with the "is" being changed from an auxiliary into the main verb
It's always rather seemed to me that this is not purposeful reinterpretation at all so much as just misinterpretation, usually by people who don't realize what the quote's larger syntactic context is. Is that really similar to what Appiah is doing with Terence? I wouldn't have said so but assume I'm missing something.
(Apart from subtly modernizing the gender attributions, as I look at the quote from Chremes in context and I actually don't even know that Appiah is doing all that much violence to Terence's original meaning. But I might be wrong about that, too.)
I was reminded recently that "the world is my oyster" is from Shakespeare and the following line is "...which i with sword shall open" which puts a slightly different spin on it. It's not just "a nice thing to eat which I can get whenever I want" it's "a thing which I can profit from if I am prepared to use deadly force to do so".
Don't forget the sexual innuendo.
Without having read the OP link, the argument doesn't work. The mutability of individual characteristics doesn't imply that there is no bundle of characteristics which can jointly be identified as a civilization, and taken as sufficient for membership in it.
Another generally misquoted or at least misinterpreted line, which Appiah also gets completely wrong:
One reason for the confusions "western culture" spawns comes from confusions about the west. We have used the expression "the west" to do very different jobs. Rudyard Kipling, England's poet of empire, wrote, "Oh, east is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet", contrasting Europe and Asia, but ignoring everywhere else.
Now, Appiah seems to interpret this as Kipling saying "Western and Eastern culture are fundamentally different and incompatible". But that is exactly the opposite of Kipling's meaning. Kipling means it literally and geographically: Peshawar is thousands of miles away from London, and it's always going to be thousands of miles away, until the end of the world.
However, as the very next line of the poem says (I'm guessing Appiah never actually read it), that's no reason why people from London can't understand people from Peshawar and deal with them honestly as equals.
No Muslim essence stops the inhabitants of Dar al-Islam from taking up anything from western civilisation, including Christianity or democracy.
It is also a bit tendentious to say this and not at least allude to the fact that, in much of the Dar al-Islam, you would be stopped from doing so by being imprisoned or executed for apostasy.
Kipling's pretty good for being misinterpreted; Orwell pointed out that "lesser breeds without the Law" in "Recessional" is generally taken as a racist reference to the subject peoples of the British Empire, when in fact (as, again, is perfectly obvious from context) it's a reference of German brutality in southern Africa. And there was even criticism of the recent film of "The Jungle Book" for not having Mowgli played by a black actor, on the basis that people thought the film was set in Africa.
It's always rather seemed to me that this is not purposeful reinterpretation at all so much as just misinterpretation
Right, it is only purposeful reinterpretation if you say "Disco tent."
The mutability of individual characteristics doesn't imply that there is no bundle of characteristics which can jointly be identified as a civilization, and taken as sufficient for membership in it.
The actual argument of the OP is that there is no such bundle that persists throughout the history of what we now identify as the 'West'.
11: but then he turns round and says "The stories we tell that connect Plato or Aristotle or Cicero or Saint Augustine to contemporary culture in the north Atlantic world have some truth in them, of course. We have self-conscious traditions of scholarship and argumentation. The delusion is to think that it suffices that we have access to these values, as if they are tracks on a Spotify playlist we have never quite listened to."
He's saying that actually there is a golden core of Western culture, but we shouldn't take it for granted, because we could lose it.
There is a single, unbroken line from Socrates to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.
11 is fair, but (still not bothering to read the link) that still doesn't imply that there can be no such bundle at any given time, or that such a bundle can meaningfully claim to have inherited characteristics from some previous bundle.
I was reminded recently that "the world is my oyster" is from Shakespeare and the following line is "...which i with sword shall open" which puts a slightly different spin on it. It's not just "a nice thing to eat which I can get whenever I want" it's "a thing which I can profit from if I am prepared to use deadly force to do so".
Or from which to acquire a pearl to throw away.
The stories we tell that connect Plato or Aristotle or Cicero or Saint Augustine to contemporary culture in the north Atlantic world have some truth in them, of course.
I'm not sure what stories he means. Until Poggio started rooting around in monastery attics, the only Plato known in western Europe was Timaeus, which is hardly his core work; and Aristotle was known through Arabic translations, fairly loose ones. I'll give him Augustine, but Tribonian is more important to cultural continuity than the Greek philosophers, who are mostly a product of the Victorians as we regard them today.
6: I have read the poem, and that's not really right. Kipling is definitely talking about a cultural incompatibility rather than mere geographic distance (after all, he's talking in part about the British in India, who are not geographically distant from India). The next line isn't claiming there's no reason for failure of communication -- it's saying that under the right circumstances it can be overcome.
Who is the Marky Mark of the Hindus?
18: I don't think so. The lines are
OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth!
In the first two lines he's talking about the end of the world, right? Revelation of St. John, xx:11. (He referred to the same passage in "The Last Chantey".) The earth and heaven being folded up. That's a geographical reference. And then in the third and fourth lines he's putting "East and West" in a list of other things that shouldn't be barriers to treating people as equals - nationality, race and class. And he even says "tho' they come from the ends of the earth" - another reference to geographical distance, not cultural differences.
And, in fact, nowhere in the poem is there any indication that the protagonists have any cultural differences at all. They speak the same language, even in the same style; they both recognise the same insults ("jackal", "dog") and the significance of an exchange of gifts and hostages, and of the blood-brotherhood custom. Apart from the first and last four lines, there's nothing in the poem to suggest that either of the protagonists is even a foreigner; it's only our extratextual knowledge that a "Colonel's son" in the Raj would be a white man that gives us that interpretation. But if Kipling had written about a "Rissaldar's son" instead there's nothing outside the prologue and epilogue that wouldn't work.
If you want a Kipling poem about incompatibility of culture, you want "Hadramauti", not "East and West".
He's saying that actually there is a golden core of Western culture, but we shouldn't take it for granted, because we could lose it.
He's equally saying that the "we" in your last sentence is whoever takes up those cultural traditions, norms, and values, and so what it means to "lose" them is less clear than it would be in an essentialist narrative. Viz., a future in which progressively less people at Harvard become classics majors but more and more people in the "Global South" take Nagy's online "The Greek Hero in 24 Hours" class and go on to build a classics education out of the resources they have available.
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Now reading the Coll book on Exxon:
Tillerson was perhaps not ideally suited to assess Nigeria's moral swamps. His feel for political economies in poor countries was limited. Even during his rise within ExxonMobil's international divisions, he had never lived outside the United States.Perfect fit for the administration!
Who is the Donald Trump of the Zulu?
20: Excluding extra-textural knowledge is a weird move here, given that it's knowledge that any competent reader of the poem would have. There is no point to the poem unless the conclusion is in some sense surprising (as the soldiers at the end of the poem are surprised to see Kamal's son returning peaceably with the Colonel's son.) I can't read the quoted lines as anything other than saying that although East, West, Border, Breed, and Birth pose significant and apparently insurmountable barriers to successful communication (Kipling in management-speak! Much duller than the original), those barriers are unimportant specifically "when strong men stand face to face." Everyone else? Still subject to those barriers.
Anyway, it's not a simple misreading like failing to know that "Lesser breeds without the Law" are the Germans.
There is no point to the poem unless the conclusion is in some sense surprising (as the soldiers at the end of the poem are surprised to see Kamal's son returning peaceably with the Colonel's son.)
Well, but they're surely surprised because Kamal is an established border bandit and horse thief, whom the Colonel's son went chasing off after alone, and the outcome they were expecting is for the Colonel's son to get his damn fool self killed. Coming back in apparent amity with the horse thief's son is a surprising outcome in any culture.
As I say, if you're reading this poem as an example of how cultural differences between East and West are overcome, you need to say at what point these cultural barriers even appear in the story. There's no point in the story where there's any evidence of any sort of misunderstanding or cultural mismatch. The conflict isn't because the man of the inscrutable East has fundamentally different and eternally incompatible mores and values from the man of the scrutable West, it's because the Easterner has stolen the Westerner's father's horse.
25 is the mid-range projection. The best-case scenario is probably Jacob Zuma, worst case something closer to Cetshwayo.
It's always rather seemed to me that this is not purposeful reinterpretation at all so much as just misinterpretation,
Doesn't matter to me! It's still a line that's been lifted and given a new construction. I never thought it was purposeful—most of the people quoting Terence aren't doing it purposefully, either.
