at the very best, makes them one-note fringe figures; it also admits others to its very centre as ground-breaking, philosophical and relatable women artists. ------ But we should be asking ourselves on whose terms unity is made, and in whose interests these fissures are kept hidden. Relatability as a critical tool leads only to dead ends, endlessly wielding a ‘we’ without asking who ‘we’ really are, or why ‘we’ are drawn to some stories more than others The irony of the ‘unlikeable woman’ is that their ‘abjection’ is likeable, even admirable, to us: they are sharper, wittier, and more beautiful than anyone we know, ideals taken to be ‘real’-life characters. There are themes that are open to us all – lessons of happiness deferred, families broken, and relationships full of uncomfortable lies and mind-bending disappointments – but there are other things, too. By leaning on the flattening, deceptively homogenising framework of relatability, what do you miss? ----------- The curious case of how these particular women, ostensibly furnished with all the social trappings to take over the world – white, wealthy, pretty, ever-amenable to men in spite of their worst efforts – prefer to turn their gaze inward to hate themselves, their bodies, their thighs, the tone of their speech, the other women in their lives, their fathers. Why are the very women who, in theory, hold the most social power so interested in divesting themselves of it? . The world-weary malaise of the privileged has always had a sort of narcissism to it, as frenetic in its neurotic energy as it is useless to literally everyone else. The problem is that so many of us want to see narratives of radical self-emancipation where there are none. For all of the chatter about how revolutionary, powerful and important these fictional lives are, the Millennial Woman par excellence is a deeply disempowered human being. These women are not so much avatars for the emancipatory possibilities of womanhood as they are signs of a colossal social failure to provide substantive avenues of flourishing, care, and communal generosity. That they are taken up in the press as symbols for a generation is an additional, final statement on how being pedestaled can be as extractive as it is empowering. ... why our media loves these depictions of conventional impotence so much, and is so desperate to give them a revolutionary gloss. Making popular culture the site of revolution is an easy way to offer the appearance of doing emancipatory politics, while actually changing little. It seems as though we have been treating the ‘flawed feminist’ as a groundbreaking archetype for the past ten years. Despite the lofty rhetoric that surrounds it, the world of the archetypical Young Millennial Woman conceives of politics as both starting and stopping at anguished individual feelings

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pursuitofdoctorate · 5 years

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Transformative Learning

When I think of a significant transformation, I am reminded of Kafka’s description of Gregor Samsa transforming into a giant insect in the novella The Metamorphosis. Upon reflection of this story, my adult interpretation is that it’s a commentary on the human condition and the mundanity of work. This is just one idea that comes to mind when I first think of transformative learning. However, transformative learning as a theory is about a different kind of change within people. A change that can result in altering perspectives, identity, and even society. Transformative learning theory has been the most popular theory since Knowles popularized andragogy in the 1970s. This theory has to do with how learning shapes people into something different than they were before. Because of this, transformative learning has in many ways replaced andragogy as something unique to adults.

What is Transformative Learning?

Mezirow who first articulated transformative learning as cognitive, rational process, studied the experiences of women who return to school to prepare for jobs. He found that their experience of returning to school made them question assumptions about who they were and how they were products of sociocultural expectations of women at the time.

Mezirow’s early description of transformative learning included a 10-step process beginning with heat he called a “disorienting dilemma.” This is a significant personal life event such as the death of a loved one, losing a job, sustaining a critical injury, etc. Although a disorienting dilemma is often categorized as an “event” it can also be a series of experiences over a span of time that culumate into transformation.

For example:

After being subject to discrimination for a period of time, a woman may begin to question assumptions about equity in society.

Self-examination with feelings of guilt or shame (upset this happened to me)

Questioning is the third step in the process critically assessing the assumptions you have been living with prior to the disorienting dilemma (that all people, regardless of their gender identity, are treated equally).

Recognizing that this discontent is shared (i.e. there are other women who have experienced discrimination because of their gender;

Exploring options for new roles, relationships and actions (i.e. learning about my identity as a woman and building relationships with other women);

Planning a course of action (addressing sexism and gender discrimination in everyday life)

Acquiring knowledge and skills for implementing roles (learning about microaggressions and how to respond to them)

Trying out new roles (calling out a situation when witnessing someone making a sexist remark);

Building confidence in new roles (taking a stand in changing workplace culture)

Reintegrating new perspectives into one’s life (constantly noticing problematic sexist behaviors).

In later writings, Mezirow discuss the role of reflection explaining:

Content reflection is what we perceive, think, feel

Process reflection is how we perceive, think, feel

Premise reflection is why we perceive, think, feel

He also notes that social action is not the goal of transformative learning; rather personal transformation results in connecting with others who have a shared mind which might result in social action.

In contrast to Mezirow’s cognitive and rational process, Drikx considers transformative learning as emotional soul work. In his view, epiphanies are the ego making conscious connection with the psychic content that was previously unconscious. These experiences are connected to emotions such as surprise of excitement. Attending to these emotions or “messengers of the soul” rather than ignoring them is what makes our learning more powerful. For example, the person who experienced discrimination might have a visceral reaction of shame or anger which would need to be attended to, brought into consciousness, and examined as to why they felt this way. Dirkx explains that soul work is not intended to replace the more cognitive understanding of transformative learning but rather make it more holistic.

Transformative Learning can also be viewed from a social change or socio-emancipatory perspective. The primary goal here is to challenge and transform system of oppression. According to Paulo Freire, a person must first become aware of power and oppression in their own lives and them work to change these structures. In Freire’s view the personal is inextricably linked to the political and in order to transform self, one must also transform society. In Freires’s model, conscientization where through dialogue and critical reflection, participants move from fatalistic, passive acceptance or their situation to realizing they can have some influence, to critical consciousness.

Sites of Transformative Learning

Transformative learning has been studied in a myriad of contexts including individual to classrooms.

Individual learning is the heart of the process. No matter if it’s cognitive, emotional “soul work” or social change, transformative learning always begins with the individual.

Higher education is a natural site for transformative learning because it offers an invitation to think, be, and act in new ways. These settings challenge learners to go beyond their learning. Activities to engage learners in transformative learning in the classroom might include dialogue, mentoring, experiential learning, and using art.

When teaching online, Dirkx suggests incorporating the six instructional design elements: (1) use of messy, practice-based problems (2) interactive and collaborative learning (3) group writing (4) individual and group debrief (5) reflective activities and (6) journaling.

Adults spend most of their time in work-related activities. While transformative learning isn’t always central in the workplace, it can usually emerge when getting workers to reflect on their role in perpetuating inequitable practices in the workplace. Brookfield explains that critical reflection in the workplace can be a very difficult process as workers are often, by virtue of their roles, colluding in their own oppression. Critical reflection in these moments can be in opposition to the interests of the company or organization.On the basic level, it’s important for workers to challenge the “this is the way things are” model by at least asking the question “why.” Some strategies that might lead to transformative learning in the workplace include modeling and peer learning, storytelling and dialogue ,coaching, and action learning.

A community itself can be a site for transformative learning. Community activists and social activists seeks a transformation at the community or societal level (Me Too Movement, Black Lives Matter, Climate Change, etc.). The goal of these individuals participating in movements is to create broader social change which, given what has been shared about transformative learning and the individual, links back to the people behind the movement having experienced some type of transformation. A movement can also be a trigger for an individual’s transformation as well.

Promoting & Evaluating Transformative Learning

There are several underlying components of instruction necessary to facilitate transformative learning including critical reflection, storytelling, artistic expression, dialogue, the facilitator intentionally creating space for transformative learning.

While there are many pedagogical strategies to engage transformative learning, there are very few ways to evaluate this type of learning. Some scholars have argued that transformative learning doesn’t exist because it can’t be evaluated. However, there are ways in which to assess or evaluate this process. One method is to use interviews with learners and ask them to tell their stories. Keep in mind that Mezirow himself first development this theory after interviewing a group of women.

In many ways, the emancipatory nature of transformative learning is deeply personal and varies according to each individual. As a result, an instructor can not necessarily state that transformative learning will be an “learning outcome.” Educators can create an environment to foster transformative learning but can not make it happen. In these settings, the instructor can usually determine if transformative learning has occurred based on the learners shift in perspective.

Critiques of Transformative Learning

Newman, the critic who questioned if transformative learning exists because it can’t be evaluated, wrote an article which essentially stated that people are applying the label of transformative learning to all types of learning. Additional, Newman raises questions about transformative learning failing to differentiate between the transformation of identity or consciousness, if learning is finite or flowing, if there are ideal conditions for discourse to exist, if mobilization is necessary, and the inclusion of spirituality in the discourse of transformative learning. Many respondents to Newman state that he relied heavily on Mezirow’s early work.

Nevertheless, some of the critiques are valid. For example, is transformative learning really a linear 10-step process as defined by Mezirow or can individuals move back and forth through various stages. Once a transformation has occurred, can it be reversed. For example, a politically moderate person has an experience which leads them to become more radical and then, at some point, they revert back to a moderate.

Another assumption is that transformative learning results in a more open and inclusive perspective. But what happens when the disorienting dilemma, such as an assault, results in a transformative where a person as a fear of a particular group of people. This could potentially result in the development of bias instead of a more “open” perspective.

There is also the important ethical questions of facilitators as change agents. What if, for example a person works with victims of domestic violence and transform them to become empowered. However, the result might be that they require to their abuser. What are the ethical considerations for this type of transformation? An important part of being ethical is remaining transparent about your role as an educator in these spaces and set the stage for open dialogue to discuss these important issues.

Theory to Practice

Tell a story about a time you have experienced transformative learning. Did your experience follow the series of steps outlined by Mezirow?

For fun, read The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. The last time I read this was in grade school so re-reading as a working adult has an entirely different meaning and interpretation: https://www.planetebook.com/free-ebooks/the-metamorphosis.pdf

#transformative learning

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micaramel · 5 years

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Artist: Dena Yago

Venue: High Art, Paris

Exhibition Title: Force Majeure

Date: June 1 – July 6, 2019

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release, and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of High Art, Paris

Press Release:

This is a proposal for subterfuge. Occupying from the inside, an act of espionage. Of moves taken to the left, taken again to the right. 1

1 Industrial espionage is steeped in history, espionage being considered the second oldest profession. As a means for nation building, industrial espionage rapidly evolved in the 1700 and 1800s under regimes of Napoleon, Frederick the Great and Otto Von Bismarck. During this time it flourished at the intersections of statehood, competition and industry. Of particular note is the case of a Catholic Jesuit priest Francois Xavier d’Entrecolles. A serving missionary in China, in 1712 the priest gained access to the center of royal porcelain manufacture in Jingdezhen. Through a series of letters, the priest captured in minute detail the secrets of porcelain production, secured since the 13th Century. From this point, porcelain evolved out from under a Chinese monopoly.

