Seth Farber, author of “The Spiritual Gift of Madness.”

“The Spiritual Gift of Madness,” outside the lively interviews, is a stiff, terribly dogmatic and one-sided polemic in which Farber concedes nothing of value to any who disagree with his central thesis that the hallucinations and delusions of mental illness are anything but the Voice of God communicating with humanity.

Theodore Bilbo, fiercely racist senator from Mississippi and an important supporter of the New Deal. (photo: Wikipedia Commons)

I had mixed feelings about “Fear Itself.” The main narrative of the text–that Southern Democrats were absolutely central to both institutionalizing the New Deal and limiting it–is fresh and well-documented. But I was also uneasy with substantial parts of “Fear Itself” because Katznelson uncritically embraces concepts of liberal democracy and totalitarianism to characterize the world the U.S. found itself in in the thirties and after.

by Steven Sherman

In his previous book, “When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America“, historian Ira Katznelson offered a perspective deeply unsettling for American liberalism. Focused on the major pieces of New Deal legislation, “When Affirmative Action…” highlighted the way all had been written to limit their impact on the Jim Crow racial order so as to secure the support of Southern Democrats. As a result, they excluded key groups from their mandate. This is particularly unsettling since the New Deal is something of a high water mark for liberal governmental activism.

In his new book, “Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time,” he retains a focus on the role of Southern Democrats in forging the New Deal order. This time, however, the point emphasized is very different. In fact, the narrative elucidated might almost be called triumphalist, albeit with a melancholy undertone. The triumphal part is that the United States navigated the challenging waters of global depression without metamorphosing into a dictatorship. The melancholy undertone is supplied by Katznelson’s emphasis on the role of Southern Democrats, simultaneously the most effective legislative bloc supporting the New Deal and indefatigable defenders of racial segregation. In addition, Katznelson reminds readers that defeating the totalitarian dictatorships required an alliance with one such dictatorship, the Soviet Union. Furthermore, of the two sided U.S. state that emerged out of the war, one side, “the crusading state,” was distinctly undemocratic, producing numerous government agencies largely shielded from public view and enamored of loyalty oaths and perpetuated by (and perpetuating) the climate of fear that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had once tried to dispel. The other side of the state, the “procedural democracy” which allowed for competing interests to assert themselves while limiting the power of the state over the economy, he sees as more continuous with democratic traditions, although he acknowledges that this “pluralism” was weighted to the wealthier and more powerful classes.

I had mixed feelings about “Fear Itself.” The main narrative of the text–that Southern Democrats were absolutely central to both institutionalizing the New Deal and limiting it–is fresh and well-documented. Even readers of “When Affirmative Action…” are likely to have the impression that the Southern Democrats were an unfortunate portion of the New Deal coalition, which had to be appeased and unfortunately clipped the wings of otherwise social democratic legislation. In “Fear Itself,” they are identified as playing a much more important role. Although Southern Democrats were unequivocally committed to defending the racist Jim Crow order, this commitment coexisted with populist sentiments that had persisted since the nineteenth century. The major economic enterprises were rooted in the Northern states, and, in the South, ideas about reining in the power of monopolies and banks and helping the little people were popular. This provided the ground for strongly supporting the first two waves of New Deal legislation. The first period, sometimes described as “radical”, included the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which pushed for extensive collaboration between the government and the major corporations and is usually regarded as a failure. Katznelson disputes the “radical” characterization and emphasizes continuities between this period and the second period, which included labor legislation, social security, and unemployment insurance. When the labor legislation triggered an upsurge of strikes and union organizing that made multiracial unions a part of the American landscape, Southern support for further reforms soured.

Still, Southern Democrats retained their key role. Katznelson highlights their importance in legislatively authorizing the shift away from isolationism that signaled imminent U.S. participation in World War II. Among other things, the populist position of the time was support for free trade (and, thus, Great Britain) against the monopolies of the North that supported tariffs. The Nazis actually appealed to the South on grounds of racist solidarity, but were rebuffed. The Southern Democrats played a major role in clipping labor’s wings with the passage of the Taft Hartley Act in 1947, and also helped usher in the Cold War national security state by embracing a heightened, even paranoid security climate within the federal government.

Katznelson’s purpose in highlighting of the role of Southern legislators is twofold. First, it shows how the US remained a liberal democracy throughout the emergency period of the New Deal, with lawmaking powers remaining in congress, notwithstanding the charismatic occupant of the oval office. Second, the role of the South helps explain the limits of the order that emerged out of World War II. The populism of the South could not embrace multiracial unions, and increasingly saw reforms as a threat to the Jim Crow order. It was more comfortable with a crusading role in the world, particularly as accusations of communism could be employed against domestic critics of the South.

As noted above, I think Katznelson’s focus on Southern legislators is fresh and provocative. It hints at continuities with older traditions of American radicalism (i.e. populism) usually obscured by a left emphasis on union struggles and the Communist Party in the New Deal period. It might also pave the way for comparisons of the role of the south to the politics of other regions or nation-states that perceived themselves as dominated by more powerful regions or states. But I was also uneasy with substantial parts of “Fear Itself.” This is because Katznelson uncritically embraces concepts of liberal democracy and totalitarianism to characterize the world the U.S. found itself in in the thirties and after. Although this has long been the favorite framework of American liberals, it is debatable whether it illuminates more than it obscures.

This is not to say that it illuminates nothing. Surely it was the case that fascist and communist dictatorships shared some aspects–intolerance of even a semblance of opposition, the absence of anything resembling an independent judiciary or press, arbitrary enforcement of laws, no checks on executive power, etc–that might usefully be described as totalitarian. By contrast, throughout this period, the U.S. (and Great Britain, mostly absent from “Fear Itself”) retained all of the features of a liberal democracy, notwithstanding the racial tyranny of the South and the arbitrary detention of the Japanese during the war. This was the case even though there was widespread skepticism within the U.S. public sphere that democratic institutions may not be up to confronting the intense crisis of the Great Depression. This skepticism was accompanied by admiration for various dictators, perceived as acting effectively to help their societies recover from the depths of the economic crash. Katznelson’s point is that it was something of a miracle that power in the US remained vested in the legislature during this period, and the press and judiciary remained uncompromised. Point taken.

That said, the emphasis on liberal democracy vs. totalitarianism obscures at least two elements crucial to understanding “the origins of our times.” First, it obscures the difference between right and left–between dictatorships that sought to preserve the existing class hierarchy and those that sought to destroy it. Secondly, it obscures the global structures that the liberal democracies stood atop of, namely, the colonial world. Regarding the first point, Katznelson never really stratches the surface of the content of the fascist project and its differences with communism. But fascism sought to maintain the existing class structure, even if this involved a wholesale transformation of the relationship of state to society. Communism not only promised an egalitarian society, it wiped out the existing ruling class.

Does this matter? Maybe the US posture was an embrace of liberal democratic institutions, and a drift from ambivalence towards the dictatorships to opposition. But perhaps, also, the U.S. was always more suspicious of the Soviet version of totalitarianism. After all, the US joined a multinational force to overthrow the new revolutionary regime following World War I. Perhaps the U.S. entered World War II because the expansion of the Nazis posed a mortal peril to the world economy the U.S. thrived in. In any case, Katznelson does little to clarify this, offering just impressionistic indicators that many voices in the public sphere were enamored of either fascist Italy or the Soviet Union. He doesn’t discuss how positive impressions of the latter may have been connected to the unusual strength of the communist party during the thirties, not replicated before or after. And just what voices in the US public sphere thought of Nazi Germany is mostly absent from “Fear Itself.”

Katznelson uncritically accepts the idea of liberal democracy without looking any closer at U.S. allies Britain and France. Among other things, both were among the winners of the race to colonize the non-Western world. It is inconceivable to justify the militarism of fascist Germany, Italy and Japan. But it has always been hard to convince those beyond the Euro-American world that World War II was a stark battle between the forces of light and evil. The forces of light had spent hundreds of years consolidating their grip over most of the world. The United States was not apart from this dynamic. The expansion westward had been accompanied by genocide, and, at the turn of the century, the U.S. wrested what was left of the Spanish Empire out of Spain’s grasp. That the US was a liberal democracy did not make its rule over Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Phillipines more enlightened than Spain’s.

A crucial, unintended result of World War II, barely noted by Katznelson, was that it shattered the colonial empires. Katznelson focuses almost exclusively on European developments after the end of the conflict, to highlight the emergence of the cold war, which he basically blames on the Soviet Union. Even if we are cognizant that the U.S. used bribery to sway elections, such as one in Italy, noted in “Fear Itself”, it should be conceded that the reconstruction of Western Europe under U.S. hegemony was a relatively beneficent process. Outside of the Iberian peninsula, which had stayed out of the war and where fascism continued to reign, liberal democracies with social democratic features were consolidated, and the process of European integration was inaugurated. The contrast between the preceding period of political instability and war was stark. The contrast with the Soviet imposed dictatorships of Eastern Europe, which also denied national self-determination, was stark as well.