I'm not sure what stories he means. Until Poggio started rooting around in monastery attics, the only Plato known in western Europe was Timaeus, which is hardly his core work; and Aristotle was known through Arabic translations, fairly loose ones. I'll give him Augustine, but Tribonian is more important to cultural continuity than the Greek philosophers, who are mostly a product of the Victorians as we regard them today.
Except for the uncertainty of the first sentence (to which I can only respond with some incredulity—Whitehead's "footnote to Plato" remark, for instance, is such a story in nuce, and it's not exactly uncommon in either the content or the concept of "western civ" courses), this would appear to be something that Appiah could profitably have included in the piece himself.
And that's the point about excluding extratextual knowledge: there is so little evidence in the poem of any culture clash whatsoever that it could almost be about an Indian colonel's son chasing an Indian bandit (if there were any Indian colonels in Kipling's time, which there weren't, or at least not at the time when he wrote "The Ballad of East and West").
Except, of course, for the quoted lines, which would make no sense at all in that context.
25: Mangosuthu Buthelezi had a cameo role in "Zulu!"; Donald Trump had a cameo role in "Home Alone 2".
32: the bit about "border, breed and birth" certainly would. All those would still be differences between an Indian colonel's son and a border horse-thief.
Leaving the lines about east and west still meaningless.
32: but go on then. If East and West is a poem about overcoming cultural barriers... what cultural barriers are these? Where's the bit in the poem where the characters display any cultural differences at all?
Leaving the lines about east and west still meaningless.
Bengali vs. North-West Frontier?
In keeping with my new deliberate ignorance policy, I haven't and won't read the Kipling, but 37 could be plausible. India is vast, and diverse to the point of thousands killed per year in inter-communal violence.
36: The extra-textual knowledge any competent reader would have of the barriers between an English officer and a 'border thief'. If you're honestly buying your argument, and think that everyone who's ever quoted the line misinterpreted what Kipling meant by the poem, more power to you, and I'm not going to talk you out of it. But it is not remotely convincing from where I sit.
The OP title brings me straight to Gandhi's I think it would be a good idea and I can read no further. Sorry neb.
42 > 26-40, but I suppose we could vote on whether it would be a good idea too.
41: And of course, Gandhi almost certainly never said it.
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/23/good-idea/
41: And of course, Gandhi almost certainly never said it
And the OP even discusses this
45: No, it doesn't!
Does the lecture linked in the OP discuss it? Of course, I would never click on one of neb's links.
Yeah, my bad, that's what I meant. It's a good lecture. People should read it.
I can't read the poem without knowing that Kipling was a racist-ass motherfucker, which kind of colors my perception. If something written by a racist-ass motherfucker is open to interpretation, I think the racist interpretation is preferred absent other evidence. Maybe Kipling was being particularly coy about his feelings this time around, but the guy who gave us "the white man's burden" isn't the first I'd look to for racial justice in his work.
49: Racism is complicated. Ajay's interpretation could be consistent with a Victorian story about about raising all races to equality with the west by incremental assimilation.
50: True, and I think fair given the stuff Kipling wrote in other contexts. Still a racist-ass motherfucker, though.
There, I would say that he's very plausibly less of a racist-ass motherfucker than most of his contemporaries were. He just gets dinged for it harder because he writes about contexts where race was salient rather than getting to pretend non-white people don't exist 99% of the time. Doesn't make him non-racist, but of course you aren't either, and neither am I.
52 has been my understanding too.
He definitely was a racist in the literal sense of believing that there were significant mental/personality differences between members of different ethnic groups (including between groups that we'd all consider 'white' now, but certainly incorporating a general belief that 'white' people generally were different and in some regards better than non-white people.) But so were the vast majority of his white contemporaries, and most of them probably more intensely and perniciously than he was.
Like, look at a book like _Kim_. While the hero is a white kid passing as Indian, there are very few other white characters, and the non-white characters aren't drawn with contempt or a sense of inferiority at all.
Kipling was a wildly, aggressively, committed imperialist, which is morally repugnant in itself, but is separable from the racism.
52. He had at least lived in India, whereas no Secretary of State for India visited the place after 1866. John Maynard Keynes made his reputation with a dissertation on the Indian economy without ever setting foot either.
I am completely consistent and thoughtful in my usage of sneer quotes. Why do you ask?
Kipling was a wildly, aggressively, committed imperialist, which is morally repugnant in itself, but is separable from the racism.
In theory. In practice, his politically nastiest poem, addressed to the great American people, called on them to "take up the white man's burden". There was no suggestion that African Americans might like to take up the black man's burden, even in the service of imperialism.
he's very plausibly less of a racist-ass motherfucker
This is so ambiguous. Are you saying Kipling was less racist? Or that his ass was relatively small? Or that he fucked his mother less often?
In my mind you are a crocodile, sneering perpetually from your algae-dark pond.
58: I didn't mean that it was perfectly separable from the racism, given that he was, definitely, also racist. But the sort of thing you're pointing out there, while absolutely racist, would have been completely surprising if a contemporary white author had avoided it.
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This Exxon book is awesome:
The consumer groups hauled out their big duck. "We actually stood outside on the steps, lobbying the old-fashioned way," flanked by the twenty-five-foot inflatable, Liz Hitchcock recalled. "Our strategy was to keep saying, 'Will Congress listen to Exxon or America's kids?'. . . The more we could say that, the more we could keep talking about Exxon, the better."|>
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Somebody presented a Gumby doll as an exhibit. Shannon Weinberg, Joe Barton's lead staffer on the issue, remarked, according to a participant, "If I were a mother, I'd never let my kids play with a Gumby." It was not obvious what the legislative implications of her comment were. Vinyl ducks made with DINP and ducks made without DINP were placed side by side and fondled; some staffers felt they could not tell much difference between the two kinds, despite being told by ExxonMobil lobbyists that DINP-less toys might be so hard and inflexible that they could pose a choking hazard.|>
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"Any time there was a discussion," the conference participant remembered, "it always went back to, 'You'd have to eat five hundred thousand rubber ducks to have an impact'" (an exaggeration of the 3,400 ducks in the written materials). "It just reverted back to the . . . ducks. That's when the chaos started."|>
200 word thinkpieces- huh. http://belowgotham.com/200-Words.pdf
It seems oddly appropriate that a discussion of western civilization turned into a discussion of Exxon Mobil.
There has to be a western civilization, because human will need something to blame when global warming gradually brings about our extinction.
68: Getting all ponderous, portentous, and prophetic, peep? Also left out an 's' .
C-.
I read it twice.
Coates:" The 'African Tolstoy' is Tolstoy"
Now you don't have to.
Not Appiah at his best.
I saw 69 first, and I knew without looking that 68 would also be peep. Peep's #1 enemy is peep.
70.2: Ta-Nehisi did say that (and agrees with that), but he was quoting someone else.
But then Coates went for Baldwin. Could have been Neruda maybe.
While I was reading the Appiah, there was like a drumbeat going in my mind: History, history, history
How much is our identity chosen and how much determined by history, history including our interaction this morning at the grocery store, where I talked with the 30 year old checker about his hip replacement. I'm such a lucky guy.
Cosmopolitanism is hard, and requires active rejection and chosen exile, probably best physical distance and immersion in an alien language. Conrad and Nabokov come to mind.
But there are bookshelves on this, and I would rather read than write.
Cosmopolitanism is hard, and requires active rejection and chosen exile
Not always a choice.
Ralph Wiley's response to Bellow's question sums it up.
"Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?"
"Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus," Wiley states.
https://twitter.com/tanehisicoates/status/642463862248357888
There is another version of the Terence sentiment, that maybe precede Malcolm Lowry Under the Volcano that I think is by Augustine but if I remembered I wouldn't be asking the polymaths:
"It is the calm judgement of the world that he is not good who separates himself from any other part of the world."
Or something. In Latin. Nihil obstet terrarum yechhh
79.2: That sounds like a judgment that Saint Augustine would bring up in order to refute.
All the important saints have cities in California named after them, not in crap places like Florida.
I gots google-fu!
Schism Scroll to "attempts to legitimize schism"
St. Augustine summed up all his controversy with the Donatists in the maxim: "The whole world unhesitatingly declares them wrong who separate themselves from the whole world in whatsoever portion of the whole world" (quapropter securus judicat orbis terrarum bonos non esse qui se dividunt ab orbe terrarum, in quacumque parte orbis terrarum).
