The Job

Thanks to Dirk van Nouhuys for sending this commentary on the financial crisis, from the Festival international de très courts ("very short" videos):

The Job

Don't miss it!

2 crises

No answers today, just a question. Today's El País is dominated by two "stories", as journalists call them, though neither one has a clear narrative yet. One is the massive bombardment and now invasion of Gaza by the Israelis. The other is the gobal financial crisis. My question: How will these two huge events affect each other? Because in our closely interconnected world, the vibrations of any major shock are felt throughout the network.

There are other big "stories", i.e., events waiting for their narrative. The Russian pressure on the Ukrainians and the constricting of gas pipelines to most of Europe, for example. The big offensive by the government of Sri Lanka, etc. And down through other events whose ripples beyond their own regions may be felt less intensely. But for now let's just look at the first two.

Did the financial pinch have anything to do with the Israeli move against Gaza? War has always proven an excellent distraction from other troubles. And with no economic surplus, what else besides war can the candidates for premier offer to their citizens? The far more severe pinch in Gaza may also have a lot to do with the Hamas government's allowing, or encouraging, reckless and senseless missile attacks on Israeli civilians. People in the strip are so frustrated that they have to lash out at somebody, and Hamas must figure, better the Israelis than us.

And how will this huge escalation of violence affect global finance? Is it going to escalate the already widespread hostility toward Jewish financiers (and toward the far more numerous non-Jewish financiers wrongly suspected of being Jewish, just because they are financiers)? Probably it will, I think, and that is likely to be a pretext for more isolationist, nationalist economic policies by, for example, Muslim countries in Asia (Indonesia among them). Will it make a rapprochement of the U.S. and the Arab countries even more difficult, because of the U.S.'s knee-jerk support of Israel? Almost certainly. And is that going to further limit the U.S.'s power to affect markets?

As I said, no answers, just questions. These are some of the things to watch for, I think. In the long run, I don't think this invasion is good for the Jews or for anybody. Though it might be good for the short run aspirations of some Israeli politicians.

Middle East finance headlines (Financial Times)
Rice cancels Mideast trip to help with financial crisis (CNN)
Turning a crisis into an opportunity. By Nehemia Shtrasler (Haaretz)
Finance Minister: No Israel banks will collapse in global crisis (Haaretz)

Crunching numbers, saving people

Collier, Paul. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Paul Collier deserves -- and has received -- great credit for developing a method of statistical comparison for identifying the very poorest countries and estimating the costs of such poverty to them and potentially to all of us (short life spans, HIV and other devastating diseases, political violence that spreads beyond their borders, etc.). He and his co-researchers are especially keen on finding correlations between such wretched conditions and various geographical, demographic and historical factors, and comparing them to countries which share many such characteristics but that have broken out of poverty -- most notably, India and China, still beset by many problems but developing.

Very briefly: Collier has identified 58 countries, together comprising about 1/6 of the world's population or nearly 1,000,000,000 people, which are not only extremely poor, but which are not developing at all -- that is, they are experiencing no economic growth whatever. He declines to provide the full list, but in the course of the book he names several: most are in Africa, others include "Haiti, Laos, Burma [Myanmar], and the Central Asian countries, of which Afghanistan has been the most spectacular" development failure.

These are all places caught in "traps" of: recurring civil conflict, an abundance of a single natural resource whose exploitation (mostly for the benefit of outside corporations and the local corrupt elite) causes neglect of all other productive areas, being "landlocked with bad neighbors," and/or suffering "bad governance in a small country."

His question: How to get these countries out of the "traps" of undevelopment and get their economies growing?

Aid doesn't work, because too much of it is eaten up in corruption and inefficiency -- though without it, people's lives would be even worse. Collier gives several woeful examples, but also singles out a few heroes who have struggled to limit or end corruption, for example in Nigeria and Uganda.

Military intervention could work very well in those places wracked by civil war and terrorism, if only the richer countries dared to use it and if they avoided the disastrous misuse in the U.S.'s spectacular and self-defeating deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. The other African countries are themselves too poor to intervene effectively in Sudan, for example, or the Congo, and would need the troops, arms and logistical support of richer countries. To be seen as legitimate, such intervention would have to come at the invitation of groups in the country or region that had wide popular support. And without raising any suspicion that the intervenors' true goal was to seize natural resources, e.g., oil. Unfortunately, in Collier's view, the U.S.'s bungling in Iraq has given intervention such a bad name that when the French, for example, send troops to a civil war zone, they are ordered to stay in barracks when the fighting breaks out. And we all remember the passivity of the Dutch UN troops in Srebrenica. UN troops in the Congo also seem to be more concerned for their own safety than that of the populace.

"By contrast, the British intervention in Sierra Leone [in 2000], Operation Palliser, has been a huge success. It has imposed security and maintained it once the RUF [rebel movement] was disposed of. The whole operation has been amazingly cheap," Collier writes (p. 127). Another example that seems to me to have been very positive (though I think Collier would disagree) was Cuban intervention in Namibia and Angola, saving both countries from far worse fates -- but of course that occurred during the Cold War, which distorted everything and made all sides' motives suspect.

"So we should intervene," says Collier, "but not necessarily everywhere. Sierra Leone rather than Iraq is the likely future of intervention opportunities in the bottom-billion countries. Look at the contrasts between the two situations. In Sierra Leone our [i.e., British] forces were invited in by the government and hugely welcomed by the local population. In Sierra Leone we could not be accused of going in for the oil, as there wasn't any." (pp. 128-9)

We also need to change laws and charters in the developed world, for example, banking secrecy regulations that permit corrupt dictators to steal their countries' wealth and hide it. (He has much more to say about laws and charters, including a proposed charter for world democracy.)

Finally, he proposes "trade policy for reversing marginalization" -- ending, for example, protective tariffs for European and U.S. agricultural interests that make it impossible for African cotton producers, etc., to compete in the only lucrative markets.