If U.S. hegemony in Western Europe following the war still looks like a relatively good thing, the picture beyond the boundaries of Europe is much more mixed. As noted, the war had shattered the old colonial world. To its credit, the U.S. did not try to put that world back together again, notwithstanding the hopes of its allies. But the U.S. soon adopted a pattern of intractable opposition to any post-colonial governments on the left, regularly allying with forces that can be fairly described as fascist. By no stretch could this be described as a “crusade for democracy.” Even among U.S. thinkers and policy makers, the emphasis was much more on “development” and “modernization” than “democracy.” The resultant destruction of democracy in Iran and Guatemala occurred just after Katznelson’s time period, and set the tone for policy throughout the cold war and beyond. But even earlier, this mentality had taken hold. When the Chinese Communist Party triumphed in China, the U.S. ignored China experts who suggested that the revolution had a strong nationalist character that would make full incorporation into the Soviet bloc unlikely. Instead, these experts were red-baited and expelled from the debate. It literally took losing the war in Vietnam to reconsider more realistically options regarding China.

In the late eighties, the U.S. began to shift towards supporting the democratization of the post-colonial states. At first, this seemed appealing to policy makers because it disorganized the threat from the left in places like Chile, the Philippines, and South Africa. Furthermore, it was discovered, civilian technocrats were more easily incorporated into transnational neoliberal networks than military leaders. The U.S. has retained its outright hostility to forces on the left, notwithstanding the demise of the Soviet Union. All sorts of Orwellian language must be deployed to obscure that the most popular political forces in countries such as Haiti and Venezuela are simply unacceptable to the advocates of democracy in U.S. centers of power.

The whole history of the U.S.’s place in the world, before, during and after the New Deal period raise serious questions about the relationship between liberalism, democracy and the demand for inclusion. Liberalism, and liberal democracy, are ideologies of property holders, and, as such, are doomed to constantly reproduce and exclude classes without property. The Jim Crow order in the South of the U.S. did not arise as an unfortunate appendage to an otherwise genuine liberal democracy. It was ratified by a national consensus that forces who threatened to impose socialism (i.e. use of the government to redistribute wealth and protect against the market) must be excluded from the polity. African Americans were, in this context, demonized as the primary threat, with workers in the North a close second. That consensus was modified in the context of the emergency of the Great Depression, which also occurred in the midst of the U.S.’s remarkable ascent as the new center of world capitalism (unremarked upon in “Fear Itself”). But it happened with the proviso that African Americans in the South would continue to be excluded. When the New Deal order expanded to begin to include African Americans and others in the sixties, it triggered a backlash that stalled, and partially reversed this progress amidst growing global economic competition. Soon the prison population in the U.S. mushroomed. The crusading state metastasized into the drone empire, picking endless battles while trying to minimize U.S. casualties. U.S. capitalism focused mostly on finance, which is a fancy way of saying the production of debtors (and bets on the loans they take), including states, consumers, students, and others. The union movement has been shrunk and neutralized, and the few remaining New Deal programs are in the crosshairs.

The U.S.’s liberal allies sat atop undemocratic colonial empires in the first half of the twentieth century. As a result of the world wars, they were forced to relinquish them. But even the most social democratic states in Western Europe now contain sizable immigrant populations, working for low wages and with limited political rights. Lately it is not even clear that the social democratic reforms can survive efforts to maintain the position of the propertied classes post-2008 downturn. Meanwhile, democracy spread beyond Europe mostly in the context of neoliberal, exclusionary economic policies. Push back against this process has been strongest in Latin America. It is an open, yet to be resolved question how inclusive these regimes can be made without violating precepts of liberal democracy as commonly understood.

Katznelson sheds some light on the evolution of the U.S. polity by highlighting its divergence from the totalitarian regimes of the thirties and the crucial role of Southern Democrats in this process. But for a fuller picture, the exclusions that have been a part of liberal democracy everywhere, not only in the Jim Crow South, would be valuable. Notwithstanding the disaster of twentieth century communism, the search for more inclusive forms of governance is likely to continue.

Steven Sherman is the editor-in-chief of Left Eye on Books.

Was ACT-UP an early example of “anarchist organizing”?

“Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis and Movement Building Strategy,” may be the “Rules for Radicals” for a growing trend of anarcho-practicos who up until this point have had little literature to make their case with.

By James Tracy

Chris Crass is an anarchist organizer. For those whose perception of anarchism begins and ends with broken windows, this may seem like an oxymoron. The tradition has a tortured relationship with organizing. Anarchism’s fingerprints can be found on many of the important social movements since the late 1980s; ranging from the AIDS activism of ACT-UP to the anti-nuclear and Global Justice Movements. Other currents within the anarchist tradition hold organizing leads to hierarchy, compromise and cooptation. The anti-organizing voice of anarchism is at its most articulate in recent tracts such as “The Coming Insurrection” and a wealth of books and manifestos from the Crimethinc collective.

Crass walks anarchism down a very different road. His anarchism, and that of the political organizations he helped build, isn’t afraid of community organizing. It also isn’t afraid to reach across the radical aisle and work with marxists, feminists, liberals and just about any other category that makes it to the meeting. His new book, “Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy” may be the “Rules for Radicals” for a growing trend of anarcho-practicos who up until this point have had little literature to make their case with. (In 1993, Tom Knoche formulated a case for anarchist participation in reform organizing, see Organizing Communities in the journal Social Anarchism.)

“Towards Collective Liberation” is an impressive contribution to radical thought. Crass outlines a vision of anarchism rooted deeply in the anti-racist tradition, and influenced by feminism.

He’s most at home when teasing out the lessons of his own politicization. The exploration of Food Not Bombs (FNB) is a delightful surprise—combining a sober assessment of the movement’s weaknesses with a nuanced description of their accomplishments under fire during San Francisco’s War For Space. Here, he carefully avoids demonizing FNB personalities who made destructive mistakes, but pulls no punches in the final analysis. He sets a high bar for constructive discourse without stooping to polemics.

His ability to grapple with the complexities of the Civil Rights Movement and draw implications for anti-authoritarians is unique. Instead of approaching social movements in terms of all-or-nothing reductionism Crass identifies ways for radical organizers to engage with them and think outside the Infoshop.

The book isn’t without some key weaknesses. In some essays, Crass’ over-reliance on jargon obscures his otherwise salient power of observation. He raises important points, “we need a revitalized, dynamic, and visionary Left politics that draws from many traditions, not just anarchism, but also Marxism, feminism, revolutionary nationalism and others;” then only scratches the surface of the mechanics of doing so.

Other themes left under-examined are the strengths and weaknesses of the interventions his organization, the Catalyst Project made in the name of racial justice in key moments such as the response to hurricane Katrina and the immigrant rights upsurge. I find it odd that the process of committed anarchists traveling to other cities in order to challenge “white supremacy” in the movement didn’t yield deeper reflection. What were the moments when this strategy bolstered local organizing? When was it unwelcome by locals? Did it ever feel a bit vanguardist, and if so, what was to be done?

Thankfully, Crass’ has a political vision of anti-racism, separated from individualistic notions of white guilt and “invisible back packs.” He recognizes white supremacy as a system and a historic roadblock to social transformation. While centering race and colonization, he also avoids reducing race to the only dilemma facing organizers today. In this sense, he snatches anti-racism from the jaws of the professional diversity trainers polluting today’s discourse.

Taken as a whole, the book makes the case for an anarchist practice relevant to, and a part of, the lives of everyday people, and the larger Left. With humility and optimism, Crass offers critical insights hard won through a life on the frontlines. “Towards Collective Liberation” is an important read, not just for anarchists, but anyone pondering the road forward.

James Tracy is a native of Oakland, California and a long-time economic justice organizer. He is the co-author of “Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times” (Melville House).

Howard Zinn (image: Creative Commons).

While I think that people can learn about Howard Zinn in Martin Duberman’s book, “Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left,” “A Peoples’ History of the United States” and Howard’s memoir-like book, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times,” would be higher on my list.

by Alan Weider

Howard Zinn was 87 when he died in 2010.  He was an activist, writer, and teacher and these three aspects of his life interacted seamlessly as he fought for social justice in the United States. Martin Duberman has written a biography of Zinn, “Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left.” Duberman, like Zinn, is an activist, writer, and teacher – he speaks to the two men’s similarities in his introduction:

We held common convictions on a wide range of public issues. Our views coincided about the justice of the black struggle and the injustice of the war in Vietnam. We deplored the entrenched and usually unacknowledged class divisions in this country, the growing monopoly of wealth in the hands of a few, and the arrogance and destruction of US foreign policy.

“Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left” by Martin Duberman is a chronological portrait of Zinn’s life. As I read the book I couldn’t shake something I learned in an early historiography class:

Beware of biographical caveats

In the introduction, besides writing of the correspondence of his and Zinn’s views of the world, Duberman notes that Zinn shredded his personal papers making it difficult to combine the political and personal in his portrayal of  Zinn’s life. In a February 2010 reading on my radio program after Zinn died, Ole Mole Variety Hour’s Tom Becker explained that for Zinn, the political was personal and the personal was political. Unfortunately, in the biography, that is told but not shown.