This is a proposal for an affair. A seminal and short-lived excursion into the relations of another. 2

2 The Story of a Nobody is a novella, set in late Romanov/pre-revolution St.Petersburg, written by Anton Chekhov and published in 1893. Hungry to be ‘somebody’ the anonymous protagonist, a political radical, is charged with infiltrating the household of a high-ranking aristocratic official, Orlov. The mission is to assassinate Orlov on behalf of the protagonists’ ‘cause’. Whilst masquerading as a servant, the protagonist becomes embroiled in the psychodrama of the household politics observing the irreverence and frivolities of his wealthy masters. As his disguise reaches climax he begins an affair with Orlov’s neglected lover Zianida although his resolve in his assassination mission deteriorates. The moral ambiguity of this novella and particularly of the protagonists’ waning political zeal is of incredible light ironic touch from Chekov, placing great responsibility on the reader to “make an ethical import in the gaps” left by the atmosphere of disappointment and the absence of narrative heroes.

This is a proposal for a disguise. Inhabiting the realm of others as if another. 3

3 The Bee Orchid (Ophrys apifera) is an orchid common to parts of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. It has a protruding and furry head resembling the body of a bee, in addition to producing a scent that mimics the female bee. This decoy attracts male bees to attempt to mate with the flower head, transferring pollen during this act of pseudocopulation.

This is a proposal for organisation. Advanced organisation. Social and labour organisation concomitant with the technological aptitude of product. 4

4 Why is it that products of technological prowess do not extend the rigour of invention to the organisation of the means of production? I look to Michael Feher in his essay Self-Appreciation;or The Aspirations of Human Capital on his point of the potential role of Unions and Labour organisation in the Neoliberal condition, “While exponents of the ‘authentic’ Left denounced workfare programs as the betrayal of the welfare state… Scandinavian labour unions endeavoured to work through them. Taking stock of the fact that, in a globalized and post-Fordist environment, ensuring job security can not longer be the aim of labour unions {they} have sought instead to make the professional trajectory of workers more secure, that is to help them navigate the changes that affect their professional life…Labour unions will tend to think of themselves as providers of personal services (training, help in finding a job etc.) rather than as merely defenders of class interests. Indeed, the potential conflicts over what a person needs to navigate a flexible labour market are not simply over what types of protections will be guaranteed or over how these protections will be financed. Rather they are over the more profound questions of what constitutes the basic conditions, the criteria, and the required means for selfappreciation.”

This is a proposal of detail. Of noticing where the edge of one thing meets with another. Of observing with quiet restrain the claggy qualities of material. 5

5 Felt may be the oldest fabricated material known. It is a dense and unwoven fabric, not requiring a warp or weft, and is produced through compression, heat and moisture to mat and interlock the fibres.

This is a proposal of digestion. A rejection of absorbing class warfare into the body. You can’t chew felt. 6

6 In the UK the class system is perfectly mapped onto supermarket identities with high and low options according to aspiration or class status. Forays late on a Saturday night to the kebab shop are not democratisers of appetite rather they are exercises in class tourism. By comparison in France the ‘daily bread’ legislation dating back to the French Revolution guarantees each citizen access to a daily, fresh, quality and cheap food source, feeding all stratas of workers alike.

This is a proposal for decoration; for space a few steps besides the functional, a sensual realm on frequencies surrounding the direct operation, pulsing outwards. This space may also be declared a space of repression. An internal dialogue acknowledged through the sensuality of non-linguistic communality. Of neighbourhood through gesture, through refrain. 7

7 I am hacking the psychoanalytic term ‘repression’ to see if it has potential to encounter a methodology, which produces an affect that is intended and unanticipated. I am untethering its meaning from the negative connotation (trauma) but keeping the aspect of an embedded behaviour or action created from a specific felt experience or encounter that is lateral and related to the significant experience.

This is a proposal for an erotics of infrastructure. 8

8 I am indebted to Dena Yago for participating in a workshop the Erotics of Infrastructure during August 2018 in London. This workshop proposed how artists offer an eroticisation of infrastructural organisations, policies and operations to re-considers how the body can have agency. The series of events and workshops explored the immense potential of the erotic as an emancipatory approach, as one, which implies a legitimate provider of viable solutions for deeply iniquitous conditions, generated from a discreet logic of artistic practice.

Text by Rachal Bradley

Link: Dena Yago at High Art

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sofiedelutikal · 7 years

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Quotes from this article:

https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/03/16/identity-crisis/

As Sue Ferguson and David McNally have explained, while “intersectionality accounts have rightly insisted that it is impossible to isolate any particular set of oppressive relations from the other,” they have not developed any coherent explanation of “how and why” different forms of oppression intersect with each in other in some ways and not others. The result is often an enumeration of oppressions without an adequate explanation of their articulation into a structured, though always uneven, whole. https://www.viewpointmag.com/2017/03/16/identity-crisis/

- Originally the Boston branch of the National Black Feminist Organization, the Collective began with four black women gathering in a living room to discuss how they came to radical politics.

- This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves.

- the Combahee River Collective hoped to deepen socialism by foregrounding the interests, desires, and struggles of all oppressed groups, especially the most marginalized. “We are socialists,” the authors of the statement proclaimed. “We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.”

- Over the next few decades, these insights were codified into what we now understand as “identity politics.” But in the process, what began as a promise to push beyond some of socialism’s limitations to build a richer, more diverse and inclusive socialist politics, made possible something very different. Rooting political action in the identity of subjects offered a promising response to the most pressing political problem of the time, but it left an opening that would soon be exploited by those with politics diametrically opposed to those of the CRC.

- Solidarity with these anti-imperialist revolutions became the defining principle of the radical left in the United States, leading many young radicals to criticize capitalism, adopt socialism, and embrace revolution.

- In Palmieri’s hands, identity politics no longer signals the fight against interlocking oppressions, but is now counterposed to struggling against exploitation, to improving all workers’ lives, whatever their gender, race, sexuality, or citizenship status. In this conception, politics is not about changing the world, but your consumer choice in fashioning an identity

- In this context, it’s understandable that many have come to decry identity politics as an obstacle to socialist unity. Forgetting the roots of identity politics in radical social movements, many critics have mistakenly come to see it as wholly alien to socialism, proceeding to denounce all its partisans – including other socialists – with a vehemence most of us reserve only for our vilest enemies.

- To move forward, socialists had to resolve an enormous strategic challenge: how to unite these diverse social forces into a single movement?

- class reductionism: that the specific political demands of a particular kind of skilled, male, and often white industrial worker in the capitalist heartland could stand in for the struggles of everyone else, allegedly producing a kind of unity from above.

- As Vietnamese communists put it in 1966: “while fighting for the interests of our people, we also fight for those of the peoples of the entire world.” Instead of successful socialist revolutions in the capitalist countries serving as the precondition for emancipatory revolutions abroad, the revolutions in the colonized world now triggered a resurgence of radicalism in the advanced capitalist world.

- Unity, they rightly argued, depended on directly confronting the specific oppressions facing African Americans, since these oppressions ultimately imposed the strongest divisions within the working classes.

- As the first point of the Panther program announced: “We Want Power To Determine The Destiny Of Our Black Community.” This meant organizational independence, but also creating new, alternative institutions: self-defense, education, housing projects, free breakfast programs, and health clinics.

- Although firmly defending their organizational autonomy, these groups all collaborated with one another. For them, autonomy did not mean withdrawing into autarkic communities; it was the precondition for a deeper unity. In Chicago, they worked towards a Rainbow Coalition of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, and poor whites. While these socialists of color never united under a single organization, U.S. socialism as a whole was never more diverse.

- there were many forms of oppression and exploitation that most socialists either did not see or did not pay sufficient attention to. All that changed in the 1960s, as radicals began to argue that liberation had to unfold in all spheres of life.

- Carol Hanisch explained in her famous essay, “The Personal is Political.”

- In 1969, a group of radicals calling themselves the Weathermen decided it was time to escalate the anti-imperialist struggle.

- While all U.S. anti-imperialists recognized the leadership of struggles abroad in the fight for a global socialist revolution, the Weathermen now argued that only those “third world” struggles could make the revolution.

- Despite their best intentions to center the struggles of others, this kind of thinking led the Weathermen to create further obstacles to unity.

- One of the most alarming of these limits was guilt. Suddenly recognizing the profound depths of others’ oppression, as well as socialism’s historical limitations in struggling to overcome such oppressions, some radicals, especially white radicals like the Weathermen, succumbed to a politics of guilt. Feeling personally responsible for racism at home, or for the U.S. government’s mass murder of Vietnamese abroad, they effectively reduced activism to self-flagellation, politics to moralism. Ironically, although they intended to draw attention to marginalized struggles, when white radicals foregrounded their acts of public expiation, they recentered the story on themselves.

- these radicals tended to romanticize black and Third World militants, elevating their struggles onto pedestals. Convinced that revolutions abroad could do no wrong, anti-imperialists idealized these movements, withholding comradely criticism of some of their overt limitations. By the same logic, some white women spared black men from a critique of sexism. They assumed, historian Christine Stansell explains, that black men were “exempt from male privilege, an idea that was highly irritating to black women.”

- the tendency to homogenize distinct social groups in ways that erased their internal differences. Increasingly, oppressed groups came to be seen as, and often saw themselves as, undifferentiated entities. Some militants in the Global South, for example, spoke of a unified “Third World project,” which tended, in the words of Aijaz Ahmad, to divide the world into monolithic blocs. Evoking the idea of a universal “sisterhood,” some feminists in the United States claimed that all women, irrespective of class or racial differences, were united by the same experience. At the same time, many black radicals evoked an organic “black community,” to which all blacks were said to belong.

- As Eldridge Cleaver later put it, “We found that we had enemies in the black community that were just as deadly as our enemies in the white community, so the white community and the black community became meaningless categories for us.”

- serve the performative function of producing unity, this conception of an organic black community ended up flattening crucial intraracial divisions, naturalizing the social construction of the “community,” and ultimately paving the way for a politics based on authenticity.

- What emerges, in other words, is the assumption that all the members of the community possess the same interests, and that representatives are therefore immediate embodiments of this collective will. This was not without its challenges. Operating with such a deeply organicist conception of community, it became very hard to evaluate representatives. The only way to condemn a black politician whose policies did not benefit the allegedly undifferentiated black community they were elected to represent was by recourse to the language of authenticity: they weren’t really black.

- In addition, assuming the identity between representatives and a predetermined constituency opened the door to a kind of tokenism.

- The result, Reed describes, was that white outsiders, socialists or otherwise, came to argue that since they were not a part of the black community, they needed to identify black individuals or groups “who reflect the authentic mood, sentiments, will, or preferences of the reified community.” “This impulse,” he goes on, “places a premium on articulate black spokespersons to act as emissaries to the white left.”

- Inter-racial solidarity risked being reduced to tokenism.

- Lastly, without a clear program, constant grassroots pressure, and a durable connection to mass movements, elected officials might fail to make fundamental changes to real social relations.

- As Amiri Baraka presciently quipped in 1972, “black faces in high places, but the same rats and roaches, the same slums and garbage, the same police whippin’ your heads, the same unemployment and junkies in the hallways mugging your old lady.”

- The over-personalization of politics spawned another set of potential limits. Claiming the personal was political necessarily implied that the political also had to be personal, a line of reasoning that could devolve into individualistic lifestyle politics.

- The turn to lifestylism also met with fierce criticism. Radicals like the Revolutionary Union claimed the counterculture risked collapsing into hedonistic individualism that easily lent itself to commodification

- But while criticizing offensive behavior was an indispensable part of emancipation, especially given the pervasive sexism on the left, incessant public denunciation ran the risk of devolving into an end in itself, detached from the larger, collective struggle against institutions and state apparatuses.

