thoughts on hayek

Road to serfdom…the argument is basically a reverse of Polanyi. He sees all of the freedoms of the current era as being the result of the separation of the political and the economic, but sees the real determining force in the free market, which leads to the freedoms of the political. It should be said that he also doesn’t see the double movement of social protection as coming from below.

Individual was what built our civilization, but the free market allowed the individual to develop that individualism to its fullest extent. Hard to parse which moment he sees as first, but notable that he resists any real dialectic and denies the relevance of social conditions outside of these two factors, both of which are seen as ideas and only ideas. Also, the canard is presented that, despite his economic inequality (and virtual political subordination) “by the beginning of the twentieth century the workingman in the Western world had reached a degree of material comfort, security and personal independence which a hundred years before had seemed scarcely possible.” And, like in most realist theories of the day, the presumption was that this had happened largely within an endogenous process of economic development. In fact, the ethnocentrism of this argument is quite present in several places, assuming as he does that “For over two hundred years English ideas had b
een spreading eastward. The rule of freedom which had been achieved in England seemed destined to spread throughout the world.” Unlike Arrighi who sees the political economic factors that led to competition from Germany, Hayek sees the thing that made England lose its footing was the importation of ideas from Germany. Both of these may be true and if they are, then they aren’t unrelated. But for Hayek, there is a sort of implicit anti-German attitude that he has in this section which implies that the German origins of socialism (or the [asserted] predominance of socialist ideas in Germany) is what actually led to the rise of fascism.

Also, the contention that the free society is somehow spontaneous or natural is less one-sided than in The Fatal Conceit. He is more willing to admit, for instance, that there had to be some government involvement in the construction of the free market. In Road to Serfdom, he says that the early successes of the liberal nineteenth century were what led to the attempt to redirect these successes towards new ends.

One of the key things he does is to marshal all kinds of quotes from people who had recently visited the USSR in order to show how all of them are of the opinion that socialism is more akin to fascism than democracy. And despite all of his talk about the unintended consequences of planning, it is clear that he has only one way of thinking about this: namely that planning inevitably leads to totalitarianism and the free market inevitably leads to individual freedom, narrowly defined as political freedom which is based on economic freedom. The difference between Hayek and Wood, as Harvey points out is that the political freedom ensured in this system is not one that can be used to change any of the economic arrangements that dominate.

Though it lies somewhat unstated, Hayek’s focus on ideas as the driver of both the current historical change and the earlier one is quite elitist. When he does take the occasion to hint at the social pressures placed on democratic governments by their unhappy citizens, his only reply is that these governments were too swayed by socialist ideas to realize the value of the freedoms that they had. He doesn’t really posit a practical way that these things could have been worked out—probably because he didn’t have the American Enterprise Institute there to present market solutions to these problems—but he simply chides them for diverging from first principles.

What is clear, however, is that Hayek converges rather neatly with the 1960s critiques of the institution of the state. Moreover it is indicative of the kind of politics that developed in this moment and their similar focus on the state organization of economic and social life. It is worth noting that Hayek’s main target isn’t socialism or Marxism per se, but the democratic socialism that made people like Marcuse so angry. It also makes clear that, despite its tepid intervention even Giddens’ Third Way would be unwelcome, On this, at least, the Marxist and Hayekians would agree, there is little hope for instituting social justice or equality while adhering to the traditional principles of liberalism. (on this see p. 37 in RtS)

One of the interesting things that he seems to want to set up as a dichotomy is that socialism isn’t a continuation of the enlightenment tradition (p.29-30) and it isn’t just a matter of expanding freedom to the economic realm. He spends most of ch. 3 positing that there is a difference between socialism as a means and as an end. He says that too many people believe that there is a way to achieve these ends without the kinds of state run means that true socialists believe. And it is this failure to balance means and ends that he sees as problematic. There may be many useful idiots out there, but they just don’t see what he does. It is interesting that, despite his claim that the ends of socialism themselves are contrary to his values, he must claim to be a part of the group of people “who value the ultimate ends of socialism no less than the socialists [but] refuse to support socialism because of the dangers to other values they see in the methods proposed by the social
ists.”

Here there is a homology between Hayek’s equivocation and that of, for instance, the Frankfurt school. In many ways both see state capitalism as an ultimate failure of the enlightenment principles. They also both frame their problem with this in terms of the way that the system affects, to use Hayek’s terms, the liberty of the individual consciousness. However, whereas the Frankfurt School see the current monopoly status of the formerly free market and the structuring of the state around it as the most obvious similarity that Nazi fascism has with American society, Hayek sees the problem stemming not from the market’s relationship with society, but with the relationship of the state to the economy. Namely, he says that the real similarity isn’t monopoly business but state intervention and planning that are the clearest threat to “freedom.”

I will also note that, throughout the book the notion of “freedom” is the only thing that is discussed, not that of democracy. This is, I think indicative of the way that he thinks things work. He certainly doesn’t have a problem with the state when it is securing property rights. This is, perhaps, where he is most similar to the planners he is criticizing and it shows that the real problem he has with planning isn’t its elitism, but that it doesn’t leave these choices up to the people who have money. Moreover, he doesn’t usually talk about the “free market” but instead “competition.” I wouldn’t put it past Hayek who was a very careful wordsmith, to have made sure that he could not be interpreted as supporting in any way the more socialist interpretation of the economy, which he derides early in the book, that says the project of socialism is an attempt to bring the freedoms of the political to the realm of economics.

This isn’t really fair. He just thinks that “competition” is the thing that will bring about the best results. What competition entails, however, is something that, in 1945, he is careful to outline. In this he mentions environmental regulations and labor standards as aspects of social good that would inevitably need to be handled by something other than the price mechanism. However, he sees competition as the most important aspect of modern civilization and planning is something that has only gained respectability among “liberal-minded people” through “socialist propaganda.” I don’t know from this who the socialists are that are promoting this or why they would be listened to if they were merely socialists, but he’s the nobel prize winner.

for spanish test...

this yahoo dictionary is very useful
and I have been trying to translate these interviews with Daniel Bensaid and Alex Callinicos

Jarrett is born

From Jesse:

Jarrett is here. 8lb 7oz and 22 in. He arrived Wednesday at 6:57 pm by c-section and both Jade and Jarrett are doing fine.

He has black hair and deep blue eyes and razorblades for fingernails.

I'm starting a blog (if Jesse wants to keep it) to post pics and info. If it sticks, it will be...

The Weekly Standard recently published an article on the need for the Republican Party to think about people who belong to "Sam's Club, not just the country club." The argument makes a number of interesting proposals about health care, family planning, social security and taxes. The funny thing is that none of them are at all definsible as neoliberal reforms on reducing the size of government. Perhaps I don't know enough about classical conservatism--or even the notions of it presented by Kirk or Kristol--but what I find interesting about these is that they are not trying to argue that we don't need healthcare or social security: in fact they are explicitly saying that it isn't possible for them to promote this position because they will lose. They see this as a policy problem rather than an ideological one. That is, in itself, refreshing.