FWIW,. whether it is extensible, whatever it means, how it compares to Terence.
82: Impressive, bob! And obviously my 80 is wrong.
It's about the need for a singular universal Church?
81: But the Nobel laureate wrote a song about him!
OTOH, it's not clear from the song (at least to me) that the Nobel laureate had any idea who he was.
The translation is questionable. "bonos non" can be "not good" (masculine accusative)
And wherefrom "unhestitatingly?"
84: yeah, go to the link if you want. Fuck me if I understand Donatism or early Church schism
"a priori" and "independent of contingent circumstances" are in there
I sometimes like to say that accusative question "X" (gay or straight, liberal or conservative) is like asking me if I am a Theophysite or Arian. I don't speak your fucking language.
Kipling was a wildly, aggressively, committed imperialist, which is morally repugnant in itself
Can I just say that, somehow, I was not raised with this as a bedrock moral belief? I mean, empires weren't particularly admirable, but I don't think I really clearly distinguished them, morally, from monarchies.
Some of this, surely, is just terrible American education in world history (in which I never took a single course; took Am Hist in 5th, 8th, 10th, & 11th grades), and some of it is American ambivalence about American imperialism*.
But I also feel as if it's just a big blank spot in American (pop) culture during my life. There was a time when dedicated democrats railed against empire, and of course many immigrants (e.g. the Irish) were anti-empire, but by the mid-'60s, anti-colonial, anti-imperial sentiment just seemed to vanish, I suppose in part due to the Cold War. Lefties would certainly call American foreign policy imperialist, but there was such a gap between the US--even in Vietnam--and the Victorian British that it seemed an epithet, not a serious critique**.
Even the obvious exception--the Empire in Star Wars--wasn't really portrayed as meaningfully imperial: no enslaved populations extracting wealth to be sent to Palpatine's coffers, etc.
To be super-clear, I'm not saying that I should have ended up like this: LB is 100% right that imperialism is awful, and I'm sure I was cloistered and stupid not to figure that out sooner. I'm just fascinated that American culture just kind of stopped talking about that by the '60s (I feel as if I have a pretty good feel for both culture and political discussion of that era; before that, not so much).
*we'd talk about Manifest Destiny and imperialism as distinct phenomena, and overseas territories were for the most part treated like relics of the McKinley presidency, not the equivalent of the Raj or the Dutch Congo
**there was, of course, a serious critique, that American foreign policy during the Cold War was imperialism under a different guise, but I'd argue it was also an epithet
87: You might be interested in this book
White World Order Black Power Politics
"White World Order, Black Power Politics possesses great intellectual weight and no small amount of ethical urgency. It is an ambitious, insightful, and provocative examination of the history of the discipline of international relations from the late nineteenth century to the 1960s. Vitalis demonstrates that in many ways the raison d'etre of IR was to address the 'race problem' and its implications for global affairs at various historical moments. As Vitalis makes clear, American investment in the idea and practice of empire was buttressed by the work of white scholars who became the architects of the discipline of IR as it is known today. The second major thread of White World Order, Black Power Politics is the presence and dogged commitment of African American scholars to advance counterarguments about the meaning of race, the legitimacy of empire, and the implications of freedom for oppressed people of color."―Chad Williams, Brandeis University, author of Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era
OTOH, as a child of the sun sixties, I somewhat agree. American Empire or hegemony was not clear domestically, Reagan certainly did not act that successfully imperial, and the conversation about Central America or missiles in Europe was a little different.
For most of the 50s and 60s we had some successful resistance abroad, Libya, Iraq, Iran, China etc such that competing blocs seemed more accurate than opposing empires. One of Reagan's moves was to turn East Germany from a cooperating monster into a victim.
As I remember, the discursive change happened with the End of the Cold War, Gulf War I, 9/11 and the book Blowback. And it was not even so much American action as how other nations reacted and assimilated to the Borg.
Personal colony of our king.
Catchy song about imperialism. Mentions the Belgians.
90: Did you remember that exchange from 10 years ago? Now I'm impressed.
I recalled it a little more accurately this time.
Lyft driver was named "Abdul" and his radio played a Christian station. I was too tired to ask him about his views on Kipling.
Didn't Kipling live in Vermont for a while (I think his wife was American)?
Anyway, obviously he was both racist and imperialist (I mean, c'mon, "Cecil John Rhodes"), but maybe he wasn't quite the naive jingoist that he is now made out to be? The poem in question ("The Ballad of East and West") does seems to gesture toward a challenge to easy assumptions of western superiority.
It is all very manly and military, though. I think we can all agree that Kipling wrote in a vein that supported late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century notions of "muscular Christianity"?
And to psychologize broadly, and probably irresponsibly: I wonder if Kipling's Anglo-Indian status led him to seek to become "more English than the English," as it were? That's a well-known British colonial tactic, after all.
One of the biggest themes in his work was ruthlessly mocking naive jingoists. He invented some of the classic insults towards jingos: jelly-bellied flag flapper, killing Kruger with your mouth, flannelled fools, muddied oafs.
[Insular, sports-obsessed nationalists who would rather do anything than actual sport, who endlessly howl for war and worship militarism and violence, but treat individual soldiers with snobbish contempt? There's clearly no way we can understand this fascinatingly alien culture...]
(BTW yes, he did, and he actually left the US because of the late 1890s war-scare over the Venezuelan border dispute. Paul Theroux wrote an essay about his time in Vermont.)
Not just mocking them, but also undermining more seriously: "Recessional" was written for the Diamond Jubilee, of all things, and caused more or less the late-Victorian equivalent of that kerfuffle over the Dixie Chicks saying critical things about Bush in 2004.
93: I did, but that was me under a different pseud, so not particularly impressive.
*Belgian* Congo.
Oh criminy. It did seem somehow off, but I started from Dutch East Indies.
88 is remarkably on-topic, cogent, and helpful. I'm pretty intrigued by that take on IR as well, simply because it reads to me very plausibly as precisely how non-malevolent racism gets institutionalized. It's very easy to see how people operating from goodwill would conceptualize issues around empire as not "how do we keep whites from being assholes in other countries?" but "what do we do about these poor, backwards POC?"
Maybe the IR people here will tell me that's stupid, but as I say, sounds plausible (at least as a major thread in IR).
Lefties would certainly call American foreign policy imperialist, but there was such a gap between the US--even in Vietnam--and the Victorian British that it seemed an epithet, not a serious critique
No, it was a serious critique, and one which wasd equally levelled at the British or French after all their colonies had become technically independent. An imperial power doesn't have to directly administer its subject populations to be an empire, or else the Babylonian and Athenian empires weren't empires.
101: Well, I meant that "seem"; I recognize now that it wasn't the equivalent of a frat boy calling the cops who bust up a party "fascists". But I still don't really buy the underlying serious critique.
Thing is, I never had any problem with "hegemonic", which seemed much more apt. Indeed, it's a term that explains and illuminates actions ranging from NATO to Korea to Vietnam to Grenada and El Salvador and Iraq. By contrast, "empire" is a terrible frame for about half of those, one that misdirects rather than illuminates.
I mean, the Babylonian kings and Athenian state directly benefitted from their empires through taxation; there was no plausible story by which the Vietnam War, even had it gone, uh, more smoothly, was a net cash gain for the USG. Even in terms of captive markets or resource extraction for private industry, South Vietnam was not a great economic prospect for Team USA.
But in terms of hegemony? Of asserting power and control, of trying to get as much of the planet as possible within your orbit so that you can organize things as you'd like? Dead simple, and no need for gymnastics about how the American business community was going to benefit so much from a split Vietnam that they got Kennedy & Johnson to do their bidding, etc.
I guess it comes down to, if there's not fairly direct remuneration or political control, I don't think "empire" is a great term, and we have a much better one. "Empire" might be useful as an analogy, although that's a claim I hesitate to make here.
102: which, interestingly, makes the Soviet bloc more of an empire than the US bloc. The periphery of the Soviet bloc subsidised the centre: eastern Europe was richer than the USSR and the flow of funds through things like dodgy trade relationships and economic agreements was from the empire to the metropolis. (Not true of Cuba, of course, but Cuba was not part of the Soviet empire because it never had a Soviet garrison.) The US didn't get subsidised by the rest of NATO.
Oh criminy. It did seem somehow off, but I started from Dutch East Indies.
I had thought you were editorializing that Belgium is Dutch France.