Duberman, now 82 years old, has published numerous books, articles, and plays including “Paul Robeson: A Biography.” He is most well known for his activism and eight books on LGBT rights. He has received numerous awards and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

Martin Duberman’s accomplishments and the accolades for his work are exceptional. Yet, “Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left” is a disappointing book. It is disappointing not because Zinn didn’t leave personal papers, but rather because Martin Duberman used neither Zinn’s voice nor those of his family, comrades, colleagues, friends and critics. We do not get a good sense of the depth or breadth of Howard Zinn.  Duberman acknowledges doing ten interviews – five with family and five with friends. There were probably more but there are almost no quotes as Duberman tells, rather than shows, Zinn’s life.

So while there are some insights, usually from books by Zinn that many of us have read, there are pages and pages of what might be generously called context that do not connect directly to Zinn’s life.

Writing on Zinn’s early life, there is a great paragraph, the gist of which was  in Zinn’s “The Southern Mystique,” where Zinn confronts racism while in the military. In the biography, the event, however, is situated within pages of context that do little to portray Howard Zinn.

It is the same for the next 100 pages that cover Zinn’s first academic appointment at Spellman College and the Civil Rights Movement. The Spellman chapter covers Zinn helping to politicize students but it is too often a list of events – some about Zinn, some about the college, and some about the South and racism without showing Zinn as a human participant.

There are snippets, however. Amidst the Spellman chapter Howard’s thinking on Malcolm X, black power, and SNCC do come alive as do some sit-in stories in the chapter on the Civil Rights Movement. Pages and pages are devoted to Zinn’s firing, and President Manley of Spellman’s accusations of sexual misconduct will hit the novice reader quite hard. That of course raises numerous questions about biographical methodology that are beyond the scope of this short review.

We are teased by mention of Zinns’s interactions with James Baldwin and Ella Baker and his work on The Freedom Summer – but I for one found myself asking for more – give it life.

Duberman writes on the Viet Nam War and Zinn’s 1967 book “Vietnam the Logic of Withdrawal.” We learn about Zinn’s critique of the war and he is humanized with a strong quote from his daughter Myla. We learn of his trips to Hanoi and Paris and his comrades David Dellinger, Daniel Berrigan, and Daniel Ellsberg, but again, I was yearning to know more of the relationships between the people as well as their relationships within the context of their collective missions.

There is a chapter called “Writing History” that speaks to Zinn within his academic discipline and includes some of his battles with historians like Eugene Genovese.  Much of the chapter, actually too much, includes Duberman’s analysis of Zinn’s scholarship – I kept writing ‘no life’ in the margins.

Also covered is Zinn’s ongoing battle with Boston University’s president, John Silber and the writing of Zinn’s most famous book, “A People’s History of the United States.” Duberman tells the well-known story about sales of the book surging after Matt Damon mentioned it in his film “Good Will Hunting,” and then again when it was shown on the HBO series, “The Sopranos.”

“Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left” actually comes more to life in its portrayal of the last three decades of Howard’s life. One hunch is that Duberman had great conversations with Anthony Arnove who Howard worked with closely late in his life?  Martin Duberman lauds “A People’s History” as well as earlier books and honors the many progressive projects that Howard Zinn’s work has launched – (for example the Zinn Education Project). He concludes by saying:

What will most certainly come down to future generations is Howard’s humanity, his exemplary concern for the plight of others, a concern free of condescension or self-importance. Howard always stayed in character – and that character remained centered on a capacious solidarity with the least fortunate.

While I think that people can learn about Howard Zinn in Martin Duberman’s book, “Howard Zinn: A Life on the Left,” “A Peoples’ History of the United States” and Howard’s memoir-like book, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times,” would be higher on my list.

Alan Wieder is an oral historian who taught for over 20 years at the University of South Carolina.  His forthcoming book, “Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid,” will be published in June by Monthly Review Books in the U.S. and Jacana Publishers in South Africa.  He writes at streetpixxwords.blogspot.com.

“Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?” by Paul Gauguin (image: creative commons)

In just a few pages I felt the brotherly embrace of a comrade-in-arms, a soul-mate, and a companion; further along his fierce intelligence and original insights challenged me to make new connections; by the end I was inspired to re-imagine next steps in my own efforts at movement-making.

by Bill Ayers

Dada Maheshvarananda is a monk and a social activist, an engaged intellectual and a writer whose powerful new book, “After Capitalism: Economic Democracy in Action“, provides a comprehensive critique of the economic system that grips the planet and suffocates our lives, names the contemporary political moment we’re facing with astonishing clarity, and illustrates with concrete cases and specific examples the practical steps needed to build a radical movement toward joy and justice, peace and love, sanity and balance. It’s a broad and ambitious book to be sure. In just a few pages I felt the brotherly embrace of a comrade-in-arms, a soul-mate, and a companion; further along his fierce intelligence and original insights challenged me to make new connections; by the end I was inspired to re-imagine next steps in my own efforts at movement-making. This is an essential book created by a gentle warrior.

The questions that animate Dada Maheshvarananda’s work are the same ones I saw recently scrawled across a sprawling panorama created by the tormented painter Paul Gauguin—in 1897, after months of illness and suicidal despair, Gauguin produced on a huge piece of jute sacking an image of unfathomable figures amid scenery that might have been the twisted groves of a tropical island or a marvelously wild Garden of Eden; worshippers and gods; cats, birds, a quiet goat; a great idol with a peaceful expression and uplifted hands; a central figure plucking fruit; a depiction of Eve not as a voluptuous innocent like some other women in Gauguin’s work but as a shrunken hag with an intense eye.

Gauguin wrote the title of the work in bold on top of the image; translated into English it reads:

Where do we come from?

What are we?

Where are we going?

These are questions—horrifying for Gauguin, inspiring for Dada Maheshvarananda—that rumble in the background on every page of “After Capitalism.” How can we see ourselves and our problems/challenges/potentials holistically? How can we connect our personal and spiritual seeking with the practical search for a better world for all? How can we live with one foot in the mud and muck of the world as it is while the other foot stretches toward a world that could be but is not yet? How can we transform ourselves to be worthy of the profound social transformations we desire and need? And how can we build within ourselves the thoughtfulness, compassion, and courage to dive into the wreckage on a mission of repair?

We begin by opening our eyes:

Look! says the pilgrim.

I can’t look…

Look at it! Open your eyes for once, for God’s sake, have the courage to at least look, will you?

I can’t look…I’m going to be sick…

You mean you won’t look, don’t you? You can look, but you won’t. It might upset you, it might mess your outfit—or it might ruin your whole day. You refuse to look. Admit that at the very least.

I won’t…I can’t…What’s the difference?

The difference is this: willful blindness is a form of cowardice and indifference, and the opposite of moral is not immoral; the opposite of moral is indifferent.

Wide awake it’s clear that planet earth has enough resources to meet everyone’s basic needs if we share; on the other hand if we hoard we are in for famine, pestilence, war, and mayhem. It’s equally clear that both tendencies live deep within every human being: selfishness and selflessness, me and we, individualism and collectivity. The question at the heart of this book is this: Where do we go from here, socialism or barbarism, chaos or community?

The practical and theoretical work of Dada Maheshvarananda and his comrades is the fight for economic justice, and on the side of sharing. One of the great deceptions of our time is the sham that meaningful political democracy is possible in the absence of economic democracy. “Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice,” wrote Mikhail Bakunin (adding that “socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality”) and it is self-evidently so: there can be no real freedom where huge differences in wealth and access make any voluntary exchange or contract little more than legal larceny and authorized plunder. The traffic in human beings, modern-day slavery, the market for body parts, international adoption—all bear the mark of privilege, exploitation, global injustice, and structural violence. And so do the sanitized schemes of the bankers, the financial wizards, and the ruling class generally.

Economic democracy requires popular control, wide participation, and decentralized decision-making, and it insists that the minimum requirements of life must be guaranteed—food, housing, clothing, education, and health-care. Life is the birthright that transcends borders, and the most straight-forward gauge of the degree of justice available in any society is how power responds to that basic right.

Our struggle is for more participation, more equality, more recognition of human agency, and more transparency as we lean toward revolution. We must rouse ourselves, shake ourselves awake and perhaps shock ourselves into new awarenesses.

But it’s often hard to look, and obstacles spring up everywhere: when we feel ourselves shackled, bound, and gagged or when we are badly beaten down, struggling just to survive, living with dust in our mouths, the horizons of our hope can become lowered, sometimes fatally, and our eyes, then, dim. What kind of world do we want to inhabit? When no alternatives are apparent or available, action becomes pointless. When privilege obstructs our vision it acts as an anesthetic, putting us to sleep; we must then call upon the aesthetic—the world of the imagination—to combat the numbing power of the sedative.

We all live in our time and place, immersed in what is, and imagining a social scene different from what’s immediately before us requires a combination of somethings: seeds, surely; desire, yes; necessity and desperation at times; and, at other times a willingness to dance out on a limb without a safety net—no guarantees.

Imagination is essential, more process than product, more “stance” than “thing,” imagination involves the dynamic work of mapping the world as such, and then leaning toward a world that might be but is not yet. Most of us most of the time accept our lot-in-life as inevitable—for decades, generations, even centuries; when a revolution is in reach, when a lovelier life heaves into view, or when a possible world becomes somehow visible, the status quo becomes suddenly unendurable. We then reject the fixed and the stable, and begin to look at the world as if it could be otherwise, and we begin the important work of reweaving our shared world.