It is also what I have noticed throughout the Bush presidency, and especially during the election: though he tries to promote conservative positions on social issues and market (i.e. corporate) friendly business policy, when push comes to shove, he has to use the rhetoric of the New Deal in order to discuss the role of the government. As the article points out, with the massive GM closures (mostly due to their astronomical costs for employee welfare, e.g. pensions and healthcare) recently, corporations are probably getting ready to accept some government intervention in that area as well. This is almost laughable considering the kind of agenda Bush said he'd be promoting and, as I am reading Harvey's "A Brief History of Neoliberalism," starkly different than the economic understandings promoted by his policy advisors. The irony of this ideology is that it has its own kind of Jacobin impulses, but instead of coming from below, it is an elite that is trying to increase its own power and the revolution is accomplished through fiscal starvation of the state rather than its overthrow. There is a sort of delusion of granduer to all of this which says that all they need to do is tell people that this way is better and they will accept it. Obviously this ideology, as deeply engrained as Harvey says that it is in the elite culture itself, is still shallow among most of the population. Thus the idea of effectively reforming these systems is much more popular than making them just window dressing on the free-market wilderness (to invoke Polanyi.) And the reason these guys are straying from the neo-liberal reservation in one of the journals its masterminds is because it simply isn't politically viable to do anything else. They warn, throughout, that all the Democrats have to do is beat the GOP to the punch on some of these issues.

This would be a good time to have an opposition party. But as Brooks, who cites the WS paper notes, despite the inept handling of everything existing on the part of the current administration, "liberals remain surpassingly effective at making themselves unelectable." This seems to be especially the case with the current batch who can't stop trying to exploit the war as their way of defeating Bush--which is only a useful strategy as long as he tries to win on that narrative. As soon as he changes his tune and they don't have a vaible alternative or anyone willing to say anything that isn't focus grouped and pollstered into pablum (see Lieberman's ass kissing on the war lately and the massive retreat from the very centrist notion that we should leave Iraq since we suck there, stated by Murtha and, earlier today, Dean) Bush will be leading the charge on the next issue--and this time he might choose wisely and have a plan. Their strategy of sitting back and waiting for him to shoot himself in the foot has worked for a few months, but even a faux cowboy can get some thicker boots.

gpe13

Sunday, 05 June 2005

If this link holds, here is an obituary for Andre Gunder Frank written by Samir Amin which, if nothing else, helps me to understand the intellectual legacy of Amin, Wallerstein,and Arrighi. It is strange that Cardoso drops out of the picture, but I am sure there is a much longer story there.

gpe12

Wednesday, 04 May 2005


original

Scholte's "critical introduction" on "Globalization" is much more an "introduction" in that there isn't really anything critical about it. His goal of clarifying "what is happening?" "what is global about globalization?" etc. are useful entry points into the conversation, but Scholte seems too interested in synthesizing and equivocating amongst these various strains, carving a path down the "radical middle," that he doesn't really say much more than what we hear in the popular press but in a more academic, well-researched fashion.

In many ways it follows from his earlier discussion on "International Relations and Social Change" in its focus on the macro level of change to show the inadequacy of former, disciplinary frameworks of understanding. However, one of his first moves is to try to limit what globalization means as a word which, ultimately, limits what he's talking about. At the same time, his call for linguistic specificity and a change in intellectual frameworks makes the same assumption that he promotes in his earlier book, namely that what is needed is a change in thinking rather than a dramatic institutional shift in order to catch up with these changes.

On the first count, his first chapter is productive, as in the earlier book, in mapping the many debates over what globalization is, when it began, and what its possibilities are for policy changes. Most of these are very shallow descriptions and, of the few that I knew by name, I noted at least one that was miscategorized (p. 28 groups John Tomlinson with people critical of "cultural imperialism:" Tomlinson is actually on the other side of this debate, and is critical of people who think that cultural imperialism exists.) Nevertheless, he shows the general "territory" of this debate. This is productive in a sense, but it also reads much more like a catalog of positions, most of them grouped in terms of binary positions, most of Scholte evaluates as basically legitimate, though more or less popular. This balanced perspective attempts to set up the issues he will explore later in the book and, I imagine, on which will eventually take a position himself.

But this themetizing of the issues around the globalization debate becomes less productive when he does stake his first position. He says that the term suffers from inadequate theorizing, alternately meaning internationalization, liberalization, universalization, westernization/modernization/americanization and deterrirorialization (43-49). He evaluates what these terms refer to and says that the first four are redundant and the only one that is worthy of consideration as a true meaning of globalization is deterriorialization.

The reason for this is twofold and based in the central problematic of the use of the term. These terms are either pointing to a process that has been going on for quite a long time and are thus not unique, and/or the uniqueness of the process is simply one of degree meaning that the original term could suffice to describe it. This is parallel to the wider debate about whether there is continuity or change in what people are calling globalization (20-23), a subject that Scholte touches on, though again in the fragmented segments of "production, governance, culture, modernity."

In focusing on the possibility that something unique is occurring, dismissing this as an expansion of earlier patterns, and isolating "deterrirorialization" as the core innovation of globalization, Scholte also limits his ability to consider that there is a complex of changes that encompass all of these categories and that it is the structural articulation of these many continuities that signals the real change that people mean to point to when they speak of globalization. In other words, he lays out these many streams of debate in isolation, considers each individually, and obscures the totality he claims to be able to see with his interdisciplinary lens. This leads him to focus on the "history" and "causes" of globalization only in terms of deterritoriality or transnationalism and changes in conceptions of space. That this is what geographer David Harvey has already termed "The Postmodern Condition" doesn't seem to faze Scholte.

He then goes on to enumerate the many aspects of this deterritorialization in a linear fashion and with little consideration of the conflict that has ensued at just about every level in this process over the past 200 years. The upshot, it seems, is an account of globalization that wouldn't conflict much with someone like Thomas Friedman, even in his most ludicrous recent pronouncements. Here a certain technological determinism or at least a neo-liberal teleology drives the assumption of the basic naturalness of the current structuration of global capitalism. More importantly, the focus moves almost completely to the macro-level of analysis exemplified by the text box on page 86 which outlines the "indicators" of globaliation which talk about numbers of radio and TV sets, numbers of financial transactions, totals of FDI etc. all of which are basic indicators of development that the UN would use and all of which (save the last two on civic associations and extinct species) are most desireable for the global capital.

In other words, though there are some interesting moments, on the whole his explanation of what is going on is little better than a New York Times celebration of the expansion of the American Order. Normally, my main disappointment with this would be the fact that it overlooks the inequalities that are all but hard-coded into this transformation. Scholte sees transborder cultural practices as a part of the same movement as the "global sourcing" techniques of transnational corporations and, more importantly, considers the former only in the terms of the latter. Although he is much looser in his formulation and later in the text allows for some equivocation on this, his assumption is ultimately that this is something that should be happening and just needs a bit of tweaking in a social democratic direction so that everyone can get in on it. This leaves little room for alternative ways of life. I am looking forward to Rosenberg's critique of this because it seems that Scholte has made just the sort of elision of the fundamental "strategic relation" that would illuminate the drivers behind "globalization."

At the same time, I see that the focus on capitalism could cover over some fairly interesting movements--usually seen as oppositional but which seem to have a different character altogether. In this I refer to the kind of cultural and social analysis that is still missing from Rosenberg's book. In thumbing through a recent volume on "Transnational Muslim Politics" I have begun to question how this fits into the normative narratives of globalization which focus mostly on the material possibilities and consequences. I think that the Inyatullah and the Badie will also have some focus on this aspect.

gpe11

Monday, 02 May 2005

original

Justin Rosenbug's Empire of Civil Society starts from a point similar to Scholte. He is critical of IR as a social science because of the way that it has divided up the social totality and focused on one aspect of it--the political. Scholte makes a similar critique, but Rosenberg gives a more compelling response. Whereas Scholte outlines a complex framework for critique which ends up seeming somewhat relativistic, Rosenberg presents an argument in favor of historical materialism and then makes the connections between the domestic and international, the individual and the global, that prove the usefulness of this approach. In doing this, he produces one of the more coherent explanations of the subject/structure problem in social science analysis.

