European v. American political consciousness: II

Here's another response to my friend Don Monkerud's query, about differences in political awareness and attitudes between Europeans and people in the U.S. This from Dan Bessie, in France:

Without doing a long sociological study, I believe that greater European political sophistication (and less idiocy - though there is certainly plenty to go around, witness Le Pen in France, right wing quasi-fascist nationalism in the Serbian countries, etc) has to do with a number of factors:

1. They have a longer and more recent association with working class struggles than do Americans. Though much weaker than they once were, socialist and communist parties are both in power in several places (socialists in Spain), communists in a few hundred cities throughout France, Italy and in other countries, and most European countries have unions that still exert far greater influence on economic events than is true in America.

2. Europe has seen two world wars rage across it. Hardly anyone here, including the British, who were bombed extensively, has been untouched by it. Fascism never touched America in the same way, in spite of the number of American deaths during WW II.

3. Large numbers of Europeans travel internally, speak more than one language (several in some cases), and thus have developed a much broader international outlook than that developed by the more or less continuing provincialism of the vast majority of Americans.

4. European media is much more open to being critical of leaders than is American media. American media fears not having access to a candidate. If, for example, the corporate owners of American media conglomerates should let too many of their reporters and commentators really nail McCain-Palin on the issues and on their lies, and, heaven forbid, they should get ELECTED, they might not have ACCESS. So their motto is, I believe, "don't bite the hand that might feed." (Since access is their bread and butter.) Most European commentators are fairly open in their political views (not all, but many more than in the States. During the last election I was in the UK when the results were coming in, and commentators on almost every station were saying substantially the same thing - "What's going on with the Americans? They must be nuts to vote for that guy Bush again.")

5. And yes, far fewer Americas travel than Europeans (though again, a lot of Europeans travel internally).


Europe is not without problems. TV watching is big and addictive here just like there. There are almost as many dumb programs (but a much higher number of quality programs as well). This (France) is also very much a consumer society. But it's someone less focused on big splashy cars and huge TVs (though there are those as well) and more on things like family vacations, seeing that the kids are well prepared for college and careers, etc.

Most Europeans are aghast that America doesn't have a national health plan in place. Here (in France and most of Europe) it's taken as a national RIGHT. Most also know that in terms of overall quality of life - health care, education, environment, standard of living, all the other things that go into making up "the good life," that America (contrary to what most Americans believe) is not #1 (Actually, France is). America, depending on which report one reads, is either #3, 4, 5 or 6 in line).

Are we happier living in Europe? On the whole, yes. But neither Jeanne nor I were unhappy in America.

Our greater happiness, I guess, comes more from what we do than from the actual conditions of life. Because the conditions of our lives here are more or less the same as they were in the States, in terms of standard of living. Some things are much less expensive (health care, for example: Jeanne had to pay about $6000 per year for an "ex-pat" policy for major medical in California. And that one had a $5000 deductible PER INCIDENT. Since she's a member of the EU (as are all Brits), she gets the same health benefits she'd get in the UK - which is about 80% (like Medicare), and spouses, even if they're not EU citizens, get the same benefits. To make up the difference we pay an annual "top up" policy of about $1500 for the BOTH of us. When we go for a doctor visit (GP) we pay a flat 23 Euros. (about $32). More for specialists We get about 75% of that back from the top up plan. Except for a very few things, all medication is included in the top up plan, so it's virtually free.

Food in restaurants are more expensive in general. Food in supermarkets is about the same, but there are a lot of items that the French consider "essential" that are very low in cost (bread, wine of course, canned veggies, etc). Gas is very high (about $7.00 a gallon).

We left the U.S. for a number of very specific reasons:

1. Why do the same thing all our lives? (That's one thing that was very important for us.)

2. Jeanne has family in the UK and she can see them more often. (You can literally fly from here to the UK for as little as about $2.00 sometimes - plus taxes, bringing it to about $25.), because a low cost Irish airline, RyanAir, would rather fill seats in the off season than have an empty airplane, since they fly back and forth to several French airports several times a day.

3. We are central to lots of places to drive to. Barcelona, about 7 hours, Paris about 6, etc, etc. (We've been to Spain once since we've been here, are going again in October, and have also been to Paris and Berlin. Aside from about three trips to the UK and two back to the States - which is getting very expensive now for air fare).

4. We like France a good deal. We live in an area of gently rolling hills, farms, small quaint villages, very friendly people for the most part, and etc. Lots of nature (France is more than 40% forest land).

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).

Socialism today in South America

Like you, I've been wondering what "socialism for the 21st century" might look like. Here's a good overview of what it looks like so far in South America. It's especially interesting for its insight into what it might mean for the relations between Venezuela and its English-speaking, pro-"socialist" neighbor Guyana. The author is Odeen Ishmael, Guyanese ambassador in Caracas. Socialist Ideology Takes New Roots in South America

Also check out the other articles on this site.

Anti-Bush T-Shirts

Thanks to Ivan Light for forwarding this list. Now go out and print your own!


Ulysses S. Grant: No Longer Our Worst President

(on an infant's shirt): Already smarter than Bush.

That's OK, I Wasn't Using My Civil Liberties Anyway

Bush. Like a Rock. Only Dumber.

