Category: Blog: Critical Historical Sociology

Şahan Savaş Karataşlı

There is probably no better example of why “it is much easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” than governments’ responses to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The problem is not so much that the structural and ideological hegemony of capital accumulation prevents us from imagining alternative forms of organizing the economy, society, and politics. It is that, short of a global revolution that replaces the current world order with an alternative, endless accumulation of capital seems to be speeding up the coming of the end of the world at a much faster pace than contributing to its own demise. “Socialism or barbarism” was an appropriate slogan for the global left in the early 20^th century, but it no longer is. Considering the deep interlinked crises that are on the eve of destroying the planet, the slogan that reflects the reality of the 21^st century is “Socialism or apocalypse.” 

Capital, Labor, and the State during the Coronavirus Lockdown

The capitalist world-system we are living in has proven to be completely incapable of dealing with such a pandemic, which is unfortunately the least of our problems, considering the environmental, social, and geopolitical crises that are waiting at our door. Clearly, the problem at hand is not a lack of scientific knowledge, technology or socio-political means to stop the spread of a new virus. We have all this in the early 21^st century. The real problem is that under capitalism any strategy or form of action that could potentially save millions of lives is immediately rejected if it has the side effect of temporarily halting or slowing the pace of capital accumulation.

It is crystal clear that the class character of capitalist relations is deeply at odds with the state’s manifest aim of protecting citizens’ lives. Government responses to the Covid-19 pandemic reveal once again that when rulers around the world realize that they need to make a choice between risking either capital accumulation or human lives, most opt for risking/sacrificing the latter without much hesitation. This choice is self-evident in the hypocritical suggestions several governments have made concerning how to stop the pandemic. Most of them ignore the class character of the world we are living in and the concrete conditions of the global labor force.

In the United States, for example, working class people, who cannot afford losing their jobs or their wages, are asked not to go to work if they are sick. Yet, they are often not granted any paid sick leave. People are advised to immediately seek medical aid when they show symptoms of high fever and dry cough. Yet, a right to universal healthcare and proper social security is denied them. Although the USA is a somewhat extreme example in terms of lack of social security and health care rights, other examples of hypocritical suggestions can easily be found in other regions of the world. For many precarious workers around the world who try to survive within the interstices of the informal economy, for instance, “social distancing” is not an option because it means hunger, homelessness, and starvation. While respectable citizens are asked to stay at home, to create their “home offices” and take time to protect themselves, “essential workers” (a category which must be registered as capital’s confession about who produces “value” in the economy) in material production, circulation, and logistics (and of course in health industries) are forced to work and reproduce their livelihoods in unsafe conditions.

It would be wrong to suggest that the Covid-19 pandemic is going to trigger a universal crisis for capitalism. As in every crisis, the effect of the crisis on capitalist enterprises will be uneven across sectors. While some sectors see many bankruptcies, others will profit from the chaos and misery. So far, the spread of the coronavirus has been a goldmine for e-commerce marketplaces and the logistics/delivery sectors (such as Amazon, Instacart, Alibaba.com, Deliveroo), many pharmaceuticals, and online entertainment, streaming, and videoconferencing companies, to cite a few.

If we turn our gaze from capitalist enterprises to their workers, however, we will see a different picture. Even workers employed in businesses that produce super-profits out of the current crisis will be negatively affected by the crisis. Companies such as Amazon and Instacart can more easily deny workers’ demands and rights because of the accumulation of a gigantic reserve army of labor of those who have lost their jobs due to the slowdown of the economy and to the stay-at-home orders, which has left many eager to take dangerous jobs at low wages and unsafe working conditions should Amazon and company need to replace recalcitrant employees. The overwhelming majority of the unemployed are not given proper compensation to pay their rent, cover their bills, and look after their families. The relative size and geographical spread of the emergent reserve army of labor will probably far exceed the levels we saw in the aftermath of the 1929 crisis. In short, Rosa Luxemburg’s dictum is even more relevant today: the only thing worse than being exploited by capital in deadly/unsafe conditions during a pandemic is not being exploited at all.

Ineffective Government Responses in Financialized Economies of the Global North

Interestingly, what appears at the first sight as “ineffective government responses” to the Covid-19 pandemic—such as lack of extensive testing and transparency and a slow response—turn out to be more beneficial than its alternatives. Proposed strategies such as flattening the epidemic curve by means of “social distancing” and “slowing down” are indeed counter-productive for capital accumulation for most sectors. After all, capitalism has always been characterized by the opposite movement. It tends to produce space-time compression by “connecting” the most distance parts of the world and “speeding up” social and material interactions. This is why, as far as capital accumulation is concerned, it is more rational to let the disease spread and wait for it to disappear on its own than to prolong social distancing and slowing down, which would eventually exacerbate the existing economic stagnation and crisis in the capitalist world economy.