There's a lot of good stuff here, and Collier and his team keep on producing more such pointed analyses. Check out the Paul Collier home page. His statistical work is a good starting point for finding solutions, but it is only a starting point. To understand phenomena such as massive corruption, suicidal terrorism (such as in Mumbai this week), and the consequences and contradictions of rapacious global capitalism requires much more than number-crunching. The "traps" he lists are not all really comparable phenomena, though the statistical method showing only their numerical consequences make them appear so. Being landlocked with few natural resources is a geographical and historical phenomenon. As Collier sagely remarks, the reason so many such countries are in Africa is that, in other parts of the world, territories that are landlocked and have few resources don't become countries -- so that is a historical political problem, dating from the way colonial powers carved up the continent.

"The Natural Resource Trap," i.e., being "too rich" in petroleum, or diamonds, or some other valuable commodity, is not a geographical fatality at all. What makes such natural wealth a "trap" rather than an asset is obviously a problem of the way markets are organized and who has the means to exploit someone else's wealth. Bolivia under Morales, for example, is working to turn its natural gas into an asset.

But if we can think along two or more tracks at the same time, keeping in mind the statistical correlations that Collier and other investigators generate while also thinking broadly and deeply about markets and other social process in the manner of, say, Ulrich Beck, Alain Touraine and others, we may seriously address these problems.

One minor quibble: The cover declares the book a winner of the "Lionel Gelber Prize for excellence in writing on international relations." It seems to me that the writing would have been more excellent had Collier found a better metaphor than "traps" to describe those difficulties and had he not repeatedly referred, with no apparent irony, to landlocked countries as "missing the boat" (of development).

Mark Engler on Obama's Economic Mandate

More intelligent analysis by friend and colleague Mark Engler in this BBC video interview.

The larger effects of Obama

The well-known Spanish-language journalist Fidedigna Fuentes has just interviewed me on the larger meaning of the Obama presidential campaign, for the journal Iberomundo. There I try to explain the phenomenon to readers from Latin America and Europe, who are both puzzled and fascinated by these developments. You can read the interview (that is, if you read Spanish) on the blog of my colleague Baltasar Lotroyo. Ms. Fuentes titled the piece, “¿Presidente Obama? - EE.UU. y el mundo”.

Alternatives: Cuba tries to make a socialism that grows

But can it succeed? The Cubans have proven so resilient and Cuban institutions so resistant to joining the "There is no alternative" crowd, that they may just make this work. It's a small economy, but its methods may again -- as they have been repeatedly through the 1960s and 1970s -- be a model for other low-income countries. From the Financial Times: A revolution to repair: New friends come to the aid of Raúl’s Cuba By Richard Lapper

Alternatives to and within capitalism

Baumol, William J., Robert E. Litan, and Carl J. Schramm. Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2007.

Baumol et al. start from the common premise that, since the collapse of the Socialist bloc, "There is no alternative" ("TINA") to capitalism, by which they mean an economy where “most or at least a substantial proportion of its means of production -- its farms, its factories, its complex machinery -- are in private hands, rather than being owned and operated by the government." (p. 62) Socialized ownership of the means of production and central planning collapsed with the Berlin wall, and what they call “precapitalist” economies, as in Afghanistan and Somalia, where the only property rights are those defended by warring clans, are just not viable.

But, the authors insist, there are at least four alternative forms of capitalism, some much better at promoting growth and prosperity than others.

"Oligarchic” capitalism, where a few rich families own everything that produces wealth and make sure nobody else gets any, is “bad” capitalism. Not just because of its unfairness, but because the oligarchs are too ignorant, too indolent and too self-occupied to invest in anything productive. Of course, they really don't have a lot of margin -- after their country club dues, luxury estate management, imported automobiles, foreign vacations, and other obligations of their class, they have to spend much of their country's wealth on army and police to shoot, beat or intimidate those pesky peasants who want to change things -- which, as we have seen in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Vietnam and other places, can get very, very expensive if those rebels are serious, well-organized, and can get funded somehow.

“State directed” capitalism, where the state picks sectors or even particular firms to favor (e.g. by subsidies or high tariffs against competing imports), hasn't proven efficient either. A major historical example was the "import substitution" policy promoted by Argentinian economist Raúl Prebisch for Latin America. The problem is that governments -- being run by human beings with their own interests and prejudices and corruptibilities -- are not very good at making such decisions. Most likely, the minister of the economy will pick the companies run by his brother-in-law. Or, even absent corruption, the inertia of bureaucracy (and pressure from interest groups) will keep the government supporting a sector whose growth potential has passed.

"Big firm" capitalism, free from the strictures of government, is better (for promoting growth), since big firms have the capital and need to invest. But they tend to be cautious and (with a few exceptions, like Bell Labs in the old days and Apple today) discourage innovation.

"Entrepreunerial" capitalism -- meaning the kind that breaks into the market by inventing new technology or new marketing techniques -- is the real hero of this book. But the wild-eyed entrepreneurs can survive and grow only if they get the backing of capital from big firms, until they turn into big firms themselves. When that happens, they either have to make special efforts to keep the innovation going (e.g., Bell Labs or Xerox) or look outside to back and buy rights to inventions made by new entrepreneurs. That kind of marriage (big firm/small innovator) is what has given the U.S. economy its dynamism in recent years and is the best bet for other economies seeking to grow.

In the real world (as the authors recognize), every economy has some mix of the four forms. The U.S. (like France and other economies) protects its agribusinesses ("state-directed" capitalism), and "big firm" and "oligarchic" systems are sometimes hard to distinguish. (E.g., the big business families of Italy, or the Fords in the U.S., where business power is hereditary.) The important question is which form prevails.

Baumol et al. also lay out four elements (they like that number) that they think are necessary to encourage such big firm/small innovator successes:

1, ease of forming or abandoning a business (if a company cannot declare bankruptcy if things go wrong, then the risks may be too high for anybody to start up in the first place);
2, rewards (they mean big money payoffs) for ”socially useful entrepreneurial activity." They specify "socially useful" to exclude such entrepreneurial activity as cocaine production and distribution, hedge-fund manipulation and other big money-making enterprises.
3, economic growth should be favored over redistribution of existing wealth -- which sounds like, Let the rich get richer as long as they invest in things that will make us all richer.
4, continuing incentives to companies to innovate and grow.

