Opposites in History

A recurring phenomenon in history is that certain key figures represent a merging of opposite tendencies.  One early figure of this nature is Brasidas, the Spartan officer lauded by Thucydides in his history The Peloponnesian War.  Unlike the most of the terse-speaking Spartans, he was a gifted orator much like his enemies the Athenians.  He died in an attack on Amphipolis  in which he led by making an example of bravery and was one of the few Spartan casualties, though he prefaced the attack with a claim that he would conduct himself in action following the advice he gave to his comrades.  But earlier, he also led covert operations and engaged in deception of cities the Spartans wished to conquer or ally with. Thucydides was actually the Athenian general who led excursions against Brasidas, but he nonetheless praised Brasidas more than almost everyone else in his entire history of the war.  Characterized by his “charm”, that really meant Brasidas excelled at the qualities that his enemies prized, namely oratory.  He also acted quickly with bold, decisive and dramatic surprise attacks.  This quick action was not common among Spartans more known for endless deliberation and caution.  He was an example of one side, the Spartans, succeeding on the terms of the opponent, the Athenians.

John Muir, with the help of many others, remained the primary catalyst for the creation of National Parks in the United States.  He was undoubtedly a pantheist, and perhaps an atheist (as much as would be accepted at the time in his cultural setting).  But reading some of his writings, the overarching tendency is to rely on religious and moral argument.  He especially leans on the tone of fundamentalist christian writing.  Yet his advocacy pointed to a return to a simple appreciation of nature.  This resembled the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the critic of civil society.  In this he merged opposite tendencies.  He used the language of the socially conservative religious status quo to advance a position that was ultimately a radical critique of the foundations of the economic system operating in his society.

Of course, history provides plenty of counter examples.  But it is worth pausing on some of the ways opposites do merge from time to time with spectacular effect.

Lexus Drivers

Something I realized long ago is that when walking or riding my bike around town, there is a very strong correlation between drivers who carelessly–or knowingly–endanger my life through reckless driving and those driving luxury vehicles like Lexus and BMW luxury sedans and fancy sport utility vehicles.  That is not to say that those are the only reckless drivers on the road.  I also noticed a strong correlation between aggressively reckless driving and driving extremely low-cost dilapidated cars or having carloads of many young men in any type of vehicle.  What always seems to stand out the most, though, were the luxury cars that were routinely driven in a way that put my life in danger only to save a fraction of a second travel time for the driver.  It gave the impression that my life was not worth the seconds saved by the driver.

As it turns out, Paul Piff, a social psychology researcher at the University of California Berkeley, has recently studied this very issue.  Not surprisingly, his data backs up what was already quite clear.  The affluent tend to have a feeling of entitlement over others.  They do feel that they are better and more worthy than others, particularly when driving.

“The Age of Entitlement: How Wealth Breeds Narcissism”

“The Money-Empathy Gap: New Research Suggests That More Money Makes People Act Less Human. Or at Least Less Humane.”

“Does Money Make You Mean”

The connection here is pretty clear if you view “money” as a unit of measure of “power” (arising from a milieu of credit and moral debts), and then consider the age-old saying often attributed to Lord Acton, “power corrupts.”  That ties this, by only an slight degree of separation, to psychology research like Philip Zimbardo’s “Standford Prison Experiement” (see also Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil).

There is also the question of so-called “Lexus lanes” that allow drivers to pay a premium for access to special, uncongested traffic lanes.  These more or less reinforce feelings of entitlement.  But that’s also a whole other issue.

It is good to see research like this being done.  It furthers efforts like The Spirit Level that show how inequality produces worse outcomes for everyone.

Loïc Wacquant – Crafting the Neoliberal State

Link to an article on the substitution of prisons for social welfare programs in the USA by Loïc Wacquant, author of Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (2009), which came out around the same time as Michelle Alexander’s similar (but more well-known) The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010).

“Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare, Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity”

Work

A recent advertorial, “Why You Hate Work,” by some consultants published by the New York Times (NYT) makes a number of false distinctions — just the kind NYT loves.  Basically, the idea is that corporate management should implement certain policies to make employees more “engaged”, “productive”, “satisfied”, etc.  Not discussed is whether employers should be forced to do these things, or whether structural changes should be implemented on a national (or international) scale that render the decisions of such managers obsolete.  The authors state, “Employees are vastly more satisfied and productive, it turns out, when four of their core needs are met . . . ”  Curiously, Simon Patten, the former economics chair of the Wharton School of Finance and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania, advocated something quite similar (yet more practical) in the 19th century.  “Patten recognized that rising productivity, public investment, and wage levels went together. That is what enabled well-fed, well-trained, and well-housed American labor to undersell ‘pauper labor.'” (See “Simon Patten on Public Infrastructure and Economic Rent Capture”).  The NYT authors presume employee productivity as a desired objective.  Undiscussed is the degree to which productivity gains flow to employees vs. employers.  Patten knew better.  He avoided circular normative logic that underlies the NYT op-ed (that is, employers undermine employees, then must find a way to “motivate” said employees to accept the prior undermining).  The NYT piece is advocating that the capital strike that began around 2007, which today requires efforts by corporate management to convince employees that there is no alternative (TINA) and they should support and assist with the erosion of their own rights and powers that the capital strike represents.  Obviously, this does require skill.  How do you convince people to act against their own interests?  Clearly, such a challenge requires consultants.  Most likely, many consultants.

Anyway, a better point has been argued by anthropologist David Graeber.  In a recent interview with Thomas Frank, Graeber expounded further on the themes in his essay, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.”  The NYT op-ed authors fall into the basic pattern of worthless glad-handing of corporate executives (ahem, the client base of these consultants), which the late sociologist Pierre Bourdieu dismissed as essentially self-justifying drivel created by business for business in his excellent book The Social Structures of the Economy.  Graeber goes considerably further than the consultants advertising/opinion in the NYT by suggesting that workers, as citizens, have the right to control what kind of social and economic circumstances they live in.  The NYT authors instead focus on selling ways management can trick employees into accepting a system they have no control over.  None of this should come as much of a surprise.  The authors freely admit (in public!) that they partnered with The Harvard Business Review, which might be labeled a terrorist organization in a more just world (because they promote fear among “noncombatant” workers to advance a marketplace war between business entities, and by owners/management against workers).

Veblen’s Precedent for Cloward/Piven Strategies

Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (1977) was a watershed.  Mark and Paul Engler recently wrote a an excellent summary “Can Frances Fox Piven’s Theory of Disruptive Power Create the Next Occupy?” (another decent introduction to her work is Who’s Afraid of Frances Fox Piven?).  The basic premise of the Piven/Cloward theory of action, dubbed the Piven/Cloward Strategy when first suggested in 1966 with regard to welfare enrollment, is that the poor–generally powerless–can exert some power, under certain circumstances, by collectively disrupting the smooth function of social institutions, and can make gains relative to vested interests as institutional actors hasten to restore some form of stability.  The more provocative aspects of the theory and associated strategy are that unions are only effective in early stages, when they are initially formed.  Once established, their own institutional dynamics tend to subvert the disruptive potential that is their primary source of power.  Another aspect that Piven explored in greater detail in later work was that conventional channels of activity (electoral politics) generally co-opt or mute disruptive activities, and have the effect of neutralizing and undermining the demands of poor people’s movements.

But Piven/Cloward’s theories here also had precedent.  The cross-disciplinary work of economist Thorstein Veblen raised similar points that merit further examination.  The early chapters of The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904) discuss how “vested interests” use “sabotage” to withhold efficiency and disrupt the interrelated parts of a complex industrial economy to extract wealth for personal gain and the expense of the wider community’s general well-being:

“business men…have an interest in making …disturbances of the system large and frequent, since it is in the conjunctures of change that their gain emerges.”

The Theory of Business Enterprise (1904)

For a modern example, think how the Enron corporation fabricated blackouts/brownouts to drive up energy prices.  This is Veblen’s notion of “sabotage” at its purest.  But Veblen didn’t view the actions of a company like Enron as the exception, but rather the rule.

“It is a matter of course and of absolute necessity to the conduct of business, that any discretionary businessman must be free to deal or not to deal in any given case; to limit or withhold the equipment under his control, without reservation. Business discretion and business strategy, in fact, has no other means by to work out its aims. So that, in effect, all business sagacity reduces itself in the last analysis to judicious use of sabotage.”

An Inquiry Into the Nature of Peace, and the Terms of Its Perpetuation (1917)

Veblen returned to this theme in his final book, Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America:

“any person who has the legal right to withhold any part of the necessary industrial apparatus or materials from current use will be in a position to impose terms and exact obedience, on pain of rendering the community’s joint stock of technology inoperative to that extent.

“Ownership of industrial equipment and natural resources confers such a right legally to enforce unemployment, and so to make the community’s workmanship useless to that extent. This is the Natural Right of Investment.