The US didn't get subsidised by the rest of NATO.
You just wait until I cut a deal!
103 my understanding was that that ceased to be true sometime in the 1970s, and the Eastern bloc became a net loss.
103: I had that very thought as I was writing it. I can't see any serious argument for the post-WW2 Warsaw Pact as anything but an empire: the elite were geographically and ethnically* removed from most of the governed, local control was strictly limited, the economic arrangements were as you describe.... Much of that holds for the pre-WW2 USSR as well, especially by the mid-'30s, but since its borders largely coincided with the predecessor state*, it's a less clear-cut argument.
106 is an interesting addition, although surely that's mostly a statement about oil (and, to an extent, the shittiness of Communist rule/economics). Of course, I'm pretty sure that it was common for colonies and other imperialized places to be net losses under the Brits and others: imperialists are no more rational economic actors than other humans.
*granted, an explicitly imperial state, but still, I could see a non-garbage argument that the USSR in 1925 wasn't fundamentally am empire.
I'm with Jroth. America's system is so unlike any other before it that calling it an empire just isn't helpful.
It's not something I have given that much thought to, but one of the remarkable changes in my lifetime is the demilitarization and pacification of the "periphery."
I grew up in the 60s with a lot of "players" When Israel and Egypt (etc) went to war in 1973 for instance it really wasn't a proxy war, or two puppet states following orders. They acted independently. Greece-Turkey, China-Russia, India-Pakistan, there were little wars everywhere. I have not yet read the book mentioned, but I vaguely remember interstate conflicts in Africa.
And now such wars are unlikely to impossible. The Pax Americana. It seems to me that is more the histories and process of Imperialism, to take away independent initiative and internal conflicts within a range of hegemony and control more than occupation and direct exploitation. The Gauls were always waging wars on each other, Afghanistan was a mess for the British, the Persians wanted to prevent ambitious actors near the Aegean etc.
John Smith, Imperialism in the 21st Century 2016 is a very Marxian attempt to understand the economic benefits of current Empire, how Empire works
It isn't so much the direct exploitation and stripping of resources of the periphery by the metropole, though that happens and was more the pattern of the Cold War years. Or even making the periphery a safe place to send capital, although that also happens. Those are pre-Empire.
What happens in an Imperial Peace is that the periphery becomes a safe place for internal accumulation and development and as long as the metropole maintains a technological and economic advantage surplus, including surplus talent, will flow to the center, not as much as during conquest maybe, but safer, much cheaper, steadier and sustained.
Historically, of course, after the peace was established and the metropole reached its limits of expansion, surplus and tech would leak across the borders, building up new adversaries and actors, forcing expensive garrisons, walls and border wars, and eventually losses of territory.
For the record, I'm not saying the Warsaw pact wasn't an empire. I don't know enough to have an opinion, especially post-Kruschev. Also yes, AFAIK most European colonies were net losses by the late 19c.
periphery becomes a safe place for internal accumulation and development
This was one of the major characteristics of the Roman empire.
Of course, I'm pretty sure that it was common for colonies and other imperialized places to be net losses under the Brits and others:
Example. A bunch of investors were convinced that Uganda was sitting on a fortune in minerals. However, Uganda is landlocked; therefore some bright sparks thought it wise to annex Kenya in order to build a railway across it to Uganda, which they duly did. The only reason Kenya was initially colonised was to provide access to Uganda. Subsequent efforts to settle it with remittance men were just making the best of a bad job.
Kenya was a net liability to British capitalism and the state up to the day they heaved a sigh of relief and scuttled off home. Uganda wasn't all that rich, as it turned out either.
Also yes, AFAIK most European colonies were net losses by the late 19c.
Were India and Indo-China net losses to the British and French? Or Indonesia to the Dutch? I'm sure the Caribbean was, but European colonisation of Africa outside the Cape and a few Portuguese trading posts didn't really start until the late 19th century. You're right they never made any money out of it, but there wasn't an initial golden age when they did, apart from speculative investment.
AFAIK most European colonies were net losses by the late 19c.
Or earlier - Adam Smith reckoned this was true about India, for example - but I think you need to ask "compared to what"? Lots of things are net losses but still a good idea - for example, insurance. The alternative to "Britain rules India and gets slightly less out of it in tax than it spends there on garrison, public services etc" is not necessarily that everything remains the same except that India runs its own affairs. More likely, it's that British trade with India is massively reduced, either because the local rulers won't let British traders in, or because the French or Portuguese or whoever take India instead and want to keep it as a captive market.
113: weren't Indonesia and the Caribbean incredibly lucrative? Sugar and spice?
Incidentally, this makes me think:
I've seen a few times over the past year anti-capitalists trying to hang slavery on capitalism. It always relies on shifting definitions of slavery, since the basic concept predates capitalism by millennia, and capitalism has outlived chattel slavery by almost a century and a half, but leave that aside.
Isn't it a better argument that chattel slavery (and its close cognates) are fundamentally an outgrowth of (modern) imperialism? From the very beginning, you had Europeans expending great wealth to gain resources from colonies, colonies that often couldn't make a return, except under increasingly inhumane slave labor. Basically you had all these economic units (thinking especially of the sugar islands, but it works for the colonial American South as well) that needed to make a certain amount of ££ if they wanted Crown support, and they were in no way self-sustainable without support (mostly military, but also structural, if you will). Under that desperation, nothing but slavery would do.
Obviously, I'm just pulling this out of nowhere, but it makes some sense to me. The kind of slavery that was materially different* from what has existed in most societies from time immemorial until today really just coincided with the high imperial era.
*chattel status plus massive relocation plus enslaved descendants; based on my copious researchreading of Wikipedia, I'm not 100% sure there really was a material difference, but the claim that capitalism had anything to do with slavery surely requires drawing a distinction from a practice that, near as we can tell, has been literally universal since before agriculture.
Indonesia probably. Was cane sugar still super-profitable by that date? I thought most British sugar needs were met by East Anglian beet by then. At some point a lot of the Caribbean started growing bananas instead, and I'm not sure what the margin is on those.
Also, one must think about sub-state actors. India was conquered by the East India Company, not Great Britain, and they did quite well for themselves.
We no longer have to occupy country X, say Vietnam to steal their resources, including cheap labor. Nor do we need a place to send surplus capital, or even the markets for our commodities as the early theoreticians like Lenin and Luxemburg thought..
A local Vietnamese will find local capital, since agriculture creates a surplus under peace, build his own factory with US IP/tech and send us cheap commodities, as long as he is assured of a market.
He/she will also exploit the fuck out of his own people, and bank his profits in the metropole out of fear of internal disorder.
Naw, American Empire isn't that new in form. It is just the biggest and most complete.
Was cane sugar still super-profitable by that date?
What date are we talking about? I'm prepared to believe that by late 19thC Jamaica was no longer profitable, but I thought you were saying it hadn't ever been. By late 19thC the Dutch weren't making money from East Indies nutmeg any more; it was tin and rubber.
The kind of slavery that was materially different* from what has existed in most societies from time immemorial until today really just coincided with the high imperial era. *chattel status plus massive relocation plus enslaved descendants
The Romans had chattel slavery plus massive relocation (at least as massive as their logistics allowed); weren't the descendants of Roman slaves automatically slaves as well?
I know nothing about Indonesia and Indochina, except that the VOC was essentially bankrupt by IIRC c.1800, and was taken over by the state. British East India company was taken over c.1860, after the mutiny, but I think was losing money for a long time before then. The insane sugar & spice profits were from the first era of imperialism, 17th and 18th centuries. According to John Darwin India was a vital asset to Britain 1830-1947, as a captive market, tax base, and source of troops; AFAICR, the African colonies, excluding SA, weren't assets at all. Spanish America was mostly a loss apart from the Peru and Mexico mines, until the late 18C, when the Bourbons reformed, mostly by taxing and excluding non-Spanish merchants more effectively.
119 is broadly true, and describes 19C Britain quite well wrt Latin America and Asia especially, though metropolitan capital is more important than you make out, in both cases.
120. I'm using the late 19th as a baseline, in response to Mossy at 110. Certainly there was a lot more money to to be made from colonialism at earlier dates. I'm also arguing that very few people ever made a red cent out of the "scramble for Africa" (late 19th century): Zambian copper being the only major exception I can think of. It was quite, quite mad.