The most important thought I took from the book was what they call their “fundamental proposition”:

that economies are complicated systems that cannot be reduced to one or two central driving forces, and cannot be turned around by applying one or even a few of the policy prescriptions various development economisys or institutions have recommended over the years. (p. 59)

In sum, I found the book useful in clarifying categories (such as those four types of capitalism), though its arguments are too general and abstract, and say too little about the political forces involved, to explain much about the current world recession, or the surge in the price of oil, or what's at stake in the Georgia-Russia conflict (we know economics is a big part of it, but just how?) or other issues.

I'm not convinced that "There is no alternative," that growth and prosperity are impossible unless all major means of production are in private hands. We'll have to see if China, for example, can continue to innovate with its mix of capitalism and socialism. Or if Hugo Chávez's "Twenty-First Century Socialism" (which so far appears to be another mix of state-ownership and private enterprise) matures and survives. But it is obvious that there are many alternative systems within capitalism.

The un-empire

You may have seen this Mother Jones article on the Pentagon study of historical precedents for the supposed "American empire."

Don't Know Much About History

A nice, silly contract for those five authors. It may make amusing reading for the brass hats, but the smart ones (not all generals are uncultured -- Petraeus actually appears well read) will pay little attention. The U.S.'s global reach is actually of a very different order than any of the four supposed precedents, and each of them was fundamentally different from the others. The Roman empire is the only one of the four that offers any useful comparisons, but the likeness is also deceptive. I'll have to give this more thought, but here's a first impression: Rome extended its power from Rome itself, over many centuries, first conquering its immediate hinterland in central Italy and subjugating Etruscans et alii, then extending its frontiers until it ran into other empires to the south and east (especially Carthage) and more "barbarous" tribes west (Gaul, Hispania, Brittania) and north (Germania et al.), and Rome's internal transformations over those centuries including numerous civil wars, assassinations and other treacheries.

U.S. expansion has developed in the opposite way. Yes, the Eastern Seaboard states progressively conquered territories on their frontiers (e.g., in the war with Mexico and the "Indian" wars). But the larger, world-wide expansion of U.S. power was not generated mainly from Washington or New York or any other U.S. city, the way Roman power was generated from Rome. Instead, those other parts of the world have transformed the U.S. and created those cities (NY, LA especially) as foci for further transformation. Globalization, the collective force of people all over the planet (those huge immigrant streams, and then movements of capital), has produced many foci for concentrating and emitting its force (Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Montreal, Quebec, Sydney, Johannesburg and others), places that didn't even exist before the modern (post-Columbus) era, each competing with all and all of them stimulating ever faster, denser relations of global power. The U.S. is the supreme product of globalization, not its original author.

This is just a rough statement of an idea I want to explore. My strong hunch is that the radically different origins and structure of U.S. power (compared to Rome and any other predecessor) foretells a radically different evolution and, ultimately, dispersion of that power. Dispersion rather than collapse is what I foresee.

The ones we really need to be afraid of

Here is an intense narrative that will help Americans understand how the sophisticated youth of Pakistan (and probably other countries of the East and South) see us, and why we should worry. Very quickly and movingly told. Click on title for my synopsis and comment.

Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. 1st ed. Orlando: Harcourt, 2007.

Thanks to Andrew Hull for recommending and lending me this book.

How to rule the world (and how not to)

Nicholas Sarkozy points the world's leaders to the right at the G8 summit conference in Hokkaido Toyako, Japan.

Engler, Mark. How to Rule the World. The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy. New York: Nation Books, 2008.

According to Mark Engler, the masters of wealth have split into two camps about how to rule the world, which leaves an opening for others of us to seize the terrain for a globalization that works for humanity.

In fact, as Engler is well aware and Marx pointed out long ago, the ruling groups have always been divided in many ways by their fierce competition for bigger slices of the wealth. But since World War II and Bretton Woods, they had come to accept a framework of cooperation, by which the elites of the most powerful industrialized economies protected one another from threats to their power from outsiders including any reform-minded elites in poorer nations, rebellious workers or underclass in their own countries, and of course revolutionary movements backed by the USSR or Communist China.

This cooperation was effected in large part by global institutions including the International Monetary Fund and World Bank (using debt-pressure to keep poor nations' economies safe for transnational investors from the U.S., Western Europe or Japan), the World Trade Organization (to make sure the poor nations didn't protect their own industries from rich nations' exports), NATO (backing the economic rules by armed force), and other treaties and agreements. Since one country, the U.S., had the greatest wealth and greatest military force in all these institutions, it was able to assure that they and others (including the U.N.) generally acted in accord with the interests of its own national military-industrial complex. The arrangement did cause occasional inconvenience for big U.S. corporations, however, since it required them to abide by the same rules that they demanded of everyone else and for important international actions to be agreed upon by all the major players.

The Bush government team changed all that. They have acted repeatedly outside the international institutions to make separate trade deals outside the WTO and IMF, and defied international law, the World Court and the UN (demanding exemptions from international law for U.S. troops abroad, invading Iraq, Guantánamo, etc.). This has split the world's elites, who no longer had much of a say in the actions of the world's biggest power.

The two camps of the would-be rulers of the world are those who want to go back to something like the older international system, and the U.S. go-it-aloners and their (very few) allies abroad. But the Bush-Cheney offensive of the past 8 years has brought both systems to a crisis. The old mechanisms of global control are broken. For example, almost all of Latin America has now freed itself of the destructive control that the IMF had over their economies. And the attempted new style of control, an unabashed and undisguised Pax Americana, is proving unsustainable. The U.S. cannot fight all the wars its policies provoke, and can't even win in the big ones it has got into now, in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the country's economic might also looks precarious.