- “Trashing” as it was sometimes called, was also potentially self-destructive, forcing many women out of the movement. “A vague standard of sisterly behavior is set up by anonymous judges who then condemn those who do not meet their standards,” explained Jo Freeman in an April 1976 article. Through incessant affronts, “trashing,” she continued, “makes you feel that your very existence is inimical to the Movement and that nothing can change this short of ceasing to exist.”

- To be sure, this kind of toxic, confrontational politics was not unique to feminism, but suffused much of the radical left in those decades. Denunciations and humiliations were common ways of addressing problems, and offenders were often forced to publicly criticize themselves for the smallest infractions, leading back to a politics of shame and guilt. In such an atmosphere, attempts at unity became strained. Modern day call-out culture has its origins here.

- As L.A. Kauffman has suggested, identity came to signify not only a description, but a project – a sense of self shaped by the experience of oppression, but also something to be embraced, affirmed.

- Whereas many 1960s radicals once had argued that exploring personal experiences could serve as the first step to discovering particular oppressions, understanding how they operated, and ultimately developing political strategies to overcoming them, some now came to insist on a direct and unmediated link between one’s identity and one’s politics. Rather than being a part of a political project, identity was now a political project in itself.

- Most importantly, identity politics tended to flatten important distinctions within otherwise heterogeneous identities. It was in this context that the idea of “intersectionality” emerged. Although now regarded as synonymous with identity politics, the concept actually originated as a critique of its flaws.

- “The problem with identity politics,” Kimberlé Crenshaw, the legal scholar who coined the term “intersectionality,” argued, is that “it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences.” She attempted to overcome one of the key limitations of identity politics by showing how some groups suffer not simply from one kind of oppression, but from the intersection of several oppressions. Thus, identity was not monolithic, but often composed of multiple vectors, which meant the political subject had to be clarified: not just black, for example, but black, queer, woman

- As Sue Ferguson and David McNally have explained, while “intersectionality accounts have rightly insisted that it is impossible to isolate any particular set of oppressive relations from the other,” they have not developed any coherent explanation of “how and why” different forms of oppression intersect with each in other in some ways and not others. The result is often an enumeration of oppressions without an adequate explanation of their articulation into a structured, though always uneven, whole.

- This is precisely why, for example, partisans of this kind of intersectional identity politics almost always revert to composing breathless catalogues of injustice when trying to explain what they oppose – the colonial white supremacist heteronormative patriarchy, or something to that effect.

- Moreover, since the list is the only way to present the object of social struggle, failure to include a particular oppression in the master list will often be mistakenly interpreted as the willful rejection or erasure of a particular struggle against a particular oppression.

- a tendency to naturalize socially-constructed identities emerges

- As a result, identities come to appear as ready-made, obscuring the complex historical conditions that created and continue to recreate them. “Identitarian political projects,” Wendy Brownexplains, transform suffering into “essentialized identities,” but forget that “suffering cannot be resolved at the identitarian level”

- It may be easier to see this dynamic in discourses that essentialize conflict in places such as Northern Ireland, the Middle East, or South Africa. To formulate the problem in those regions as one of Catholics versus Protestants, Arabs versus Jews, or blacks versus whites, rather than understanding the oppositional character of these identities as in part produced and naturalized by historical operations of power (settler-colonialism, capitalism, etc.), is a patently dehistoricizing and depoliticizing move — precisely the sort of move that leads to moralizing lament or blame, to personifying the historical conflict in individuals, castes, religions, or tribes, rather than to potent political analysis and strategies.

- it is precisely the historical existence of these identities that must themselves be explained. These identities then tend to close onto themselves as fixed expressions of life itself.

- Only those who belong to a given identity are said to be able to understand certain oppressions. This implies not only that those who do not belong to the identity cannot understand that oppression, but that all those who belong to said identity will have an automatic knowledge of it: no white person can ever truly understand racism, just as every person of color will naturally understand racism simply by virtue of having darker skin. It is then further assumed that this experiential knowledge will necessarily lead to the right political stances against those oppressions.

- One of the fundamental problems of contemporary identity politics is therefore reductionism. As the very term suggests, for partisans of identity politics, one’s politics are a direct reflection of one’s identity. One’s gender, race, or sexual orientation, the assumption goes, will lead automatically to certain political stances. Because you are a white woman, you will naturally vote for Hillary Clinton. Because you are black in a fundamentally racist society, then you must automatically have anti-racist politics. If you belong to any marginalized group, you must endorse identity politics. In this way, identity politics has come to erase the contingent mediations between identity and politics.

- As everyone knows, those who are said to belong to a certain identity often – if not most of the time – fail to behave according to their ascribed interests. When this happens, a number of arguments are marshalled to salvage the determinism of identity politics. First, in language hauntingly similar to the discredited concept of “false consciousness,” partisans of identity politics blame those who betray their interests as having been duped. Second, they charge collaboration. For example, instead of engaging with the content of their work, some critics denounce writers like Adolph Reed and Barbara Fields as “Uncle Toms,” even likening them to Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. Third, those who deviate from the politics demanded by their identity might be accused of not actually being of that identity. This is why people of color who criticize identity politics are so often accused of being white.

- Baltimore showed that the quest for descriptive representation based in the illusion of organic racial solidarity cannot end racism. “When a Black mayor, governing a largely Black city, aids in the mobilization of a military unit led by a Black woman to suppress a Black rebellion, we are in a new period of the Black freedom struggle,” Taylor writes. While undoubtedly still necessary, representation remains insufficient on its own. It matters who these representatives are, what interests they serve, what they do in practice, and how they are held accountable.

- This past election cycle presented yet another challenge to our assumptions about the direct link between identity and politics. How, according to this view, could one explain the fact that 52% of white women voted for a sexual predator? Or that up to 30% of Latinos cast a ballot for a man who called Mexicans criminals? In short, how can one explain why so many people acted against the “interests” allegedly demanded by their identity?

- By forcing a short-circuit between one’s background and one’s specific political positions, identity politics has effaced the crucial middle step: political struggle. The hard work of engaging with people, listening to their particular needs, collectively connecting their desires to a project, of building a political movement through organizing and struggle is replaced by an appeal to their alleged identity. As this election shows, not only does identity politics rely on shaky theory about how people become politicized, it does not even work.

- In an ironic reversal, what once began as a critique of reductionism within socialist movements has now fallen into the same conceptual error.

- Historically, many socialist movements were mired by a crass “workerism” that argued workers necessarily had the correct political worldview simply by virtue of the fact that they were workers. If any bad ideas had entered the movement, it was on account of petty-bourgeois influences. Those issuing from proletarian backgrounds were lauded, while those who did not were heavily scrutinized, forced to atone for parents’ occupations, or pressured to change their “class identity.”

- Behind all this was the assumption that one’s class position automatically determined one’s politics.

- In the 1960s and 1970s, women, African Americans, immigrants, queer folk, and others criticized this extreme class reductionism, rightly arguing that it posed a massive barrier to unity. But today, identity politics has snuck determinism in through the back door.

- Criticizing identity politics is therefore often treated as tantamount to silencing marginalized voices and reverting to an old, class-reductionist framework of socialism.

- But one of the first steps is to invent more effective concepts.

- Instead of making assumptions about the needs of marginalized people, perhaps it might be worth undertaking concrete inquiries and self-inquiries to discover what people really want, why they have adopted certain political positions.

- assuming an automatic link between one’s DNA and one’s politics, we should turn to the concept of articulation to understand the contingent ways that different subjects arrive at different politics.

- the theory of articulation asks how an ideology discovers a subject rather than how the subject thinks the necessary and inevitable thoughts which belong to it; it enables us to think how an ideology empowers people, enabling them to begin to make some sense or intelligibility of their historical situation, without reducing those forms of intelligibility to their socio-economic or class location or social position.

- By challenging deterministic thinking, articulation can better explain why people adopt seemingly alien political positions, why antagonistic social forces enter into contradictory alliances, and why those who may not immediately face a particular oppression may still be in a position to combat those oppressions.

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siderealist · 7 years

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From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump—and Beyond

By Nancy Fraser, from American Affairs Journal

Whoever speaks of “crisis” today risks being dismissed as a bloviator, given the term’s banalization through endless loose talk. But there is a precise sense in which we do face a crisis today. If we characterize it precisely and identify its distinctive dynamics, we can better determine what is needed to resolve it. On that basis, too, we might glimpse a path that leads beyond the current impasse—through political realignment to societal transformation.

At first sight, today’s crisis appears to be political. Its most spectacular expression is right here, in the United States: Donald Trump—his election, his presidency, and the contention surrounding it. But there is no shortage of analogues elsewhere: the UK’s Brexit debacle; the waning legitimacy of the European Union and the disintegration of the social-democratic and center-right parties that championed it; the waxing fortunes of racist, anti-immigrant parties throughout northern and east-central Europe; and the upsurge of authoritarian forces, some qualifying as proto-fascist, in Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific. Our political crisis, if that’s what it is, is not just American, but global.

What makes that claim plausible is that, notwithstanding their differences, all these phenomena share a common feature. All involve a dramatic weakening, if not a simple breakdown, of the authority of the established political classes and political parties. It is as if masses of people throughout the world had stopped believing in the reigning common sense that underpinned political domination for the last several decades. It is as if they had lost confidence in the bona fides of the elites and were searching for new ideologies, organizations, and leadership. Given the scale of the breakdown, it’s unlikely that this is a coincidence. Let us assume, accordingly, that we face a global political crisis.

As big as that sounds, it is only part of the story. The phenomena just evoked constitute the specifically political strand of a broader, multifaceted crisis, which also has other strands—economic, ecological, and social—all of which, taken together, add up to a general crisis. Far from being merely sectoral, the political crisis cannot be understood apart from the blockages to which it is responding in other, ostensibly nonpolitical, institutions. In the United States, those blockages include the metastasization of finance; the proliferation of precarious service-sector McJobs; ballooning consumer debt to enable the purchase of cheap stuff produced elsewhere; conjoint increases in carbon emissions, extreme weather, and climate denialism; racialized mass incarceration and systemic police violence; and mounting stresses on family and community life thanks in part to lengthened working hours and diminished social supports. Together, these forces have been grinding away at our social order for quite some time without producing a political earthquake. Now, however, all bets are off. In today’s widespread rejection of politics as usual, an objective systemwide crisis has found its subjective political voice. The political strand of our general crisis is a crisis of hegemony.

Donald Trump is the poster child for this hegemonic crisis. But we cannot understand his ascent unless we clarify the conditions that enabled it. And that means identifying the worldview that Trumpism displaced and charting the process through which it unraveled. The indispensable ideas for this purpose come from Antonio Gramsci. “Hegemony” is his term for the process by which a ruling class naturalizes its domination by installing the presuppositions of its own worldview as the common sense of society as a whole. Its organizational counterpart is the “hegemonic bloc”: a coalition of disparate social forces that the ruling class assembles and through which it asserts its leadership. If they hope to challenge these arrangements, the dominated classes must construct a new, more persuasive common sense or “counterhegemony” and a new, more powerful political alliance or “counterhegemonic bloc.”

