Trampled rights

“Huzaifa Parhat, a fruit peddler, has been imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay Detention Center for the last seven years. He is not a terrorist. He’s a mistake, a victim of the war against al Qaeda,” begins Jonathan Shaw in The War and the Writ: Habeas corpus and security in an age of terrorism in the current Harvard Magazine. It's a necessarily long piece on a complex issue, vitally important to Americans and to America's place in the world.

June Jordan's revenge

Obama is June Jordan's revenge. A sweet and satisfying revenge that does no harm to anybody, but goes far to right an ancient wrong. You'll know this when you listen to Sweet Honey in the Rock perform "We Are the Ones" -- which you can hear along with other great songs on their website at that link.

Barack Obama must have heard Sweet Honey's version many times, and no doubt knows well the work of June Jordan, one of the sharpest and most politically conscious American poets of our times.

The line is the last one in her "Poem for South African Women," written in 1980, when the end of apartheid still seemed distant. Whether he got if from the song or directly from the original poem, Obama made it the defining call of his presidential campaign, and may its spirit guide his administration: "we are the ones we have been waiting for." To say it another way, it's up to us to make this a better world. The South African women and men were up to the challenge, and we had better be too.

June Jordan, unfortunately for all of us, did not live long enough to see this triumph. Her words still echo, though, in the minds of all of us who have read them or heard her read them in her rich voice. (You can hear that voice in a 2003 interview on Democracy Now!) Obama's campaign amplified them.

Here is the whole poem.

Poem for South African Women
June Jordan, 1980

Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands
by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land
into new dust that
rising like a marvelous pollen will be
fertile
even as the first woman whispering
imagination to the trees around her made
for righteous fruit
from such deliberate defense of life
as no other still
will claim inferior to any other safety
in the world

The whispers too they
intimate to the inmost ear of every spirit
now aroused they
carousing in ferocious affirmation
of all peaceable and loving amplitude
sound a certainly unbounded heat
from a baptismal smoke where yes
there will be fire

And the babies cease alarm as mothers
raising arms
and heart high as the stars so far unseen
nevertheless hurl into the universe
a moving force
irreversible as light years
traveling to the open eye

And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea:

we are the ones we have been waiting for.

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.

Cautionary tales & historical theory: 2 by Diamond

Having been greatly stimulated by Jared Diamond's earlier book, Guns, Germs and Steel (see below), I was eager to read this newer one -- Diamond, Jared. Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. London: Penguin Books, 2005. But, as you'll see from my notes, I found it disappointing .

In Collapse, Diamond relates cautionary tales of societies that thrived and then collapsed, contrasted to some that still survive, to identify recurrent causes of collapse. In all the cases selected, the main cause (according to him) was the society's misuse and exhaustion of material resources, esp. forests, aggravated in some cases by aggression from other societies -- which is hardly surprising. And he warns us of comparable dangers (but are they really comparable?) to our new, global ecosystem. Stories include Easter Island, the contrasting experiences of 3 dissimilar S. Pacific islands, the Anasazi, Maya, Viking settlements (Greenland, a failure; Iceland still going strong), Japan (Tokugawa success in forest management), Rwanda (Diamond blames environmental stress more than ancient enmities for the genocide of 1994), Haiti's poverty v. the Dominican Republic's much better management of resources (he credits Joaquín Balaguer especially), China, and Australia (still functioning, but precarious because overexploiting poor soil and little water). These tales are all more or less interesting (China less, Greenland more, because the information is less well known), but they don't add up to anything much beyond a reminder that the prosperity of global society requires much better husbanding of resources.

After his "Guns, Germs and Steel," which presented a coherent and audacious theory explaining Europe's rise to preeminence, this is a pious hodgepodge. Here are my notes on the earlier, stronger book:

Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: Random House, 1997. 1999 Norton paperback.

The reasons why European whites acquired the "guns, germs and steel" with which they decimated and subdued all other peoples are (according to Diamond) due entirely to accidental geographical advantages: a wider variety of minerals in Eurasia, including the rocks necessary for an efficient stone-age technology necessary as a first stage of development; the availability of easy-to domesticate, highly productive plants and animals enabling people in Mesopotamia to become farmers and produce enough of a surplus to build cities, long before anybody else; and the east-west orientation of the Eurasian continent, with a wide swath in the same latitude with a long growing season and plenty of rain, so that crops developed in Mesopotamia could also be grown as far as western India, all across northern Africa and across southern Europe to its western edge; the absence of major physical barriers also facilitated transfers of inventions (whether in agriculture or devices such as the wheel, practices such as weaving, etc.).