He begins by looking at three foundational practitioners of the discipline (Carr, Morgenthau, and Walz), explicating and dissecting their arguments and problematizing the central tension of (domestic) sovereignty and (international) anarchy which the field seeks to explain through the instrumental mechanism of balance of power. In each case, Rosenberg shows the inadequacy and contradiction that mires each argument--usually because of its attempt to bracket the political from other social forces, the belief in the transhistorical character of the dynamics of the international system, and the failure to clearly define what the terms of the debate are. More importantly, and specific to Rosenberg as opposed to Scholte, the field fails to fulfill its goal as a social science. For Rosenberg, this goal is to explain what is unique in the emergence of the modern era. The short answer, for Rosenberg, is capitalism and the "strategic relationship" of wage labor.

The latter conclusion is, in part, reached about midway through the text, following a rigorous argument about the way that social structures should be conceived. Much of this section, like Scholte's work, is informed by Giddens' work on structuration. However, Rosenberg doesn't stick with one theorist but instead takes from Giddens to reinvigorate the "second way" of thinking about social structure. He says that the benefit of Historical Materialism as a theoretical instrument isn't that it is more rational or more evidential (52) but that it explains more than realism

This is because the central thesis of historical materialism is not economic determinism: it is the centrality of those relations which organize material production to the wider institutional reproduction of social orders. And exactly what those relations are in any given society is always an empirical question. (53)

Here Rosenberg and Scholte part ways. For where Scholte wants to speak of co-determinant social dimensions of local, national, and international, Rosenberg sees this as a more one sided process, quoting Gramsci's question from "The Modern Prince:" "Do international relations precede or follow (logically) fundamental social relations? There can be no doubt that they follow." Thus, IR must begin by thinking about the social structure before considering international relations or politics as such.

The following chapters are meant to show, simultaneously, the problems of Realist assumptions of history and the explanatory power of historical materialsim in better understanding of societies, their states, and their relations with other socially determined states. By looking back at the Greek City States and Reniassance Italy, he shows the inadequacy of thinking about "purely political authority" i.e. soveriegnty in a transhistorical way, projecting backwards the assumptions of the modern state. In each of these cases the state does not exhibit the realist notion of sovereignty, and, in any case, the social configurations could not be generalized beyond that context. Rosenberg eventually moves to Marx to discuss the unique emergence of the state within a capitalist social configuration where "this condition of the emergence of a discrete sphere of 'the political' is actually internal to the mode of production"(85). In this way, Rosenberg is in some ways admitting that there is cause for IR and political science to isolate the political as an object of study, but he is saying that the possibility of doing this, the emergence of this concept, is only credible or possible from a modern perspective. In this configuration, the separation of the political and the economic is analogous to the separation of the public and private spheres. As civil society emerges as a check on public political power, and as the concept of political liberty and freedom emerge as general social goals, the "unfreedom" of the "non-political," i.e. the economic, the private, begins to be seen as equally natural and of a piece with political freedom. Rosenberg quotes Ellen Wood as pointing out that this "differentiation of the economic is in fact a differentiation within the political sphere." But the point is that, on the surface it seems separate and it is this separation that IR (and much post-war, American social science) reifies.

More here on spain, portugal;

Roughly, Rosenberg uses the early Spanish and Portuguese imperial endeavors to show the differences in the "distinct historical structure of social relations embodying processes of 'international' accumulation" (93). This seems to follow in some ways from the articulation of Historical Structures of Robert Cox and certainly focuses on the particularity of each international expansion. Here he is arguing with both realist and World Systems articulations of the transformation of global order. And, roughly, this corresponds to a refusal to consider this form of imperialism as the same thing as that of the "Age of empire" in the late nineteeth century. His argument is that each pattern of expansion and the mode of social relations at the international level mirrors the fundamental structures that existed in each country and corresponded to particular class interests and assumptions. So that there wasn't the economic or political motive that drove the style or direction of these colonial endeavors. For example:

The encomienda system by which, following the opening round of slaughter and looting, the Spaniards institutionalized their command over native labour was adapted from institutions developed earlier by the Crown to allocate newly reconquered Moorish territories. And the distinctive role of the castilian town--both as a garrison planted in an alien countryside and as a co-ordinated grid of intra-Spanish relations of authority and appropriation was also carried over [the ocean].(110).

Thus thinking about these movements with attention to earlier social structures explains much more than simply trying to put these movements into a transhistorical framework about power or economics in the world system or international relations. The evidence that Rosenberg presents clearly supports his contention that "the dynamics and forms of geopolitical expansion are structurally specific--specific on the one hand to the historical identity of the social order which is expanding its reach and, on the other hand, to the particular social relations which it seeks to encompass and direct." (120) The latter isn't illuminated much, but he does talk about the attempt by Spaniards to step into the already existing social structure to direct expansion using this as a method of legitimizing their power.

anarchy in social structure and analogy of anarchy of individuals in market to anarchy of states.

Rosenberg's sixth chapter is a fairly complex argument which eventually comes out illustrating the homology between the individual in the anarchic market and the state in the anarchic international relations of capitalist modernity. It is a compelling argument and, for me, performs two related moves in basically synthesizing IR and Critical Sociol Theory: He overcomes some of the agent/structure dichotomy by discussing it in terms of an anarchy that capitalist modernity necessitates through the division of public and private aspects. And by extending this relationship to a global level, he shows that it is basically the same sort of understanding that IR has of the state--the latter being a unique formation of capitalist modernity rather than a transhistorical reality. In doing this, he shows the utility of the historical materialist method for exploring events and social formations in the last two hundred years in terms of what is unique in this development. By extension, he also shows the utility of the method for considering earlier social formations if only by comparison to the present day.

.............

also...more on contradiction w/ habermas public/private and refeudalization of public sphere at precisely the moment rosenberg says its been generalized globally.

gpe10

Monday, 18 April 2005


original

Jan Aart Scholte's International Relations and Social Change is a sweeping critique of a veriety of intellectual fashions. He attempts to carve a sort of "third way" through the various disciplinary discussions he addresses, while also recommending less division between these disciplines. His most important criticisms are reserved for realist international relations and its primary focus on the nation state and the endogenous development of social change within its boundaries. He is also encouraging a broader understnding of social change than the narrow politicist definitions that often prevail in that field. Later he turns to other debates within the social sciences--such as the question of determinism, the subject/structure problem and the issue of theory vs. practice. In all of these he proposes a "co-determination" or, what I would call, a dialectical notion of mutual constitution.

I find his broad range of intellectual others to be the most productive part of the book. In presenting the myriad of questions that (should) face social scientists attempting to look at the social whole, he provides a significant bibliography of theoretical legacies and does an excellent job of parsing the issue into a variety of manageable chunks. He is very methodical in his examination of each issue, which makes it easy to comprehend the field as a whole. As I am writing a field statement myself, I admire this clarity.

His most potent other, in this context, is International Relations as a discipline. Ch 1 outlines the misconcieved premises on which the field rests: it is "marked by statism; by politicism; by separation of the domestic and international; frequently, though not always, by reductionism; and by the assumption that there is an underlying continuity in international history." (14) In most cases in the chapter, and throughout the book, Scholte provides examples to illustrate these points and usually these are compelling. The problem tends to be that he is trying to discipline the disciplines rather than founding a new category of inquiry altogether (Global Studies, perhaps?). In the rest of this chapter, he then looks at Historical Sociology and other perspectives that, like IR, have taken the nation-state to be the primary space and engine of social change. Though he obviously recommends that these fields also revise their notion of social change, his main focus is on IR. Since it doesn't seem that IR was ever intended to look at social change per se, this seems odd.