This is probably why, for much of the world—especially in regions which opted to gain profits primarily out of financial speculation and intermediation rather than material expansion of commodity production—letting the novel coronavirus spread to 65 to 85 percent of the population will be a quicker and less costly solution (in terms of what is economically important: profit). And there is also an added bonus for business-government complexes in the global North: The prediction that 2 percent of the infected population that would “unfortunately” die with this strategy will be concentrated overwhelmingly among the elderly—i.e., ex-commodified sections of the relative surplus population who can no longer be exploited by capital but who have been receiving pensions that they secured during the post-war era.

From this perspective, pursuing what is often called “herd immunity” is a predatory accumulation strategy with genocidal implications for elderly people. Contrary to common assumptions, however, this strategy is not a mere fringe proposal but is instead being implemented in practice by many governments that are responding to the pandemic slowly or ineffectively. By externalizing the responsibility of “social distancing” to their citizens, by failing to help the working classes and broader masses prepare for the pandemic in a socially responsible way, and by rushing to return the economy to normalcy, many governments are already following the pro-capital “herd immunity” strategy without saying so.

Considering the lack of transparency, lack of tests, and systematic underreporting of infection and death rates, it appears that many governments are banking on the assumption that the overwhelming majority of Covid-19 related fatalities will occur in the shadows, without attracting much attention or criticism. Comparing our current experience with the 1918 pandemic, we might see how this can be the case. While the so-called Spanish flu pandemic killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide—more than both of the world wars combined—it did not attract much attention largely because, as Martin Kettle put it, “its onslaught did not occur in public but in private, behind closed doors in millions of homes.”

Of course, the reason why many governments are forced to experiment with this “strategy” is because they do not have sufficient resources to deal with the pandemic. The lack of resources, even in the “most developed” parts of the world, and the inability to produce simple masks and protective gowns, let alone ventilators and diagnostic tests, signal the level of crisis produced by financialized capitalism. Put more directly, since finance capital has been totally remiss with regards to actual productive activity, lack of preparedness for the pandemic is one implication of the financialization of economies.

Value Production in Emerging Markets of East Asia, New Leviathans, and New Authoritarianism

Although the “herd immunity strategy” is widely used in various parts of the world, in some of the emerging economies of the global South, especially in the East Asia, we see a different picture. Instead of ineffective government responses, in regions such as China and South Korea, we see “successful” interventions by strong states. While China’s and South Korea’s responses are sometimes viewed as opposites—one based on hardline lockdowns, the other on transparency, government-society cooperation, and extensive surveillance—in reality they represent two varieties of a similar kind of response made possible by the existence of the same geopolitical-economic context and similar strategies of capital accumulation. In contrast with the previously-industrialized capitalist economies of much of the global North which are now leaders in financialization, capital accumulation in these regions is primarily based on material production of commodities. Consequently, value production is strong enough to accommodate the costs of a strong state-led response to stop the spread of the pandemic. While containing the pandemic through complete lockdowns, construction of new hospitals, distribution of masks and protective gear, and reliance on surveillance and extensive tests are expensive in the short run, the existence of material and labor-intensive value production ensures that these economies will recover quickly. Likewise, to ensure that labor-intensive value production can continue in the long term, these governments are also more motivated to take strident measures to protect the human population.

As in previous epochs, the effects of these divergent capital accumulation strategies may have very significant effects for politics at the global and local levels. At the global level, for instance, the relative failure at containing the coronavirus pandemic in the core capitalist regions in “the West” versus the relative success in the emergent geo-economic powers in “the East” became an important symbolic marker signaling the demise of the superiority of “the West” and giving the government-business complexes in the Eastern Asia region an opportunity for global leadership in the 21^st century, if they play their cards right. From this perspective, the crisis produced by the Covid-19 pandemic may play a comparable role to that of the world wars in affecting the last world-hegemonic transition.

At the local level, the same processes have the potential to further strength the already-existing authoritarian tendencies arising in much of the world. Interestingly, in the face of the so-called “ineffective government responses” that risk millions of lives, many citizens around the world have already started to ask their governments to declare curfews, stay-at-home orders, travel bans, and other “limitations of rights and liberties” to stop the pandemic. This call from below for new “Leviathans” during the current state of (capitalist/pandemic) nature is also an open invitation to the right-wing authoritarian leaders to grab power, as Viktor Orban recently did in Hungary. Currently, some right-wing authoritarian governments seem to be using the lack of mass mobilizations from below, due in large part to the pandemic, as an opportunity to suppress their democratic challengers and opponents. In Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, for instance, the AKP government has taken control of four more pro-Kurdish municipal administrations (Batman, Silvan, Lice, and Ergani), removing the pro-Kurdish HDP mayors from their posts, detaining them, and appointing their own trustees. Using Covid-19 as a pretext, the same government is working on a law that would release 90,000 criminals from prison—but that would keep political prisoners locked up.