Choice and confidence is a necessary politics. I don’t want to minimize the horror, but neither do I want to get stuck in its thrall. Hope is an antidote to cynicism and despair; it is the capacity to notice or invent alternatives; it is nourishing the sense that standing directly against the world as such is a world that could be, or should be. Without that vital sense of possible worlds, doors close, curtains drop, and we become stranded: we cannot adequately oppose injustice; we cannot act freely; we cannot inhabit the most vigorous moral spaces. We are never freer, all of us and each of us, than when we refuse the situation before us as settled and certain and determined and break the chains that entangle us.

The tools are everywhere—humor and art, protest and spectacle, the quiet, patient intervention and the angry and urgent thrust—and the rhythm of and recipe for activism is always the same: we open our eyes and look unblinkingly at the world as we find it; we are astonished by the beauty and horrified at the suffering all around us; we act on what the known demands and we also doubt that our efforts made enough difference, and so we rethink, recalibrate, look again, and dive in once more. If we never doubt we get lost in self-righteousness and political narcissism—been there—but if we only doubt we vanish into cynicism and despair. Awake/Act/Doubt! Repeat! Repeat! Repeat for a lifetime.

Revolution is still possible, democracy and socialism, possible, but barbarism is possible as well. Our expansive and expanding dreams are not realized, of course, not yet, but neither are they dimmed or diminished. Every revolution is, after all, impossible before it happens; afterwards it feels inevitable.

W.H. Auden provides another: We must love one another or die.

Bill Ayers is the author of several books on education, as well as a memoir, “Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Anti-War Activist,” and the forthcoming “Public Enemy: Memoirs of Dissident Days.”

Much more than a symbol, anarchism has become the focus of a great deal of activism and theorizing (image: Linurexist, Wikipedia Commons).

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“The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economics” develops both the anarchist critique of capitalism and the project of an anarchist society.”

by George Fish

Political economy is the name originally given to economics during its early days of development under the classical economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and its enfant terrible, Karl Marx. But I want to use it in a different, a “new,” sense here, as the intersection of politics and economics; because, while economics itself has become a highly technical field, it is more often politics that informs economic policy and practice—that is, just what is done to create jobs, promote equality, produce goods and services that benefit all, and basically provide for the material benefit of society. Further, while much of economics, or classical political economy for that matter, is implicitly or explicitly pro-capitalist, significant objections to capitalism have been raised through the economic analysis of capitalism itself, as well as through the positing of an alternative political order to capitalism—chiefly, of course, by the left. Both historically, and in the present, the left divides broadly on the alternative polity to capitalism into two main camps: socialism and anarchism.

“The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economics” develops both the anarchist critique of capitalism and the project of an anarchist society and its achievement through nineteen essays written by anarchist scholar/activists, not all of them professional academics. This scholarly activism is exemplified in the biographies of the three editors themselves, Deric Shannon, Anthony J. Nocella II and John Asimakopoulos. Appropriately for the discussion of “new” political economy and economic analysis as seen through anarchist eyes, “The Accumulation of Freedom” is subtitled “Writings on Anarchist Economics.”

Anarchist critiques of both capitalism and socialism have taken on an active new life in recent years on the left, and anarchist movements are now an integral part of it. The anarchist notion of direct participation in the restructuring of society, the notion of non-hierarchical social arrangements, and full democratic participation in all decision-processes have become integrally part of the world left theory and practice, often displacing previous left attraction to socialism and Marxism-Leninism. Anarchism and anarchist movements have come prominently into play since the Seattle demonstrations against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1999, and are integrally involved in both the activism and the political theory of Occupy movements. The “Postscript” in “The Accumulation of Freedom” written by the three editors in November 2011, at the height of Occupy Wall Street, expresses both the indebtedness of anarchism to the Occupy notion, its cross-fertilization by Occupy, and posits directions within an anarchist perspective that build on and extend Occupy notions.

An important development concomitant with the rise of contemporary anarchism is the notion of effective socialist-anarchist alliances around issues of common concern, and friendly, if critical, dialogue between socialists and anarchists. Three contributions to this notion of positive socialist-anarchist alliance have been articulated by socialists who see commonality despite differences with anarchist activists. The first of these was Ursula McTaggart’s “Can We Build Socialist-Anarchist Alliances?” in the socialist bimonthly Against the Current . A more restrained, but equally positive, assessment of socialist-anarchist alliances was given by Marvin Mandell in his review article in New Politics , “Anarchism and Socialism.” Mandell ends his review by writing, “I think Marxists and Anarchists can learn from each other and, in fact, need each other.” George Fish also contributed to the positive discussion of socialist-anarchist alliances from a socialist perspective in his review of Noam Chomsky’s “Chomsky on Anarchism,” in New Politics , “Chomsky, Anarchism, and Socialism,” and has a review of “The Accumulation of Freedom” forthcoming in New Politics 54 (Winter 2013).

“The Accumulation of Freedom” reciprocates this socialist appreciation by several contributors borrowing much of their analyses and critiques of capitalism from socialist and Marxist sources and, in some cases, openly expressing appreciation for Marx and Marxist ideas themselves. This is sometimes quite hard to do for anarchists, as Marx was a foremost critic of anarchism and engaged in vigorous polemics with two of its leading proponents, Mikhail Bakunin and Pierre-Joseph Prudhon. Yet in many ways the socialist and anarchist critiques of capitalism dovetail, and few socialists would have quarrel with the extensive critiques of contemporary capitalism and its destructiveness laid out here. Further, these analytical essays, contained in Parts 2 and 3 of the book, are extensive, well documented, and well done, giving great elucidation and development to the topic. The only analytical essay in these sections I was disappointed with was Abbey Volcano and Deric Shannon’s “Capitalism in the 200os: Broad Strokes for Beginners,” which I found more descriptive than analytical, but perhaps that is why it is subtitled as it is—it is aimed at beginners to economic analysis of capitalism, not so much at veterans like me.

There are many essays that discuss the how-to-do-it aspect of anarchist social transformation, but they all share in common the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) and cooperative, mutual aid and support approach that is an integral part of contemporary anarchism. Unlike many socialists, anarchists rely more on direct action and determined groups of people just doing it, from Occupy movements to workers taking over factories and running them themselves, as detailed in Marie Trigona’s “Occupy, Resist, Produce! Lessons from Latin America’s Occupied Factories.” Here anarchists differ in emphasis and tactics generally from socialists in that they are impatient with socialist efforts to gain control of state power and use the power of the state to transform capitalism and create the new socialist state order because, of course, anarchists oppose the very existence of the state itself. But they also believe that the people themselves can organize to provide for their needs and wants independently of, and without reliance on, the state and state power.

“The Accumulation of Freedom” also contains useful guides on tactics of resistance, protest and effective opposition. Chief among these is Robin Hahnel’s “The Economic Crisis and Libertarian Socialists,” based on a speech Hahnel gave in Greece to anti-austerity activists. Hahnel lays out a multi-point guide for political action to restructure the European economies such as Greece’s that have been devastated by neoliberalism, and articulates in this a program many a supposedly “tamer” socialist would heartily agree with. D.T. Cochrane and Jeff Monaghan’s “Fight to Win! Tools for Confronting Capital” draws lessons on tactics and strategy from anti-corporate struggles that have been found useful and effective in a number of cases, from opposing sweatshops to getting divestment from arms manufacturing to stopping destructive research on animals.

The “Introduction” by the editors, “Anarchist Economics: A Holistic View,” the “Preface” by Ruth Kinna, and the “Afterword” by Michael Albert, “Porous Borders of Anarchist Vision and Strategy” articulate points of convergence and divergence among anarchists themselves, and elucidate in detail that there is no more only one sole variety of anarchism than there is only one sole variety of socialism. These three essays are especially useful for beginners in anarchist thought, though they have much also to teach the veterans, and they teach positively to all across the board—anarchists, socialists, as well as to interested political science and economic specialists and students who are neither.

Nor are people of color, both in the US “internal colony” and the Third World, slighted; Ernesto Aguilar takes note of their struggles in “Call It an Uprising: People of Color and the Third World Organize against Capitalism,” emphasizing a positive intersection of race, class and resistance in sparking rebellion of the darker-skinned vast majority of the world’s oppressed against global capitalism. While insightful in many ways, I did find this essay burdened too much with rhetorical flourish when it seemed to need more in-depth analysis. Aguilar raises many an intriguing thought, but then drops it without further discussion.

But all this only demonstrates the extensiveness and diversity to anarchist thought. It certainly belies any notion of an anarchist “party line” or generic “one-size-fits-all” variety of anarchism. The essays are well chosen, expressive of a wide diversity of approaches, and interesting and exciting to read. I read ‘The Accumulation of Freedom” virtually nonstop; once I started, I simply could not put it down. “The Accumulation of Freedom” is an important contribution to the study of this “new” political economy defined at the beginning, and is a book to heartily recommend.