To these ideas of Gramsci, we must add one more. Every hegemonic bloc embodies a set of assumptions about what is just and right and what is not. Since at least the mid-twentieth century in the United States and Europe, capitalist hegemony has been forged by combining two different aspects of right and justice—one focused on distribution, the other on recognition. The distributive aspect conveys a view about how society should allocate divisible goods, especially income. This aspect speaks to the economic structure of society and, however obliquely, to its class divisions. The recognition aspect expresses a sense of how society should apportion respect and esteem, the moral marks of membership and belonging. Focused on the status order of society, this aspect refers to its status hierarchies.

Together distribution and recognition constitute the essential normative components out of which hegemonies are constructed. Putting this idea together with Gramsci’s, we can say that what made Trump and Trumpism possible was the breakup of a previous hegemonic bloc—and the discrediting of its distinctive normative nexus of distribution and recognition. By parsing the construction and breakup of that nexus, we can clarify not only Trumpism, but also the prospects, post Trump, for a counterhegemonic bloc that could resolve the crisis. Let me explain.

The Hegemony of Progressive Neoliberalism

Prior to Trump, the hegemonic bloc that dominated American politics was progressive neoliberalism. That may sound like an oxymoron, but it was a real and powerful alliance of two unlikely bedfellows: on the one hand, mainstream liberal currents of the new social movements (feminism, antiracism, multiculturalism, environmentalism, and LGBTQ rights); on the other hand, the most dynamic, high-end “symbolic” and financial sectors of the U.S. economy (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood). What held this odd couple together was a distinctive combination of views about distribution and recognition.

The progressive-neoliberal bloc combined an expropriative, plutocratic economic program with a liberal-meritocratic politics of recognition. The distributive component of this amalgam was neoliberal. Determined to unshackle market forces from the heavy hand of the state and from the millstone of “tax and spend,” the classes that led this bloc aimed to liberalize and globalize the capitalist economy. What that meant, in reality, was financialization: the dismantling of barriers to, and protections from, the free movement of capital; the deregulation of banking and the ballooning of predatory debt; deindustrialization, the weakening of unions, and the spread of precarious, badly paid work. Popularly associated with Ronald Reagan, but substantially implemented and consolidated by Bill Clinton, these policies hollowed out working-class and middle-class living standards, while transferring wealth and value upward—chiefly to the one percent, of course, but also to the upper reaches of the professional-managerial classes.

Progressive neoliberals did not dream up this political economy. That honor belongs to the Right: to its intellectual luminaries Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan; to its visionary politicians, Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan; and to their deep-pocketed enablers, Charles and David Koch, among others. But the right-wing “fundamentalist” version of neoliberalism could not become hegemonic in a country whose common sense was still shaped by New Deal thinking, the “rights revolution,” and a slew of social movements descended from the New Left. For the neoliberal project to triumph, it had to be repackaged, given a broader appeal, linked to other, noneconomic aspirations for emancipation. Only when decked out as progressive could a deeply regressive political economy become the dynamic center of a new hegemonic bloc.

It fell, accordingly, to the “New Democrats” to contribute the essential ingredient: a progressive politics of recognition. Drawing on progressive forces from civil society, they diffused a recognition ethos that was superficially egalitarian and emancipatory. At the core of this ethos were ideals of “diversity,” women’s “empowerment,” and LGBTQ rights; post-racialism, multiculturalism, and environmentalism. These ideals were interpreted in a specific, limited way that was fully compatible with the Goldman Sachsification of the U.S. economy. Protecting the environment meant carbon trading. Promoting home ownership meant subprime loans bundled together and resold as mortgage-backed securities. Equality meant meritocracy.

The reduction of equality to meritocracy was especially fateful. The progressive-neoliberal program for a just status order did not aim to abolish social hierarchy but to “diversify” it, “empowering” “talented” women, people of color, and sexual minorities to rise to the top. And that ideal was inherently class specific: geared to ensuring that “deserving” individuals from “underrepresented groups” could attain positions and pay on a par with the straight white men of their own class. The feminist variant is telling but, sadly, not unique. Focused on “leaning in” and “cracking the glass ceiling,” its principal beneficiaries could only be those already in possession of the requisite social, cultural, and economic capital. Everyone else would be stuck in the basement.

Skewed as it was, this politics of recognition worked to seduce major currents of progressive social movements into the new hegemonic bloc. Certainly, not all feminists, anti-racists, multiculturalists, and so forth were won over to the progressive neoliberal cause. But those who were, whether knowingly or otherwise, constituted the largest, most visible segment of their respective movements, while those who resisted it were confined to the margins. The progressives in the progressive neoliberal bloc were, to be sure, its junior partners, far less powerful than their allies in Wall Street, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley. Yet they contributed something essential to this dangerous liaison: charisma, a “new spirit of capitalism.” Exuding an aura of emancipation, this new “spirit” charged neoliberal economic activity with a frisson of excitement. Now associated with the forward-thinking and the liberatory, the cosmopolitan and the morally advanced, the dismal suddenly became thrilling. Thanks in large part to this ethos, policies that fostered a vast upward redistribution of wealth and income acquired the patina of legitimacy.

To achieve hegemony, however, the emerging progressive neoliberal bloc had to defeat two different rivals. First, it had to vanquish the not insubstantial remnants of the New Deal coalition. Anticipating Tony Blair’s “New Labour,” the Clintonite wing of the Democratic Party quietly disarticulated that older alliance. In place of a historic bloc that had successfully united organized labor, immigrants, African Americans, the urban middle classes, and some factions of big industrial capital for several decades, they forged a new alliance of entrepreneurs, bankers, suburbanites, “symbolic workers,” new social movements, Latinos, and youth, while retaining the support of African Americans, who felt they had nowhere else to go. Campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1991/92, Bill Clinton won the day by talking the talk of diversity, multiculturalism, and women’s rights, even while preparing to walk the walk of Goldman Sachs.

The Defeat of Reactionary Neoliberalism

Progressive neoliberalism also had to defeat a second competitor, with which it shared more than it let on. The antagonist in this case was reactionary neoliberalism. Housed mainly in the Republican Party and less coherent than its dominant rival, this second bloc offered a different nexus of distribution and recognition. It combined a similar, neoliberal politics of distribution with a different, reactionary politics of recognition. While claiming to foster small business and manufacturing, reactionary neoliberalism’s true economic project centered on bolstering finance, military production, and extractive energy, all to the principal benefit of the global one percent. What was supposed to render that palatable for the base it sought to assemble was an exclusionary vision of a just status order: ethnonational, anti-immigrant, and pro-Christian, if not overtly racist, patriarchal, and homophobic.

This was the formula that allowed Christian evangelicals, southern whites, rural and small-town Americans, and disaffected white working-class strata to coexist for a couple decades, however uneasily, with libertarians, Tea Partiers, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Koch brothers, plus a smattering of bankers, real-estate tycoons, energy moguls, venture capitalists, and hedge-fund speculators. Sectoral emphases aside, on the big questions of political economy, reactionary neoliberalism did not substantially differ from its progressive-neoliberal rival. Granted, the two parties argued some about “taxes on the rich,” with the Democrats usually caving. But both blocs supported “free trade,” low corporate taxes, curtailed labor rights, the primacy of shareholder interest, winner-takes-all compensation, and financial deregulation. Both blocs elected leaders who sought “grand bargains” aimed at cutting entitlements. The key differences between them turned on recognition, not distribution.

Progressive neoliberalism mostly won that battle as well, but at a cost. Decaying manufacturing centers, especially the so-called Rust Belt, were sacrificed. That region, along with newer industrial centers in the South, took a major hit thanks to a triad of Bill Clinton’s policies: NAFTA, the accession of China to the WTO (justified, in part, as promoting democracy), and the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Together, those policies and their successors ravaged communities that had relied on manufacturing. In the course of two decades of progressive neoliberal hegemony, neither of the two major blocs made any serious effort to support those communities. To the neoliberals, their economies were uncompetitive and should be subject to “market correction.” To the progressives, their cultures were stuck in the past, tied to obsolete, parochial values that would soon disappear in a new cosmopolitan dispensation. On neither ground—distribution or recognition—could progressive neoliberals find any reason to defend Rust Belt and southern manufacturing communities.

The Hegemonic Gap—and the Struggle to Fill It

The political universe that Trump upended was highly restrictive. It was built around the opposition between two versions of neoliberalism, distinguished chiefly on the axis of recognition. Granted, one could choose between multiculturalism and ethnonationalism. But one was stuck, either way, with financialization and deindustrialization. With the menu limited to progressive and reactionary neoliberalism, there was no force to oppose the decimation of working-class and middle-class standards of living. Anti-neoliberal projects were severely marginalized, if not simply excluded, from the public sphere.

That left a sizeable segment of the U.S. electorate, victims of financialization and corporate globalization, without a natural political home. Given that neither of the two major blocs spoke for them, there was a gap in the American political universe: an empty, unoccupied zone, where anti-neoliberal, pro-working-family politics might have taken root. Given the accelerating pace of deindustrialization, the proliferation of precarious, low-wage McJobs, the rise of predatory debt, and the consequent decline in living standards for the bottom two-thirds of Americans, it was only a matter of time before someone would proceed to occupy that empty space and fill the gap.

Some assumed that that moment had arrived in 2007/8. A world still reeling from one of the worst foreign policy disasters in U.S. history was then forced to confront the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression—and a near meltdown the global economy. Politics as usual fell by the wayside. An African American who spoke of “hope” and “change” ascended to the presidency, vowing to transform not just policy but the entire “mindset” of American politics. Barack Obama might have seized the opportunity to mobilize mass support for a major shift away from neoliberalism, even in the face of congressional opposition. Instead, he entrusted the economy to the very Wall Street forces that had nearly wrecked it. Defining the goal as “recovery” as opposed to structural reform, Obama lavished enormous cash bailouts on banks that were “too big to fail,” but he failed to do anything remotely comparable for their victims: the ten million Americans who lost their homes to foreclosure during the crisis. The one exception was the expansion of Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act, which provided a real material benefit to a portion of the U.S. working class. But that was the exception that proved the rule. Unlike the single-payer and public option proposals that Obama renounced even before health-care negotiations began, his approach reinforced the very divisions within the working class that would eventually prove so politically fateful. All told, the overwhelming thrust of his presidency was to maintain the progressive neoliberal status quo despite its growing unpopularity.

Another chance to fill the hegemonic gap arrived in 2011, with the eruption of Occupy Wall Street. Tired of waiting for redress from the political system and resolving to take matters into its own hands, a segment of civil society seized public squares throughout the country in the name of “the 99 percent.” Denouncing a system that pillaged the vast majority in order to enrich the top one percent, relatively small groups of youthful protesters soon attracted broad support—up to 60 percent of the American people, according to some polls—especially from besieged unions, indebted students, struggling middle-class families and the growing “precariat.”

Occupy’s political effects were contained, however, serving chiefly to reelect Obama. It was by adopting the movement’s rhetoric that he garnered support from many who would go on to vote for Trump in 2016 and thereby defeated Romney in 2012. Having won himself four more years, however, the president’s newfound class consciousness swiftly evaporated. Confining the pursuit of “change” to the issuing of executive orders, he neither prosecuted the malefactors of wealth nor used the bully pulpit to rally the American people against Wall Street. Assuming the storm had passed, the U.S. political classes barely missed a beat. Continuing to uphold the neoliberal consensus, they failed to see in Occupy the first rumblings of an earthquake to come.

