Tag: Sociology

Paul Kivel – Social Service or Social Change?

Link to an article by Paul Kivel:

“Social Service or Social Change?”

Bonus links:  “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex” and “Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundations at Home and Abroad” and “Foundations and Cultural Imperialism An Interview with Robert Arnove” and “The Ford Foundation in the Inner City: Forging an Alliance with Neighborhood Activists” and “Science of Science and Reflexivity” and Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History and Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism and Under the Mask of Philanthropy (plus review) and No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy (this one is underwhelming) and “The Real Agenda of the Gates Foundation” and Foundations of the American Century: The Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller Foundations in the Rise of American Power and Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalism and “The Philanthropy Racket or: How The People Destroying the World Anoint Themselves Its Saviors” and “Medicalizing Society” and  Nonprofit Enterprise in the Arts: Studies in Mission and Constraint and “Philanthropic Power and Development: Who Shapes the Agenda?” and “Professional Societies: Corporate Service, or Public Services for You!” and Against Charity (plus review) and Wrong Kind of Green and “Class Struggle and the Parable of an Environmental Victory” and “The Philanthropy Hustle” and “The Problem With Capitalist Philanthropy” and “The Ultrarich Don’t Deserve Our Gratitude for Small Acts of Philanthropy” and “How the Ultrawealthy Use Private Foundations to Bank Millions in Tax Deductions While Giving the Public Little in Return” and “The Price of Civil Rights: Black Lives, White Funding, and Movement Capture” and “An Interview With John Stauber on the Impotence of the Progressive Movement” and “Which Side Are ‘Liberal’ Lawyers On?” and “The Political Economy of Effective Altruism” and “Reputational Laundering” Definition and Stephen Gowans Comment (“Change the institution, or make people behave in a contra-institutional way?“) and The Good Woman of Setzuan and “Socialism and Religion” (“those who live by the labour of others are taught by religion to practise charity while on earth, thus offering them a very cheap way of justifying their entire existence as exploiters and selling them at a moderate price tickets to well-being in heaven.”)

Michael Hudson – Euphemise to Conceal

Link to parts of an interview with Michael Hudson, discussing his book J Is for Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception:

“Euphemise to Conceal”

“Alluring Infrastructure Income”

“Focus on Capital Gains”

“Why Deficits Hurt Banking Profits”

“Retirement. What Social Obligation?”

Bonus links: Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power and Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society and “Social Chauvinism” (a critique easily leveled at Hudson’s admiration for protectionism)

Demos – Understanding the Racial Wealth Gap

Link to a report by Demos:

“The Asset Value of Whiteness: Understanding the Racial Wealth Gap”

Selected quote: “This paper explores a number of these popular explanations for the racial wealth gap, looking at individual differences in education, family structure, full- or part-time employment, and consumption habits. In each case, we find that individual choices are not sufficient to erase a century of accumulated wealth: structural racism trumps personal responsibility.”

Bonus link: “From the Cold War to Clinton: How Liberals and Conservatives Have Separated Race From Class”

Leo Tolstoy – The Kingdom of God Is Within You

Quote from Chapter XII “Conclusion – Repent Ye, For the Kingdom of Heaven Is at Hand” from The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), by Leo Tolstoy:

“the organization of our society rests, not as people interested in maintaining the present order of things like to imagine, on certain principles of jurisprudence, but on simple brute force, on the murder and torture of men.

“People who own great estates or fortunes, or who receive great revenues drawn from the class who are in want even of necessities, the working class, as well as all those who like merchants, doctors, artists, clerks, learned professors, coachmen, cooks, writers, valets, and barristers, make their living about these rich people, like to believe that the privileges they enjoy are not the result of force, but of absolutely free and just interchange of services, and that their advantages, far from being gained by such punishments and murders as took place in Orel and several parts of Russia this year, and are always taking place all over Europe and America, have no kind of connection with these acts of violence. They like to believe that their privileges exist apart and are the result of free contract among people; and that the violent cruelties perpetrated on the people also exist apart and are the result of some general judicial, political, or economical laws. They try not to see that they all enjoy their privileges as a result of the same fact which forces the peasants who have tended the forest, and who are in the direct need of it for fuel, to give it up to a rich landowner who has taken no part in caring for its growth and has no need of it whatever—the fact, that is, that if they don’t give it up they will be flogged or killed.

***

“Simply because torture and murder are not employed in every instance of oppression by force, those who enjoy the exclusive privileges of the ruling classes persuade themselves and others that their privileges are not based on torture and murder, but on some mysterious general causes, abstract laws, and so on. Yet one would think it was perfectly clear that if men, who consider it unjust (and all the working classes do consider it so nowadays), still pay the principal part of the produce of their labor away to the capitalist and the landowner, and pay taxes, though they know to what a bad use these taxes are put, they do so not from recognition of abstract laws of which they have never heard, but only because they know they will be beaten and killed if they don’t do so.

“And if there is no need to imprison, beat, and kill men every time the landlord collects his rents, every time those who are in want of bread have to pay a swindling merchant three times its value, every time the factory hand has to be content with a wage less than half of the profit made by the employer, and every time a poor man pays his last ruble in taxes, it is because so many men have been beaten and killed for trying to resist these demands, that the lesson has now been learnt very thoroughly.

“Just as a trained tiger, who does not eat meat put under his nose, and jumps over a stick at the word of command, does not act thus because he likes it, but because he remembers the red-hot irons or the fast with which he was punished every time he did not obey; so men submitting to what is disadvantageous or even ruinous to them, and considered by them as unjust, act thus because they remember what they suffered for resisting it.

“As for those who profit by the privileges gained by previous acts of violence, they often forget and like to forget how these privileges were obtained. But one need only recall the facts of history, not the history of the exploits of different dynasties of rulers, but real history, the history of the oppression of the majority by a small number of men, to see that all the advantages the rich have over the poor are based on nothing but flogging, imprisonment, and murder.

“One need but reflect on the unceasing, persistent struggle of all to better their material position, which is the guiding motive of men of the present day, to be convinced that the advantages of the rich over the poor could never and can never be maintained by anything but force.

“There may be cases of oppression, of violence, and of punishments, though they are rare, the aim of which is not to secure the privileges of the propertied classes. But one may confidently assert that in any society where, for every man living in ease, there are ten exhausted by labor, envious, covetous, and often suffering with their families from direct privation, all the privileges of the rich, all their luxuries and superfluities, are obtained and maintained only by tortures, imprisonment, and murder.”