The book's great success ("over 1 million copies sold," the cover proclaims) is mainly because Diamond weaves a coherent story through a huge subject, all human history, that is a plausible alternative to the naïve race theories still current. The problem for many scholars is that the coherence seems too facile, neglecting the complexities of many developments over the millennia and (according to some of those scholars) getting many particulars wrong.

The other reason for both the book's popularity and many scholars' impatience is that Diamond repeats his essential points over and over. This makes it hard to miss them, which must be convenient for the distracted undergraduate, but is wearisome for the attentive reader, especially one who is already familiar with many of the arguments.

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).

Georgian blunders

The west shares the blame for Georgia

By Anatol Lieven

This article in the Financial Times is the most sensible I've read so far about this conflict.

Also see this by Gregory Djerejian in his blog "The Belgravia Dispatch." Well worth reading.

An American in Carboneras

Watching the amazing and stirring Obama campaign from this little town in southern Spain has made me reflect once again on what it means to me, as someone who has been intensely interested and active in U.S. politics, to be living at this moment so far from my homeland. So, what can I do from here?

First, a bit of personal political history. I've been involved in political organizing since high school 50 years ago (I graduated in 1959), when I used the history club to set up public fora on issues including recognizing the People's Republic of China (a very touchy subject in those days). Later I was president of the Socialist Club at Harvard, organizing fora, debates, film showings (Sergei Eisenstein and others), and demos. And in the years since college, I've used my writings as well as various organizational efforts to "raise consciousness" and push events toward greater equality of opportunity.

But that was then. I was much younger (and more naïve), working in places (universities mostly) where I could reach students and others in personal face-to-face contact, and in an epoch where access to other (non f2f) communications were pretty much limited to print (ditto machines, mimeographs, offset if we were lucky) and sometimes radio (on underfunded, low-power stations). The other approach, harder to achieve and much more rewarding, was to get published in larger circulation periodicals or books.

Now I am who I am, a wiser (I hope) and much more fully trained sociologist, living in a small place far from the center of U.S. politics, in an era with Internet communications, including new forms invented every week (see blog below, on "knols"). So I think it is at least possible for me to be as involved politically as ever, even from here. I don't have f2f contact with American voters, but I do have as much technical access as anybody. And U.S. politics no longer belong exclusively to U.S. citizens. Spaniards, French, Germans, Iraqis, Pakistanis and others don't get to vote in the United States in the formal sense of entering a voting booth and pulling a lever, but in mass demonstrations, opinion polls and other ways, they do "vote" in the basic meaning of that word, to "express a preference for a candidate or a proposed solution of an issue." (Etymology: Middle English (Scots), from Latin votum vow, wish — more at vow) And because our world is now so interconnected, any sensible politician will heed that vote.

All this reflection has led me to a new view of my country and its enormous power. The U.S.A. is commonly viewed as a purveyor of globalization, which of course it is, but more importantly, it is globalization's most extremely developed product. It is the most successful of the dozens of countries, all but Australia in the Western Hemisphere, refashioned from native peoples and native materials by successive waves of immigrants. The U.S., Brazil, and the others are "New Worlds" set in motion and built by forces from all of the old ones, those places where custom and tradition had more nearly congealed and opportunities for innovation were stunted. Of all of the New Worlds, the United States is where the collective force of all humanity has come together most densely and has been producing what up to now has been the greatest energy.

Much of that energy has been foolishly spent in the past eight years, but even in its Bush-whacked condition the U.S. still projects great power, partly from inertia (the power, economic, military and cultural, accumulated in years before) and partly because the country still receives power from abroad in many ways, including investments, immigration, and imitation. As we critics often say, the U.S. is undoubtedly a large part of the problems of globalization, from global warming and pollution to high food and petroleum prices, cultural banality to terrorism. But it is also, and for the same reasons, our best hope for solutions. This is something that Obama seems to understand very clearly, which is why so many people in Germany and other countries are "voting" for him in whatever ways they can. Obama has reawakened enthusiasm for the world-healing potential of American power. And that's why I'll do whatever I can, even from here in Carboneras, to encourage my compatriots to cast official, legally recognized ballots for him.