Ideas such as closing the borders, controlling immigration, increasing surveillance, and using strategic censorship to avoid panic also resonate with authoritarian nationalists seeking power elsewhere in the world. Considering that such pandemics or other forms of environmental, social, and geopolitical crises will continue to take place in the following years and decades, probably at an increasing pace, it is not difficult to see that the global right will use such crises to declare Schmittian “emergencies” and thus to take power and expand their influence in many parts of the world in the name of protecting their people.

The Global Left and Internationalism in an Era of Pandemics

It is important to note that although the Covid-19 pandemic helped a broad spectrum of the left refresh their faith in a critique of capitalism, the global left has not been a major actor in shaping responses to the pandemic crisis so far. As far as the global left is concerned, the Covid-19 pandemic teaches an important historical lesson: Being correct on a political issue is not sufficient to win a struggle. At first sight, the Covid-19 pandemic appears to be a huge opportunity for the global left because it reveals the hypocritical class character of the world-we-are-living-in in a very explicit manner, even to the most skeptical of eyes. In many parts of the world, leftist organizations have raised urgent demands such as safer work conditions, paid sick leave, the right to stay at home, unemployment benefits, and a rent freeze. Given the pandemic, these ideas appeal not only to the left’s usual constituents but also much more broadly. It has even been argued that everyone became a socialist during the pandemic. Yet, the global left has not been a major player in this transformative moment.

The crux of the problem is that the global left has been raising demands in an abstract manner without an equally strong mass mobilization from below. While there are obvious challenges regarding finding ways to initiate and sustain collective action from below in an era of pandemics, millions of people who manage to work in this environment have the capacity to develop and employ suitable forms of collective action. Indeed, this is already happening. From Italy to the USA there are ongoing and very serious efforts by workers to organize union-led or wildcat strikes and other forms of collective action from below, such as workplace occupations. Considering the structural bargaining power most “essential” workers have at this point, it is not inconceivable that we might soon see a major wave of collective action from below similar to the resurgence of labor unrest during and in the aftermath of the world wars.

Yet, for this emergent wave of labor unrest to be successful, as we struggle to “flatten the epidemic curve,” we must also find ways to “unflatten the collective action curve” by coordinating and synchronizing spontaneous mass actions from below. Governments and businesses can easily ignore and suppress many particularistic, uncoordinated forms of spontaneous collective action if they are dispersed over time and space as isolated events. However, if movements are coordinated and clustered, the frequency, geographical spread and strength of these movements will pass governments’ and businesses’ capacity to contain and suppress them, which will give the movements the necessary power to push forward their demands. This is what we can expect under Covid-19.

Of course, the key task of activists should not merely be “clustering” the movements in space and time but also helping workers in different sectors, peasants/small farmers, movement lawyers, cooperatives, unions, etc. develop solidaristic relations and coordinate with each other. The key problem of sustaining prolonged strikes in this environment is the lack of resources: first and foremost food, shelter, and medical supplies. This is where solidarity with the peasantry, semi-proletarianized workers who still have access to land, and production cooperatives comes into the picture.

While the formation of a “movement of movements” at local and global levels is an absolutely necessary component of a successful global left strategy, it will definitely not be sufficient in the long run. Furthermore, to win, it is not enough to have short-term bargaining power against businesses and governments. The actual victory of the global left also requires a total transformation of the social, economic, and political systems we are living in, with a global and long-term focus. Our experience with the coronavirus pandemic illustrates why such representing, bringing to the front, and defending the global and long-run interests against particularistic gains is absolutely vital. Today, with the advantage of hindsight—i.e., seeing how Covid-19 has been spreading all around the world and how it is not feasible to contain once it has spread in this manner—many would agree that the best way to protect lives in the rest of the world would have been to identify and exterminate the disease when it first originated in Wuhan. The problem is that when the coronavirus outbreak occurred, only a few realized that the fate that befell the people of Wuhan would soon be that of the people of Lombardia, Madrid, Qom, New York City, Istanbul, and the rest of the world. De te fabula narratur.

The interesting property of the coronavirus pandemic is that it spreads at such a quick rate that it is like a slap in the face, reminding us about the stupidity of our egocentric and myopic biases based on our current particularistic experiences. Our obsession with our own experiences at the present moment (and our related assent to national, racial, and class-based boundaries) creates the dangerous illusion that the story told is not actually ours, that what we see elsewhere in the world is not linked to us, that it is their fate and their problem and there is not much we can do other than to feel sympathy for them. Due to the extraordinary speed of the spread of coronavirus, it is easy to see how utterly nonsensical this egocentric, particularistic, and presentist worldview is.

We are living in a world where the fate of our lives depends on others not only in spatio-temporal terms but also in terms of asymmetric power relations. Our key problems in social, economic and political spheres are interlinked in complex ways. So are the possible solutions to our problems. During normal times, when we talk about environmental crises, geopolitical wars, refugee crises, economic crises, unemployment, and class/ethnic/national/gender-based oppression, it is more difficult to see that the fate of all humanity is also linked to the fate of the most oppressed, exploited, and excluded sections of society and to nature.