*****

George Fish is a veteran socialist writer and poet in Indianapolis, Indiana, who has contributed to many left and alternative publications. He has appeared in New Politics, In These Times and Socialism and Democracy, among many others. He has written on economics (in which he has a university degree), Marxism and socialism, mental health issues and pop music, also writes on Indiana and Indianapolis as a journalist for Examiner.com, and has a political blog, “Politically Incorrect Leftist.”

The end of the world will arrive eventually, but leftists probably shouldn’t be betting on the arrival of the four horsemen of the apocalypse any time soon (image: Albrecht Durer, Apocalypse (public domain)).

Posited as an intervention of sorts, “Catastrophism” is seemingly aimed to create debate on the Left. … Its premise, that old radical ideas that destitution leads to revolution need reappraisal, deserves closer review.

By Ernesto Aguilar

With the presidential election upon us, the idea of withholding votes against Democrats has surfaced among slivers of the Left, as it does every four years. The lesser of two evils is still evil, it is asserted, and should not be supported at all, even if it means a harsher evil could take control. Yet distilling quite monumental differences on reproductive rights and scores of other matters into both Democrats and Republicans being monolithic and essentially the same is as important in some quarters as fidelity to that line.

The hard edge of such distinctions was crystallized in a recent kerfuffle in which the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) was blasted in an online forum for claims it wanted people to vote for Barack Obama. FRSO, a Marxist group whose lineage includes bygone Maoist and Stalinist formations, was the target of 2010 FBI raids for the group’s reputed support of Colombian guerrillas. Yet FRSO seemed to have its long and extensive rebel credentials called into question over a single line about voting and swing states in a 1,300-word statement. Bizarre purism? Perhaps, but it has its adherents, on both Left and Right.

The notion that the worse society gets for people (under a Mitt Romney presidency; amid the ascent of anti-immigrant Nativism; as financial institutions crumble), the better the prospects for revolutionary politics is not a new idea. In “Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth,” authors James Davis, Sasha Lilley, David McNally and Eddie Yuen delve deeply into these parallel worlds. They artfully deconstruct the ideology predicting blight. Yet nowhere in the prose is there a clarion call for radicals to practice politics centered on lower expectations either. On the contrary, sharper struggle seems to be a primary encouragement. The result is an outstanding, albeit at moments disturbing and revealing, investigation not only of the neo-Nazis, survivalists and fellow travelers preparing for society’s decline but also of the marginal anarchist and quasi-Marxist tendencies anticipating popular revolts or American insurgencies.

Through film and television, both Christian and mainstream, many people are familiar with apocalyptic fantasies. As McNally , professor of political science at York University, reminds us, the cottage industry of zombie fiction and end-of-the-world horror have mushroomed in popularity. Still others have heard of conspiracy theories of forces like the Illuminati controlling the masses through all manner of machinations. In each scenario, from wild blockbuster films to little-known political theory, a cataclysmic crisis is often forecast as the spark that creates a rupture with the existing social order. In the Left milieu, Lilley, host of the radio program Against The Grain, correctly says, pining for and sometimes attempting to initiate this crisis can backfire on the Left and the environmental movement. At the same instant, catastrophism from the right wing, with its visions of assaults on the Western way of life, can often shape military and domestic policy.

Right-wing populism cooks up an ideological concoction in which the powerful, the godless and the all-seeing are closing in on our freedoms. What seems like a crude viewpoint is, as “Catastrophism” contributors remark, far more complicated than one might imagine. Cold War caricatures of work camps and groupthink mingle with fears of feminism and multiculturalism and the evisceration of “traditional values” as capital is concentrated. For the far Right, the product is a theoretical quilt in which a new Dark Age is just around the corner. The racheting up of such alarms can have horrifying consequences. A spike in hate crimes, mass killings by avowed white supremacists and the sharp rise in armed militias are among the more memorable occurrences. Quite tellingly, the image of the destruction of the American way of life through subversion has much in common with generations-old slurs against Catholicism and Judaism. This siege mentality cultivated by the Right, notes documentary filmmaker Davis, is happening in spite of capital’s seeming victory, with the virtual decimation of unions and workers’ rights, the gutting of social welfare programs, slashing of taxes for the wealthy and ascendance of quality-of-life policing espoused by the likes of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani among other things. This is in part because hegemony is often more critical than markets.

On the Left, particularly for the branch predicting social collapse via economic calamity, a similar affliction stunts progress. Faith that “heightening the contradictions” will create conditions for a mass movement or violent thousands-strong uprising against the status quo has long been an assumption that never really materialized. As many students of history saw with the Weather Underground Organization and other outfits, hoping to foment the revolution through random and even calculated targeting never monumentally changed the course of capital either. In truth, such suggestions, including in the radical environmental vein, take on an almost misanthropic veneer, where people are simply assumed as sleeping, unaware and merely needing a shove in the correct direction. Why those approaches were and still are wrong, and why political engagement is necessary are central themes here. A more sophisticated reading of history and theory, among other imperatives, are necessary, the authors reason. No level of retreat awaiting capitalism’s demise can replace grassroots struggle and community organizing for broad change.

“Catastrophism”‘s authors observe that the idea of capitalism’s and imperialism’s stretched resources and ultimate failure have held sway in the radical imagination since at least the 1800s. This sort of presentation is often paradoxical: glum forecasts of tuition cuts, foreclosures and collaborations between politicians on both sides of the aisle compete with claims capitalism’s crash is near and exhortations for a revolution that its organizers have no material basis in influencing let alone leading. On the Left, the idea that deepening social rifts and institutional failure to serve people’s needs will prompt a turn to radical politics seems a fixture in nearly every movement. Nowhere is such positioning as prominent as the environmental movement, where extinction for species, the landscape and humanity seems to always loom. However, as Yuen, author of “Confronting Capitalism” shares, the romance with terrifying imagery and vague solutions has inspired little more than hopelessness and certainly not a broad anti-capitalist commitment to mass organization. The truth is that capitalism is evolving constantly, and those with revolutionary hopes must as well.

Posited as an intervention of sorts, “Catastrophism” is seemingly aimed to create debate on the Left. And those interests in contemporary Left history are sure to be avid readers. Its premise, that old radical ideas that destitution leads to revolution need reappraisal, deserves closer review. Lilley and company provide much to digest in an excellent book sure to challenge some long-held political contentions.

Ernesto Aguilar is a media professional and writer based in Houston, Texas. He is a contributor to the books  “The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economics“  and the forthcoming “The End of Prisons“.

Noam Chomsky: America’s most cosmopolitan intellectual? (Photo: John Soares, Wikimedia Commons)

Robbins writes in the first person, displays a flare for personal anecdotes, and is not at all bashful about expressing his perplexities and uncertainties, all of which should make “Perpetual War” accessible to those who are challenged by the wealth of detail and insider talk Robbins brings to the case studies.

by David White

Anyone who has served as a juror is familiar with the judge’s charge, the instructions not on what verdict the jury should reach but on how they should come to a verdict of their own. “Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence” is Columbia University humanities professor Bruce Robbins’ charge, an appeal to the conscience and the intellect of the whole body of academicians in the humanities, to contribute to what Robbins thinks is the cosmopolitan moment. Cosmopolitanism has never been more popular, but the outstanding issues must be decided, and decided soon, even though the kind of work he wants the world’s intellectuals to do cannot be hurried at the expense of accuracy. “Perpetual War” is effectively a provisional agenda for the painstaking and detailed examination and reconstruction that cosmopolitanism deserves and the world needs.

In the interest of time and efficiency, Robbins urges that we skip the Platonic inquiry regarding the nature of Justice and the ancient Stoic’s kosmo-politis. Instead, we should concentrate on the most recent refinements of the cosmopolitical development, with special attention to the difference levels of application (local, national, global) make, and—most importantly—that we never forget ours is a pragmatic quest for a pragmatic resolution. Just as with a judge’s charge to the jury, Robbins urges his readers to take their time, to deliberate among themselves, but also not to make mistakes. There is a tide in the affairs of men, …, and now is the cosmopolitan hour to ride that tide, if only we can step out of our academic detachment and get into the surf even if the danger is real enough, and even though working out the pragmatics a priori is out of the question. Robbins does not mention the American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, but his tone is that of “Civil Disobedience”: we feel shamed to remain scholars only and are embarrassed if we do not engage in the partisan struggle. But here is the question: which side does the cosmopolitan take? Or can we somehow rise above the fray in our efforts to change the world and not merely solve it?

Robbins skips the philosophical investigations entirely, and minimizes method. Instead, he does, with brilliance and perspicuity, what we all wish we could do. He provides seven case studies, letting us see in rich detail how the Robbins mind works. Socrates rejected this business of definition by example, but we have given the Socratic method a full and fair hearing and have now proved that whatever its merits it will never yield a consensus on the most important and most pressing issues before us. Unfortunately, Robbins does not consider philosopher Bertrand Russell’s view that even though philosophy fails in its ostensible aim, the practice of philosophy even as a failed enterprise nevertheless provides the best preparation for becoming a citizen of the universe.