The argument that he only implicitly makes a couple of times, is actually that international relations isn't actually international, muchless global, in its scope, but is mainly concerned with actions between states. International relations should have to look at, as Scholte does in Ch. 3-5, a variety of other processes, actors, and institutions which co determine a structure of regimes and norms that have a powerful effect on the national level, regardless of the lack of a global authority.

This argument is made succinctly and with some attention to evidence. He articulates a different position than, for instance, Susan Strange, who also looks at the diffusion of state power and the ways that IR and GPE are unfit to consider it with their current disciplinary reflexes. Strange points to something new and unique happening in the global environment. Although she wonders if the state was ever the primary mover, she argues that it is now in retreat. Scholte, on the other hand, while he recognizes some of the changes that are taking place (or that it was fashionable to consider) is explicitly arguing that this issue of world society is transhistorical, even making one of his 14(!) clarifications that it can be applied to the most ancient of social changes--giving the example of the cosmolpolitan nature of anceint Greek civilization, saying it "developed not as a distinctively 'western' product, but out of intermingling in the second millennium B.C. between preexisting local peoples of the Aegean, Indo-European infiltrators from the north, Egyptian colonizers from the south and Phoenician arrivlas from the Levant" (33). In this valuable insight, he is trying to create a more productive version of what Gunder Frank attempts in Re-Orient. Only instead of throwing out all of western social theory, he decides all it needs is a revision. Still, he thinks this revision isn't necessitated by historical circumstances but is, instead, a key to understanding any historical circumstances.

This is, I think, what makes his later arguments so weak and places most of the enterprise, despite his empirical evidence, in the realm of ideas. For though I will acknowledge that it would be just as wrong (in the style of Scholte) to say that one or another "dimension" or "factor" of society was transhistorically dominant or determinant, it is rediculous to say that they are always just lined up on the checklist of "things to look at" when examining the process of social change. It reminds me of the problematic themetization of cultural studies in its trip from the UK to the US. Suddenly, in lieu of any theory of determinism, it became a simple matter of looking at race, class, and gender--and basically just looking at them, in terms of representing them "authentically." What Scholte, obviously influenced by the "third way" theorist Giddens, ends up saying is that "every transaction between people in some way contains a combination of all five qualities:"

It follows, then, that a social transformation is a process with multifaceted causation and multifaceted effects. World-systemic dynamics of socail chanve involve a combination of ecological, psychological, cultural, economic and political forces which alters a combination of power relations, production patterns, value frame works, constitutions of the self, and biospheric condititions. Like the distinction of international, national, and local dimensions of social relations, the distinction of facets of social life involves analytical differentiation which should not be reified as an actual separation. (118)

This is the point that he must make in his transhistorical frame, but if he were actually going to apply this, it would be essential to say that, in every situation, some of these factors are more powerful than others. Likewise, when he discusses the structure/agent problem, his attempt to find a universal theory of society in Giddens, allows them both to seemingly ignore the problem of history as something other than a tool to prove your point. Sio that, when Scholte claims that "the structure is a product of the actions...that it has helped produce," (128) and Militarism is seen as one such structure, it is clear that the level of the subject has little to do with the production of that structure and more to do with the reproduction of that structure. Though there are possibilities for change in this theory, the history of the structure and the force of social norms is clearly far more powerful than the individual agent. Thus to ultimately place the engine of social change at the level of the agent--which is what Scholte ultimately does--gives little indication of how a large scale movement is created except to say that thats how change happens. This is largely a re-articulation of "rational choice" theory with the rider that collective movements are sometimes, somehow constituted around something.

Nevertheless, Scholte does much to undermine some of the predominant assumptions in IR and in several other theories about the character of social change, even if he isn't quite sure how it happens. And, since he pretty much even handedly critiques every kind of determinism, he probably doesn't ruffle too many feathers. I don't imagine that was his goal, but overall, that is ultimately the result of presenting a set of observations and recommendations rather than prescriptions and manifestos. This reminds me of a few recent examples of the former (here and here) and the fact that it is examples of the latter that seem to be most powerful in actually producing change.

........
a link:

http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1994/09/art8exc.htm

gpe9

original

http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/FreedomIndex.html

Another interesting piece from LBO. This seems related to Sen in a direct way. First, the rhetoric of the Heritage foundation is almost identical to Sen--more freedom equals more growth (i.e. development). With just these terms, as mythic signs in US culture, it is easy to see how, for instance, certain Hawkish ex-defense department, future World Bank president folks who believe in, more than anything, promoting America as the uber-state in the world system (this having a direct correlation to "freedom") could hijack any such rhetoric for whatever selfish, misguided plan they wanted to carry out.

But, second, it also shows how unsettled these terms could be. For the HF indexes would fith Sen's definition of either freedom or development.

gpe8

Saturday, 26 March 2005

original

http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050321/006000.html

An article in the NYT on Friday mentions the excess capital that has been slushing around in the world market. It seems that this is largely because of political economic effects of China's rise. I say political economic because it doesn't seem that it is about rational, neoclassical economics where I interpret it as saying that individual economic choices are motivated by some immediate economic outcome. This is more about the potential payoff "if things keep going this way" so that there has ben a lot of overinvestment in sectors--such as automobiles--that don't promise to become profitable except in the very long term. I haven't read the rest of the LBO thread on this, but I someday when I am not buried by the field I intend to. I post it on this blog because it seems to be somewhat related to waht Arrighi mentioned in terms of financial expansions and the way that the excess capital that is created, but can't be profitably invested, is usually spent on consumption rather than investment.

This is related but seems to have a sort of contradiction because the article is also saying the opposite of Arrighi in that he says the reason there is excess capital is because the component capitalists of the structured oligopoly (Aglietta's term--not used by Arrighi) have agreed to stop competing for markets with one another and stop investing in production capacity (i.e. Division I). I am probably mucking all of this up, but I do want to note the connection for future research. But I will note that Arrighi is probably wrong about Japan being the next world hegemonic force, though it probably seemed that way in the early 1990s. The trend now points to China and/or India, both of whom are involved in an extensive material expansion, as a quick browse through the LBO archives over the last few months will show.

This is from the NYT article:

We have seen too much capital before, but not on a worldwide basis. It
flooded into Japan in the 1980's when money there was cheap and the
success of the Japanese economy obvious. Japanese business still suffers
from excess capacity. Excessive investment in telecommunications in the
late 1990's left a lot of unused fiber optic cable.

The excess of capital is bad news for wealthy economies, especially as
it is happening when aging populations in Japan, Europe and the United
States need good investments to finance retirement. But it should be
good news for economies that need capital to develop.

Capital will not remain in excess forever. Money will be spent on
consumption rather than investment, and new technologies and rising
demand will eventually create more uses for a supply of capital that
will have been depleted as low returns discourage saving. But for those
with capital, that could be a slow and painful process.

gpe7

Thursday, 17 March 2005


original

Okay, so that last post began to go south before I could really pin down what I meant. I will try to pick that thread back up and tie it back into my more general comments about the book and how I see it tying into what Sylvester is trying to say about these different fields.