It is now relatively easier to see that to emancipate all humans and other natural beings, we need to exterminate systems generating exploitation, oppression, and exclusion not only in our geographies but everywhere they exist. So, in addition to a “movement of movements” that would forge international solidarity at local, national, and global levels, the global left needs an internationalist political organization to defend the long-run and universal interests of these movements with an eye to exterminating such systems. The global left is not ready for this in its current struggle against Covid-19; but as I mentioned at the beginning, this is unfortunately the least of our problems now. We will get through this Covid-19 pandemic period  in one way or another, but the exploitative, oppressive, and exclusionary systems that we are living in will survive. Thus, we must be ready for the more decisive struggles that await us.

Şahan Savaş Karataşlı is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of North Carolina, Greensboro. His research areas include international political economy, global and comparative-historical sociology, and social movements, with a focus on financialization, nationalism, and labor movements. 

(Photo: Lucas Jackson / Reuters)

The two candidates take opposing positions in a debate as old as the New Deal.

Josh Pacewicz

In this election cycle, left-of-center Democrats are faced with an unprecedented embarrassment of riches: two front-running candidates who promise big structural reforms. But, beyond this or that policy position, what is the difference between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders?

Media observers sometimes frame the difference as one of style or degree, with Warren cast as a moderate, ecumenical, or wonky version of Sanders. This framing may be consistent with each candidate’s messaging, but it squares poorly with the facts so far. Consider that this season’s more radical regulatory and fiscal proposals have come first from Warren, supposedly the more moderate of the two.

My argument in this essay is that media narratives that present Warren as a warmed over version of Sanders (or vice versa) misread the situation and produce false expectations about both candidates. Warren and Sanders differ in many ways, including in their policy priorities. And the best way to make sense of their policy differences is to view them in historical perspective—in particular, by revisiting disagreements among New Deal-era reformers.

Today’s left-of-center Democrats largely divide along the same lines as reformers did then. Warren and Sanders embody competing visions of American political economy. And their visions imply different end goals—for Sanders, a European-style welfare state, and for Warren, a regulatory state that supports people’s capacity to build wealth.

Before proceeding, two quick caveats.

First, my interest in this essay is in the policy priorities of Warren and Sanders, which requires some degree of guess-work about what each cares about most. I infer priorities from policy platforms, but also from which policies the two showcase and how they talk about them. If elected president, any Democrat would be lucky to get much big legislation through Congress.

What follows is my best guess about what each candidate would prioritize and fight for.

Second, this essay provides no definitive rationale for supporting one candidate over the other. Differences between Warren and Sanders are slight relative to their differences with other Democratic candidates (and certainly vis-à-vis the GOP). And there are many reasons to like a candidate besides policy priorities. For example, some people look for a candidate whose style or campaign strategy can mobilize previously disengaged voters (see here and  here). But an understanding of each candidate’s policy priorities is surely important for making an informed choice. And a revisit of the New Deal helps us to identify the key differences.

The New Deal: European welfare state or wealth-building through regulation and taxation?

Warren and Sanders are, in many respects, children of the New Deal. Both regularly invoke Franklin Delano Roosevelt and champion proposals inspired by New Deal policies. But the New Deal was motivated not by a coherent ideology so much as by fierce debates about how to deal with unprecedented crises—the mad mashing of buttons by reformers who offered different solutions to the problems of the day. Then, as now, there were two competing impulses.

Some reformers looked with envy on the cradle-to-grave social programs that existed or were being created in Europe. This was ultimately a road not taken by the United States, where social programs remained underdeveloped vis-à-vis Europe. But many recent works of social science suggest that the New Deal state was not comparatively weak or inactive. Rather, New Dealers focused on fiscal and regulatory reforms designed to redistribute wealth.

Monica Prasad argues that this divergence between Europe and the United States occurred due to the different position of each within the global economy. By the early-20^th Century, the United States was, to take the title of Prasad’s book, “The Land of Too Much.” Agricultural and manufacturing productivity far outpaced that of Europe, and consumer demand could not keep up, leading to falling prices. The government tried in vain to stabilize prices by dumping excess milk in rivers, setting bales of cotton ablaze, and destroying manufactured goods.

Europe faced scarcity. Productivity lagged, particularly after the Second World War, which devastated European nations. Policy-makers hoped to limit domestic consumption and invest everything in national industries capable of competing globally with American firms.

For both European and American policy-makers, welfare policies were a social contract with citizens—one that offered benefits in exchange for the sacrifices necessary to maintain or enhance economic competitiveness within the global economy.

In Europe, the bargain was public programs in exchange for lower income and personal consumption. European governments convened sector-wide national labor-management councils and convinced organized labor to accept lower wages in exchange for expansion of cradle-to-grave government programs. They pursued industrial policies that encouraged, rather than broke up, monopolies. And they developed systems of taxation that relied on consumption taxes rather than corporate or progressive income taxes.