For over a decade now, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has floated an agenda for philosophy that posits two levels of negotiation. The global philosophical culture, just by existing at all, would provide not answers, but a kind of psychic highway allowing diverse cultures to communicate even when the individuals involved are divided by political loyalties or hostilities. UNESCO’s charge to the philosophers of the world is functionally equivalent to Robbins’ charge. This is not a criticism, since the deficiency, if there is one on Robbins’ part, has already been made good by the work of UNESCO in cultivating the global culture of philosophy. The brouhaha over Iran’s attempt to host the event a couple of years ago has forced us all to become more pragmatic, and it is critical, pragmatic cosmopolitanism that Robbins presents in his seven case studies.

Despite holding an academic position for over forty years and taking as his topic matters of life and death most grave, Robbins writes in the first person, displays a flare for personal anecdotes, and is not at all bashful about expressing his perplexities and uncertainties, all of which should make “Perpetual War” accessible to those who are challenged by the wealth of detail and insider talk Robbins brings to the case studies. The material here was first published in periodicals over the past decade, making “Perpetual War” an excellent introduction to Robbins’ work as a whole. As befits a cosmopolitan author, the writing is personal and universal, qualified and emphatic.

In Robbins’ analysis, Noam Chomsky is arguably the most cosmopolitan of American intellectuals, mimicking the viewpoint of a visitor to Earth from outer space. Chomsky blames the United States as if he were a Martian, but we are not to blame Chomsky for being a partial and imperfect cosmopolitan since there is no cosmopolitanism without some degree of belonging. Chomsky has no fear of the supposed arrogance of speaking for humanity, and more power to him for that. The problem Robbins has with Chomsky is that he tries to hide behind his sources and writes as if cosmopolitanism is helpless in the face of state violence. What the times require is someone to “make our cosmopolitan arguments stronger and our strength more cosmopolitan,” and this Chomsky is in no position to do from his extraterrestrial perch, however helpful his deployment of his genuine strengths may have been to the cause.

Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein defines “system” in terms of the division of labor in an economic structure and then makes system the privileged unit of analysis. Robbins rejects the disciplinary special pleading of Wallerstein’s critics, but feels that blaming the system will not be efficacious. We need a vocabulary and a rhetoric that do more than express our disapprobation.

In his discussion of the novelist George Eliot and others who have revealed to us the ultimate power of the quotidian, the patterns of daily life we enact often without observation let alone report, Robbins delivers his most direct charge to the reader: there is, he writes, an imperative “to do some institutional housecleaning—that is, to do what we can to ensure that we do not work in universities, libraries, museums, and other cultural institutions that for many of our colleagues will function … like intellectual sweatshops.” In an end note he adds, “This will mean after-hours work, it can’t be the content of our teaching and writing.”

“Perpetual War” begins with an anecdote about the author’s ten year old son liking the movie “Three Kings” (1999) because it is not “one of those, “I’m great, you stink” movies,” and the chapter on Edward Said, who was Robbins’ teacher, mentor and friend, begins with an account of how Said’s son Wadie spoke “bravely and humorously” at his father’s funeral of Said’s “dedication to the idea of speaking out and staying informed, no matter how sick or infirm” one is. Here Robbins refers explicitly of the confessional “movement from the personal to the general,” and it is such a movement that characterizes “Perpetual War” as a whole.

The remaining chapters engage Slavoj Zizek’s struggles with credibility, Louis Menand’s treatment of Robbins’s own principal concern, the global public and its problems, praising Menand for the consistency between “The Metaphysical Club“’s “narrative form and its philosophical content,” and present Robbins’ final summation and charge to the jury of readers as a comparison of German and British war crimes in the Second World War, making the point, his main point, that in order to blame or to be forgiven, one must forgo the pleasures of pure detachment, the pleasures that human rights individualism has made accessible, and acknowledge as a cosmopolitan that one belongs not only to the human race of which one is ashamed but also to a particular nation that probably has been and certainly could be wrong.

David White teaches philosophy at St. John Fisher College, Rochester NY, and is a specialist in the life, work and reception of Bishop Butler, whose theology was foundational to the British Empire and its conscientious critics.

Anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman (photo: Creative Commons).

Jones manages to paint clear and vivid portraits untainted by judgment. The portraits of the times and events are just as clear and stunning.The book also has its weaknesses. While Jones paints a vivid portrait of the historical figures and their setting, he sadly does little work to sketch anything like an analysis.

by Pamela DiFrancesco

It is not surprising to learn that Thai Jones’ interest in the 1914 explosion of a bomb in an apartment building at 1626 Lexington Ave in New York City came through its similarity to the bomb explosion in 1970 on West 11^th Street in Greenwich Village. The events were similar, to be sure. Both bombs went off accidentally long before their detonation was intended. Both bombs, at the time of explosion, were in the possession of political radicals who intended to use them for subversive purposes. There is certainly a connection between the two events, but it is Jones’ own history that makes the link even stronger. Until age 4, Jones lived under an assumed name, hiding out with his parents, who were former members of the Weather Underground, the group whose members were in possession of the bomb that detonated in 1970. Jones’ first book, “A Radical Line,” details his family’s history of radicalism. Though at the time of that book’s release in 2004, Jones said that leftist politics were not his main interest, he has since become deeply involved in the study and scholarship of radical political histories. He holds a PhD in US History from Columbia University, and teaches courses on such subjects as anarchism on that campus and others. And there is no denying the link between his family’s history with the Weather Underground and the event that inspired his second book, the accidental explosion of the bomb held by anarchists on Lexington Avenue that was allegedly meant to take the life of John D. Rockefeller, Jr. The details of this latter event are chronicled in Jones’ book, “More Powerful Than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York’s Year of Anarchy.”

Though he makes clear his sympathies for the anarchists in the book’s forward, Jones seems set on providing a balanced history, in humanizing all the players in this history as much as possible. Though the anarchists in question certainly saw villains in presidents and plutocrats, Jones goes out of his way to show the reader that such distinctions are not his own. “A new mayor…who had surrounded himself with a coterie of nonconformists and social scientists…a sympathetic leader, Woodrow Wilson…these were the officials tasked with anarchy’s containment: not some corrupt political machine that could resort to violence without a qualm, but progressive administrations contained by their own ideals of civil liberties and impartial justice.”

With this balanced eye, Jones introduced the reader to a large cast of characters—John Purroy Mitchel, the 34-year-old “boy mayor” of New York City bent on flushing out the corrupt Tammany Hall and making lasting social change; Woodrow Wilson, the triumphant progressive president responsible for the great banking reforms of the time; Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, firebrand anarchist leaders, both of whom had already been imprisoned for acting on their anti-authoritarian beliefs; John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the heir to the massive Rockefeller fortune and also a failure at business, a man who had suffered multiple nervous breakdowns, and someone bent on casting his family name in a new light through philanthropy. Jones has no less balanced a view when it comes to the lesser characters in this history tale, and goes to even greater pains to make them shine through the pages of the book. We meet Frank Tannenbaum, a poor, young member of the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W., or the “Wobblies”), who wanted nothing more than work and an education, and who eventually led an army of the unemployed on marches through New York City demanding what was owed to them; Becky Edelshon, a fiery young anarchist said to be “always two steps ahead of Berkman and Goldman,” and known for wearing bright red tights and spitting in the faces of the rich; Arthur Woods, the man appointed police commissioner under Mayor Mitchel who promoted freedom of speech as a method to diffuse violence – while simultaneously using heavy undercover surveillance of radicals to contain them.

If the historical figures Jones introduce seem larger than life, the backdrop against which they are set is no less moving. 1914 saw the rise of the I.W.W. throughout the US, a violent and bloody revolution in Mexico that the US found it harder and harder to remain aloof from, and the beginning of World War I in Europe. While it could hardly be seen as an idyllic time, the jingoistic fervor that accompanied the US entry into WWI had not yet begun, and the stage (in the case of this book, NYC) was set for radicalism. It was able to thrive and flourish in ways that would be impossible in the coming years.

The book, and the year of 1914, both appear to open brightly. Jones takes us into the carefree celebration of New Years Eve 1913 and the hope that fighting in Europe and the Balkans had calmed, to the hope pinned on the coming of a new, progressive mayor to the New York City political arena, to the modernist hope that all was progressing towards the new and the better. These bright longings are barely touched upon before we are taken to the much darker anarchist point of view – the child labor, unemployment, and the ongoing, and at times violent, strike taking place in the coal fields of Colorado. The strike undertaken by the workers of Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (largely owned by the Rockefellers) becomes one of the focal points of the history this book recounts.

The first cold snap of the year takes the gleam of hope out of everyone’s eyes when the new mayor and his team of starry-eyed reformers are faced with the very real problem of the homeless and jobless freezing to death under their watch. When the solution comes in the forms of paying the jobless to shovel snow, backbreaking work that they are paid almost nothing for, radical tensions rise, and anarchists are soon marching through the streets with increasing animosity. The mayor’s new police commissioner adopts a policy of letting radicals say as they please, even protecting them from angry citizens during their speeches. Then tensions rise at the site of the strike in Ludlow, Colorado. Between 19 and 25 people, including women and children, are massacred. The anarchists blame Rockefeller and his uncompromising position on unions and begin to protest in his direct vicinity. And then one of those anarchists accidentally detonates a bomb that authorities believe was meant for Rockefeller.