Photo: A few Obama voters in Berlin. From the NYT.

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.

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.

New slogan

You may have noticed the change at the top of this page. Up to now I had been using the most-quoted lines from William Carlos William's 1962 poem Asphodel, That Greeny Flower: "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there."

Sweet, but hardly startling. My new slogan is meant to suggest a less familiar line of thought. It is of course an inversion of Karl Marx' 11th "Thesis on Feuerbach": "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."

In 1845 (Marx was only 27), when feudal structures of domination were still blocking the capitalist transformation of society, that thesis was forceful and persuasive. Today, with capitalism freed to do its worst, we know that it is only too easy for corporate executives, religious fanatics, and other revolutionaries under banners red or black to "change the world" uncomprehendingly, by (for examples) polluting our water, heating our globe, creating famine, blowing up marketplaces and even skyscrapers and so on -- whether in pursuit of profit, comfort, glory, spiritual salvation or power. Today, the most useful thing any of us can do is to try to understand these developments so as to predict consequences of alternative actions, so that we can steer our course. This has been the effort of sociologists such as Ulrich Beck, Alain Touraine, Pierre Bourdieu, and Alvin Gouldner (to mention only those cited lately in this blog).

Anyway, it beats staring at a greeny flower.

Coming up: Church & party in Spain

It's been a complicated week, in my life as well as in Spain's. We just got back to Carboneras and my home Internet connection on Wednesday, after 2 very busy weeks in Madrid. And meanwhile, the hierarchs of the Spanish Catholic Church launched a surprise offensive on the Socialist government, which has gone to great lengths to appease them. Excessive lengths, in my opinion. The State still subsidizes the Church, and pays the salaries of military chaplains and religion teachers in public schools who are hired and fired by the bishops. And despite all this, at a huge rally in Madrid the day before New Year's Eve, supposedly to defend "the family," Cardinal Agustín García-Gasco thundered that "Radical laicism [i.e., the threatened separation of Church and State] is leading to the dissolution of democracy!"

Democracy? What does the all-male dominated, vertically commanded Church with its infallible pope know about democracy? This cluster of cardinals is taking a stand to the right of Pope Benedict, and openly siding with the conservative Popular Party. But rather than take pot-shots at purple-clad targets, I want to investigate these serious social questions:

What is causing this sudden ecclesiastic politicization? An upcoming election within the Church for control of the Bishops Conference is one vector, intersecting with the also proximate national elections (announced for March) for civil authorities, but mere coincidence (or contemporaneity) doesn't explain what is making certain cardinals so belligerent.

A second question is: How serious is all this going to be politically? Do the cardinals really control very many votes in contemporary Spain?

And we must also ask what it is about "laicism", homosexual unions and abortion that gets Spanish clergy so much more outraged than their counterparts in other European countries. Of even whether those are the real issues, or rather the public relations front to cover a more serious fear of the Spanish clergy: the threatened loss of their privileged institutional status and financing in a Church-State concordat still in effect since the Franco years.

I don't promise to answer all these questions, but simply to reframe them as hypotheses that can be proven or disproven. They are important for understanding Spain, and Spain is important for understanding the world.

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).

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.

Everything really is going to hell...

... if Bush & Cheney carry out the attack on Iran that they've been planning. Since the last two invasions (Iraq & Afghanistan) have proven so disastrous, the only thing that occurs to the Bush Administration is to create another, even more dangerous war. Before that happens, listen to these Iran experts interviewed by Amy Goodman.

Everything's going to hell…

… and there's not much we can do about it, according to Richard Sennett's most recent book. Sennett, Richard. The Culture of the New Capitalism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006, argues that 3 values of the "old" capitalism are eroded or lost in the "new" and should be restored: narrative, the sense that one's life has a pattern & is going somewhere (impossible when companies outsource everything & everybody is freelance with no job rights or pension & the older they get, the less employable they become); usefulness, the sense that one's activity actually benefits somebody--now available only in low-status or volunteer service activities; & craftsmanship, the value of doing something well--eroded where youth, energy & obedience are rewarded and experience is not, which is almost everywhere these days. In his final sentence, Sennett proposes, "Perhaps, indeed, revolt against this enfeebled culture will constitute our next fresh page."