Americans are always surprised to hear that even in social democratic countries, some taxes are notably more regressive than in the United States—like in Sweden, where citizens pay a 25 percent value-added tax when purchasing most goods and services. This, in conjunction with lower wages, limited consumption in Europe: fewer cars, smaller homes and apartments, less luxury.

In the United States, the New Deal bargain was to allow for more consumption in exchange for a weaker safety net. Policy-makers saw under-consumption as the problem, which they blamed on the same culprit as do many progressives today: inequality. They lived in a “land of plenty,” but the dollars were in the wrong pockets.

The solution was redistribution. In the words of Huey Long, a left-wing populist whose program FDR coopted, New Dealers hoped to make “Every man a king,” as Prasad recounts.

The New Deal’s big innovations were fiscal and regulatory. New Dealers passed some sweeping work programs early on and, most significantly, established the Social Security Administration. But American social programs remained limited in scope—mostly means tested, or reserved for the most vulnerable and worst off. For example, the United States remains virtually unique in its absence of some universal program of health care insurance.

But relative to Europe, the American taxation and regulatory system was a beast. Personal and corporate taxation was by far the most progressive in the world, with top marginal tax rates that peaked at 90 percent. The United States was also virtually unique in its absence of a national sales or value-added tax, and remains so.

Citizens’ consumption was also fueled by regulations that promoted plentiful, cheap, and secure credit. Regulators subdivided the financial sector and eliminated serious financial crises for a generation. A federally-backed mortgage market standardized the 30-year mortgage and turned the United States into a nation of homeowners (though nonwhite Americans were excluded—more on this below). Consumers were additionally protected by a web of regulatory agencies that pioneered everything from seat belts, to the world’s most lax personal bankruptcy laws, to modern food labeling requirements.

Like Elizabeth Warren today, the New Dealers who championed regulatory and fiscal policies proudly declared themselves pro-capitalism, for that was the point: not to create a safety net to shelter Americans from the market, but to eliminate the need for one by redistributing wealth.

Warren and Sanders in historical perspective

The breakdown of the New Deal system fueled the rising inequality of recent decades. The nation’s tax laws have become less progressive. And given Americans’ historical reliance on credit, deregulation of the financial system wreaked havoc on people’s pocketbooks—and additionally encouraged corporate mergers and investment strategies that move wealth from workers to managers and from rural areas to financial centers in a few large cities.

The divergence between Warren’s and Sanders’s respective priorities largely boils down to disagreement about what to do now—rebuild the New Deal fiscal and regulatory system or try for something social democratic? Warren and Sanders often adopt one another’s planks, making some of the differences between their platforms ones of degree. But the priorities of the two candidates are evident when one considers the principles behind each conversation: taxation and regulation versus social programs.

The most radical regulatory and fiscal proposals have come from Warren, while Sanders has put universal, European-style social programs on the agenda.

The New Deal era’s regulatory elan is at the center of Warren’s candidacy, unsurprising given her history as a consumer advocate. Though many Americans today see regulation as wonky and therefore moderate, Warren’s proposals embody the New Dealers’ penchant for regulatory populism. The call to break up big tech companies, for example, came from Warren’s campaign. And Warren, more than Sanders, has built her candidacy around Huey Long-type calls for soak-the-rich taxation.

Of course, they converge on some things. Both candidates call for higher taxes on the rich and neither has proposed a European-style value-added tax—of the Democratic candidates, only outlier Andrew Yang has done so.

But it was Warren who first called for a wealth tax, a policy consistent with but beyond the accomplishments of the triumphant New Dealers. And it is Sanders who says paying for Medicare for All with taxes on middle-income Americans is a matter of course while Warren floundered, refusing to consider this.

Sanders embodies American progressives’ historical fascination with European welfare states. It is true that both candidates support Medicare for All. But the idea came from Sanders and is central to his campaign, whereas Warren is more tepid and signals a willingness to deprioritize the policy. And Sanders’ programmatic proposals tend to be universal, whereas Warren’s often include means tests. Sanders proposes eliminating all college debt. Warren proposes doing so only for lower income Americans.

At issue in universal versus means-tested programs is a disagreement about the goals of social policy. Many Americans may see Warren’s inclination towards means testing as a symptom of pragmatic wonkery—a targeting of public benefits to those who truly need them. But means tests also imply that the goal of social programs is to protect the vulnerable and worst off, a rather American take on the welfare state.

By contrast, many European reformers see the goal as creating a lived experience that is the same for all citizens, regardless of income. In many social democracies, the rich and poor send their children to the same public daycares. Rich and poor college students live in the same subsidized apartments and eat at the same subsidized dining halls. Drivers pay traffic fines that are calibrated on a progressive income scale to be equally onerous to rich and poor alike.

Sanders has put many such universal programs on the American public agenda. This includes better known programs like Medicare for All and Free College for All, but also many lesser-known policies—from universal internet access to a housing policy built around mixed-income housing that integrates market rate and publicly subsidized units.