According to John Darwin India was a vital asset to Britain 1830-1947, as a captive market, tax base, and source of troops
But what's the point, in profit terms, in making a financial loss in order to keep a colony that provides lots of troops if you're just going to use them to obtain and defend other loss-making colonies? Colonial-raised troops weren't AFAIK used to defend the metropolis in the Napoleonic Wars; the British used continental mercenaries and levies instead. (The King's German Legion, etc.) Nor were they used in the Crimean War.
Indian troops fought on the Western Front in WW1, but there were also a load of British troops in India at the same time.
120.last: Not sure; I've always had the impression that slave => citizen was a lot more common in Rome than the US, at least. Anyway, Wiki says that most (vast majority, not 55%) slaves in Italy were Italians, so not as relocation-driven. More important, most "barbarian" slaves were direct war spoils, which was the traditional source of slaves/way to become a slave. The Atlantic slave trade was, at most, indirectly fed by war captives; I think it's more accurate to describe slave raids, where the goal was people, not land, wealth, or domination.
I mean, not that it matters to the slave, but IMO there's a delineation between a polity that sends out an army for military purposes with the expectation that it will return with spills, including slaves, and a polity that sends out soldiers to capture people who will be sold for cash and goods. As I say, the former is universal; the latter is, if not exactly particular, at least not the norm.
On scale, Wiki says that, from the 16th-19th C's, the Arab slave trade was about 3M people, the Atlantic 12M.
weren't the descendants of Roman slaves automatically slaves as well?
They were. It was moderately common to "free" your slaves either at or before your death, but that meant that they and their descendants assumed all sorts of obligations to you and your heirs for at least one generation, sometimes more.
BTW, on modern slavery, an FB friend who knows says that estimates are so... approximate that they basically shouldn't be used at all, more or less like D^2's line about liars' estimates. There's no good underlying data, definitions are fluid, and of course there are agendas at work. She wouldn't even commit to a broad range; we just don't know, except to say that it's not zero.
116: I don't think there was a material difference, for the reasons you and ajay give. But running with it anyway: slavery was vital to Caribbean sugar, because no-one would voluntarily migrate to do the work. Sugar mattered a lot, but wasn't the only thing going on. American cotton AFAIK could actually have been made to work without slavery, possibly in fact more profitably. Indonesian spice I don't know enough. The Dutch did use slaves, but I don't know if that was actually necessary or just because they were bastards; in any case I think that economically it was actually far less important than sugar. Also, Spanish American silver was important for catalyzing the whole modern imperial/capitalist era (don't know how important, but I suspect vastly, more so than sugar even), and those mines didn't run on slavery. Indian* laborers were coerced via taxation, but were never chattels. Most migrated periodically, worked long enough to pay their taxes, then left.
*Don't know the polite term. 'Native American' doesn't feel appropriate at all.
Besides the John Smith above, of course Panitch and Gindin, The Making Of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy Of American Empire 2013 show how the export of just the political legal economic system creates an American Empire.
(another thing I remember is how fucking Keynesian the Cold War world was. Nasser built dams and subsidized bread. Now that Empire is complete, we have neoliberalism)
Of course the world-systems crowd understood what to look at and how to look, although Wallerstein himself was too eurocentric and overestimated the degree to which Empire had to keep the periphery underdeveloped.
One thing the world-systems got was not to follow, as mainstream economists do, direct FDI from Empire to periphery. Money is nothing, you can create it out of air. It's called "credit" and as long as the Bangladeshi entrepreneur has a good contract from Walmart Singapore, China, India, he can get can the investment capital for light industry from anywhere. What the world-systems people did was to look at intrastate trade and investment not initiated by the metropole, between the Phillippines and Vietnam during the 18th for instance, stuff msm economists ignored.
1st rule:follow the money. Where is the wealth and where are the proles, plebes and peasants and then try to understand how the flow of exploitation works.
Sorry coastals, you are metropole and red states are periphery. They get it.
Wiki says that most (vast majority, not 55%) slaves in Italy were Italians, so not as relocation-driven.
At what date? From 49 BCE every free person in Italy was a full citizen, and from 212 CE every free person in the empire. Good luck enslaving them.
125.2: Not disagreeing, but want to point out that the polities doing the slave raiding were all African, selling to private European traders on the coast.
what's the point, in profit terms, in making a financial loss in order to keep a colony that provides lots of troops if you're just going to use them to obtain and defend other loss-making colonies
IIRC, India wasn't loss-making to the British Treasury. Most of the wars you mention are outside his period, starting 1830. In the world wars Indian troops also helped capture and defend Middle Eastern oil, which was strategically important. In any case, Darwin leans mostly on the money, not the troops.
I've seen a few times over the past year anti-capitalists trying to hang slavery on capitalism. It always relies on shifting definitions of slavery, since the basic concept predates capitalism by millennia, and capitalism has outlived chattel slavery by almost a century and a half, but leave that aside.
I thought this has been, if not fairly well established at least rather rigorously argued by a number of academic historians. No book titles at hand, ask Loomis I suppose.
There seems to me to be a serious lack of class analysis in arguing that slavery or imperialism wasn't profitable to the states that engaged in them. Both were enormously profitable to the ruling classes of those states even if it was a net loss to the states taken as a whole.
I thought this has been, if not fairly well established at least rather rigorously argued by a number of academic historians
What does 'this' refer to? I don't think anyone's argued that slavery or imperialism weren't profitable to states or elites, but that profitability varied greatly by time and place, and the importance of slavery to capitalism isn't entirely clear.
123 is all true, but you can add gold and diamonds in SA, and maybe cotton in Egypt and rubber in the Belgian Congo, depending on what exactly you count as 'scramble'.
132: Oh yeah, thought that went w/o saying.
131: No idea; the stat made no sense to me, and I reread it a couple times. May still have misunderstood, or it may have been simply wrong.
136.last
That's what seems oddest to me about this discussion. I mean this is a fairly well trodden field, not something a bunch of internet anti-capitalists have come up with recently. We can argue whether the arguments hold and over the evidence put forth for them but it's not as if there's not a well-established body of literature making the connection between slavery and capitalism.
https://www.thenation.com/article/capitalism-and-slavery/
Oh, for instance slavery built the Midwest.
After converting to plantation cotton, slave states needed food and light tools/umm pottery*/light industry/small arms, which to a large degree flowed down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.
*often the development step after ag and textiles is kitchen utensils, plates, sewing needles, shovels & picks etc
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery 1994, Phillip Foner, Business and Slavery 1941 (about NY Finance)
Edward Baptist, Beckert and Rockman, both 2016
just looking at Amazon
No, haven't read them, have the Williams on my list.
But c'mon people, let's not go nuts on this, as if whaling and ship-building and tea were nothing to the ante-bellum North or China Japan S Korea were built on Georgian slaves.
Exploitation of agricultural workers builds early surplus, and capitalism/industrialization wasn't done once for all time and then everybody else just used existing capital.
Agree with 135.last, although I think it's foolish to believe that every imperialist venture was doing significant good to any meaningful number of people (someone will benefit from any venture; that's an insanely low bar to consider). I don't think anyone is arguing that slavery wasn't broadly profitable, although I think it likely that it wasn't always the most economically efficient thing, even setting aside the human cost.
a well-established body of literature making the connection between slavery and capitalism.
I'm not talking connection, I'm talking causation. Talk to me like I'm stupid: what were people doing with slaves for the first 7000 years of civilization, before capitalism?
Obviously there's a strong relationship between slavery and capitalism. Same deal with agriculture and capitalism. But it would be flatly insane to ascribe agriculture to capitalism, which is what the people I'm describing do with slavery: "capitalism is awful for many reasons, including slavery."
Either slavery (as we know it) didn't exist before 1750 or so, or capitalism has never not existed. What's the third possibility?
136 last was badly put. JRoth's original was "anti-capitalists trying to hang slavery on capitalism", that is, capitalism causing slavery, which it didn't; and the rest of the discussion is over variations in the importance of slavery.
Capitalism didn't cause slavery in general and is obviously long predated by it, but capitalism nourished particular instances of slavery, leading it to exist in cases where it otherwise might not. Fair?
I did not cause Moby, who long predates me.
I'm a product of the Nixon administration.
Packing up my office, the movers come Monday. They turned off the internet today, though. Sorry about the lack of posting.
Packing up my office, the movers come Monday. They turned off the internet today, though. Sorry about the lack of posting.