Engler points out the fallacy of the slogan, "There is no alternative" to globalized capitalism as we know it. There is always the alternative of saying, as Bolivia has recently to water and gas companies seeking monopolies, "No." And there are always many alternatives within the system. What there is not is a single, unified opposition movement with a clearly defined program -- and that, Engler thinks, is just fine. And I agree with him. Our last single, unified opposition movement, very tightly unified, its cadres firmly disciplined and marching on orders, the world Communist movement, turned out to be too disciplined and rigid to adapt to ever changing, many-faceted realities.

"Capitalism" is not united and never has been, that has been its strength, what has allowed aspects of it to thrive and grow even as other expressions of it became obsolete and died. Opposition to particular capitalist abuses has to be as flexible and creative as capitalism itself. "Capitalism" is not one thing but many different ways for people to seek private profit from public goods, and there are just as many ways to try to re-channel that private profit motive into public welfare.

Engler is particulary good, and amusing, in his critiques of Thomas Friedman's global enthusiasms and the limitations of Joseph Stieglitz's acute denunciations of current practices (though without proposing a radical alternative). Also valuable is his chapter on how countries of Latin America -- backed in different ways by Venezuela's oil wealth and Brazil's enormous agricultural and industrial potential -- are changing the ways the game has to be played.

He gives us no assurance that we can make a better world -- that wiser people with more generous, solidary motives can come to rule it -- but he shows that there is a chance. As for what we can do, I think he's pointing us in the same direction as two older researchers whose books I've mentioned here. See my notes on Alain Touraine, Penser autrement, and Ulrich Beck, Power in the Global Age.

More on globalization

I meant to post this earlier. It's still relevant.
Truths for a new world of them and us by Philip Stephens

Why Bush & Co. are bad for capitalism

And why a lot of the smart big money is now backing Obama. Check it out.

Globalizers, Neocons, or…?

The World After Bush
By Mark Engler

Unsolicited opinions

This week's essay is not about Spain, but a couple of other conflicts that affect all of us. I probably don't know any more about them than you do, but we have to try to find out enough to orient our responses or we'll all fall prey to the demagogues. These opinions are not political positions but are tentative, hypotheses open to revision in the light of new information or a logical rebuttal.

Tibet, China and the West
Have the Chinese "invaded" Tibet and are they oppressing the Tibetans, somewhat like the Americans in Iraq? I've read claims that the Chinese population now greatly outnumbers the ethnic Tibetan population of Tibet due to deliberate population transfer by Peking. ("Chinese" in this context means mainly Chinese-speaking Han, though Mongol, Uighur or other non-Tibetan Chinese are also in the region.) First, I doubt that this is true; most sources state that over 90% of the region's overwhelmingly rural population is Tibetan, though Han may be more numerous in specific urban areas. Second, even if it were true, I don't see how uncoerced labor migration, whether or not encouraged by the government, could be offensive to human rights.

We've also seen calls for negotiation by Peking with the Dalai Lama, billed as the "spiritual leader" of the Tibetans. Anybody who allows anybody else to lead his or her "spirit" --Pope, Patriarch, Grand Rabbi, Ayatollah, Lama or shaman -- has to that extent given up a claim to personal, responsible citizenship. I have no way of knowing how many of the monks protesting in Lhasa have truly surrendered their will to that distant, exiled figure; I suspect that the ringleaders among them are just using him as they would a flag, to rally people around their own chosen cause.

My conclusions: I think what motivates the protests is panic in the face of inevitable and necessary social change. Tibet is being forced into the modern world, of which the Han immigrants are willy nilly representatives. And those adventurous Han, struggling to make a decent living (as they understand it) in a strange land, are the first victims. Probably -- almost certainly -- the police have overreacted to the protesters, because that's what frightened policemen do.

Boycotting the Olympics won't do anybody any good. And demanding Tibetan independence of China is just loony -- it can't happen now, or probably for a very long time, and wouldn't do the Tibetans any good. The only way even its advocates conceive it is as another state run by a religious institution, and we have enough of those to deal with. That's something people are still trying to get free of here in Spain.

Encouraging Peking authorities to negotiate with a committee of the protesters there in the country is probably a good idea -- not with the Dalai Lama or any other exile group claiming jurisdiction over people who never elected them.

Some sources I found helpful:
Tibet’s history, China’s power by George Fitzherbert, Open Democracy
Tibet's Population Put at 2.84 Mln in Gov't Survey, All-China Women's Federation
How many ethnic Chinese live in Tibet (population transfer)?, TULARC
Tibet's Economy Depends on Beijing, by Anthony Kuhn, NPR

Victory in Iraq?
The problem with Petraeus' promise of eventual victory in Iraq is that, as he conceives it, it is not a victory of American values and it certainly is not a victory for Iraq. What he's talking about is a victory for the American Armed Forces as an institution. He and Bush want to postpone the embarrassment of televised defeat, and are willing to sacrifice thousands more Iraqi and U.S. bodies so that the brass and pols can save face.

The only argument against U.S. withdrawal is that we would leave the country in a bloody chaos. As though that weren't what our troops have created. So they should stay there and be part of that horrible bloody chaos? Just get out! There is no good solution, no clear way to reduce the violence without killing all the potential killers, i.e., producing more violence. Our military presence is the defeat of American values -- “liberty and justice for all" -- and a costly delay of victory for and by Iraqis.

Uprooted

This week on my birthday, April 3, El País reported that Spain "will need 157,000 immigrant workers a year until 2020". This week in Madrid we saw two foreign films highlighting radically different aspects of the disruptive effects of global migration. The first was Fatih Akin's Auf der anderen Seite (2007) -- literally, "On the Other Side" (oddly translated "On the Edge of Heaven" in the English version), a moving, ambiguous story about suffering and reconciliation of Turks in Germany and Germans in Turkey. There are no really evil people here, just people who hurt (and even kill) others without intending to. Akin extracts marvelous performances from his cast.

Auf der anderen Seite -- that is, on the other side is the evil system exploiting the desperation and vulnerabilities of migrants, exposed in Ken Loach's powerful fictionalized exposé, It's a Free World. Angie, a high-energy single mother who unfairly loses her job at a labor-contracting agency, decides to start her own agency and discovers, first, by playing fairly she can't win competing with the guys who operate illegally, and, secondly, that there are big rewards and little risk for going illegal herself -- hiring workers without papers and then, when convenient, faling to pay them. This is a classic tragedy, in which a victim of the exploiters who starts out with a lot of sympathy for the Poles, South Americans, Iranians and other foreign job-seekers, becomes herself a heartless exploiter of immigrant labor.