Killing For Peace Is Like Screwing For Virginity

You Can't Be Pro-War And Pro-Life

If You Can Read This, You're Not the President

Of Course It Hurts: You're Getting Screwed by an Elephant

George Bush: Creating the Terrorists Our Kids Will Have to Fight

(over a photo of Bush) Electile Dysfunction

America: One Nation, Under Surveillance

They Call Him "W" So He Can't Misspell It

Which God Do You Kill For?

Jail to the Chief

No, Seriously, Why Did We Invade Iraq?

Bush: God's Way of Proving Intelligent Design is Full of Crap

Bad President! No Banana.

We Need a President Who's Fluent In At Least One Language

We're Making Enemies Faster Than We Can Kill Them

Is It Vietnam Yet?

Guess What? Bush Doesn't Care About Poor White People Either

When Bush Took Office, Gas Was $1.46

The Republican Party: Our Bridge to the 11th Century

What Part of Bush Lied Don't You Understand?

Bush Lost Iraq. Deal With It

Legislating history: Holocaust denial ban

Prison sentences for those who deny the Holocaust of 1939-45 or Armenian genocide, 1915-17, are among the worst imaginable ways to "combat racism and xenophobia," their supposed purpose. For one thing, such laws probably won't work where they are proposed--they go against hard-won conquests of free speech in western Europe, as well as the commercial interests of a lot of mass media delighted to stir up a storm about anything. But the greater threat is that they might work, at least somewhat, not to make people feel more tolerant toward other races, but to shut up about their unofficial, unsanctioned opinions. And then where will we be? In something like Putin's Russia, where only the official story gets expressed, or maybe Iran, with its deep and complex apparatus for control of opinion.

Curiously, last year the then-leading candidate for president of that country (he lost, though) argued that censorship wasn't working. The man who did win, Ahmadinejad, has not dismantled the censorship apparatus, but has come up with imaginative ways to test the West's tolerance for dissent: a cartoon contest lampooning the Israels leaders' supposed Holocaust-complex.

History should be left to the historians, to debate and argue out their interpretations. The evidence for the so-called "Holocaust" (the real event, or series of events, was far worse than any real holocaust) is overwhelming, it appears to me and should appear to most people. So those who claim it didn't happen can be refuted by evidence. Denying those "deniers" a voice is denying ourselves a chance to debate and clarify many details of a very complex history, in which vast parts of European society--not only in Germany--were complicit. As for the Armenians, the debate is not over whether tens of thousands or more died, but over whether (a) their death was deliberate policy by the Ottoman leadership and if so, (b) what responsibility modern Turkey, the secular nation-state created by Attaturk, has for its imperial predecessors. We should do everything we can to get Turkey to acknowledge the issue and join an open search for the historical truth; punishing in France those who denied that it happened is as obnoxious to free speech as punishing in Turkey those who argue that it did.

BBC NEWS | Europe | Push for EU Holocaust denial ban

See also The fight against Holocaust denial by Raffi Berg (BBC)

But most of all, see Index on Censorship

Responsible shopping is not enough

Mark Engler has an article in the November issue of New Internationalist, which is on the stands but not yet on-line. Meanwhile, you can check out the September issue of NI (always interesting), and then check back in (I suppose) a few days to read Mark's piece, which is clearly argued and well researched as usual: Sweating over sweatshops: Supporting 'clean clothes' campaigns to end the exploitative labour practices that pervade the textile industry is not as simple as just picking the 'right' brand to buy, reveals Mark Engler.

Iraq Through a Rebel's Eyes

À propos of my comment below about insurgent "terrorists" in the American Revolution, here's a more developed argument:

"Thomas Jefferson was a rebel, as so many of his comments demonstrated. He also was a gun enthusiast, and not the bird-shooting kind. His gang of insurgents fought the British with the eighteenth century equivalents of assault rifles, RPGs, and roadside bombs — and that is why they are worth recalling when our conversation turns to Iraq." Iraq Through a Rebel's Eyes

The War Prayer

A very short story, very angry, very pertinent to today's events -- though Mark Twain was thinking about the U.S. war in the Philippines at the time.
The War Prayer

Photo from rotten.com: Mark Twain

Revolutionary terrorists: Benjamin Franklin?

Regarding Luis Posada Carriles, Cuban former C.I.A. operative and free-lance assassin and mass murderer (he planted the explosive toothpaste tupe that blew up a Cuban airline in 1976, killing all its 76 occupants):

"How can you call someone a terrorist who allegedly committed acts on your behalf?" asked Felipe D. J. Millan, Mr. Posada's El Paso-based lawyer. "This would be the equivalent of calling Patrick Henry or Paul Revere or Benjamin Franklin a terrorist." Castro Foe With C.I.A. Ties Puts U.S. in an Awkward Spot - New York Times

No, Mr. Millan, not those guys. Henry was an orator, Revere a silversmith famous for a midnight ride warning of an attack, and Franklin -- well, Franklin was many things, printer, author, diplomat, inventor. Not one of them was an assassin or, as far as I can tell, ever fired a shot at a human being. Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys would be better examples of terrorists among the American revolutionaries, if we apply the Bush standards. In fact, by those standards (the ones applied in Afghanistan, that fighters without regular uniforms or with authorization of a recognized state are not "soldiers"), the entire Continental Army should have been sent to Guantánamo. But not Franklin, Revere or Henry. Though if they had fallen into British hands they would have been hanged as abettors of terrorism, or insurrection as it was then called.