And yet, Jones paints no villains. Jones does not hesitate to tell us of Rockefeller’s good deeds as well as his bad ones – the Ludlow Massacre inspired Rockefeller to eventually change his views of labor unions, and many union organizers came to see him as a friend. Jones tells us of Berkman’s commitment to the ideals of anarchism (“Humanity was perfectible. Each could prosper. All were worthy of trust. Self-government was government enough. In a society of equals, there would be no need for any authority other than one’s own conscience”), and then without flinching, tells of Berkman’s attempts on the lives of other human beings. This is perhaps one of the greatest strengths of this book. Jones manages to paint clear and vivid portraits untainted by judgment. The portraits of the times and events are just as clear and stunning.

The book also has its weaknesses. While Jones paints a vivid portrait of the historical figures and their setting, he sadly does little work to sketch anything like an analysis. At the very end, Jones seems to draw a conclusion that progressives and anarchists have similar goals, if different strategies. That notion is sure to be a bit alienating to both radicals and progressives alike, the two groups this book is most likely to interest.

“More Powerful Than Dynamite” provides a solid history of anarchism in its heyday, before the nationalistic fervor of WWI and before the Red Scares that pushed radicalism underground for so long in the U.S. Here we see anarchists on the street corners, anarchists leading hunger strikes from prison, anarchists in news headlines, and anarchists taken quite seriously as a political force. But there is more to be found than just a nostalgic look at the “good old days” of anarchy. By viewing police repression, the tensions between two sides of politics that are both (ostensibly) out for good and progress, and the tactics used for containment and escalation, we see a picture not of what anarchism once was, but one that it oddly still resembles today.

A native of Pennsylvania coal country, Pamela DiFrancesco has lived, written, and worked for social change in the City of New York since she was 18. Among other publications, her fiction has been featured in the Carolina Quarterly, who nominated her for Best American Mystery Writing 2012.  She maintains a writing blog at www.thebaffledkingcomposing.wordpress.com.

Will Greece, the site of much social unrest since the onset of the crisis in 2008, play the role of the Minotaur-slaying hero Theseus? (Photo: Piazza del Popolo/Creative Commons)

In what is likely to become a classic, Greek political economist Yanis Varoufakis traces the origins of the global crisis and looks beyond the U.S.-dominated world.

By Boris Stremlin

In 1944, just as the institutions of the postwar monetary order were being fashioned at Bretton Woods, Karl Polanyi published his now-classic historical reconstruction 19^th century capitalism, “The Great Transformation.” Polanyi’s main argument was that the “self-regulating market” was ultimately undone by “fictitious commodities” – land, money and labor that lay at its very foundation, because they were not in fact created for the purpose of market exchange, while their treatment as such elicited a defensive reaction on the part of society that, by 1930s, had taken both socialist and fascist forms. As the various movements representing the self-protection of society entered into a life-and-death struggle with one another in the Second World War, Polanyi hoped that the conclusion of the conflict would lead to the formation of a new system characterized by a balance between “habitation” (social stability) and “improvement” (socioeconomic progress), one in which the market would be embedded in a wider framework of social relations.

In many ways, Yanis Varoufakis’ “The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy” constitutes a sequel to Polanyi’s narrative. It tells the story of the embedded market society whose foundation was laid down in 1944, and whose crisis began in 2008. Varoufakis, a Greek political economist who has taught in Great Britain and Australia, chairs the Doctoral Program in Economics at the University of Athens, and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Texas. A sometime economic advisor to the center-left Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) government in the previous decade, Varoufakis has also gained prominence as a commentator on European integration and the global crisis in such left-wing venues as Monthly Review and Left Business Observer. With the publication of “The Global Minotaur” and the Greek election of May 2012 that has apparently pushed the Eurozone to the brink of disintegration, Varoufakis has been thrust into the limelight as a leading proponent of the reformation of the European Union and an economic consultant of the anti-austerity Syriza Party.

Echoing Polanyi, Varoufakis contends that the smooth functioning of the surplus-producing capitalist machine is hampered by the presence of two “gremlins” – the labor and money markets. As two commodities that are unwanted for their own sake – (borrowed) money because it must be repaid, labor because it must be remunerated and compromised with, these gremlins represent necessary evils in the pursuit of higher profits. When confidence in their ability to earn profits drops, the market malfunctions: uninvested capital and unemployed labor expand, but despite the fact that their price continues to fall, so does the demand for them. When this happens, a capital C Crisis, like the Great Depression or the Global Crisis that began in 2008 causes the system to break down. The solution to this breakdown lies in recognizing the presence of a living ‘ghost’ in the machine of market society, and re-initiating a process similar to Polanyi’s embedding of the market in social relations. In speaking of the renewed creation of value, Varoufakis means a reconstruction of a pattern of social relationships that allows valuation to take place – something that a mere expansion of automation, commodification, and things cannot do. In such a way, crises can serve as ‘laboratories of the future’.

For Varoufakis, the key to overcoming Crises and re-embedding markets in social relationships involves the establishment of a Global Surplus Recycling Mechanism (GSRM). Ameliorating class conflict and growing imbalances between surplus and deficit countries, stimulating demand, and creating a basis for social valuation, a GSRM comprises a set of institutions and policies that directs investment toward productive activities in particular key regions that ensures the restoration of growth of the world economy as a whole.

In the post-Great Depression history of capitalism with which the bulk of Varoufakis’ book is concerned, two distinct models of GSRMs are evident. The first, which he terms the Global Plan corresponds to the period between the establishment of the Bretton Woods system and the mid-1970s, after the United States’ closing of the gold window and the onset of the first oil shock. The story Varoufakis tells here is largely familiar to readers of Fred Block or Giovanni Arrighi. Having rejected Keynes’ proposed blueprint of a global currency, or Henry Wallace’s suggestion of an effective postwar alliance with the Soviet Union, U.S. policymakers opted for a dollar-based international financial in which they would make all the key decisions. At the same time, the surplus capital accumulated in the US would be recycled primarily for the benefit of two zones that had been largely destroyed during the war, but had the potential to become the main competitors of U.S. industry – Western Europe and Northeast Asia. The initiation of this strategy in the context of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and against the explicit economic interests of U.S. elites, because it exposed the domestic market to competition from cheaper imports, speaks to the dominance of political priorities.

Though this tale has often been told, Varoufakis does deserve credit for highlighting two points that are commonly under-emphasized. First, the specific selection of Germany and Japan by the administrators of the Marshall Plan and General MacArthur’s occupation government, respectively, as the anchors of U.S. strategy of promoting regional recovery followed from the imperative to further undermine the teetering colonial empires possessed by European powers on the Allied side. Thus, the main American partnerships under the Global Plan were established with two defeated, occupied, semi-sovereign states that lacked legitimacy for independent regional leadership, thereby further strengthening the U.S. globally. Second, the promotion of an economically-, but not politically-based regional integration centered on its chosen partners was a U.S. driven policy – a point frequently obscured, Varoufakis contends, by the Founding Fathers of European integration, who presented the project as a ‘third way’ alternative, independent of the Cold War superpowers.

As the policies favoring surplus accumulation by German and Japanese manufacturers, combined with the profligate military spending of the Vietnam War era turned the U.S. from a surplus to a deficit country, the Global Plan came undone. However, rather than leading to the dissolution of the system or its revolutionary transformation, as many radicals expected at the time, successive administrations from Nixon to Reagan succeeded in replacing the Global Plan with a new surplus recycling mechanism that operated because of, rather than despite, the expansion of U.S. deficits, reversing the global flow of surplus back to the revived hegemonic power. The study of this latest GSRM, which Varoufakis calls the “Global Minotaur,” forms the centerpiece of the book.

The metaphor of the Global Minotaur hearkens back to the classical legend that narrates, in mythic form, the history of a Minoan tributary empire that dominated the Aegean and the Greek mainland in the middle of the second millennium BCE. In the story, the Minotaur – the product of an unholy union of a Cretan queen and a sacrificial bull is placed in a labyrinth, where he feeds on young men and women supplied by Crete’s vassals, which, at the same time, benefit from the commercial prosperity and political stability underwritten by Minoan power. In applying this metaphor to the global economy between the mid-1970s and 2008, Varoufakis means to underline the political character of the decision to abandon the Global Plan and replace it with an essentially tributary structure that allowed the U.S. to retain freedom of action, rather than, as neoliberals argue, a shift back to ‘free markets’ (or, as more mainstream critics contend, a simple victory of finance over the ‘real economy’). Although he certainly condemns the Global Minotaur for its inegalitarian character and its proliferating disequilibria that ultimately made its perpetuation unsustainable, Varoufakis does express some admiration for the Minotaur’s designers because of their ingenious prolongation of U.S. hegemony, their ability to attract other countries to participate in the new global order, and, at bottom, their very recognition of the necessity of a surplus recycling mechanism in a modern economy. The latter lesson, he contends, is one that has not yet been learned by austerity-minded European policymakers struggling to deal with the consequences of the global crisis.