Loach has done a tremendous job. But there are still other "other sides" to this story, and we'll keep trying to relate them. Maybe there are some things we can do, as ordinary citizens pressuring governments and companies, to ease the constant churning of families from poorer to more promising lands.

(For more on immigration in Spain, see the many articles from El País at La inmigración en España.)

Catching up on continuing issues

I'm in Madrid this week, again using the connection available to anyone at the Casa Encendida, where things have been -- well, if not exactly "encendidas" (burning), at least hopping, literally. A rock-rap group was performing, and the main hall was filled with people about a third my age, jumping up and down along with the band. It was fun to see such enthusiasm.

I promised a couple of weeks ago to give some thought to two persistent issues in Spain: violence against women, and the peculiarities of the housing crisis, or more accurately, crises (plural), because several different things are at work here.

I start from two assumptions, one modern and the other very ancient. The modern one, still resisted by theocrats and other believers in magic, is that "Everything is the way it is because it got that way." (Which I got from biologist D'Arcy Thompson via Daniel Dennett.) Like Charles Darwin and every other serious scientist since him, I am firmly convinced of this.

The older assumption is that everything is connected to everything else. The connections may be distractingly trivial (the butterfly's wing in one place and a traffic accident somewhere else, for example), but for large-scale social phenomena, probably useful.

Saying that women in Spain get beat up or killed by their partners because Spanish men are especially "machista" (an argument you sometimes hear) doesn't explain anything. Even if it were true, that is, if Spanish men were especially prone to such violence (which they aren't: check out the UN International Violence Against Women Survey), we'd have to ask, What made them that way? And in fact, about half the men involved aren't even Spanish but immigrants from as far away as Russia, or Bolivia, or Morocco, or the Ukraine. So how did THEY get that way?

Part of the answer is no doubt the stress on traditional family structures and expectations that occur in immigration. Great article on this: "No reconocí a mis hijos, ni ellos a mí" by J. J. Áznarez.

Casa Encendida is about to close down my computer (time's up), so I'll leave it at that for now. Thanks. More on this later. Hasta luego. I still owe you a comment on the housing problems, too.

All global politics is local

Viewed from an ocean away, the presidential campaign in the U.S. is highly entertaining but of only secondary importance. The principal question was settled months ago: no matter who wins in the U.S. in November, the neo-con offensive of the right-wing ideologues around Bush is over.

The lives of Spaniards, Colombians, Iraquis, Afghanis, Pakistanis, Somalis, Palestinians and others almost everywhere have suffered from Bush's "war on terror" -- which has mainly provoked more terror -- and his flagrant disregard of international laws. In Spain, people hold Bush & Co. responsible for Spanish casualties in Iraq (before Zapatero withdrew the troops) and the 11 March 2004 bombing of the Atocha train station (hundreds of civilian deaths), continuing turbulence of relations with Islam (especially problematic for Spain), the falling dollar (which hurts all European exports), a good part of world climate change, and a generally insulting attitude to the rest of the world. But now, to everyone's relief, Bush, Cheney and their crowd have been completely discredited at home by their failures in war, economy and public security (remember New Orleans!). Once they are gone from the scene, it matters much less whether the new president is McCain, Rodham-Clinton or Obama -- but it sure is fun to watch the turmoil (especially the unprecedented likelihood of either a woman or a half-African man as chief executive) from such a safe distance.

The view from here

The world looks different from this little town in Spain than it did from New York, where I lived for more than 25 years. Especially, America looks different -- the U.S. of A. and all the other countries of that hemisphere.

To start with, the U.S. electoral process is hard to explain to Spaniards. How is it that that whole huge country can sustain a campaign of so many months, mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people and costing millions or even billions of dollars, just so that the parties can choose their presidential candidates? Especially when, after all, there are only two parties, which should make things simpler than here. And why is that? Why has no third party emerged or survived, and why are there no important regional parties? The answers must be historical, geographical and legal, but back in the U.S., few of us ever raise the questions. I think they are things we should be asking ourselves -- there are alternative systems, representing a much wider range of views.

The campaign process fascinates Spaniards because so much here and everywhere else in the world seems to hang on the outcome. Or maybe not, because there's no guarantee that the next U.S. president, whoever he or she may be, will do anything about the most grievous of the problems created by his/her predecessors -- except probably closing down Guantánamo prison camp, as an embarrassment, though possibly continuing the tortures and abuses in other sites.

Hillary or Barack? my Spanish friends ask me. Gee, I don't know -- either one would open up the democratic process in the U.S., and that would be good. But how much difference will it make to the rest of the world? Nobody among the candidates has a convincing proposal for ending the war and undoing the damage to Iraq, and none even hints at a rational, comprehensive Mideast policy including a firm attitude toward Israel, such as cutting off support until that country begins obeying international law. And the lack of such a policy is a major stimulus (though not the only one) to the turmoil and violence spilling out from that region to Spain, Belgium, France, the U.K. and elsewhere.

The bizarre and complicated pre-presidential campaign in selected states of the United States seems likely to affect lives of everybody else, in some ways. But nobody knows how or -- except for voters in those selected states -- can do much about it. In a presidential system, the chief executive can get away with just about anything (invasions, wire-tapping, secret or overt funding of favored causes) as long as it doesn't affect the most powerful vested interests. That kind of power far beyond the country's borders seems really frightening, especially to people who don't even have the privilege of voting in the U.S. People who do have the privilege should be frightened, too.

The other parts of America also look different from here -- the parts that speak Spanish or Portuguese. Spain has complicated but basically good relations with those countries, most of the time, and takes them much more seriously than does the government of the U.S. For generations, migration flowed from peninsular Spain to those ex-colonies, where opportunities seemed much greater. Since the restoration of democracy in Spain and the 1982 constitution, that flow has been reversed -- because the economy has grown and civil rights have become much more secure than in much of Latin America. Spanish companies are heavily invested in every Latin American country, and the Spanish governments, national and regional, grant extensive aid in many of them.