Basically, I was initially concerned with Escobar's lack of discussion about how these discourses were distributed. But I was, admittedly, thinking of them more in terms of ideologies which were pervasive not only at the level of the institutions, but also at the level of interpellating subjects into the development discourse, of calling them into place as "docile bodies" or what have you. My problem was that he was failing to consider the materiality of this distribution process and the very real way that the technological means of communication in many developing areas of the world were directly connected to propaganda goals of the American "military-industrial complex" (to use a cliche). Though much work has been done since, Herbert Schiller's analysis of Mass Communications and American Empire clearly shows that television and radio broadcasts were often illegally beamed into foreign territories with the express purpose of creating a climate in that country that was friendly to American business and foreign policy goals.

In other words, I was being a bit of a pedant and asking why this more materialist angle wasn't explored. But as I thought about it, I realized that the real problem I had wasn't just in the absence of explanation of distribution, but with the same thing that cultural studies critics have skewered Schiler for: there isn't any evidence or discussion of the ways that people understood themselves in these narratives or discourses.

Escobar is using a very rich definition of discourse and his use of the institutional ethnography to elaborate on how the idea of development was produced and poverty made visible. He focuses not only on the words but on the way those words inspired actions and, in this case, plans. He is quite brilliant in exposing the logic behind the programs that were recommended and the elegant escape hatches (123) so that failure is never the fault of the plan or planners but of the executors or the subjects (or objects, if were being critical). This seems to be standard way that developmental debacles have been denied for years--and continue to be: "not working, eh? well here's your problem the markets still aren't open enough and you have this subsidy..." But the way that he was talking about the production of the developmental subject, the way that he used the idea of the medical gaze and the development gaze, it made it seem like these were being used as in Foucault and it was difficult for me to see how the peasants of the community thousands of miles from where these words were spoken, some of whom might not completely understand and certainly wouldn't be forced to internalize the gaze in the way that he seems to indicate. This is an important caveat to the way that Foucault understood the gaze and I harp on it because I find it important for transferring his ideas to an international context.

I understand these discussions of Foucault about discourse to be situated fairly historically and, more importantly, within the context of the state. He is looking at the way that power works in a modern state apparatus which has to deal with 1) the absence of absolutist notions of legitimacy and sovereignty; 2) the ascendence of new forms of rationality that ultimately help to legitimize a new form of state power; and 3) the presence of newly discovered urban populations qua society. He looks at the people who were trying to figure out the best way to organize mass society and the new forms of power/knowledge that were being created to manage disease, crime, etc. within these contexts. The idea of the gaze or of the panopticon is not only about the act of looking or even the discourse that structures that looking: it is based on the premise that the subjects themselves internalize that gaze and, therefore, also the discourse so that they begin to think of themselves in the ways that must negotiate with that discourse.

Though he doesn't use Foucault, Fanon has a similar understanding in Black Skin, White Masks (based more on Lacan) which might be more applicable to this situation, which is that Fanon felt that the racism of the colonizer more or less destroyed the self image of the colonised even as it made him wish for the power of the colonizer. The key here that there was a direct interaction between the colonizer and colonized.

The problem with transferring Foucault's ideas of discourse and, especially, the gaze to the discussion of international development is that this direct interaction between the colonized and colonizer is lost and the bureacracy becomes quite separate from the space of development. So when Escobar says that, "there is no materiality that is not mediated by discourse, as there is no discourse that is unrelated to materialities" (130) it raises a lot of questions for me. He goes on, "from this perspective, the making of food and labor and the making of narratives about them must be seen in the same light." Perhaps what Escobar really does is cast a slew of questions on my understanding of Foucault, but it seems that the international context makes these leaps untenable. I would agree that no materiality is unmediated by discourse. However, in chapter two, and especially in the concluding sections, he focuses on the hybrid or even trenchently traditional way in which people on the ground were interpreting the practices they were being asked to partake in. In other words, there are a variety of discourses for mediating that reality and without that direct connection between colonizer and colonized, the subject and the state apparatus, it is unlikely that the gaze will be internalized in the way that it was intended. In thinking of this I am reminded of a quote that Escobar provides from documents on the PAN planning process in Columbia:

Traditional politicians, however, were weary of PAN and its technical outlook was sometimes seen as bearing the mask of an imported technocratic perspective. No regional leader praised PAN any longer than was strictly needed to insure budget approval. (147)

So the discursive understanding of the situation or its solutions didn't even extend all the way through the local development apparatus. This is largely because the cultural differences are too great--something Escobar keeps pointing out. But at the same time, he discusses the discursive regime in the same way that Foucault does, wherein there is a smooth, uniform power of the discourse which, from within the discourse, allows points of resistance. Maybe Foucault himself makes too general a statement about the dispersion of discourse in relation to the materiality he's discussing, but Escobar surely does. Thus to say that food and labor are the same as narratives about them (or should be seen as a similar production) overlooks the real consumer of this discourse is the development communty and the people they deal with directly in the countries. Certainly the discourse will get carried into the communities via the institutions in some form, but even at the level of the institution, they will be mutated by hybrid understandings. In other words, the discourse and the gaze are functioning differently here at the level of the subject population simply because they are insufficiently reified to work in the same way that they do in Foucault.

Escobar, does not, I don't think, intend to show these different ways of functioning, but in doing so, it only further solidifies his main point which is that development officials are interested in making the power they weild seem disinterested. Here, I return to his discussion of political economy. He has just finished looking at a political economic analysis by De Janvry wherein it is argued that thereis a "functional dualism" in the economy so that the cheap labor needed to work on the capitalist farms is fed by the cheap food produced at no profit by the "backward" or traditional sector. De Janvry calls this a Disarticulated accumulation. Escobar feels that analyses such as these "are too quick to impute purely economic functions to development projects" and argues that:

The requirements that political economists discovered [in the description of disarticulated accumulation] rest upon the ability of the development apparatus to create discourses that allow institutions to distribute individuals and populations in ways consistent with capitalist relations. The logic of capital, whatever it is, cannot explain fully why a given group of rural people were made the targets of the interventions we are discussing. Such a logic could equally have dictated another fate for the same group. (130-131)

This is where I see Escobar connecting with the other readings I've done so far. For this is almost the same critique I had of Frank's economism: that by attributing everything to some economic logic, you can only explain so much. On the other hand, Escobar himself, who remains rather calm for most of the book, seems to get rather excited near the end when he begins discussing "sustained development" and the "progressive capitalization of production conditions," in particular, the move from talking about nature to talking about "environment" as a resource to be exploited and asking peasant populations to begin patenting their commons. Though he goes on to more post-structural desctiptions from Donna Haraway and Deluze that attempt to make more discursive sense of this process, the fact of the matter is that he sees this as an economic logic. And, for all his discussion of discourse, there is little other explanation for why these discourses are doing what they are doing except for this logic. To look back at the quote from the Columbian Bureaucrat, it would also seem that the respect given to the discourse was, for the most part, informed by that logic as well (i.e. they played along to get the money.)

It would seem, to tie it in to Arrighi as well, that the new turn towards the commodification of nature (in ways Polanyi could only have dreamed) in the form of intellectual property rights is not only a new form of enclosing the commons, but is another part of the financial expansion which America is leading. These patents are seen as investments, even pitched as such to the indigenous population. And, like Polanyi's description of the false commodity, (quoted in Escobar 200) these are not commodities that have gone through the production process with the intent of selling them.

What I am getting at here is that I think Escobar does valuable work in using Foucault to illustrate the way knowledge functions in service of power. He also helps answer the question of how well meaning people who end up fucking people over are still able to sleep at night. And it also reminds me of the importance of understanding the way that institutional knowledges contribute to these systems of domination and accumulation--above and beyond simplistic ideologies.