But in such a scenario of seamless gloom, where is revolt supposed to come from? Cheer up, Richard. It's not so seamless. In fact, as Ulrich Beck (see below) and many others have recognized, it's a chaos of opposing global forces out there (transnational businesses, states and combinations of states, and nongovernmental organizations of all kinds) and like any mêlée, it's bound to create new opportunities among the disasters. Political craftsmanship in such confusion will be rewarded, new narratives composed, and commitment (even if to an illusory cause) may prove as satisfying as real usefulness. It always has.

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.

More capitalism, please -- Are you sure?

Terrible things are happening all over the world. Rainforests are disappearing, icecaps melting, the air is becoming unbreathable, and the Chinese are poisoning our toothpaste. And besides all that, there are people who want to kill us, although they don't even know us. Just in today's El País, lead stories include "50 big cities [just in Spain!] exceed air contamination limits," new suicide attacks in Baghdad and in northern Iraq,and terror in the United Kingdom perpetrated (apparently) by physicians who are supposed to be saving lives. And inside there's a map of all the places too dangerous to visit on your vacation.

What's going on, and what should we do? Besides duck, I mean. Is global capitalism the problem? Or is it the solution? And is there anything we can do about it, either way?

Scholar, Richard. Divided Cities: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2003 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) gives us arguments on all sides. James Wolfensohn, the intelligent and enterprising past-president of the World Bank (1995-2005, before the lamentable Paul Wolfowitz), is well aware of the problems but convinced that only capitalism can solve them: he gives us lots of persuasive examples of how fomenting capitalism among the poor has improved lives from Rio de Janeiro to South Asia (micro credits, for example, using capital scraped together by the poor themselves, or provision of basic services like water for which the poor are willing to pay a small fee). Meanwhile, Stuart Hall and David Harvey have no doubts that global capitalism is creating poverty, inequality, frustration and massive social violence -- not to mention (curiously, they don't) environmental degradation. Changing the system will be a massive job but not impossible, thinks Harvey. But it will require challenging the very concepts of rights and social justice that Wolfensohn buys into.

Michael Likosky mostly agrees with Harvey and Hall, even as he accepts Wolfensohn's record of good accomplishments -- but raises the moral issue, of whether it is right to make the poor pay for infrastructural improvements that mostly benefit, economically, the big companies that build them?

And then there's Peter Hall, no relation genetically or ideologically to Stuart. He thinks things aren't all that bad, and anyway there's no alternative to capitalism. (He doesn't buy Harvey's argument.)

The only sensible answer is, yes, of course, to all of them. "Capitalism" is many things, all operating simultaneously, with notoriously contradictory effects. The clearest definition of it I know is by Ellen Wood: "a system in which goods and services, down to the most basic necessities of life, are produced for profitable exchange, where even human labor power is a commodity for sale in the market, and where, because all economic actors are dependent on the market, the requirements of competition and profit maximization are the fundamental rules of life."

Such a system is not entirely evil. It has proven very efficient at capital accumulation, which is needed for investment in anything, including good things like those listed by Wolfensohn. And a lot of perfectly awful things, enumerated by Stuart Hall. More important, and in support of Harvey, capitalism (as defined by Wood) is NOT inevitable or unchangeable. Maintaining it obviously requires constant "inputs" of energy and capital in propaganda, police and military repression (think Iraq), an elaborate state and judicial structure (for example, to deny rights to Bush & Blair's prisoners of war). This is because, basically, it goes against those most common human instincts of solidarity and group loyalties, instincts that are likely to break out whenever the State relaxes its vigilance. Nor is the system everywhere in effect (think of how decisions are made in Saudi Arabia, for example, or in your family), but because it is in effect in ruling sectors of the most powerful countries of the globe, its operations in some ways condition everything else.

But our discussions of that great ball of meanings we call "globalization" will get nowhere as long as we use such catch-all terms as "globalization" or even "capitalism." We can sit around nodding our heads in agreement with those who use these words the way we like, but to do anything useful we are going to have to pierce the rhetorical fog and challenge cherished formulations. Harvey seems to be pointing us in the right direction, though so far he is only waving vaguely. And it will only be worth following that path if we can deliver solutions at least as good as Wolfensohn's.