“Plainly, ownership would be nothing better than an idle gesture without this legal right of sabotage. Without the power of discretionary idleness, without the right to keep the work out of the hands of the workmen and the product out of the market, investment and business enterprise would cease. This is the larger meaning of the Security of Property.”

Absentee Ownership and Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America (1923)

The use of sabotage was not limited to the captains of industry.  In the first chapter of The Engineers and the Price System, “On the Nature and Uses of Sabotage,” though, Veblen makes an interesting point:

“Any strike is of the nature of sabotage, of course. Indeed, a strike is a typical species of sabotage. That strikes have not been spoken of as sabotage is due to the accidental fact that strikes were in use before this word came into use. So also, of course, a lockout is another typical species of sabotage. That the lockout is employed by the employers against the employees does not change the fact that it is a means of defending a vested right by delay, withdrawal, defeat, and obstruction of the work to be done. Lockouts have not usually been spoken of as sabotage, for the same reason that holds true in the case of strikes. All the while it has been recognized that strikes and lockouts are of identically the same character.

“All this does not imply that there is anything discreditable or immoral about this habitual use of strikes and lockouts. They are part of the ordinary conduct of industry under the existing system, and necessarily so. So long as the system remains unchanged these measures are a necessary and legitimate part of it.

***

“And yet, that extent and degree of paralysis from which the civilized world’s industry is suffering just now, due to legitimate businesslike sabotage, goes to argue that the date may not be far distant when the interlocking processes of the industrial system shall have become so closely interdependent and so delicately balanced that even the ordinary modicum of sabotage involved in the conduct of business as usual will bring the whole to a fatal collapse. The derangement and privation brought on by any well organized strike of the larger sort argues to the same effect.”

The Engineers and the Price System (1921)

He talks about militant worker activism (like Coxey’s Army) as being no better or worse than lockouts by employers.  But Veblen clearly sees the context as being different.  He equates the two in order to argue for a leveling and equalizing effect.  Establishing worker rights to strike on par with the rights of business to engage in a capital strike has the effect of promoting fairness.  Indeed, in The Theory of Business Enterprise he notes that strikers “seek their ends by extra-legal means of coercion” because the court system is set up on terms favorable to businessmen, not to workers, and exigencies thus force extra-legal action like strikes.  Alan Nasser wrote a rather excellent article discussing this topic, “Political Power Made Invisible
Who Strikes, and Against Whom?,” and elaborated in a contemporary setting how Veblen’s insights are fundamentally correct, yet also how economists and the media tend to selectively ignore capital strikes and business cycle fluctuations in this context.

Cloward and Piven aren’t linked to Veblen too frequently.  More common would be a link from Cloward/Piven to Karl Polanyi, who worked independently in a manner somewhat redundant with Veblen, but who wrote in a more “acceptable” and standardized academic format.  The extension of Veblen that Cloward and Piven offered was to extend the theory beyond the purely economic sphere.  They emphasized how government bureaucrats and (especially) politicians sought stability and, above all, predictability.  These things are undermined by disruptive action.  Attempts to restore stability offer opportunities for concessions and advancement of the interests of the poor that would not be granted otherwise.  Like Veblen said about the courts being set up on terms favorable to business rather than workers, the electoral system is not set up on terms favorable to the poor.  And so, Cloward and Piven made the keen observation that the poor have only certain options to exercise any power to advance their interests to achieve greater fairness.

The recently deceased historian Gabriel Kolko wrote a book, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History 1900-1916 (1963), that also took a similar approach in taking a fresh look at the so-called “progressive era” to find that business interests aligned with government (as part of a “regulatory capture” dynamic) to suppress disruption to better protect their vested interests.  Kolko’s book was well researched and fit quite squarely in line with Veblen’s original theories.

A somewhat similar political debate between Stephen D’Arcy and Vijay Prashad was also published recently, “Are Riots Good for Democracy?” D’Arcy emerges with the better argument, because Prashad seems to “throw the baby out with the bathwater” in being cowed by certain atrocities of riots while neglecting atrocities that riots often are meant to redress.  As D’Arcy notes, not all riots are created equal, and they aren’t always a force for good.  Prashad is certainly correct that riots, and disruption more generally, can be used as a pretext for a subsequent authoritarian crackdown (to wit: German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder made Die dritte generation [The Third Generation] to emphasize the idea that the Baader-Meinhoff Red Army Faction’s militant “urban guerrilla” actions were used to justify a regressive crackdown; or read a history of the Haymarket Riot and its aftermath, like James R. Green’s Death in the Haymarket (2006)).