Whether Warren or Sanders offer workable solutions for today’s pressing problems is an open question.

One may wonder whether either reformist tendency would reduce glaring inequities between white and nonwhite Americans. My suspicion is that the devil is in the details; neither approach guarantees a path to racial inclusion nor is immune to racial bias. Historically, the obverse was certainly true. African Americans and Hispanic Americans were definitely barred from federal mortgage and other wealth-building initiatives, but most were also excluded from more-universal programs like Social Security. And today, Scandinavian social democracies are rife with racial and ethnic discrimination, as evidenced by rates of residential segregation of non-European immigrants comparable to those of African Americans in the U.S.

Likewise, one may wonder if a consumption-oriented approach to political economy can be reconciled with a climate policy that reduces carbon emissions—this is one big reason why the policies that worked in the 1930s may not be appropriate today. Here again, I think it depends. Historically, Americans have certainly associated material wellbeing with fossil-fuel driven consumption. But there’s no reason why such impulses could not be turned towards greener ends—reformers could champion consumption of electric cars over pickup trucks, energy efficient condos over McMansions, locally grown food and services over plastic tchotchkes.

In sum, the choice between Warren and Sanders involves considerable value judgement, but we should start by recognizing that their differences run deeper than personal style and are not ones of degree. Both candidates want to take the country in a new direction, but they disagree about the destination. In that respect, Warren and Sanders take opposing sides in a debate that has divided American reformers since the New Deal.

 

Josh Pacewicz is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Brown University. His research focuses on American urban governance, federalism, party politics, and the welfare state.

 Richard Butsch

Comparative/historical sociology has long been concerned with large structural changes, such as the transition from feudalism to capitalism, agricultural to industrial society, colonialization and post-colonial dynamics. While such concerns sometimes lead researchers to treat media tangentially, only rarely is media considered a focus. Print, for example, has long been considered important to the transition beginning in the early modern European era. But there is good reason to assess the impact of film and television during the twentieth century, and of the internet in the twenty-first century. Media have come to hold a central place in societies, from everyday life to the workings of political and economic structures, in the U.S. and around the world.

Comparative-historical research needs to catch up. The field of media history has grown greatly in the last two decades, including major strides in the study of audiences and of media outside the U.S. and Europe. Much of that work bears on questions of interest to sociologists. Moreover, with the globalization of media, the topic is well-poised for comparative analysis. Let me give some examples of what such work may offer historical/comparative sociologists.

Media have been an important part of social interactions and societies since the nineteenth century, when reading became a mass phenomenon. Audiences and audience time have increased geometrically since then. Today smartphones and internet access have begun to penetrate even the poorest areas of the world. During the past century and a half, media have, through advertising, been integral to modern consumer capitalism. They have played an important part in colonialism and post-colonial nation-building as well as in cultural hegemony. Moreover, media companies grew from metropolitan newspapers, at the turn of the twentieth century, into global multi-media corporations, at the turn of the twenty-first. While in the 1940s, Hollywood was a relatively small industry in a large economy, today some of the world’s largest companies are media corporations.

In the 1930s and 1940s, American sociologists produced several of the pioneering studies in the field that became communications research, and sociology textbooks included it as an important topic. Then the topic became marginal to American sociology. Only in the last decade or so have communication and media begun to be re-incorporated into “Introduction to Sociology” textbooks.

The rich body of research on media and audience history has now reached a scale that allows us to construct global accounts that deal with the economic, social, and cultural dimensions of media, accounts that can reveal similarities and differences across time, cultures, and geography, and that can point to exciting conclusions.[1]

Differences of power and subordination are reflected in divergent reactions and relations to media and media content. When moviegoing was the predominant entertainment before television, working-class and middle-class moviegoers in the same city, whether New York, London, Paris, Mumbai, or Shanghai, attended different cinemas, preferred different film genres, and used the theater as a place reflecting their different class norms. Working class viewers, for example, gravitated to more informal cinemas with accommodating management, and were more sociable and vocal as audiences.  In “traditional” cultures of Muslim West Africa and Hindi India, male village elders disapprove of television’s influence on women and teens. Today, cross-cultural differences are evident in mobile phone and computer use. In the West the mobile phones, tablets and computers are treated as personal and individual, even intensely so, reflecting the emphasis on individuals in those cultures; whereas in parts of South and Southeast Asia, with greater emphasis on family ties, for a time at least phones have been kept in a basket at the door where family members can take anyone as they go out, and parents might stand over an adult child’s shoulder and kibbitz while he is on a social media website.

These different practices also shape public or private spaces and relationships in different ways.

Perhaps even more striking than different reactions to media are similarities in audience behaviors when confronted with the same medium. For example, women in strikingly diverse cultures, from the U.S. in the 1940s, to Latin America and India in the 1980s, to Egypt and West Africa at the turn of the millennium, shared an interest in soap operas or telenovelas and often in very similar ways: they applied lessons they took from them to their familial relationships. Another similarity occurred in the early days of moving pictures across the U.S., Europe, Rhodesia, and elsewhere, when widespread stories reported audiences new to film mistaking the moving image as reality.