As for Sylvester, I had a very hard time focusing on the post-colonial section because I used to know so much more about it and now it just makes my head hurt. Nevertheless, I came away from both her and Escobar with a clear connection to Sen. What all of them seem to be saying is that there is a great deal of value in subalterns being able to have a role--if not the role--in deciding their fate. Though Escobar and Sylvester insist that what is at stake is the ability for subalterns to represent themselves, to control the production of the discourses about them, it seems to me that the real freedom is not only being able to change the representation or interpretation of the world, but to change their actual material circumstances. This seems to be what most of the protests were against anyway; not global capital or the discursive regime of development but being forced to grow stuff they didn't want to eat so they could try to market it and sell it and buy the things they did want to eat. Whether you call that development, bigotry, neo-colonial discourse, the key is that changing the discourse alone won't necessarily create the desired change in the way that discourse is articulated into a power relationship that could have the opposite effect. This is, of course, the greatest danger in Sen's elegant attempt to re-envision development. Once "freedom" becomes agreed upon as the end of development, its role in the means is incedental: the struggle will be over who has the power to define and determine what Freedom is.

gpe6

Monday, 14 March 2005


original

I am really impressed with Arturo Escobar's Encountering Development . Though I am only about half-way through the book, it is already clear that this is an important book. I am not sure how many later works have looked at his argument or how well it has stood the test of time, but it has all the gravitas of a classic, even if it isn't old enough to be one. Personally, I think he is as important to the field of cultural studies as to development studies and I know that he isn't on the radar in my field. He should be. For this book does something that many recent uses of Foucault and discourse analysis have failed to do--if ever they tried: it says something important. And it does this by applying Foucault in a most rigourous way to a recent set of discourses--not to show what we already know, i.e. that they are racist and patriarchal and ethnocentric--but to show the way that they construct an object (or as he says it "a set of objects") in such a way as to make them meaningful and then shows how the institutionalization of this discourse at a particular time, in a particular way, reifies certain assumptions which lead not only to a misunderstanding of reality, but to an utter failure in the purpose for which they were given their authority (and more importantly, to much unnecessary death and hardship.) Though this is all very abstract in how I am describing it, it is this abstraction that I am getting at, namely, that by using Foucault in this way--and with little reference to "the master" himself, he is showing the value of social theory and the importance that cultural studies approaches can have in not only describing a conjuncture, but in recommending a new course.

This is refreshing because often the way that theory is used is instrumental and highly literal. Though there is a value to this in certain moments--and a similar process is certainly informing and/or underpinning Escobar's analysis--it often is so far removed from even a notion of reality that it becomes a sort of intellectual onanism that only the most fetishistic of fans would want to watch. Escobar, instead, shows that one doesn't have to show off every few pages with random citations from Foucault--or better yet, that it is much more important to his analysis to be familiar with something other than post-structuralist cultural criticism. Instead of showing his intricate knowledge of an important theorist, he models the theory by looking at the object and, it seems, begins to make a theory of his own in the process: but neither of these is the goal. As Stuart Hall recommended, his theory is something he uses on the way to something more important.

The thing more important has implications for cultural studies but since it has already been ten years since this work was published and I have no sense of CS shifting its focus in this direction, I will assume the bulk of its practitioners haven't grasped it. The real implications are, in some ways, an update of another scholar who seems to be overlooked in cultural studies, much to its detriment. Polanyi's argument in The Great Transformation is ultimately about culture, in the broadest sense and about the embeddedness of social institutions such as the market within a culture. He bases this on a critique of classical economists and their misunderstanding of the relationships of their own historical circumstances, misunderstandings that were then placed into a universalist discourse about the way that markets functioned. This discourse guided political economy into the marginal revolution which eventually led to the market outstripping the cultures and societies in which it was operating, prompting these societies to demand, in what Polanyi calls a double movement, protection from the market. This demand for protection leads societies to accept otherwise unconscionable levels of political repression--what he terms "fascism" in order to assure them some material security and cultural autonomy. It is all a very contradictory process, but that is precisely Polanyi's point: the marginalists and neo-clasicalists may be right about the economic logic they are promoting, but the key is that, for this free-market to work in the perfect way they predict, it will violently destroy the cultures it is let loose on.

Escobar has a similar argument about both the cultural logic that led to the implementation of the developmentalist regime of truth and about its failure to understand that there is more to life and, consequently, to development, than economics. And, more importantly, Escobar doesn't see this as an issue for the bleeding hearts to whine over--though it may be--but rather a more rigorous perspective. As he puts it:

"The suggestion that we take into account people's own models is not only a politically correct position. On the contrary, it constitutes a sound philosopical and political alternative. Philosophically, it follows that mandate of interpretive social science that we take subjects as agents of self understanding whose practice is shaped by their self-understanding." (100-101)

I should note that in this is one place where, I can see that Pierre Bourdieu would be useful in thinking through this "logic of practice" (as he would have been for most of Escobar's study.) This also leads to another interesting aspect of the study that opens up one of the central questions that I have about the his interpretation.

In each section, he provides some ethnographic anecdotes which illustrate the hybrid ways that local populations have appropriated these development models. These examples of transculturation are meant to show that these development models were something that locals were aware of, i.e. it wasn't just an academic discussion in the core, AND that locals had some agency in incorporating them into their own worldviews. This is, first of all, the way that Cultural Studies could be most helpful in bridging these cultural divides, in creating a true dialogue and, god forbid, making it possible for development economists to imagine it possible to learn something from local populations (realizing, of course, that this category of "development economists" is as much a generalization as "local populations" and that some of my readers may even know people from both camps that are perfectly reasonable and a delight to be around). But I digress...what I see in this analysis is a space of possibilty for creating a dialogue, but I also see a potential where the tools of cultural studies or anthropology could be cynically employed in the power of these institutions. That is by simply creating more complex understandings of indigenous communities so that these developmental models could be more easily marketed, there is no change in the power dynamic, just a bit more wining and dining before the date rape begins. (sorry. it's a bit late.)

But it also occurs to me that this is something that communication scholars have already been doing for years and it was precisely in the realm of development studies that they began to think about the "diffusion of innovations." They tried to come up with a complex understanding of how societies who were encouraged to adopt certain practices actually came to adopt them. Everett Rogers has one of the more well known set of works in this paradigm. The upshot of these studies is that, basically, you have to understand the culture that you are trying to change before you can change it. On the surface, this seems to at least incorporate some of the spirit of what Escobar is recommending and, if we were to be presented with this model, it would be difficult to point out to most people enmeshed in the discourse that this was really just a continuation of the core-periphery relationship. Because, at its heart, it doesn't challenge the fundamental assumption of development economics as Escobar has described it, namely that, though it may be more culturally nuanced, it still assumes that one culture, one model is superior, it is an "innovation" and the goal is to manipulate its diffusion to the users of the less superior model. It is a marketing ploy that is based on a discursive inequality in power/knowledge (though I suppose that few marketing ploys aren't.