142. I've not come across this one before. I mean it's trivially true that "capitalism is awful for many reasons, including slavery." Also: "Greeko-Roman civilisation was awful for many reasons, including slavery"; Mediaeval Islamic civilisation was awful for many reasons, including slavery"; Ancient Chinese civilisation was awful for many reasons, including slavery". You could go on all day. But slavery is fairly peripheral to capitalism as we know and loathe it, from 17th century Holland and England on up, at least by comparison to earlier modes of production. I can only suggest that people making that argument have no sense of history whatever.
144 doesn't make sense to me: "capitalism nourished particular instances of slavery, leading it to exist in cases where it otherwise might not." But without capitalism, the cases in point wouldn't have existed either. You can't argue that without capitalism cotton plantations in the American south would have been run as non-profit cooperatives, because without capitalism there wouldn't have been any cotton plantations in America.
152: It's coming from smart people with a string sense of history, but I think also an ideological commitment that supersedes strictly logical argument. ISTM that at least some people who explicitly self-identify as "anticapitalist"--and I know there are some here--think that capitalism is so problematic that it and everything associated with it are utterly discredited. They don't seem to be Marxists, just anticapitalist.
Perhaps this belongs as part of the "nothing is really a business" thread.
slavery is fairly peripheral to capitalism as we know and loathe it, from 17th century Holland and England on up
Haven't read enough to have a strong opinion, but I lean this way. For instance the piece Barry linked includes
Empire of Cotton explains the industrial take off of Europe and North America as a result of the emergence of peculiar kinds of uniquely powerful states
My basic take is that modernity* begins and ends with state formation. This is why I mentioned American silver upthread: it fueled the first century of modern European warfare, and all the state formation that came with it. *Not identical with capitalism, but the two are very hard to separate.
I can only suggest that people making that argument have no sense of history whatever.
Nah, it's politics. And I take it seriously, the problem left anti-racists have to confront is how to get the minorities "caught up" with whites. Universal Programs or a universal politics won't do it. What ideology and discourse are necessary?
Woke culture vs brosocialists! Thith meanth war!
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I liked this
Identity Politics and Class Solidarity;Its Not as Simple as Doing Both;The Difference Between Identity Politics and Woke Culture ...quite long, Chicagoan; I think black
Bernie for Politics reddit subthread; this week
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I'd buy the middle part of 144, in that capitalism supercharged slavery*, but of course that's true of nearly everything, including, as I noted, agriculture.
Two related arguments I'm basically fine with: mercantile-fueled slavery laid the groundwork for modern capitalism (by creating larger stocks of capital than had been hithertofor known in Europe), and capitalism drove a new kind of racism, because raising the salience of racial/ethnic differences was valuable to capitalists. I still don't think that gets you within sneezing distance of the claim I started out complaining against.
*although, even then: I'd say the supercharging predated the actual economic system of capitalism, and imperialism/mercantilism is a more likely suspect
Second 157, except the footnote. I've been taking 'capitalism' to include the mercantile era, starting 1600 at the latest.
If you do exclude that period then the centrality of slavery is indeed massively reduced.
I was taught that "Western" (aka "Modern") civilization was distinct from but an offshoot of "Classical" (aka "Greco-Roman") civilization. Is this not still the consensus?
I just read a good review of Chaos of Empire by Wilson. Recommended here by those in the know?
Yes, Minivet. We already had a reading group and everything.
160: that always seemed to me like a just-so story, particularly one propagated by people who really wanted to claim a unique lineage from ancient Rome.
160. Up to a point, Lord Copper. There is a distinct caesura not merely between late antiquity and the early middle ages in about 600, but between the late middle ages and modernity, sometime in the 16th century. Mediaeval Europe knew very little about Classical Rome and less about Greece, and these were reinterpreted almost from scratch when they were rediscovered. You couldn't have got here without starting from there, but I think it's a huge oversimplification to say that "Western" civilisation is simply an offshoot of "Classical".
I've been taking 'capitalism' to include the mercantile era, starting 1600 at the latest.
If you do exclude that period then the centrality of slavery is indeed massively reduced.
Maybe we need DeLong to adjudicate this. From my own reading/knowledge, I'd hesitate to call mercantilism more than porto-capitalism: you have things like joint-stock companies and double-entry accounting*, but more or less everything is still by royal charter, credit is pretty limited, no central banks (or anything very like them), and of course no theoretical understanding of any of it.
Anyway, I agree with your points; I just don't know if I should agree with your date.
*first published--as opposed to used--in Europe in 1494; had been used earlier, but as independent innovations, not a new standard
165+ And what caused the break in the 1500s? Some would say Protestantism; some would say movable type; some would say unlimited American silver. You pays your money...
157.2: Sorry, I don't buy it, and there is something pretty racist, eurocentric, and anglo-centric about claiming that (liberal) capitalism was invented in England and then exported to the rest of the world in some kind of linear fashion.
Even where the development model is known and understood the contingent difficulties of local implementation overwhelm the theory. Japan, IIRC, never really went the enclosure/commercial ag route.
166. Except that mercantilism remained the dominant economic ideology up to the time of Adam Smith, and surely we're looking at capitalism in at least Britain and the Netherlands (and their colonies) by then.
168. I think most people would say it was invented in the Netherlands and exported to the rest of the world in a deeply non-linear fashion.
"invented" (nobody came up with the idea, ever.)
165: I wasn't suggesting that Western civilization was derived directly from Classical, without the Medieval interlude, but that many of the features of Western civilization were derived from the "rebirth" caused by access to Classical knowledge. "Medieval" civilization up to a point (perhaps when the Crusades started or maybe even later) thought of itself as a continuation of Classical, though they tended to believe they had declined from the heights due to man's fallen nature, of course.
In any case the idea you can define a civilization in any sort of easily wrapped up packet seems pretty silly. A lot of the things we were taught about the Middle Ages were wrong, and 164 is right that such definitions often exist to draw boundaries and serve agendas.
167: fair. But lots of glaring holes there: no US central bank until 1913; feudalism deliberately prevented in Spanish colonies starting ~1520; credit in Europe sufficient for 150 years of Habsburg warfare, with a very modern bond market around it.
Wasn't intended as an exhaustive list. Obvs no single cause.
Assuming 173 was to 166: Right, it was a gradual development. Unlike the development of life, we don't need a single element or moment marking the threshold. We can be comfortable with a continuum.
I'm just leery of defining capitalism too broadly, partly because it's a peeve of mine in general (see the "neoliberalism" arguments of yore), partly because, if people do seriously want to talk about postcapitalism, we probably need a definition a bit narrower than "everything that happened after feudalism" (especially since feudalism as we conceive it wasn't really a [widespread] thing either).
Except that mercantilism remained the dominant economic ideology up to the time of Adam Smith, and surely we're looking at capitalism in at least Britain and the Netherlands (and their colonies) by then.
The way I've always thought of it is that Smith codified a system that had come into existence without anyone A. understanding it or B. claiming it as an ideology. That is, you didn't have Frenchmen sneering that the Dutch were no longer true mercantilists, even though that was a true thing to say by, I dunno, 1700.
I could be wrong, but my impression is that at least some of Smith is him asserting/assuming that behavior X was inherent, when it would be better described as how people tend to act in a capitalist system, but he didn't know that, because it was what he'd lived under his whole life. Maybe that's bunk.
Will have to wade into this tomorrow.
175 I still think "neoliberalism" is a useful concept and I'm not convinced by arguments to the contrary. Hell, we're living with the consequences.
Yes, to 166. Fair! What date do you have in mind for capitalism?
(Deletes long-winded, useless comment) What JRoth stated in 157 is pretty much what I think, better worded.
181: True, arguing is fun. Alright, hombres, get ready for some hot takes. Capitalism started with Augustine and ended with Tsiolkovsky. Capitalism is both necessary and sufficient for bee die-off. You probably don't agree because you're a goddamned neoliberal.
178: I'd say 1750 for "widespread but not ubiquitous", but that's pretty lose. I feel as if 1700 it definitely exists somewhere, but isn't a primary driver; by 1800, it's old news (it's like an NYT trend story: once it's in the Times, it's not a trend anymore). But I'm pretty convincible on that.
175 I still think "neoliberalism" is a useful concept and I'm not convinced by arguments to the contrary. Hell, we're living with the consequences.