That earthquake finally struck in 2015/16, as long-simmering discontent suddenly shape-shifted into a full-bore crisis of political authority. In that election season, both major political blocs appeared to collapse. On the Republican side, Trump, campaigning on populist themes, handily defeated (as he continues to remind us) his sixteen hapless primary rivals, including several handpicked by party bosses and major donors. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed democratic socialist, mounted a surprisingly serious challenge to Obama’s anointed successor, who had to deploy every trick and lever of party power to stave him off. On both sides, the usual scripts were upended as a pair of outsiders occupied the hegemonic gap and proceeded to fill it with new political memes.

Both Sanders and Trump excoriated the neoliberal politics of distribution. But their politics of recognition differed sharply. Whereas Sanders denounced the “rigged economy” in universalist and egalitarian accents, Trump borrowed the very same phrase but colored it nationalist and protectionist. Doubling down on long-standing exclusionary tropes, he transformed what had been “mere” dog whistles into full-throated blasts of racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, homo- and transphobia, and anti-immigrant sentiment. The “working-class” base his rhetoric conjured was white, straight, male, and Christian, based in mining, drilling, construction, and heavy industry. By contrast, the working class Sanders wooed was broad and expansive, encompassing not only Rust Belt factory workers, but also public-sector and service workers, including women, immigrants, and people of color.

Certainly, the contrast between these two portraits of “the working class” was largely rhetorical. Neither portrait strictly matched its champion’s voter base. Although Trump’s margin of victory came from eviscerated manufacturing centers that had gone for Obama in 2012 and for Sanders in the Democratic primaries of 2015, his voters also included the usual Republican suspects—including libertarians, business owners, and others with little use for economic populism. Likewise, the most reliable Sanders voters were young, college-educated Americans. But that is not the point. As a rhetorical projection of a possible counterhegemony, it was Sanders’s expansive view of the U.S. working class that most sharply distinguished his brand of populism from that of Trump.

Both outsiders sketched the outlines of a new common sense, but each did so in his own way. At its best, Trump’s campaign rhetoric suggested a new proto-hegemonic bloc, which we can call reactionary populism. It appeared to combine a hyper-reactionary politics of recognition with a populist politics of distribution: in effect, the wall on the Mexican border plus large-scale infrastructure spending. The bloc Sanders envisioned, by contrast, was progressive populism. He sought to join an inclusive politics of recognition with a pro-working-family politics of distribution: criminal justice reform plus Medicare for all; reproductive justice plus free college tuition; LGBTQ rights plus breaking up the big banks.

Bait and Switch

Neither of these scenarios has actually materialized, however. Sanders’s loss to Hillary Clinton removed the progressive-populist option from the ballot, to no one’s surprise. But the result of Trump’s subsequent victory over her was more unexpected, at least to some. Far from governing as a reactionary populist, the new president has activated the old bait and switch, abandoning the populist distributive policies his campaign had promised. Granted, he canceled the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But he has temporized on NAFTA and failed to lift a finger to rein in Wall Street. Nor has Trump taken a single serious step to implement large-scale, job-creating public infrastructure projects; his efforts to encourage manufacturing were confined instead to symbolic displays of jawboning and regulatory relief for coal, whose gains have proved largely fictitious. And far from proposing a tax code reform whose principal beneficiaries would be working-class and middle-class families, he signed on to the boilerplate Republican version, designed to funnel more wealth to the one percent (including the Trump family). As this last point attests, the president’s actions on the distributive front have included a heavy dose of crony capitalism and self-dealing. But if Trump himself has fallen short of Hayekian ideals of economic reason, the appointment of yet another Goldman Sachs alumnus to the Treasury ensures that neoliberalism will continue where it counts.

Having abandoned the populist politics of distribution, Trump proceeded to double down on the reactionary politics of recognition, hugely intensified and ever more vicious. The list of his provocations and actions in support of invidious hierarchies of status is long and chilling: the travel ban in its various versions, all targeting Muslim-majority countries, ill disguised by the cynical late addition of Venezuela; the gutting of civil rights at Justice (which has abandoned the use of consent decrees) and at Labor (which has stopped policing discrimination by federal contractors); the refusal to defend court cases on LGBTQ rights; the rollback of mandated insurance coverage of contraception; the retrenchment of Title IX protections for women and girls through cuts in enforcement staff; public pronouncements in support of rougher police handling of suspects, of “Sheriff Joe’s” contempt for the rule of law, and of the “very fine people” among the white-supremacists who ran amok at Charlottesville. The result is no mere garden-variety Republican conservatism, but a hyper-reactionary politics of recognition.

Altogether, the policies of President Trump have diverged from the campaign promises of candidate Trump. Not only has his economic populism vanished, but his scapegoating has grown ever more vicious. What his supporters voted for, in short, is not what they got. The upshot is not reactionary populism, but hyper-reactionary neoliberalism.

Trump’s hyper-reactionary neoliberalism does not constitute a new hegemonic bloc, however. It is, on the contrary, chaotic, unstable, and fragile. That is partly due to the peculiar personal psychology of its standard-bearer and partly due to his dysfunctional codependency with the Republican Party establishment, which has tried and failed to reassert its control and is now biding its time while searching for an exit strategy. We cannot now know exactly how this will play out, but it would be foolish to rule out the possibility that the Republican Party will split. Either way, hyper-reactionary neoliberalism offers no prospect of secure hegemony.

But there is also a deeper problem. By shutting down the economic-populist face of his campaign, Trump’s hyper-reactionary neoliberalism effectively seeks to reinstate the hegemonic gap he helped to explode in 2016. Except that it cannot now suture that gap. Now that the populist cat is out of the bag, it is doubtful that the working-class portion of Trump’s base will be satisfied to dine for long on (mis)recognition alone.

On the other side, meanwhile, “the resistance” organizes. But the opposition is fractured, comprising diehard Clintonites, committed Sanderistas, and lots of people who could go either way. Complicating the landscape is a raft of upstart groups whose militant postures have attracted big donors despite (or because of) the vagueness of their programmatic conceptions.

Especially troubling is the resurgence of an old tendency on the left to pit race against class. Some resisters are proposing to reorient Democratic Party politics around opposition to white supremacy, focusing efforts on winning support from blacks and Latinos. Others defend a class-centered strategy, aimed at winning back white working-class communities that defected to Trump. Both views are problematic to the extent that they treat attention to class and race as inherently antithetical, a zero-sum game. In reality, both of those axes of injustice can be attacked in tandem, as indeed they must be. Neither be can be overcome while the other flourishes.

In today’s context, however, proposals to back-burner class concerns pose a special risk: they are likely to dovetail with the Clinton wing’s efforts to restore the status quo ante in some new guise. In that case, the result would be a new version of progressive neoliberalism—one that combines neoliberalism on the distributive front with a militant anti-racist politics of recognition. That prospect should give anti-Trump forces pause. On the one hand, it will send many potential allies running in the opposite direction, validating Trump’s narrative and reinforcing his support. On the other hand, it will effectively join forces with him in suppressing alternatives to neoliberalism—and thus in reinstating the hegemonic gap. But what I just said about Trump applies equally here: the populist cat is out of the bag and won’t quietly slink away. To reinstate progressive neoliberalism, on any basis, is to recreate—indeed, to exacerbate—the very conditions that created Trump. And that means preparing the ground for future Trumps—ever more vicious and dangerous.

Morbid Symptoms and Counterhegemonic Prospects

For all these reasons, neither a revived progressive neoliberalism nor a trumped-up hyper-reactionary neoliberalism is a good candidate for political hegemony in the near future. The bonds that united each of those blocs have badly frayed. In addition, neither is currently in a position to shape a new common sense. Neither is able to offer an authoritative picture of social reality, a narrative in which a broad spectrum of social actors can find themselves. Equally important, neither variant of neoliberalism can successfully resolve the objective system blockages that underlie our hegemonic crisis. Since both are in bed with global finance, neither can challenge financialization, deindustrialization, or corporate globalization. Neither can redress declining living standards or ballooning debt, climate change or “care deficits,” or intolerable stresses on community life. To (re)install either of those blocs in power is to ensure not just a continuation, but an intensification of the current crisis.

What, then, can we expect in the near term? Absent a secure hegemony, we face an unstable interregnum and the continuation of the political crisis. In this situation, the words of Antonio Gramsci ring true: “the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Unless, of course, there exists a viable candidate for a counterhegemony. The most likely such candidate is one form or another of populism. Could populism still be a possible option—if not immediately, then in the longer term? What speaks in favor of this possibility is the fact that between the supporters of Sanders and those of Trump, something approaching a critical mass of U.S. voters rejected the neoliberal politics of distribution in 2015/16. The burning question is whether that mass could now be melded together in a new counterhegemonic bloc. For that to happen, working-class supporters of Trump and of Sanders would have to come to understand themselves as allies—differently situated victims of a single “rigged economy,” which they could jointly seek to transform.

Reactionary populism, even without Trump, is not a likely basis for such an alliance. Its hierarchical, exclusionary politics of recognition is a surefire deal-killer for major sectors of the U.S. working and middle classes, especially families dependent on wages from service work, agriculture, domestic labor, and the public sector, whose ranks include large numbers of women, immigrants, and people of color. Only an inclusive politics of recognition has a fighting chance of bringing those indispensable social forces into alliance with other sectors of the working and middle classes, including communities historically associated with manufacturing, mining, and construction.

That leaves progressive populism as the likeliest candidate for a new counterhegemonic bloc. Combining egalitarian redistribution with nonhierarchical recognition, this option has at least a fighting chance of uniting the whole working class. More than that, it could position that class, understood expansively, as the leading force in an alliance that also includes substantial segments of youth, the middle class, and the professional-managerial stratum.

At the same time, there is much in the current situation that speaks against the possibility, any time soon, of an alliance between progressive populists and working-class strata who voted for Trump in the last election. Foremost among the obstacles are the deepening divisions, even hatreds, long simmering but recently raised to a fever pitch by Trump, who, as David Brooks perceptively put it, has a “nose for every wound in the body politic” and no qualms about “stick[ing] a red-hot poker in [them] and rip[ping them] open.” The result is a toxic environment that appears to validate the view, held by some progressives, that all Trump voters are “deplorables”—irredeemable racists, misogynists, and homophobes. Also reinforced is the converse view, held by many reactionary populists, that all progressives are incorrigible moralizers and smug elitists who look down on them while sipping lattes and raking in the bucks.

A Strategy of Separation

The prospects for progressive populism in the United States today depend on successfully combating both of those views. What is needed is a strategy of separation, aimed at precipitating two major splits. First, less-privileged women, immigrants, and people of color have to be wooed away from the lean-in feminists, the meritocratic anti-racists and anti-homophobes, and the corporate diversity and green-capitalism shills who hijacked their concerns, inflecting them in terms consistent with neoliberalism. This is the aim of a recent feminist initiative, which seeks to replace “lean in” with a “feminism for the 99 percent.” Other emancipatory movements should copy that strategy.