Nevertheless, I feel that Escobar implicitly endorses (at least in the first three chaptes) a simple awareness of the "other" as a subject (rather than an object) within the discursive formation. (I should come back here and fill in some quotes but I am trying to push throught this before I sleep) This seems to be a fine first step, and a welcome one at this point, but it doesn't really solve the problems he is talking about. Perhaps it is late, perhaps I have too much materialism in my head, but it seems to me that this is where his analysis needs to move a few steps back from his own assumptions about discourse and ask some more other questions. One important one for me would be where these discourses are distributed. Although it is clear that they have some origination in the conference proceedings and reports that he analyzes and he provides some proof that there is a negotiated reading given by the local population, there is no sense of how this message was distributed, how technocrats in Washington and Bogota were able to begin to convince these local populations that this was even remotely in their best interest. There is a certain assumption on the part of Escobar that the words spoken by development economists were heard round the world. This is, of course, the consequence of considering a discursive formation outside of the mediums through which it is transmitted...Institutions, yes, but how was the ideology of development secured. This isn't just a mundane question--though I will admit it may be completely tangential to Escobar's study. I'll return to this, but I will point out that the dominance of US communication corporations in the third world, and their goal of promoting US ideologies and interests is well documented by people like Herbert Schiller. I would also like to remind myself that propaganda is alive and well. (again, mostly incedental--that's what blogs are for, right?)

Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged TV News

By DAVID BARSTOW and ROBIN STEIN

Published: March 13, 2005
New York Times

"It is the kind of TV news coverage every president covets.

"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration's determination to open markets for American farmers.

To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department's office of communications.

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production."

gpe5

Monday, 21 February 2005

original here

Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century is quite similar to Frank’s in terms of the project he has undertaken. He is mostly drawing on the historical and economic analyses of others rather than doing his own primary research. In doing so, however, he has a very different end. Whereas Frank was more interested in showing the utility of a certain method of historical inquiry, Arrighi is making a more concrete argument about the function of finance capital and the cycles of its expansion in capitalist development. He is not very reflective about the methodology he uses, but in the terms Frank uses, he is employing a world system’s approach, but it is much more informed by a vertical analysis of the similarities and differences between different capitalist formations at different times rather than a horizontal analysis of similar events happening at the same time. The latter is important to him—as shown in his analysis of the Italian city-states—but his not using it primarily is, in some ways, a testament to the limits of its usefulness, or at least the limits that one should place on Frank’s unequivocal belief in its total explanatory power.

On the other hand, the differences in how the two define their objects clearly delineate the moments when each method might be more or less correct. The Kondratieff cycles on which Frank bases/constitutes his arguments about the 17^th century silver crisis—and the benefits of his mode of analysis—are discarded by Arrighi early on because, as he says, “there is no agreement in the literature on what long-term fluctuations in prices—whether of the logistic or Kondratieff kind—indicate. They are certainly not reliable indicators of the contractions and expansions of whatever is specifically capitalist in the modern world system”(7). This, it seems, is also important in Arrighi’s focus on Europe and the “capitalist world system” as opposed to the holistic world system that Frank advocates (and follows Abu Lughod and others in illuminating.) Namely, that he is focusing on the development of a mode of production—something which Frank categorically dismisses. Arrighi addresses this as well, and sets up most of his argument to come, by acknowledging the variety of ways that people have considered the cycles of development of the world economy, but making the distinction between simple exchange, manufacture, wage-labor or commerce and “capitalism:”

As in Marx’s general formula of capital (MCM’), [. . . .] an agency is capitalist in virtue of the fact that its money is endowed with the “power of breeding” (Marx’s expression) systematically and persistently, regardless of the nature of the particular commodities or activities that are incidentally the medium at any given time.(8)

It is largely with this in mind that Arrighi bases his “systemic cycle of accumulation.” It is, in effect, a projection of this process of accumulation across the “long century” (or in this case multiple long centuries) of its development. His argument is that the hegemon of a given regime of accumulation of the capitalist world system has two phases in its growth: the first is a material expansion (MC) and the second is a financial expansion (CM’). He says that there have been four systemic cycles of accumulation since capitalism began in the modern world system and each has been led by one state (or city-state): Genoa then Holland then Britain then the US. An important component of this argument is largely that the second phase always signals the demise of the current system. The upshot of his argument is, ultimately, that the US’s time is up and someone is about to take its torch. Arrighi points to developments in US Japanese relations as indicators of the likely successor, but he also suggests that cultural factors may limit the ability to have the process reach completion i.e. racism keeps the US from allowing Japan to take the leading role.

The prevalence of states in this lineup should also indicate his understanding of capitalism as having a special relationship with the state. This is another place where he sees a distinction between his own work and that of Frank and Abu-Lughod. There are a variety of other analytical distinctions that Arrighi makes to make his argument, but one of the more useful is the difference between a territorialist versus a capitalist state (33). The difference becomes quite important when he begins a discussion of the different logics of each of the states leading their cycles of accumulation.

In outlining the development of each of these phases he is much more useful—in my mind—than Frank. He focuses not only on justifying events as rational based on a neo-classical understanding, but also on the different social, economic, and even cultural configurations that rule within each state of the cycle and the way that these relate to other states. His perspective does make it difficult to see the connections throughout the world system, but it makes it much easier to understand the way conjunctures have developed from below as well as from above. The first chapter, which begins with an IR conception of Hegemony pace Cox and Gill, was quite different than the three that followed. I found the latter interesting, but will need to review them to come up with any concrete understanding of the concepts I could take away. If nothing else, they provide an interesting history of the development of finance. I will return to this some below.

For now, I will say that the sections I found most stimulating were the discussion he had about hegemony. I was a bit disappointed that he separated this out from the discussion of finance because I think the cannot really be separated. To look at the world financial markets today, there is nothing economically rational about anyone holding US currency in reserve, nothing sensible about OPEC nations selling solely in dollars, little that could make the foreign extension of credit to the US understandable in purely economic terms. It seems that it can only be explained in the dialectical understanding of hegemony that he attributes to Cox and others.

I also think more synthesis between these sections would be useful because many of the social, cultural, and even political factors that he attributes to the rise of each hegemon within their cycle of accumulation would be more interesting mapped onto their financial expansion.

gpe4

Sunday, 13 February 2005

original here

Having finished the book, I can at least see Gunder Frank's logic and even his motivation for writing the text. This brings two things to my mind. The first is that in thinking through his argument, it has made me question what I assumed to be fairly settled understandings of world history and, especially the development of modern, western capitalism. These were such commonplaces that it had never entered my mind to question them—because I never had reflected on what I thought. In a way it wasn’t that difficult to accept that Europe and America were so marginal until 1800, that they inspired little contemplation on the part of China or India, that they were only able to participate in the economy at all because they found some silver just sitting around on another continent, because I had never really investigated what took place “Before European Hegemony.” But, on the other hand, I was surprised to feel how difficult it was to accept that argument. It seems that, even though I had never really considered it, I simply assumed that everyone was on an equal tier across the planet and the West just started doing a few things better and others did them a bit worse, until we got to where we are now.

I think Frank is well aware of this Eurocentric predilection—which, I’m sure, has an analogous mental construct in the non-European world (at least that which hasn’t taken on the worldview Fanon talks about in Black Skins, White Masks—and part of his project, surely, is to shift our understanding of the past 2,000-5,000 years so that it is more “holistic.” As Peter and I discussed, this is especially important at the time he is writing because of the triumphalist narratives being proffered by people across the political spectrum. This is one of his audiences. It seems that it is also not an audience with whom he would find it difficult to reason. As noted above, by focusing almost totally on macro-economic issues at the global, regional and occasionally national level, he frames the discussion in terms that would make Neo-liberals proud. Trying to decipher where his loyalties lie in this regard leads me to my other initial conclusion.

As problematic as it may be for me to think in terms of understanding what actually motivates an individual subject, Frank seems to push this way beyond problematic. Though I am sure that it goes with the territory of World Systems Theory, it simply assumes it can understand too much based on the economic structure—and usually only the economic structure in terms of external trade patterns. Better, it assumes perfect information and perfect rationality in all of these movements. Even if he doesn’t take into account any of the social or cultural circumstances or theories about them—all of which he would say are the result of the economic position—he seems to be overlooking a fairly important recent thesis in mainstream economics.