But then, after looking from here at the globe, I turn back to Spain and see that a lot of what gets the media and some voters most excited is overblown. ETA terrorism is a real problem, but not one that deserves so much more press than the far graver threat of Islamist terrorism, which is international but includes Spanish institutions among its targets. The Islamists have killed many more Spaniards lately (Atocha, Casablanca), but the Basque ETA is useful in divisive politics -- the PP accuses the governing PSOE of being soft on ETA; focusing on Al Qaeda might foster national unity, which doesn't sell papers or mobilize party voters.

Behind ETA is the whole "nationalism" question, which seems archaic -- Do Basques or Catalans really want to become an independent new country in Europe? What would either of them gain, in terms of rights or economic benefits or anything else, in a Europe with a common currency and where national borders are becoming less and less relevant? As for the Basques, could they even really become a single, new independent country? For example, could the French Basques get along with the Spanish ones, or the sophisticated urbanites of Bilbao with the their rural countrymen? And could they even agree on what language, or which dialect of Basque, to use? What would they do about the very large non-Basque population of the so-called Basque Country? And so on -- questions that could only be settled by patient negotiations, not by bombs, kale borroka (street violence) or assassinations. Or by outlawing political parties.

And then there's "the Church" (because in Spain, there's only one billing itself as "the true Church"). Why does anybody pay attention to a group of robed fanatics so terrified by sex that they insist that their savior was born to a virgin? But those self-repressed men in purple have managed to infect others with their fears and close down perfectly legal abortion clinics in the past few weeks, creating enormous problems for hundreds of women. Some of those women have made their own internationalist response: they've maxed out their credit cards to flee to France, where the hospitals treat them courteously and professionally in the national health service.

The rose and the cross

To understand the rage of the Catholic bishops against the "radical laicism"of the Socialist government of Spain, you have to look at their precipitous fall from the power they exercised only 40 years ago. To understand the pusillanimity of the Socialist response, you have to look at the continuing erosion of what used to be the Party's base.

Spanish habits, desires and world-views, like those everywhere else in the world today, are changing too rapidly for the old institutions -- churches, parties, trade unions, etc. -- to contain them. The new organizational forms are multiplying as suddenly as the windmills of La Mancha in the 17th century, and the priests and politicos of today, like Don Quijote then, see them as monsters.

In the Spain governed by Francisco Franco, when there was only one Church and the schools taught that patriotism, religion and obedience to the caudillo were all the same thing, something like 98% of the people declared themselves to be Catholics. It was almost impossible to get married outside of the church -- to do so, a couple would have to demonstrate that they were not Catholics, or if they had been baptised, make a formal declaration of apostasy, and you can imagine how that would be seen. There was no divorce, of course. And no right to abortion, or even contraception, or even sex instruction.

As recently as 1998, 83.5% of Spaniards still said they considered themselves Catholic -- a huge drop from just 10 years before. By 2007, the figure had fallen to 77%. And vocations are way down. A cheery Catholic statistician pointed out that the news wasn't all bad, that there are still 10 million who go to mass at least once in a while. "In Spain there's no other social phenomenon as big as this, not even football!" he declared. (I'm not making this up. See Crisis de vocaciones en España.) Maybe. But fans of fútbol are a lot more enthusiastic. More than half (56.2%) of those self-declared Spanish Catholics tell researchers they never go to mass, and only 17% say they go only occasionally. So I don't know where they get that 10 million figure.

Most significant: 46% of Spaniards between 15 and 24 years old describe themselves as agnostics, atheists or indifferent to religion, only 10% say they are practicing Catholics and 39% nonpracticing Catholics.

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and the Partido Socialista Obrero have nothing to do with this phenomenon, except that they are trying (weakly) to catch up with it. And as the Church decays, the PSOE has no attractive alternative. The old discipline of the socialist trade unions, fighting for workers' dignity, is barely a memory. It's globalization, stupid! It's the Internet and all the other communications with a wider world, the shifting (and in some areas disapppearing) job market, a turmoil where priests offer no certainties and your family, church and school connections offer you no job security. Those 15-24 year olds know that they're on their own.

The PSOE at least seems to be aware of the problem, and some of its people are trying to redefine their socialism as increasing opportunities for youth. But the government has made such drastic concessions to the vociferous church hierarchy -- continuing to finance religous education in public schools and even increasing the state contribution to financing the church itself, failing to follow through on defense of the right of abortion -- that it is having difficulty keeping any youth loyalty. The Cardinals, meanwhile, egged on by the German pope, are howling in the rhetoric of the by-gone fascist era, but nobody but the PSOE (in their own time warp) and a fraction of those ten million mass-attenders wants to pay them much attention.

España se seculariza, El País, 10 de enero de 2008
Parties & church in Spain

Wolfowitz & the World Bank

On a subject mentioned several times on this blog, see Top 10 Reasons Why Paul Wolfowitz Was a Great World Bank President By John Cavanagh, AlterNet. Posted May 19, 2007. I especially liked reasons 6 and 9.

Which way is Left? (3) - Thinking otherwise

In previous notes, I've discussed the ideas of Ulrich Beck (Roots & Wings, 9/30) and, last Friday, Vidal-Beneyto (The Spanish Exception). In our recent visit to Paris I picked up the latest book of another sociologist, Alain Touraine, whose work has interested me since his publications 40+ years ago on workers' consciousness in São Paulo.

In the course of his long career, Touraine (Hermanville-sur-Mer, France, 1925) has not only explored consciousness and social change among the oppressed, but has also worked to facilitate both. With workers in Latin America and Poland, or more recently with Muslim women in France, his research design has been a guided dialogue (guided by sociologists) among activists, with the objective of helping those activists understand their situation better so as to act to change it. Since 1992, he has been summing up these experiences for the rest of us in a series of books, of which this is the latest:

Touraine, Alain. Penser autrement. Paris: Fayard, 2007.