These cross-cultural convergences push us to seek explanations beyond simple cultural relativity or “human nature” to commonalities of structure across diverse societies. These similarities may arise instead from a common ground of everyday life practicality. Across a wide range of cultures people must navigate similar face-to-face situations and relationships, such as between spouses, parent and child, neighbors or friends. This seems to be illustrated also by numerous accounts of the reactions of peoples around the world upon first encountering alien tools. Where some practicality of a tool is evident to them, they adopt and adapt it to their own use; where such practicality seemed obscure to them, they were less inclined to adopt it. The curiosity of audiences new to movies may be read as at least partly a process of such investigation. The rapid adoption of mobile phones even in remote areas and poor communities is due in large measure to how they have been adapted to local uses. People have found ingenious solutions to charging phone batteries where there is no electrical service, and have devised schemes to minimize the costs of phones and phone service.

This leads us to consider cultural hegemony and its ebb and flow in the case of screen culture. Moving-image technologies were developed in the U.S. and several European countries simultaneously. Differences in domestic circumstances first favored French companies’ leadership in the distribution of film internationally. Even in the U.S., for example, the French company Pathe was dominant during this early phase. But soon, due in part to the outbreak of World War One, U.S. film companies displaced the French and then held sway internationally for several decades. But by the new millennium, that hegemony has been challenged. With industrialization and modernization drives in post-colonial societies, there have arisen multiple film centers that rely on multi-national investments and reach consumers in many countries. In the U.S., Spanish-language television networks with roots in Latin America, are even challenging English-language networks that have grown up isolated in the U.S. Bollywood and Chinese films as well have gained some popularity beyond Indian and Chinese diasporas. Thus, cultural distribution is shifting from vertical, unidirectional hegemony to a horizontal, multi-directional exchange. This may eventually resolve into another era of hegemony, but it is currently in flux.

Cultural hegemony has been a critical political as well as economic concern for colonial administrators and post-colonial governments. Britain, France, and other colonial rulers imposed censorship on film and instituted their own film-making and radio to bolster their imperial power. Upon independence, post-colonial governments in Egypt, India, and China attempted to reverse this process by restricting and censoring imported films and owning and operating national film, radio, and television production facilities.

The foregoing suggests that it would be fruitful for comparative and historical sociologists to increasingly address themselves to media and communication. I encourage other CHS scholars to incorporate the impact of media in their own thinking and research, as I have encouraged media scholars to think historically and comparatively–and sociologically.

Richard Butsch is Professor Emeritus of Sociology, American Studies, and Film and Media Studies at Rider University. His research has long focused on histories of audiences and media culture. His books include The Making of American Audiences: From Stage to Television,1750-1990 (Cambridge University Press 2000), The Citizen Audience: Crowds, Publics and Individuals (Routledge 2008) and Screen Culture: A Global History (Polity Books 2019). He is currently editing a special section on histories of audiences for Participations the journal of audience studies, and beginning his next book, tentatively entitled The Importance of the Social.

NOTE

[1] For my own work on this topic, see, most recently, Richard Butsch, Screen Culture: A Global History (Polity 2019) and, with Sonia Livingstone, Meanings of Audiences: Comparative Discourses (Routledge 2013).

(Photo: An anti-Vietnam war rally, 1968. Bettmann Archive)

Max Elbaum

In this piece, I want to discuss the political climate and experience of revolutionaries of the 1960s to better understand today’s political landscape and what I think could be some useful directions forward for the battles we are engaged in now. I think a useful way to start this discussion is to briefly paint a picture of the outlook of those of us who turned toward revolutionary politics in and around the watershed year 1968. From there I will summarize the experience of a large layer of 1960s revolutionaries who embraced Third World Marxism and built what was called the New Communist movement.

The Vision of the 1960s: From Fear to Hope

So to 1968, when I was 20 years old, and the years just before and after: One side of my generation’s experience is that in our teens we had either directly experienced or witnessed tremendous shock, horror and destruction. We had been gripped by fear of imminent nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile crisis. We were jolted by one assassination after another–two Kennedys, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King. We shuddered as police dogs were unleashed on civil rights protesters and saw mobs of young whites beating up Black people for the crime of sitting at a lunch counter.

And then there was the U.S. war on Vietnam, a war brought into every home every night on TV–not like today when pictures of the killing are hidden. Just about every day we saw a Vietnamese person or U.S. soldier shot in a news report, not to mention photos of the My Lai massacre and watching as a U.S. officer say with a straight face, “we had to burn down this village to save it.” And of course, if we weren’t sent to Vietnam ourselves, we all knew someone who had been, or who was coming back wounded or in a body bag.

So those of us who came of age in the ’60s lived with pain, fear and often desperation.