Second, Rust Belt, southern, and rural working-class communities have to be persuaded to desert their current crypto-neoliberal allies. The trick is to convince them that the forces promoting militarism, xenophobia, and ethnonationalism cannot and will not provide them with the essential material prerequisites for good lives, whereas a progressive-populist bloc just might. In that way, one might separate those Trump voters who could and should be responsive to such an appeal from the card-carrying racists and alt-right ethnonationalists who are not. To say that the former outnumber the latter by a wide margin is not to deny that reactionary populist movements draw heavily on loaded rhetoric and have emboldened formerly fringe groups of real white supremacists. But it does refute the hasty conclusion that the overwhelming majority of reactionary-populist voters are forever closed to appeals on behalf of an expanded working class of the sort evoked by Bernie Sanders. That view is not only empirically wrong but counterproductive, likely to be self-fulfilling.

Let me clear. I am not suggesting that a progressive-populist bloc should mute pressing concerns about racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and transphobia. On the contrary, the fight against all of these harms must be central to a progressive-populist bloc. But it is counterproductive to address them through moralizing condescension, in the mode of progressive neoliberalism. That approach assumes a shallow and inadequate view of these injustices, grossly exaggerating the extent to which the trouble is inside people’s heads and missing the depth of the structural-institutional forces that undergird them.

The point is especially clear and important in the case of race. Racial injustice in the United States today is not at bottom a matter of demeaning attitudes or bad behavior, although these surely exist. The crux is rather the racially specific impacts of deindustrialization and financialization in the period of progressive-neoliberal hegemony, as refracted through long histories of systemic oppression. In this period, black and brown Americans who had long been denied credit, confined to inferior segregated housing, and paid too little to accumulate savings, were systematically targeted by purveyors of subprime loans and consequently experienced the highest rates of home foreclosures in the country. In this period, too, minority towns and neighborhoods that had long been systematically starved of public resources were clobbered by plant closings in declining manufacturing centers; their losses were reckoned not only in jobs but also in tax revenues, which deprived them of funds for schools, hospitals, and basic infrastructure maintenance, leading eventually to debacles like Flint—and, in a different context, the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Finally, black men long subject to differential sentencing and harsh imprisonment, coerced labor and socially tolerated violence, including at the hands of police, were in this period massively conscripted into a “prison-industrial complex,” kept full to capacity by a “war on drugs” that targeted possession of crack cocaine and by disproportionately high rates of minority unemployment, all courtesy of bipartisan legislative “achievements,” orchestrated largely by Bill Clinton. Need one add that, inspiring though it was, the presence of an African American in the White House failed to make a dent in these developments?

And how could it have? The phenomena just invoked show the depth at which racism is anchored in contemporary capitalist society—and the incapacity of progressive-neoliberal moralizing to address it. They also reveal that the structural bases of racism have as much to do with class and political economy as with status and (mis)recognition. Equally important, they make it clear that the forces that are destroying the life chances of people of color are part and parcel of the same dynamic complex as those that are destroying the life chances of whites—even if some of the specifics differ. The effect is finally to disclose the inextricable intertwinement of race and class in contemporary financialized capitalism.

A progressive-populist bloc must make such insights its guiding stars. Renouncing the progressive neoliberal stress on personal attitudes, it must focus its efforts on the structural-institutional bases of contemporary society. Especially important, it must highlight the shared roots of class and status injustices in financialized capitalism. Conceiving of that system as a single, integrated social totality, it must link the harms suffered by women, immigrants, people of color, and LGBTQ persons to those experienced by working-class strata now drawn to rightwing populism. In that way, it can lay the foundation for a powerful new coalition among all whom Trump and his counterparts elsewhere are now betraying—not just the immigrants, feminists, and people of color who already oppose his hyper-reactionary neoliberalism, but also the white working-class strata who have so far supported it. Rallying major segments of the entire working class, this strategy could conceivably win. Unlike every other option considered here, progressive populism has the potential, at least in principle, to become a relatively stable counterhegemonic bloc in the future.

But what commends progressive populism is not only its potential subjective viability. In contrast to its likely rivals, it has the further advantage of being capable, at least in principle, of addressing the real, objective side of our crisis. Let me explain.

As I noted at the outset, the hegemonic crisis dissected here is one strand of a larger crisis complex, which encompasses several other strands—ecological, economic, and social. It is also the subjective counterpart of an objective system crisis to which it constitutes the response and from which it cannot be severed. Ultimately, these two sides of the crisis—one subjective, the other objective—stand or fall together. No subjective response, however apparently compelling, can secure a durable counterhegemony unless it offers the prosect of a real solution to the underlying objective problems.

The objective side of the crisis is no mere multiplicity of separate dysfunctions. Far from forming a dispersed plurality, its various strands are interconnected, and they share a common source. The underlying object of our general crisis, the thing that harbors its multiple instabilities, is the present form of capitalism—globalizing, neoliberal, financialized. Like every form of capitalism, this one is no mere economic system, but something larger, an institutionalized social order. As such, it encompasses a set of noneconomic background conditions that are indispensable to a capitalist economy: for example, unwaged activities of social reproduction, which assure the supply of wage labor for economic production; an organized apparatus of public power (law, police, regulatory agencies, and steering capacities) that supplies the order, predictability, and infrastructure that are necessary for sustained accumulation; and finally, a relatively sustainable organization of our metabolic interaction with the rest of nature, one that ensures essential supplies of energy and raw materials for commodity production, not to mention a habitable planet that can support life.

Financialized capitalism represents one historically specific way of organizing the relation of a capitalist economy to these indispensable background conditions. It is a deeply predatory and unstable form of social organization, which liberates capital accumulation from the very constraints (political, ecological, social, moral) needed to sustain it over time. Freed from such constraints, capitalism’s economy consumes its own background conditions of possibility. It is like a tiger that eats its own tail. As social life as such is increasingly economized, the unfettered pursuit of profit destabilizes the very forms of social reproduction, ecological sustainability, and public power on which it depends. Seen this way, financialized capitalism is an inherently crisis-prone social formation. The crisis complex we encounter today is the increasingly acute expression of its built-in tendency toward self-destabilization.

That’s the objective face of crisis: the structural counterpart to the hegemonic unraveling dissected here. Today, accordingly, both poles of crisis—one objective, the other subjective—are in full flower. And, as already noted, they stand or fall together. Resolving the objective crisis requires a major structural transformation of financialized capitalism: a new way of relating economy to polity, production to reproduction, human society to nonhuman nature. Neoliberalism in any guise is not the solution but the problem.

The sort of change we require can only come from elsewhere, from a project that is at the very least anti-neoliberal, if not anti-capitalist. Such a project can become a historical force only when embodied in a counterhegemonic bloc. Distant though the prospect may seem right now, our best chance for a subjective-cum-objective resolution is progressive populism. But even that might not be a stable endpoint. Progressive populism could end up being transitional—a way station en route to some new, postcapitalist form of society.

Whatever our uncertainty regarding the endpoint, one thing is clear. If we fail to pursue this option now, we will prolong the present interregnum. And that means condemning working people of every persuasion and every color to mounting stress and declining health, to ballooning debt and overwork, to class apartheid and social insecurity. It means immersing them, too, in an ever more vast expanse of morbid symptoms—in hatreds born of resentment and expressed in scapegoating, in outbreaks of violence followed by bouts of repression, in a vicious dog-eat-dog world where solidarities contract to the vanishing point. To avoid that fate, we must break definitively both with neoliberal economics and with the various politics of recognition that have lately supported it—casting off not just exclusionary ethnonationalism but also liberal-meritocratic individualism. Only by joining a robustly egalitarian politics of distribution to a substantively inclusive, class-sensitive politics of recognition can we build a counterhegemonic bloc that could lead us beyond the current crisis to a better world.

#trump #neoliberalism #antonio gramschi #globalism #bill clinton #hillary clinton #ronald reagan

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notesonthemodernspectacle · 7 years

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To what extent was British grand strategy in the interwar period a failure?

Churchill called it the “Second Thirty Years War” and EH Carr the “Twenty Years Crisis” (Tooze, 2015: 4). The interwar period, for many, is defined by the two wars which bookend it. Yet, this is with the benefit of hindsight, at the time Britain faced choices and decisions in her grand strategy in an unstable world. That is Hitler was never guaranteed, Britain could have equally gone to war in Turkey or Russia in the period, or the world economy could have collapsed much earlier or later than 1929. The economy is key to this period, throughout the historiography economic weakness is always in competition with military interests. More than this, those with the economic power, would be at the centre of policy making. Whether the periphery elites of the empire, to the great bankers of Wall Street, or the economic block of middle England. It must also be viewed in the context of the recasting of the international order by a new generation of global elites, from Tokyo to Washington, Paris to Delhi. I wish to argue that there are four overarching themes which would define the approach of Britain in this period. The first being that of empire. In 1914, Britain was the most powerful nation on earth, the Great War changed this, it was to become an increasing challenge for the British government to maintain the many colonies under her rule. After the toppling of the Russian, German and Austrian Empires by the emergent force of the global proletariat (Hatherley, 2016). British grand strategy was also dominated by a fear of Communism. From intervention in the Russian Civil War to lack of intervention in the Spanish Civil War, but also by the growing force of the working class at home. The combination of these two huge challenges forced Britain to look for an ally in global governance. Atlanticism thus became a major force in the foreign policy of Britain. Whether this was in the Naval treaties which placed the American navy on the same footing as Britain's or on the huge flows of cash which streamed from New York to London. Finally, it is important to also discuss the policy of appeasement employed by the British government as fascism increasingly threatened war across Europe. Often seen as one of the great failures grand strategy, despite strong defences of the policy by AJP Taylor and revisionist historians throughout the post-war period (Finney, 2000). Appeasement must be seen as part of the wider historical movements which were shaping Britain’s foreign policy at the time. In many ways a culmination of twenty years of strained imperialism, anti-communism and increasing reliance on American money. By defining British grand strategy as a product of shifts between differing global forces and ideas, the uncertainty of the period between the wars becomes clearer. However, it also means that it is harder to assess whether British grand strategy was a failure. Certainly, it was not a success. Appeasement led to war. Atlanticism led to American supremacy. Imperialism led to decolonisation. Yet, much of this was still to come, and the product of continued shifts in worldwide structures of power. As the interwar period ended in the autumn of 1939, Britain was still a global power of immense force. Therefore, British grand strategy was only to some extent a failure.

Britain and Her Empire

“I have but one goal in this world, and that is to maintain the greatness of Empire.” - Lord Wolseley

(Maurice & Arthur, 1924: 314)

As the realist historian and theorist EH Carr points out, the quote above is typical of many public figures of the late British Empire. The Empire was at the centre of British grand strategy for many generations, but especially through the turbulent period between the wars. The new rhetoric of self determination, gave rise to imperial subjects seeking an opportunity for freedom from the British colonisers. Here we see also the interplay of realist and liberal theories of grand strategy in the British attempts to neutralise this threat. Contradictions also appear as the British economy recovering from the First World War. Britain relied on her Empire for its source of wealth, yet, it was becoming increasingly expensive to defend such a territory covering a quarter of the earth (Kotkin, 2015: 316). It is through the frame of these two contradictions, one ideological the other economic, which will show the degree to which the maintenance of the Empire, can be seen as a slightly successful aspect of British grand strategy.