Frustrating development

I just read an essay that helps put into perspective the failure of Ghana and other countries to fulfill the great promises that independence seemed to open up (see my note below on Ghana). The articulate Jamaican-born cultural theorist Stuart Hall puts it this way:

The decolonization that occurred at the end of World War II, often hailed as 'setting the colonial world free', was in fact marked by three broad stages redefining relations between the developed West and the rest. In the first phase, fundamental relations of neocolonial dependency were established between the developed and underdeveloped worlds in the context of the Cold War. ...the Cold War was fought out largely by proxy on post-colonial terrain. In the second phase, 'structural adjustment' regimes were imposed by the West on the developing world, via international organizations coupled with massive indebtedness through the banking system. More recently, with the collapse of the Soviet empire and the rise of the US to single super-power hegemony, an unholy alliance of global corporate forces, collusive indigenous elites, and legal and illegal armies on the loose has been able to treat the world's poor and the societies of the South as open marketplaces, repositories of scarce resources, and reservoirs of cheap labour.

(Pp. 27-28 in Hall, Stuart. "Cosmopolitan Promises, Multicultural Realities." Divided Cities: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2003. Ed. Richard Scholar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 20-51.)

Photo of Hall from The Chronicle - Stuart Hall

Ghana and Guinea (Conakry) were among the countries that resisted being sucked into the Cold War, but Ghanaian cocoa farmers and others, backed by the C.I.A., readily enlisted and overthrew Kwame Nkrumah in 1966. Sékou Touré, who had led the République de Guinée to independence (and became the exiled Nkrumah's host) hung on to power until his death in 1984, but the international agencies mentioned by Hall (initially, the aggressive economic and diplomatic actions of France) made serious economic development impossible.

Bad news, not just for France

Segolène was hardly inspiring, but consider the alternative! Sarkozy is José María Aznar on steroids, even more narcissistic, opportunistic and cruel, and (unfortunately) a lot smarter than his Spanish counterpart, and therefore more dangerous. Doug Ireland: Why Sarkozy is dangerous

The Growing Toll of Iraqi Civilian Deaths

Be sure to read the reader comments on this important article by our good friend César Chelala. And thanks, César, for stimulating this discussion. The Growing Toll of Iraqi Civilian Deaths - CommonDreams.org - Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community

What might be the consequences of a rapid withdrawal of "coalition" (i.e., U.S. and British) troops? Moise Naím has argued persuasively -- it's an easy argument to make -- there's no way that any amount of U.S. assistance will make the Iraqi government prepared to provide security, so the immediate consequence might be an increase in violence -- though how things could get any worse is hard to imagine. I've been impressed by Zbigniew Brzesinski's argument, repeated in several recent articles: the U.S. military presence is an OBSTACLE to peace, because it relieves the governing faction from the need to negotiate with its foes. If the government has to defend itself, all by itself, it will either come to terms with its many and varied attackers or succumb, in which case the victors may form some new government. Or, most likely, we may see a repeat of the Somali experience, where nobody wins and everybody loses -- that is, no one faction or coalition of factions has the force to conquer.

The U.S. invasion has just compounded the massive errors by previous imperialisms. But here we are: we can't go back and undo any of it, we just have to figure out where we can go from here. Peace in Iraq, whether as a single country or divided into three or more (a very bad idea, it seems to me, but possibly inevitable given the depth of hostility among Kurds and Sunni and Shiite Arabs and Turkomans)--how to achieve it? A first step is to get U.S. & U.K. troops out of there. Negotiated peace will take far more diplomatic skill and sensitivity than the U.S. neocons have so far demonstrated. A coalition force of foreign troops may indeed be needed to assist whatever government(s) emerge. But the first requirement would be NO U.S. or U.K. MILITARY PARTICIPATION. We've demonstrated our massive incompetence and united almost all Iraqis against us.

Politics of the absurd

«The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) said in a statement issued Jan. 30 that it is adding 350 Nepalese soldiers to its force in order to fight crime in Port-au-Prince."americas.org

Lots of luck, guys, and sharpen your Gurkha knives. Here's what the U.S. State Department says about Haiti. And here's what the Nepalese say about their peacekeepers: The Rising Nepal

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.