The Minotaur’s strategy for effecting a reversal of capital flows back to the U.S. (in order to avoid cutting spending and raising taxes while finding support for expanding deficits) centered on breaking the dollar’s gold peg, allowing its Persian Gulf allies to drive up the price of oil, and arresting the wage growth of U.S. labor. As a result, the European and Japanese economies – more dependent on imported energy, based on higher-priced labor, and lacking hegemonic status, became increasingly uncompetitive relative to the that of the U.S., allowing the dollar to maintain its reserve currency status. What Varoufakis calls the Minotaur’s “four charismas” – reserve currency status, rising energy costs, cheapened labor, and geopolitical might succeeded in luring capital back to U.S. markets.

The hiking of interest rates by Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker in the early 1980s completed the transition to the Minotaur’s regime. At the price of a recession in the U.S., Volcker was able to attract foreign capital while driving indebted Third World and Soviet client states into default or austerity measures, thus shattering the compact between populations and revolutionary nationalist regimes. The collapse of the USSR less than a decade later not only delegitimized any possible alternative to the Minotaur, but also drew the erstwhile socialist bloc into a single globalized economy geared to financing its U.S. deficits.

The onset of the Minotaur’s “Golden Age” at the end of the Cold War betokened changes on the economic, ideological, cultural and epistemological domains that reflected the beast’s unrivaled power, and near-universal efforts to imitate its behavior. Varoufakis characterizes the main supporting institutions of the Minotaur regime  – Wall Street, Walmart, trickle-down politics, and supply-side economics as its monstrous “handmaidens”. While Wall Street hedge funds inflated financial bubbles through the de facto creation of private money in the options and mortgage markets, Walmart supplied the U.S. market with cheap imported goods at a time when wages remained stagnant, creating an illusion of growing prosperity. Concurrently, neoliberals in government presided over an attack on the welfare state, a deregulation of business and a decline of taxation on the “creative classes”, while at the same time increasing the size of the national security state, thereby generating spinoffs in the high-tech sector that were branded as the new “knowledge economy”. Notwithstanding its planned and state-oriented character, the economics profession provided scientific legitimacy to the Minotaur regime. In generating the complex algorithms behind Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) and proclaiming unbridled faith in the power of markets to export American-style prosperity to the rest of the world, professional economists came to play a key role in building the Minotaur a labyrinthine maze that no one truly understood, but from which there was no escape.

Easily the most interesting part of the book deals with the vicissitudes of Europe and Asia under Minotaur rule. Despite the policy of ‘controlled disintegration of the world economy’ explicitly enunciated by Volcker and others, the existence of a surplus-recycling mechanism meant that other countries could achieve success in the medium term provided they played by the Minotaur’s rules. In the 1970s and 1980s, the most notable performer was Japan, which retained its relatively untrammeled access to U.S. markets in exchange for reinvesting its surpluses in U.S. treasuries and equities, thus fueling the growth of its budget and trade deficits. Japanese dynamism would ultimately be reined in by the 1985 Plaza Accords, which devalued the dollar relative to the yen, leading to the inflation of a Japanese bubble economy ill-equipped to absorb the heightened supply created by Japanese industry. Competition for U.S. market share by export-oriented industries in Southeast Asia, fashioned with the help of Japanese banks in search of profits also contributed to the onset of Japan’s ‘lost decades’, though, as Varoufakis argues in the face of mainstream analysis, continued state support for its integrated keiretsu system precluded the crisis of its banking sector in the early 1990s from turning its economy into an unmitigated disaster.

The second pillar of the Global Plan – Germany – fared rather better during the Minotaur’s Golden Age, owing to the continued expansion of European integration. Like Japan, Germany restructured its economy as a surplus-producing industrial powerhouse that recycled its profits in the U.S. financial sector. Unlike Japan, Germany had a backup option in the form of a demand-producing European periphery, one that steadily gained importance in the wake of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty that laid the foundations for the European currency union. In exchange for universalizing the Bundesbank’s stringent monetary policies throughout Europe and preventing competitive devaluations that had previously hamstrung the Deutschmark and German industry, the deficit economies of the Eurozone gained access to cheap credit that a strong Euro allowed, as well as to high-quality German products. The success of European integration was further underwritten by the reunification of the two Germanies, which depressed German wages, allowing German exports to retain competitiveness abroad while the surpluses accumulated by German banks continued to pile up. Second, the Franco-German partnership allowed the burgeoning German domination of the European Union to remain obscured behind French-driven European political integration. The illusory character of the political integration, and the growing imbalances between the surplus and deficit zones of the Euroland that threatened to tear the whole of the EU asunder only became exposed once the entire Minotaur-centered system crashed in 2008.

The final key pillar of the Minotaur regime was China. Originally projected as the central component in the Global Plan’s Asian strategy, China followed a different trajectory after the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949, but under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, it began to follow the export-led model developed by Japan and the Southeast Asian Tigers. Owing to its geopolitical weight and a careful analysis of the errors of its forerunners, China’s rulers kept its renminbi pegged to the dollar and rejected any demands to revalue it, thus ensuring continued industrial expansion and surplus accumulation at the expense of the Tigers and other competitors such as Mexico. By 2003, China had displaced Japan and Germany as the largest underwriter of U.S. deficits. Around the same time, its own economic growth and rising incomes fostered a restructuring of the global economy to accommodate its rise. Thus, countries like Brazil and Argentina, fearful of the inflow of hot money and chastened by the Asian Contagion and their own crises in 1998 and 2001, respectively, began to abandon export-oriented industrialization in favor of supplying agricultural goods and raw materials to China. The rise of commodity prices during the “noughts” decade reflected the growing influence of Chinese markets, as well a hedging strategy against a dollar that had begun to lose the unquestioned faith as a guarantor of global stability. Varoufakis does not, however, view the last decade as laying a foundation for a future Chinese hegemony. Anticipating criticism of his analysis of China as incomplete, he answers that the rise of China can only be understood as a factor of the Minotaur system, albeit, most likely, its final stage.

By 2008, the imbalances of the system had become unmanageable, and the ‘controlled disintegration’ spun out of control. The run-up to the crisis – the mortgage and energy bubbles, the proliferation of CDOs and private money, extensively analyzed over the last four years does not interest Varoufakis as much as the crisis’ outcome. Initially, the deep-seated Keynesian instincts, especially in the U.S., came to the fore in policymakers’ actions. Governments bought up bankrupt enterprises and banks, while central banks stimulated economies through increased liquidity. But, as in a bad horror movie, a fatally wounded or undead Minotaur came back for one last anticlimactic scare. Using government handouts under the Geithner-Summers Plan, indebted banks formed new hedge funds to not only rid themselves of toxic debt, but to resurrect the system of private money creation by bidding up the value of this debt. Once relieved of its burden, Wall Street  – the Minotaur’s ugliest handmaiden – moved against the politicians that brought them back from the edge of destruction, and threw its support to those political forces (the Tea Party) that supported less regulation. In Europe, this ‘bankruptocracy’ took the form of the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), which created a CDO-like vehicle for buying up the debts of European states even as it enabled the formation of hedge funds that bet against the weaker economies – first Varoufakis’ native Greece, then other members of the PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain), thereby driving up their borrowing costs, proliferating austerity regimes, and increasing the likelihood of the Eurozone’s collapse. In both cases, the bankruptocracy deliberately weakened the ability of governments to address the consequences of Crisis.

Ultimately, unlike some commentators on the North American left, Varoufakis does not believe in a post-crisis restoration of a tributary, U.S.-centered neoliberal regime. Notwithstanding the bankruptocracy, the U.S. is no longer capable of generating sufficient demand to restore a GSRM for the world economy (much of the recent talk about a return to export growth, re-industrialization and the shale revolution suggests, more than anything else, the imminence of the Minotaur’s final demise). But what then? We are not as far along the road to the formation of a new regime as Polanyi was in 1944, but a few of the outlines may be coming into focus. With China, in his estimation, too weak to single-handedly generate a new GSRM, perhaps a more globally cooperative order based on mutual agreements between the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) and other emerging powers could stabilize the system. Alternatively, Varoufakis envisions the fulfillment of Keynes’ dream of an International Currency Union, though he admits that such a scenario is far-fetched. Given his continued belief in the possibility of a quick solution to the European sovereign debt crisis (recapitalization of the banks in exchange for writing off all debt plus turning the European Investment Bank into a regional version of the World Bank), perhaps a series of smaller GSRMs, spearheaded by the EU, can turn the tide on the deepening chaos (Varoufakis sees the departure or expulsion of Greece and other peripheral economies from the Eurozone as triggering a global disaster of catastrophic proportions). For the time being, Varoufakis’ story is without its Theseus, though in supporting Syriza’s rejection of the European Central Bank’s bailout regime, he is clearly hoping that Athens will play a role in recapitulating the Minotaur-slaying feat of its mythic hero. There is no sense in “The Global Minotaur,” as in some other post-crisis works like Minqi Li’s “The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy,” that a surplus-generating order as such has become impossible due to structural or environmental limitations. But perhaps, once the fact that the Minotaur will not return becomes universally recognized, the more positive schemes combining habitation and improvement will at least be attempted.

Boris Stremlin is Visiting Assistant Professor at Manhattanville College.