Throughout the interwar period, especially in times of crisis, the defence of the empire would be closely tied to a belief in defending democracy and liberal morality (Carr, 2001: 72). Yet, the fact was the British Empire increasingly came into conflict with the new liberal internationalism of the Treaty Of Versailles. The dream of a liberal empire became increasingly far-fetched, as self-interest and security became the focus of many in the core and periphery of the colonial administration. Even before the end of the First World War, Indian nationalism was becoming a mass movement. The subcontinent was the centre of British imperial policy, and ensuring continued rule there was paramount. Indian soldiers fought in the First World War and felt that they deserved a say in how they were governed. As well as this, revolutions across Europe at the end of the war saw waves of self-determination for peoples once under the control of vast empires. Finally, Wilsonian internationalism promised freedom from the brutal imperialism which defined the Victorian and Edwardian periods (Manela, 2014: 84-97). Against all of this stood British self-interest, expressed in India by the provincial governors. They saw any attempt to democratise India as an attack on the Empire. The introduction of a new constitution, which took on a stable form by 1925, attempted to balance these two competing demands on British grand strategy in India (Tooze, 2015: 386). Especially with the growth of Gandhi's civil disobedience campaigns, these contradictions were not resolved. This lead to the 1935 Government of India Act, which introduced an elected Indian assembly. Resolving more of the tensions, yet playing the Hindu majority off against the Muslim minority. The interwar period was one of tension for British India, with the Empire struggling to maintain a grip on the forces in ruled over. In many ways, British grand strategy in India can be seen as a success, given the many challenges imperial rule faced. We see in India the victory of a liberal imperialism, in other parts, no such concessions were made. Such as the repeated attacks on the new state of Turkey, which threatened British positions in the Mediterranean and Middle East. The balancing act, between imperialism and self-determination, was repeated across the Empire, to varying degrees of success. For example, the tensions that simmered in Ireland after the 1916 uprising. Or in the Middle East the long fallout following the Balfour Declaration, which before the Second World War burst into the Arab Rebellion against the British mandate (Mansfield, 2013: 233). Many of the nations which made up the empire increasingly demanding to rule themselves. Yet, in 1939 Britain maintained a comparable global presence to the one it had in 1919.

The other tension within British imperial grand strategy was economic. Britain had come to great power status because of her vast empire, based on the exploitation of millions and the free trade of the London Stock Exchange. Yet, the challenge for Whitehall in the interwar period was defending this source of wealth, on a much smaller budget. While maintaining her famed naval dominance, Britain increasingly had to choose between military options. Thus maintaining the Navy and investing in the Royal Air Force, came at the expense of the British Army. With huge spending cuts beginning as early as 1919, and continuing throughout the following decade (Tooze, 2015). This meant that the defence of the empire increasingly relied on local forces and rulers. In Egypt this lead to difficulties for Britain, sitting as it did on the Suez Canal. Making imperial policy reliant on the power of an out of state apparatus. In 1926 Lloyd George described the British position as such, “Magnitude without position, power without authority;” (Mansfield, 2013: 215). Lack of funding was also visible in Iraq, where the RAF was used to suppress a revolt against British rule. The RAF were increasingly relied upon across the empire, to maintain peace at a lower cost. In the words of Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for the Colonies at the time “That everything that happens in the Middle East is secondary to the reduction of expense” (Barr, 2011: 122). The strains on the empire's resources were also deeply affected by inflationary and deflationary swings which the economy took throughout the twenties and thirties (Krul, 2015). In particularly as the pound returned to the Gold Standard, silver based currencies such as the one used in British India collapsed. Yet, if Britain hadn’t returned to gold, the US threatened to lever away parts of the empire, Canada and South Africa (Tooze, 2015: 465). It is the threat of American economic power that repeatedly effected imperial strategy in this period. For example, trade policy within and outside of the empire, was affected by the war debts Britain owed to America, who demanded free access to the Empire's markets. The maintenance of empire, was a key element of British grand strategy in the interwar period. While the liberal contradiction of the emancipatory empire were made clear, especially by theorists like Carr, the realist goals of security for the wider empire also became difficult to maintain. Certainly, as the supposedly objective analysis of empire produced by both sides of the great debate can be seen as distinctly racialised today. Even when repeated by modern historians like Niall Ferguson (Mishra, 2011). The British imperial elite faced many challenges to their dominance. Politically threatened by emergent national awakenings, also threatened by her own economic weakness as well as the growing might of the United States. In the service of whose debt Britain was forced to cut spending and adjust the economics of her empire. While it is hard to avoid viewing this all in light of the decolonisation which would follow the Second World War. However, I believe that Britain's grand strategy in this area can be seen as a qualified success, balancing these problems more effectively than in other areas.

Across The Atlantic

“From the financial shackles on Germany’s feet, there extend solid chains which encumber the hands of France, the feet of Italy and the neck of Britain.” - Leon Trotsky (Trotsky, 1929)

I believe that it is essential to understand Britain’s grand strategy in the context of growing American power. As hinted at in the previous section, America’s financial power was always growing. Again we see the contradictions between the demands of the British economy and the British military. Adam Tooze declares that the entire shape of the interwar period can be seen as “Inflected by this basic impulse on behalf of successive United States administrations: to use America’s position of privileged detachment, and the dependence on it of the other major powers, to frame a transformation of world affairs” (Tooze, 2015: 516). Tooze’s work is heavily influenced by a focus on the economics of the period, this leads him to focus on the power of America. It seems almost impossible for British grand strategy not to have developed a distinctly Atlanticist inflexion in the interwar period. Yet, the goal of balancing growing American power against British interests leads Britain into the role of the junior partner by the end of the Second World War, a trend already apparent in the interwar years.

The one major problem for those in Britain who saw major benefits in shifting towards what Paul Kennedy described as “The appeasement of the United States” was the naval policy of both countries (Kennedy, 1981:259). The resolution of this throughout the interwar period shows how much Britain was willing to concede to keep America onside. It shows perhaps that built in with the Atlanticist shift in British grand strategy was an acceptance that Britain alone could not rule. Surprisingly liberal internationalist Wilson, began the American policy of building up her navy, to compete with the British. In 1916 he declared “Let us build a bigger navy than hers and we shall do as we please” (O’Brian, 1998: 117). However, unlike when Britain competed with Imperial Germany in a naval arms race the outcome was markedly different. Through several naval conferences, Britain and the United States agreed to naval parity. As the British Admiralty pointed out, “We shall be supreme in European waters, but as regards as the seas as a whole the supremacy will be shared with the United States” (Roskill, 2016: 214). This would appear to a realist conception of grand strategy as a strange move. However, this is not quite the idealist misjudgement, those like Carr would portray it as. Britain could no longer afford such massive defense spending, the British government themselves were increasingly happy to concede to the American’s in the name of transatlantic alliance. Britain needed America, and throughout the 1920s especially tried to maintain American interest in working on disarmament and other international agreements. This became strained late in the 20s, as the Conservative government in Britain turned away from earlier Atlanticism. Again in the 1930s, as America truly turned in on herself, British foreign policy clearly lacks the balance of an Atlantic ally. These tensions are highlighted by the failure of the Geneva Naval Conference in 1927 and the weakness of its 1930 follow-up in London. Despite this, Atlanticism can be seen to be having a growing impact on British foreign and defence policy in the period. Tooze points out how both the Liberal and Labour parties bought into the Wilsonian vision of Versailles, as well as the ideas of later Harding and Coolidge administrations (Tooze, 2015). Certainly, as the war began again at the end of the thirties, Britain turned to America, if not to intervene, but to be a key part of the war effort.

The Wall Street Crash is the hinge that the interwar period turns upon. It also highlights the closeness of American and British financial interests. The overlap between the British ideology of free trade and the American “Open Door” policy is clear. The Wall Street Crash spread quickly from America to Britain. It seemed Trotsky’s description, which opens this section, was apt to describe the collapse of the great European economies (Trotsky, 1929). To extend this metaphor further, the metal that composed these immense shackles was war debt. As Kennedy argued, it was Britain’s central role in the world economy which left her more exposed than other more protectionist neighbours (Kennedy, 1981:261). In this way he argues, avoiding the high cost of war became important for Britain. This could sound like the liberal belief that integrated international markets lead to a more peaceful world. Yet, I think it hints at a less optimistic vision of the world, where financial capital can have a huge influence over nations, as explored by Lenin in his explanation of the First World War (Lenin, 1916). Throughout the First World War, American banks had financed the Entente’s effort. For example, in 1915 the Anglo-French Financial Commission arranged a massive loan of $500,000,000 from JP Morgan, at the time the largest loan in financial history (Horn, 2000). The degree to which America had lent during the war meant that despite being a debtor nation in 1914 she had become a global lender by the end of the conflict (Hobsbawm, 1995: 97). The constant need to repay these debts became a crucial part of how Britain conducted their grand strategy. It meant, from the Empire to appeasement British policy was focused on cost cutting, but also on keeping close to America. This was the motivating factor for Britain to return to the Gold Standard. While it made economic sense for the United States to do so, it had harsh implications for Britain’s economy. Yet, Britain struggled through this in order to keep the pound close to the dollar (Maier, 1975: 586). Beyond this from China to even into the Middle East, American financial interest became increasingly aligned with British foreign policy. Here we should recall the Trotsky quote, as it was not quite the symbiotic relationship it would appear. American financial interests had a shackled British grand strategy closer than ever. Of course, after the great crash, Britain and America turned in on themselves. Showing the failure of those liberal believers in Atlanticism, this new alliance was not a secure footing for wider peaceful cooperation. However, the financial shackles held tight throughout the chaotic thirties. This I think shows that for British grand strategy, the influence of Atlanticism played an important role, both economic and also political. Not to mention the huge cultural influence jazz and Hollywood were beginning to have. An influence surprisingly ignored by Tooze in his focus on American power in the interwar years. Given its importance in creating a powerful vision for America and its place in the world (Hatherly, 2016). Overall I think that this shows that Britain's attempts to mould their grand strategy to be in parallel to American powers rise was a failure. While the Atlantic did get smaller during the period, Britain itself became far more exposed to the will of American capital. While also conceding to growing US military might, which would show itself explicitly after 1939, and especially after 1945.

Against Global Revolution

“What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will.

I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic

Death? Very well, I accept, for

I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain.” - WH Auden

(Auden, 1979: 51)

The threat of global revolution was much wider than the Bolsheviks. For some it was the great dream of the age for others a threat which broke down traditional understandings of international relations, a threat was both internal and external. It was not interested in the realist understanding of security or the liberal obsession with international institutions. This is perhaps why it has been under discussed in accounts of the period, by either radical historians like Tooze or Taylor, or more traditional authors. Yet, I still believe it is a crucial frame through which to view the period. Before the war had even ended there had been repeated mutinies along the French lines of the Western Front, which didn't spread to the British front only by the force of the armies punishments (Thatchell, 2014). When peace came, the fears of militancy came home, with strikes, riots and mutinies taking place all over Britain well into 1919. The rebellious nature of the ordinary troops has been downplayed in mainstream histories of the war. Yet, even the benign threat of the Labour Party of Ramsay MacDonald caused fear amongst those who traditionally ruled. The example of the Zinoviev Letter is instructive of how the threat of the proletariat at home affected British grand strategy. There was a media frenzy over the letter. Which claimed the USSR was using the Labour Party as a vehicle to advance the radicalisation of the British proletariat. The letter was fake, but it shored up the Conservative vote in the 1924 election, giving them victory over a demoralised Labour. Shifting British foreign policy in a decidedly insular direction.