That reminds me of the excellent article I read last week that was the best neoliberal-themed thing I've ever read... until it ascribed incarceration rates in the US solely to neoliberalism. Which is eg-fucking-zactly the sort of mindless bullshit around that word that drives me mad. Because the primary fact you need to know about prisons in America is that the DLC became a major player in the late 1980s. Not that Nixon began the War on Drugs intentionally to attack hippies and blacks*, but because some guy at the Washington Monthly thought that there was some overreach by liberal governance.
I also look forward to learning how neoliberalism drove James Comey to throw 6 million votes to Trump.
*who, of course, were previously free from state coercion in America. Jim Crow laws: neoliberalism?
FWIW, the argument I found convincing in that article was that, under both Naziism and neoliberalism, you have supermanagers who are paid out of all proportion to their nominal roles because their actual job is to manage a pseudocapitalist state that is neither meaningfully democratic nor state-run. Industry is required to serve the state when called upon, but is otherwise free to operate as it sees fit. The job of the supermanagers is to handle that nebulous relationship.
Skimming back through, the authors make an interesting argument about unchecked police power, but ascribe it in the US specifically to the neoliberal era of Thatcher/Reagan. Because, again, from the rise of police departments until 1981, police in America were pretty strongly restrained by democratic norms, right? It was only after Reagan fired the air traffic controllers that police stopped respecting the rights of suspects?
Indeed, at the conclusion, it says, "the neoliberal state has already created a penal system to rival the world's most authoritarian dictatorships." But that applies to exactly one neoliberal state on earth. They talk about neoliberalism as a transnational, evangelical enterprise, yet this supposedly defining characteristic--incarceration and extravagantly arbitrary police power--applies to exactly one neoliberal country, and is much, much better explained by completely different factors.
Of course there was the Nixonian War on Drugs that ramped up incarceration rates. But under neoliberalism we've had privatized prisons which is another order entirely. It creates perverse incentives in the system which both political parties are susceptible too quite apart from any law and order ideological commitment.
Someone claimed it was Glenn Greenwald who popularized using "neoliberal" as a meaningless slur. Since Greenwald is the prototypical brocialist, it makes sense.
Here we go again
Since I am halfway thru the Routledge Handbook of Neoliberalism 2016 which has:~50 articles of 10 pages by about 75 scholars with each article followed by a bibliography (mostly the point) totaling 666 (!?) pages and each article starts with something like a definition I can help you out all day long.
Sealing Cheng, Chapter 19
Scholars have argued that neoliberalism is about the subsumption of capital into everyday life such that there is nothing outside capital (Read 2009). Thereby, individual interest and competition become the guiding principle not just in the economic sector, but also all aspects of social life. Furthermore, the fantasy of free trade (Dean 2008) comes to constitute the neoliberal actor as rational agents engaged in the market of everyday exchanges, celebrating the consumer as a political subject while banalizing the citizenry (ibid.: 54-63). Posing as a system of rationality and universality that fosters the continuous expansion of a free market inhabited by competitive and responsible individuals, neoliberalism constructs itself as a regime of truth about society and human nature. Neoliberal transformations thereby shape not only the world we live in, but also the idea of being human - and thereby, being sexual.
Look Inside the Book of Neoliberalism is also available at Amazon, including the Table of Contents and most of Chapter 1, but not the Introduction
Matthew Eagleton-Pierce
Three themes are examined: (1) individualism, whereby the individual tends to acquire ontological priority over the collective; (2) universalism, such as seen in the expansionary moves towards a world market; and (3) meliorism, whereby humans, it is claimed, have the potential to improve and remake themselves.
And what is wrong with those, you ask? Well, no spoilers.
188: NO!!!! DON"T LOOK INSIDE THE BOOK!!!
187: But Marx could have written the same in 1848, and basically did. We have a really terrific term for the phenomenon, and that term is "capitalism".
No, you're looking at it too economistically, maybe.
"(1) individualism, whereby the individual tends to acquire ontological priority over the collective"
So Maggie says There is no society
This means that the individual, not society, gets to decide what her sexuality is and how it shall be performed
That the hedge fund trader gets to make a billion gambling on and facilitating the immiseration of Greece, with only her conscience as her guide
That society or the gubbmint ain't gonna force me to buy no stinking health insurance
That borders should be open and people free to travel
Neoliberalism is a liberalism, just one so intense that Locke and Mills wouldn't recognize and probably disapprove the place
You can get there through Marx and Marxism, but maybe you have to be Fredric Jameson to do it.
I am not one who always uses neoliberalism or capitalism as curse. They have some very good points, especially for individuals, or they wouldn't work their magic
I just finished the book I was reading on Song China, which is a really interesting example of a society with a lot of the institutions of capitalism without the corresponding ideology justifying them.
186 solves everything.
185: Sadly, no. From the ACLU:
Today, for-profit companies are responsible for approximately 6 percent of state prisoners, 16 percent of federal prisoners, and inmates in local jails in Texas, Louisiana, and a handful of other states.Total US incarceration spiked from around 500k in 1980 to 2400k in 2005. Ascribing an almost fivefold increase to one seventh of the system is absurd*. Privatized prisons are the devil themselves, and have pushed arguments in the wrong direction, but they are not the reason the US puts so many people in prison.
Or wait: did neoliberalism put lead in the inner cities?
Total US incarceration spiked from around 500k in 1980 to 2400k in 2005. Ascribing an almost fivefold increase to one seventh of the system is absurd*. Privatized prisons are the devil themselves, and have pushed arguments in the wrong direction, but they are not the reason the US puts so many people in prison.
Or wait: did neoliberalism put lead in the inner cities?
*if we returned to 1980 incarceration rates and kept every private prison cell in the US, we'd still fill all the public cells from 1980. IOW, the increase in private prisons accounts for population growth, while the War on Drugs + lead account for the entirety of the increase in incarceration rates.
Finally, what is the difference between neoliberalism and libertarianism?
Gov't. Neoliberals want lots and lots of gov't helping individuals achieve their dreams, often at expense of their local societies. Send the 1st Armored Division to Kentucky and get that couple married, goddamit.
191: That's an old Marxist argument. Homosexuality is a bourgeois decadence, and won't exist after the revolution. This is not an idea that survived the 60s idea of personal liberation. If you want to define neoliberalism so that its exemplar is hippies, you have to admit that's a pretty idiosyncratic use of the term.
Given that we have to use "fascist" as a descriptor again, it's handy that we have "neoliberal" to use as an otherwise meaningless term for something one does not like.
195: Did you think that was what I was saying?
You are a malicious idiot, and I am through with you.
Have you tried to open a friendly dialogue by accusing him of beating his wife?
Okay, you dumb fucks, let's go through it all again.
Three themes are examined: (1) individualism, whereby the individual tends to acquire ontological priority over the collective; (2) universalism, such as seen in the expansionary moves towards a world market; and (3) meliorism, whereby humans, it is claimed, have the potential to improve and remake themselves.
This means that the individual, not society, gets to decide what her sexuality is and how it shall be performed Good thing, good expression of neoliberalism
That the hedge fund trader gets to make a billion gambling on and facilitating the immiseration of Greece, with only her conscience as her guide
Bad thing, bad instance of neoliberalism
That society or the gubbmint ain't gonna force me to buy no stinking health insurance
Bad thing, bad expression of neoliberalism
That borders should be open and people free to travel
good thing, good expression
Guess I was being too subtle and artful for you.
(1) individualism, whereby the individual tends to acquire ontological priority over the collective
When you set this as a guiding principle, a tenet, sometimes there are consequences some people do not like. Such is politics, such was the history of liberalism as it played out in local circumstance
198: Is that better or worse than accusing me of rabid homophobia on this forum?
All bets are off with that rapacious finance fuck.
Guess I have to choose, you dumb fucks, or the three thousand or so internationally respected academics represented in the Routledge book.
Tough fucking call.
Here's a big middle finger for y'all, one I ave been saving
The End of Progressive Neoliberalism
Nancy Fraser (only a woman, huh), Dissent Magazine, January 2, 2017 comments on the election
"A party bent on liberalizing the capitalist economy found its perfect mate in a meritocratic corporate feminism focused on "leaning in" and "cracking the glass ceiling."
I, for one, shed no tears for the defeat of progressive neoliberalism. Certainly, there is much to fear from a racist, anti-immigrant, anti-ecological Trump administration. But we should mourn neither the implosion of neoliberal hegemony nor the shattering of Clintonism's iron grip on the Democratic Party. Trump's victory marked a defeat for the alliance of emancipation and financialization.