In chapters 2-5—which use mostly contemporary terminology to talk about inflation, terms of trade, balance of trade, etc.—he projects all of these ideas into the past with little consideration of how it would have been understood. This is more of a science studies complaint, along the lines of Bruno Latour, but it wouldn’t hurt to have some evidence that, for instance, someone before Adam Smith in 1776 had a notion of inflation. We can look back and see that there was a certain type of monetary crisis in the way that we define it, but to attribute a response to it as the product of a rational understanding of the event is something that should be done with many reflective caveats on the part of the analyst. This is a position that Frank is unable to take, so he transhistoricizes neo-classical models of economics, naturalizes the “response” of not only individuals, but entire regions or “civilizations” as rational in that framework, and assumes that all the data it has taken the hundreds of analysts he has drawn on hundreds of years to collect was readily available to most people at the time. In a way, this assumption goes along with his assertion that rationalism isn’t exclusively European. (He actually says that European rationalism had little to do with their rise in the world economy. Dussel, on the other hand, says that it is a product of that rise—though his timeline makes it necessary for this rise to have occurred earlier than Frank would now allow. It is a bit of a contradiction for Frank to use that the neoclassical cum monetarist understandings of economics and econometrics as his tool for understanding this while simultaneously claiming their cultural roots had nothing to do with it, but only from a certain perspective: he seems to care little about how agents operate or with what logic.)

Here, I am not so much questioning his evidence or his argument about the primacy of Asia in the “Asian Age,” but the way that he uses these to pose a larger claim about all of the knowledge produced thus far and the method in which it was collected. Namely, that everything coming before was bunk and he has the new master narrative that will explain everything we need to know via neo-classical economics. He evidently didn’t get the memo from the post-modernists.

This is the real argument that he is making. It is an argument that he has been having with Perry Anderson and other historians for at least 30 years. It also has important implications for realist International Relations. Thus, in terms of the field, this book has two important arguments to make. With Anderson (and by extension, many theorists of development). Frank’s argument for a “Horizontally Integrated Macrohistory” is ages old and seems to stem from the roots of World Systems Theory. In this he argues: “To account for and understand any local or regional process, it may also be necessary to inquire into how those processes are affected by and respond to contemporary events elsewhere and/or to simultaneous processes in the world economic system as a whole.(278)”

This theory about the way history should be investigated begins by posing itself as an additional tool, but ultimately rejects any vertical type of understanding of development. One of the main culprits in this regard, from Frank’s perspective, is Marx and anyone working in the Marxist tradition who tries to outline different socioeconomic developmental stages on the way to capitalism. When Frank begins writing, Anderson is the main culprit of this type of scholarship. Frank specifically refers to Anderson’s theory about the development of feudalism in Europe where he makes a distinction between the dates of events and the “time” of feudal development.(345)

I take Frank’s argument very much to heart and think he is basically right about the need to consider development holistically and horizontally. I can also see the problems with the not-so-subtle Darwinism lurking beneath the surface of Anderson’s account. On the other hand, at the time Anderson wrote Passages and Lineages, Frank pretty much thought about the differences between the west and east in the same way.

Here I also think Frank has much to say to statists who want to attribute development to endogenous causes alone. This includes many of the Monetarists and neo-classical economists who are in charge of the leading organizations for international development (with the focus on the “national”). Much of this literature is based on an understanding of the rise of the west as something that it created within its borders. This is only possible when one doesn’t look to hard beyond them or think too much about what was happening elsewhere before it took place. Frank is right to call them to task for having a different understanding of both development itself and the scope one should use in considering what drives it.

This is, perhaps, where Frank’s argument is the strongest—if only he didn’t try to provide any evidence. In addressing the way one could look at he development of history, he tries to use the example of how a series of 17^th and 18^th century recessions can be connected on a global scale to revolutions in France, America and the Netherlands. Here he is attempting to account for these solely on the basis of the world economic system and discount any possible cultural circumstances that might have caused them. If he stopped here, there would still be plenty to argue with that only someone with a finer tool (like Perry Anderson) could consider. Questions about these kinds of revolutions with these social groups happen in these particular places seem irrelevant to Frank’s study. Though it seems a bit strange to keep these out of the conversation, this is only because Frank exhibits a different use of studying history: to be able to explain everything in terms of Kondrieff cycles.

This is the second goal of the chapter—though one that Frank seems to do completely reflexively. Instead of using an old school Darwinist understanding of internal national development, he uses a more modern understanding of economic cycles. The problem is that it doesn’t do much more than replicate the error he accuses Anderson and other of using a fancier set of assumptions. Looking at the period of 1400-1800 for the whole world economy makes sense in terms of this horizontally integrated history, but when he starts talking in terms of Kondrieff cycles—which are supposedly as transhistorical as Perry Anderson’s stages of feudalism—seems to forget a major component of all of the preceding chapters: most of the period of 1400-1800 can only be accounted for by an economic development exogenous to any predictable cycle, namely, that Europeans pillaged the resources (including the land) and enslaved the labor of several continents that were not integrated into the world system before that time (it should be noted that Oceania barely figures into Frank’s history) Unless one can expect this every few hundred years, it doesn’t seem very reasonable to think about this in terms of a rational cycle. (I would also note that the only time when something seems to happen because of a historical accident is when the east “falls” an event for which Frank gives little reason and only sees it as a coincidence that the West was rising at the same time. He points to the loss of trade by India and China, but doesn’t explain how that could happen for fear that it might give the Europeans some agency , however indirectly, in that fall.)

So there are issues I have with this book. Not because it doesn’t give a good reason to think about an alternative or additional historical methodology, but because it wants to say that it is the ONLY method. This is just contradictory. After outlining the problems with having one dominant framework for interpreting history, Frank is asking us to simply exchange one for the other. He wants antithesis when what we need is synthesis. In addition to the macrohistorical focus on economics, why not have some discussion of the transfer of culture? Habermas, for instance, discusses the coffeehouse as a place where many of the practices of the rising bourgeoisie were honed into the democratic ideal that eventually (re?-)emerges in the 17th or 18th century. Frank talks about the virtual equilibrium in the transfer of scientific/technological knowledge—why not think about other forms of culturally or socially developed knowledge which surely rode alongside goods in their transfer. The answer, in my opinion, is that that would take too much work.

Most of Frank’s final chapter consists of complaining that more people don’t try to do this kind of macrohistory because it is simply too hard. But he is still thinking too small—and overlooking the answer his own method would give to this. Because he is mired in hundreds of years of Eurpean rationalism and egotistical scholarship, both of which have only become intensified in recent years, he simply calls everyone else who isn’t doing this work ideological and, basically, bad scholars. Here he is using the model that he critiques throughout the book: what he really should be asking is what does the macroeconomic structure have to do with this and how can we change that. This is where his argument would really have some effect. Because as necessary as this scholarship is, it will never be possible so long as the model of rewards for academic and intellectual work is based on the market model wherein one must: 1)publish complete, self contained arguments in a short amount of time; 2)assert ones own authority and ability above all others and think of scholarship in terms of competition; and 3) Worry more about furthering one’s own career even at the expense of producing or contributing to a broad field of knowledge. Though Marx may have been “wrong about everything” as Frank says, until more of us are willing and able to suffer our carbuncles in destitution for decades at a time to produce a body of work, few will be able to surpass his scholarship.