Throughout the interwar period, Britain maintained a high level of unemployment, reaching almost 25% at the height of the slump (Hobsbawm, 1995: 93). This urban mass may seem irrelevant to great power politics, yet I think their presence played on the minds of those making strategies for Britain. Lloyd George can only have been influenced by his own experience of numbing radicalisation of the workers, before the war, when he was Prime Minister. When the economy strangled his more radical domestic policies, he could at least reduce the spectre that was haunting the whole of Europe. As Tooze argues he did when trying to integrate the Soviet regime into the global market and the League Of Nations, in exchange for reducing the economic strain on the young economy (Tooze, 2015: 429). This would appear to be a masterstroke of liberal diplomacy, yet still driven by an underlying fear of the threat from the East. Furthermore, it backfired greatly at the Genoa Conference, with the USSR signing a treaty instead with Weimar Germany. Perhaps this was because of British hostility to communism. As well as the obvious reliance of Britain’s own economy on America, undermining Lloyd George’s dealmaking (Fink, 1984: 84). It was the left which campaigned for peace, as the thirties swelled with rearmament. Forces in the Labour Party were powerful at arguing this case. Though AJP Taylor argue that their impact maybe overstated in Britain’s lack of interest in the war (Taylor, 1961: 256). The peace movement should be seen as part of the wider trend, in the interwar period, where the popular classes were becoming more influential on grand strategy. There can be no doubt that proletarian power inside Britain did begin to affect British grand strategy in the period. If not simply because the Labour Party became the official opposition. Whether we can consider the grand strategy of anti-communism to have effectively limited this spread can only be seen by looking outside of Britain too.

The end of the First World War coincided with the beginnings of the Russian Civil War. Despite the immense costs Britain faced, there were those in the British establishment who felt that communism must be resisted at all costs. This is perhaps the clearest example of the British grand strategy of fighting communism. Not only did Britain massively fund the White Russian forces, whose aim was to end the Bolshevik rule, but they also intervened themselves hoping to force a Bolshevik capitulation. Britain also encouraged her allies in the US and Japan to mobilise. Furthermore, Kolz argues that Britain considered occupying the entirety of Siberia, in order to undermine the Bolsheviks and maintain British economic interest (Kolz, 1976: 484). Here we see that the British policy of anti-communism was motivated by ideological but also economic interests, working in tandem. A fact often ignored, even by tendentious economic historians like Tooze. Whose main sources on his analysis of the Russian Civil War are Pipes and Figes, which give him “Lopsided judgements” (Krul, 2015). As the Bolsheviks prevailed the British policy on the war collapsed, the failure was wider than just the Russian Civil War. Despite the huge amount of support Britain gave right wing forces, who would go on to haunt the interwar period, in the short term it was Social Democrats and socialists closest to power in much of Europe. Thus in this area, we see a failure for British grand strategy. However, in the following two decades, it was those right wing forces which Britain had begun to fund, which succeeded in beating back the Communist threat (Hobsbawm, 1995: 126).

Furthermore, in the next major civil war, Britain achieved more success at containing communism. Again, despite Spain’s now important place in the collective memory of the interwar period. Thanks to Auden, Picasso and Orwell. Historians of the wider period underestimate the degree to which it highlights the ideological focus of the British elite against the possibility of working class power. Yet, historians of the war itself, in the definitive work of Hugh Thomas for example, do discuss the negative effect British Grand Strategy had on the cause of the Republic. The policy of Britain during the Spanish Civil War was one of ignorance and non-intervention. Hard-nosed realism mixed with anti-communism drove grand strategy, ensuring the radical socialist Spanish Republic was defeated and keeping the fascists of Europe onside. No liberal defence of democracy here. The degree to which Britain followed this policy left the French, themselves under a socialist government, worrying whether Britain would switch to alliance with Germany (Thomas, 1965: 288). While the proletariat supported the Republic, anti-communism lead much of the bourgeois classes to cheer on the fascists. Hobsbawm points out this trend was repeated across Europe, as Britain was happy to back the more extreme right against the left (Hobsbawm, 1995: 113). Fear of the radicalism of the Spanish Republic meant also that Britain, unlike France, kept her borders closed to many of the refugees of the conflict (BBC, 2016). The policy of strict non-intervention allowed Britain to appear neutral, while Germany and Italy sent troops, supplies and money to the fascists Franco. This almost certainly guaranteed his victory, despite the immense bravery of the Republican cause. While if we view the Spanish Civil War on its own, it appears a victory for British grand strategy. Yet, it also leads to wider problems, Britain’s repeated concessions to Germany and Italy worried the French. It also shows the weakness of Britain, now that America was isolated from Europe, non-intervention became the best option. This again reflects the economic weakness of Britain, as well as the paranoia which stalked the bourgeois classes over the threat of revolution.

Appeasement

“Born out of weakness, with resources and military commitments stretched to their utmost... Chamberlain's drive for appeasement was a logical outcome of the years of drift,” - Ian Kershaw (Kershaw, 2008)

The causes of appeasement are clear Ian Kershaw argues. Yet, the degree to which it was successful strategy, in the face of the rise of fascism, is much harder to pin down. Churchill has greatly influenced many historians and theorists, especially from the realist tradition, in his deep condemnation of the idealists (Ripsman & Levy, 2008: 43). The guilty men theory that naive leaders like Neville Chamberlain, conceded too much to Hitler (Ripsman & Levy, 2008: 46). This idea especially reoccurs in the realists' portrait of appeasement, as in the work of EH Carr. Yet, I think to understand appeasement, it is important to move beyond this traditional view. Especially if you look at appeasement through the frame of the other three factors analysed here. Furthermore, as historians like AJP Taylor have argued, appeasement may have been crucial to Britain’s rearmament (Taylor, 1963). On the other hand, we should not celebrate appeasement, it as a policy clearly failed in its stated goal of maintaining peace.

The supposed pacifists, who in their belief in the League of Nations and economic interdependence let Hitler get away with far too much. While there can be no doubt of the great desire to avoid a repeat of the Great War. These guilty men still haunt the discourse which surrounds appeasement, furthermore “the historiography of appeasement has been inextricably intertwined with shifting understandings of British national identity” (Finney, 2000). Yet, we see the same struggle for success which defined the other aspects of British grand strategy. As with the defence of the empire, Britain was deeply restricted by her finances. Unable to afford the massive defence spending necessary to be the world's policeman. This was as true in Palestine as the Sudetenland, and while it is true Liberal and Labour politicians tried to limit rearmament spending, realistically Britain could not have managed at the rapid pace needed anyhow (Kershaw, 2008). Anti-communism played hugely into the politics of appeasement, the Soviets attempted desperately to ally themselves with the Western democracies. In one case Britain, France and the USSR were close to a deal over Poland, which was undermined by the Poles themselves (Taylor, 1963: 256). Stalin went so as to offer more than a million Soviet troops to move to the German border to deter Hitler's aggression just before the Second World War, if the French and British agreed on an alliance. Yet, Britain, in particular, gave the Soviets the cold shoulder (Holdsworth, 2008). Despite this being the exact deal which could have balanced the powers of Europe in favour of peace. The fact was in the period after Munich, both Britain and France were rushing to make pacts with Hitler, not the Soviets. I think it is clear after the unpleasant governments that Chamberlain had been happy to support from Spain to Poland, that fear of communism drove much of this decision. America was only just emerging from isolationism, at the time of Munich, and herself was not fully up to speed with rearmament. Thus, we see Britain even more isolated without the backing of her English speaking giant across the sea. Furthermore, Roosevelt himself telegraphed the PM, "Good Man!" after the Munich deal (Kershaw, 2008). Showing how America and Britain again were on the same page in terms of foreign policy. Tooze also offers an interesting perspective on American power at the time, suggesting that its preponderance over Germany was one of the motivating as a driving force of German aggression (Tooze, 2006).

This leads us to the point that appeasement was the culmination of a multitude of factors which had shifted the success of British grand strategy in the twenty years after the First World War. The environment in which leaders from Lloyd George to Chamberlain had attempted to maintain British power had been constantly changing, repeatedly putting them in awkward situations. This is how we should understand the entirety of British grand strategy, a response to material changes in the global order. Thus appeasement appears as yet another attempt to find resolution to the unstable contradictions in the recast bourgeois order that the Treaty of Versailles had begun (Maier, 1975). That same desire for peace, but a peace that still allows for a maintenance or British power, in the face of great change. AJP Taylor argues that such instability had been present in Europe for much of the interwar period, and gives in some places a much more sympathetic assessment of the appeasers (Taylor, 1963). Yet, Taylor’s work is famously riddled with paradoxes, at times also harshly critical of Chamberlin. This is perhaps as much a reflection of the confused nature of the period as Taylor’s own fraught ideological contradictions (Finney, 2000: 4). Appeasement did not keep the peace, it also allowed Hitler to do much more than he should have been allowed to do. Ignorance to the evils of fascism, especially after Kristallnacht pervaded British foreign policy thinking at the time, after years of cosying up to the right of Europe (Kershaw, 2008). Both the sides of the great debate failed to look at the domestic events of the Axis powers. Thus appeasement must be seen as a failure of British grand strategy, but one which was unavoidable. All roads pointed to Munich and also Munich’s failure.

Conclusion

Which brings us to the invasion of Poland, the Allied declaration of war and the end of the interwar period. It had been a difficult and twisting journey for Britain, as the world changed rapidly from the armistice of 1918. The major security goal had not changed, the maintenance and protection of the empire remained. In fact, the empire itself remained pretty much intact. Despite repeated challenges, both internal and external, the British Empire was still a huge slice of the Earth. This was arguably the greatest success of grand strategy in the interwar period. Anti-communism was the dominant ideological frame which aligned almost the whole of the British elite in the interwar period. It was also to define the postwar era, perhaps more than any expected. For British grand strategy, the goal of containing the communist threat proved successful, despite the failures of early interventions and the growth of a working class left at home. The support of the right or at least feigned neutrality across Europe, in Spain or Poland for example, helped suppress Communism for a generation. We also see the beginnings of the special relationship emerging even in the early politics of Versailles. Throughout the interwar period, the Atlanticism attempted by Britain proved to have mixed results. While America power did continue to grow, even if in seclusion throughout the early FDR period, Britain’s attempt to benefit from this growth only reinforced her weakness. That is American banks and other centres of US capital became preponderant over Britain for the first time, while Britain’s foreign policy increasingly worked in their interest. In conclusion, we have appeasement, a strategy created in many ways by the three other policies Britain had pursued in the interwar period. As well as the chaotic political and economic situation of the thirties. Its failure to prevent a second global war rests as an overall testament to the failures of British grand strategy. Despite the successes of some aspects of Britain’s foreign policy, these successes could never make up for the overall contradictions between the goals, especially while Britain continued to decline economically. This was a failure both in realist and liberal terms, yet it was also a failure of those world views which dominated the thinking of the period. Therefore, I believe that despite some successes for British grand strategy in the period, it was an overall a failure in this period.

#interwar period #auden #war #revolution #empire #imperialism #america #britain #uk #appeasement

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