"Whether that happens will depend in part on some serious soul-searching among the progressives who rallied to the Clinton campaign. They will need to drop the comforting but false myth that they lost to a "basket of deplorables" (racists, misogynists, Islamophobes, and homophobes) aided by Vladimir Putin and the FBI. They will need to acknowledge their own share of blame for sacrificing the cause of social protection, material well-being, and working-class dignity to faux understandings of emancipation in terms of meritocracy, diversity, and empowerment." ...all text NF
I'm still waiting for Dissent to merge with Commentary.
202: bob, you forget that each one of us is primarily an individual, not a member of the unfogged collective united against you.
In that spirit I denounce the mean-spirited trolling of Walt's 195.
204: Dommentary: the kinkiest of the small political magazines.
Because, again, from the rise of police departments until 1981, police in America were pretty strongly restrained by democratic norms, right? It was only after Reagan fired the air traffic controllers that police stopped respecting the rights of suspects?
The authors of that argument are morons. Tennessee v. Garner wasn't until 1985. Before then it was pretty much the "fleeing felon" rule by both policy and the law which equated to "if a felon is running away you can shoot that fucker". And that's exactly what happened, a LOT. Around here the old timers would have a "burglar gun" in their trunk that they would pull out on calls like "burglary in progress". Commonly lever action carbines and the entire purpose of that trusty little cowboy rifle was to put down any suspect dumb enough to try and run away. These are rough numbers being pulled from memory but NYPD last year I think shot a number of suspects in the single digits. When they first started tracking that stat in '70 or '71 it was around 90.
The cops had lead poisoning too, you know.
I'm way too busy blocking Nazis in my mentions to refight the Great Unfogged Neoliberalism wars but I still think it's a very useful concept and I'll continue to use it here until Halford comes back and begs me to stop.
My understanding is that cops still tend to get lead poisoning from poorly ventilated shooting ranges. There is also the steroid abuse.
Lincoln looks serene under a couple of inches of powdery snow. Wish I had boots and a couple of free hours.
I'm sure that's true, but I think the people in Illinois would really appreciate it if you returned his body.
Paul Ryan and Donald Trump want to eat it first.
Trump needs to wait until he's inaugurated. I guess Ryan can start now.
This is my body, which was given up for you and for all elected Republicans...
40 -- I'm a bit wary of the assumption that Colonel's son is English? He could well be Border Scots (esp given "I hold by the blood of my clan" and the way Kipling uses a sort of ersatz-border-scots voice in the poem) which lets you read "ends of the Earth" as a reference to the north-west frontier and the borders respectively (partly poetically as mountainous, remote frontiers) but also (more) poetically in the sense that the borders really are the ends of (an) earth in a way that it wouldn't make sense to talk about England as being -- and those readings open up a case that this is a poem about cultural similarities between border-living clan societies and the line about East is East etc becomes very heavy handed irony. Particularly the echo about a "Border thief" -- surely horse thieving is a sort of Borders thing to do?
And the Colonel's son doesn't behave very Englishly, if that makes sense - an Englishman would surely say something more along the lines of Napier's "let us all act according to our national customs" and simply impose his notions of lawfulness on the thief, not accept thievery as a cultural custom to be dealt with within a clan structure?
219: interesting reading, but I'm not sure about it.
The border reivers' characteristic crime wasn't horse-theft, it was cattle theft. Stealing cattle is a lot easier. For a start, they're used to being herded along for long distances by men on horses (did you know that Scottish cattle were taken from the Highlands to be sold in London? Including swimming them across the mile of sea between Skye and the mainland? And that they put horse-shoes, or I suppose cow-shoes, on the cattle first to enable them to cover the hundreds of miles involved without going lame? Amazing. Did the stockmen of the American west shoe their cattle before driving them along the trail?) Also there were more of them, and they were easier to get at; Border families didn't raise herds of hundreds of horses, they had a few which were very valuable and kept not in stables but actually inside their tower-houses, on the ground floor. Going after them wouldn't be a night raid sort of operation, it would be a deliberate attack against a fortified position.
Second, on the "an Englishman wouldn't have said that" - well, bit of a national stereotype, for a start. And also, yes he would if he was working on the Frontier, as an officer of the Guides. Napier could afford to take a firm line because he had several thousand reliable Company troops backing him up. The Guides were locally recruited forces who had far more in common with Kamal and his son than with their British officers (the same is true today); they had an awkward tendency to switch sides from time to time, either individually by deserting or collectively through mutiny.
Also, the Colonel's son didn't have the option of arresting Kamal. He was on his own, remember.
...or I suppose cow-shoes...
Orkers. They're cow-orkers.
Though I notice that Wiki makes the same connection, pointing out that some of the vocabulary is specifically Scots (like "lifted"; the 51st Highland Division of Scots infantry were known as the Hydraulic Division because they would lift anything).
And also cites this commentary on the first four lines, from 1978:
No lines of Kipling's have been more freely quoted, and more often misquoted in exactly the opposite sense which Kipling gave them. The first couplet is an echo from the Psalms where the figure of speech is used to express the universality of the divine law in spite of estranging seas; the second couplet is Kipling's commentary, with the same theme as the psalmist.
Various other authors agree.
http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/rg_eastwest1.htm
Incidentally, I am very sceptical from personal experience that reversing the horseshoes on one's horse would actually deceive a proper tracker for very long. Things like the direction that mud or dust was thrown, the depth of the front of the hoofprint, route choice and so on would be a bit of a giveaway of the true direction, especially for a tracker who knows the horseshoe trick. Walking backwards to deceive a tracker doesn't work either, for the same reason.
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Reading the Routledge chapter "Neoliberalism and Unions" I get the usual Mirowski-ish history of Hayek, Friedman, Mancur Olsen, public choice theory, Becker, Foucault...that is, with the important exception of the French guy, the history of an anti-union ideology imposed from above opposing closed shops and favoring "Right to Work" measures and policies.
But what comes to my mind while reading this is the simultaneous national and global movements to force unions to admit and fairly treat women, minorities, etc. Note: this in no way says that I oppose these movements or consider them the cause of union decline.
But the connection of the two forces above leads me to consider that both are symptoms, consequences of a deeper wider popular change in a politico-economic ontology that can be expressed in the point 1) above: "(1) individualism, whereby the individual tends to acquire ontological priority over the collective" and makes resistance to either or return to a partial empowerment of previous social structures vastly more difficult.
No, we are not sending women back to the kitchen nor are we going to get politically effective unions back, because neoliberalism is not just embedded or internalized by nefarious conservatives or utilized by liberation movements but because neoliberalism is generated from the grass roots up, most likely as a superstructural expression of changes in the base mode of production with the conflicting and contradictory problems of a political economy in transition.
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197: I didn't say that you endorsed it -- I said it was a line of argument about capitalism that predated the 60s, and thus not very "neo". Once you stretch the definition of "neoliberalism" to include 60s liberation movements, you've destroyed its usefulness as an analytic category.
Useful for who how
Of course the last paragraph of 224 pretty much indicates what a resisting analysis looks like, how Marxism or historical materialism opposes (neo) liberalism. Tends toward determinism.
We give the collective ontological priority over the individual.
And yeah, that means neoliberalism (or other arguable social forces) created Gary Becker and determined what he wrote, and neoliberalism created third wave feminism. (not 2nd wave or 60-70s feminism, which represented a different conjuncture)
Okay yeah, there are certainly people even who use the term "neoliberalism" that consider it amorphous or too broad. But the attraction came after Marxists recognized the real subsumption of capital and the effective disempowerment of the language of class struggle (for instance)
But the overextension of Marxist or radical categories are partially redeemed by the reversal and contradiction of liberalism 2) above.
"(2) universalism, such as seen in the expansionary moves towards a world market"
Universalism is denied in theory and praxis, and applications are always contingent. local, and particular.
Have a good day
But what does "neoliberalism" add to that term versus "capitalism"? If you want to emphasize the recent aspects, how is "neoliberalism" an improvement over "late capitalism"?
228: I think there is a useful distinction to be made. Particularly in the US it has been easy to conflate the two, but I don't think capitalism is dependent on the sort of economic liberalization (free trade, open markets, deregulation, etc. popularized by neoliberals in the last decades. As such, it's still a useful term to contrast, and I suspect it will become more useful in coming decades as some of these policy chickens continue to come home to roost.