He begins with a critique of what he calls the "dominant interpretive discourse" (discours interprétatif dominant) or DID of the past 60 years. The 19th century had effectively killed God (i.e., an eternal and unchanging moral arbiter beyond our reach), and then the horrors of the 20th century (world wars, genocide, etc.) destroyed our faith in God's replacement, Progress (better and juster society through the advance of science and technology). Then, before the world's thinkers could recover from the shock of World War II, they were split by an Iron Curtain that almost completely blocked new social thought on either side. The sudden and unexpected collapse of that curtain left intellectuals on both sides without any clear idea of where to go next and deepened their pessimism that human beings could even affect the course of our history. From such pessimism arose what Touraine calls the "dominant interpretive discourse", that our lives are shaped by forces beyond our control, and any contrary idea is an illusion or "false consciousness." According to the DID, our individual lives are ruled by material and sexual instincts that we barely understand and can't change, our social lives by the market, especially the mechanisms of global capitalism. This is a view of a society without "actors" (acteurs), that is, human beings capable of acting upon and changing their situation. Such a desperate view of our possibilities encourages people to behave completely narcissistically, with no sense of any larger social purpose or moral control. For those with power, it's all about money and how to get more of it, with no reason to regard the poor. For those without, it's also sometimes about money and survival, but also about something more precarious, personal identity, the precariousness of trying to be recognized as a human being with rights. Among the social consequences of such desperation among the poor are delinquency and "identity politics," including the many forms of fascism or extreme, exclusionary nationalism we see all over the globe, even in places thought to be as staid and stolid as Belgium and Switzerland (not to mention ex-Yugoslavia, Pakistan, Sudan, Guatemala, etc.) Among the social consequences of the irresponsible behavior of the powerful, eager to exploit and profit from the turbulence of the less powerful, are wars and global warming.

The second half of Touraine's new book is his proposal to "think differently" -- penser autrement. It is a continuation of an argument he has been developing in a series of books since 1992: that we don't need faith in either God or Progress, but in ourselves. And the self that you or I or Touraine needs to look to is what he calls "el double", the better self or ideal self that I or you imagine and constantly compare with our practical, here-and now selves: a self with rights, affirming its "right to have rights." Most importantly, this must be a self that recognizes equal "rights to have rights" in all the other selves we encounter.

Touraine insists that this is not just wishful thinking, but a description of something that is already happening all around us. In myriad groups, organized around concerns ranging from global warming to neighborhood deterioration or, what he takes to be the most significant change-agent today, women's rights, people are coming together, discovering their differences and how to accept and even profit from them in terms of personal growth. In the end, Touraine's proposed solution, or path to a solution, to the world's problems is parallel to and quite compatible with Ulrich Beck's: we liberate ourselves and one another through social movements, by which he means self-conscious organizations (conscious of our aims and of the conditions in which we struggle) to confront whatever form of oppression we experience.

Like Vidal-Beneyto, Touraine thinks that the "Left" is exhausted and has nothing more to offer us, but that is because both thinkers think of the Left the way the Left thought of itself in recent decades -- the decades of the "dominant interpretive discourse" where individuals counted for nothing, and only a mass organization led by an enlightened elite had a chance of effecting change. And since the forces of global capitalism were so strong and pervasive, the only change worth struggling for was a total, violent rupture with the present order, that is, revolution.

But the Left (at least in my mind) is and always has been something much more valuable and more permanent, since long before the French Communist Party (Touraine's bête noire) and similar outfits tried to congeal it. That something was never better expressed than in 1789, exactly 200 years before the collapse of Soviet communism: liberté, égalité, fraternité. And those are the values that Touraine is working to recover.

My earliest contact with this thinker, research still worth reading:

Touraine, Alain. "Industrialisation et conscience ouvrière à São Paulo." Sociologie du Travail Octobre-décembre.4 (1961).

Bolivarian Alternatives

A reader has asked about "Hugo Chávez' ALBA" which I mentioned as an example of inter-state associations that can limit multinational corporations' activity (see below, under headline "Globalization"). Here goes:

The Alternativa Bolivariana para los Pueblos de América is one of a half-dozen or more political-cum-trade associations among Latin American countries, in their attempts to establish policies and resources independent of the United States. In name and intention, "ALBA" is a direct response to "ALCA" (Área de Libre Comercio de las Américas ), Spanish acronym for the U.S.-sponsored Free Trade Area of the Americas.

ALCA/FTAA was founded at U.S. initiative in 1994 to reduce tariff barriers among 34 countries of the Western Hemisphere, that is, all of them except Cuba. Few, however, have actually joined, though the U.S. is still pushing the idea. Hugo Chávez has denounced it as another tool for imperialist exploitation by the U.S. The presidents of Brazil (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) and Argentina (Néstor Kirchner) have conditioned their participation on U.S. elimination of its agricultural subsidies (which appears unlikely), and there has also been loud objection to ALCA/FTAA's attempts to impose U.S. principles of "intellectual property" and patent protection, which the critics fear (with some historical basis) would be used to prohibit independent research and even exploitation of native plants which have been "patented" by a U.S. chemical company.

ALBA is the "alternative" proposed by Hugo Chávez. It does not exclude Cuba -- in fact, it was founded in Havana in 2004. (Just this week, Chávez surprised his Cuban hosts by proclaiming that "Cuba and Venezuela are really one government.") It does however exclude the U.S. It is "Bolivarian" both because Simón Bolívar (1783-1830) imagined a union of Spain's ex-colonies in America (he wanted to put its capital in Panama) and because it is Venezuela's treasury of bolívares (the national currency) that give it some plausibility. So far, besides Venezuela and Cuba, ALBA has negotiated agreements with Nicaragua, Bolivia, Haiti, and "bilateral agreements" (something less than full participation) with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, etc.

Along the same lines, but with more radical implications, Venezuela and Cuba (with Venezuela's money) have created a new alternative to the International Monetary Fund, from which Cuba was excluded and which Venezuela recently abandoned. It was launched in Haiti with with $1 billion of Venezuelan money. Most of the countries of South America have already agreed to participate in what has now been redefined as a development bank which (at Brazilian insistence) will limit its lending to South America (thus leaving out Nicaragua and Haiti and other Caribbean countries -- Venezuela presumably will continue lending to them outside of the new bank).

Globalization: Ours & theirs

A friend writes, à propos my review of Ulrich Beck's book on globalization (also at Newsvine ): "I remain skeptical of globalization, a neo-capitalist plan to push American, British and other corporate countries markets into small countries around the world. With global warming, there may be a counter trend of people taking care of their own needs on a smaller scale as global trade may be come less and less plausible."

Here's my response:

Globalization: Since we can't beat it, we've got to figure out how best to use it. Interconnectivity among people all over the globe is not a neo-capitalist plan, or any kind of plan at all. It's been happening since the first navigators began exploring, or even earlier, and has been happening faster and faster since the steam engine, telegraphy, aviation and now electronic, wireless media. Our problem is that corporations know how to use it more effectively than most of us, but they are vulnerable in several ways that make them subjectable to pressure from citizen groups and even from states. Chiefly, they must sell their products to survive (in competition with other corporations), making them vulnerable to consumer boycotts and receptive to any "good" publicity that gives them an edge over the competition (My friend Charlie Kernaghan's National Labor Committee exploits this vulnerability brilliantly). Secondly, corporations can pressure governments by threatening not to invest, but they MUST invest somewhere, so states and combinations of states (Hugo Chávez's ALBA, for example) can severely limit their activity. And there are other vulnerabilities (the precariousness of CEO's positions, for example) that smart trade unions (Reuther was a genius) have been able to use.

Beck points out that the "ant-globalizers" are themselves enthusiastic globalists, organizing NGOs world-wide. Focusing on smaller scale, local needs while taking into account the the global is exactly what he advocates : "glocalization" is the ugly word for it, "cosmopolitanism" is (to my ear) much better. He uses both words, but emphasizes cosmopolitanism, which, he reminds me, is an ancient Greek concept: loyalty to and concern for the "polis", the local city-state, AND for the "cosmos", i.e., everything. Global organizations he mentions for praise most often include Amnestiy International and Greenpeace.

Roots & wings

In his much-praised recent book, Ulrich Beck, German sociologist and professor at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich, demonstrates why neither nation-states nor international capital alone can save us from the many dangers of the "globalized" globe, and proposes an alliance of these two forces (which can't be ignored) with global "civil society" movements -- not to withdraw from globalization, but to engage it and realize its potential for making a better world for all of us.

Beck, Ulrich. Power in the Global Age: A New Global Political Economy. Cambridge, UK; Malden, MA: Polity, 2005.

Beck argues that: 1. The most urgent problems are now too global to be dealt with effectively by any state (global warming, pollution, exhaustion of carbon fuels, AIDS and other diseases, immigration, terrorism, etc.); 2. Transnational organizations (UN, WTO, NATO, etc.) are clumsy and ineffective, because they are still playing by obsolete "rules" of seeking common ground among states rather than among citizens; 3. Global capital is thus unrestrained by laws except companies' own "extralegal laws" of agreements among themselves, and exercises power over states by nonviolent means of threatening not to invest (in, say, Bolivia, if its laws become too uncomfortable) -- though companies do have to invest somewhere in order to survive, and fierce competition among and within companies makes their leaders' power precarious; 4. Global NGOs can exploit the vunerabilities of global capital (e.g., by organizing consumer boycotts) and pressuring states (e.g., by mobilizing voters and demonstrators), either to solve terrible humanitarian or ecological problems (e.g., Greenpeace, Amnesty International) or exacerbating them (e.g., al-Qaeda -- which is another kind of global nongovernmental organization).

The only hope for humanity is for these three forces (states, which are still necessary instruments of power, enlightened global capital, and global civil society) to combine forces as cosmopolitans, meaning that they feel themselves as belonging simultaneously to the cosmos and to the polis ("glocalization"), not to impose a Western vision of democracy or American culture or any other particular ideology ("universalism" of this sort is imperialism), but recognizing and accepting "the otherness of others" (die Andersheit der Anderen), different strokes for different folks, all recognizing one another's rights to live in a better world.

He says all that in far too many words (my favorite, from p. 286, is Globalisierungsbefürwortungsgegner, rendered by the translator as "opponents of the pro-globalization lobby") and occasionally surrealist metaphors (cosmopolitans should have "both roots and wings" he says over and over), repeats ideas and even phrases, and tells you many things that you already knew (e.g., Pres. Bush's attempt to impose his own sketchily-developed vision of a world order has had and can only have disastrous results, in Iraq and everywhere). Still, the basic ideas (the 4 points numbered above) are probably valid and well worth thinking about and maybe even acting upon -- the utopian (his term) cosmopolitan vision is a lot better than any of the alternatives under discussion.

Thanks to Professor Christopher Leo (University of Winnipeg) for suggesting the importance of this book. For other interesting postings by this astute reader of social theory, see his blog, Christopher Leo.

Reasons for optimism

Happy new year! Reasons for optimism in 2003:
1) Hugo Chávez will probably survive the employers' strike in Venezuela, which is good, and will also have to pay closer attention to the demands of the middle class, which is also be good.
2) Luiz Inacio da Silva, "Lula," is sure to advance economic democracy in Latin America's largest country, Brazil.
3) The Russians' stupid repression of Chechens, and the Chechens' reckless assaults on Russians, may so exhaust the patience of Russian citizens that they force Putin to change policy or get out.
4) Good people in Africa will keep trying (against terrible odds) to make democracy a habit -- Kenya may be the latest example.
5) The Israelis will run out of ways to punish Palestinians and out of patience with their own aggressive settlers, so more of them will demand that the government seek peace.
6) Palestinians are running out of families willing to sacrifice their children in suicidal attacks, so more of them will be willing to respond.
7) My latest novel, just completed, will become a best-seller and a movie, which will make me and my friends very happy.