But there was another side. Despite all that, we were filled with optimism and hope. That was dominant. We were going to win and build a better world.

We had seen southern governors standing at university doors saying “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.” But less than two years later, Jim Crow was outlawed. After that the Black freedom movement, anchor of the ’60s upsurge, didn’t stop. It gained momentum.

Vietnam was threatened with genocide, but the Tet offensive in early 1968 shook the U.S. war machine to its core and made it clear that however long it took, Washington’s empire-building project was going to lose a war for the first time in its history. And it wasn’t just Vietnam. All across what we called the “third world,” freedom movements were shaking colonialism and foreign domination, from Uruguay to Palestine, from South Africa to the Philippines.

And when, on 31 March 1968, Lyndon Johnson withdrew from the presidential race and announced that talks with the Vietnamese would begin, every one of us who had protested believed we had taken part in overthrowing a president of the U.S., not by the cruelty of assassination, but by engaging in mass political action.

Revolution wasn’t just in the air in the global south. I recall when the member of my Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) chapter who had spent 1968 studying in Paris reported on her experience in the French May. Ten million workers on strike and students on the night of the barricades came within a hair’s breadth of overturning a government in the heart of Western Europe. I can still feel my heartbeat surge when she recounted the slogan they chanted as they marched through the streets where the Paris Commune of 1871 marked the first working class seizure of power in world history: “We shall fight, we shall win! Paris, London, Rome, Berlin!”

Is it any wonder that so many of us became revolutionaries in the wake of experiences like those?

We had a vision. We were part of an unstoppable human surge toward a better world. It was anchored in the rising of the wretched of the earth, but it embraced and welcomed all who had a conscience. It had a moral as well as political foundation. Yes, we knew we had to fight against the “hopeless sinners who would hurt all mankind just to save their own,” as that wonderful 1960s anthem, “People get Ready,” by Curtis Mayfield, put it. But we didn’t see it as a fight of good people vs. evil people. It was a fight against unjust systems of oppression. These systems hit hardest on the most marginalized, but afflicted everyone. Our aim was to build a better world for all and usher in a new and brighter stage of human history. And everyone who joined that fight had a contribution to make.

Third World Marxism

Now on from vision to the messy world of politics on the ground. Especially after Martin Luther King’s assassination, a whole layer of 1960s protesters decided that the socio-economic and political system in the U.S. could not be reformed and a social revolution as necessary to bring about peace, equality and justice. So we looked around for the kind of theory, strategy, and organization that could bring such a revolution about. Inevitably, the different directions in which we went were shaped by the historical moment and, in particular, the contours of the radical left across the world at that time.

Inspired by the dynamic liberation movements that threatened to besiege Washington with “two, three, many Vietnams,” as Ché Guevara put it, we decided that a Third World-oriented version of Marxism was the key to building a powerful left here. In tune with the central axes of 1960s protests, Third World Marxism put opposition to racism and military interventionism front and center. It riveted attention to the intersection of economic exploitation and racial oppression, pointing young activists toward the most disadvantaged sectors of the working class. It linked aspiring U.S. revolutionaries to the parties and leaders who were proving that “the power of the people is greater than the man’s technology”: the Vietnamese and Chinese Communist Parties; Amilcar Cabral and the Marxist-led liberation movements in Africa; Che, Fidel and the Cuban Revolution.

Third World Marxism also promised a break with Eurocentric models of social change, and pointed a way toward building a multiracial movement out of a badly segregated U.S. left. For many of us, Third World Marxism seemed the best framework for taking the most radical themes struck by Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and César Chávez–the US figures that most inspired rebellious ‘60s youth–and transforming them into a comprehensive revolutionary ideology.

Within the Third World Marxist ranks, a determined contingent set out to build tight-knit cadre organizations. These activists believed that new upsurges lay just ahead and that it was urgent to prepare a united and militant vanguard so the revolutionary potential glimpsed in the 1960s could be realized the next time around. To guide this process, not just Marxism but Marxism-Leninism was deemed indispensable. Partly this was because the Third World parties we looked to for inspiration advocated Marxist-Leninist ideology. But we were also drawn to Leninism out of our own experience in exceedingly sharp confrontation with state repression.

This current on the left, the New Communist component of the Third World Marxist layer, was not the only one that attracted 1960s radicals. All sections of the left grew–traditional communism, social democracy, Trotskyism, anarchism, radical feminism and others. But this current attracted the largest number, and especially the largest to come out of the freedom movements in communities of color. A detailed historical analysis of rise and decline of these movements can be found in my book, Revolution in the Air. In what follows, I want to focus on a few critical themes from this historical experience that are important to draw lessons about the present moment.

Four Lessons

1) Political strategies and tactics must be tailored to the particular historical moments in which activists operate. Any strategy or tactic that ignores the broader historical context will lead to isolation and failure.

First, I want to target what I think was our most costly error. We misassessed the historical moment we were in, the balance of forces we faced, and the resilience of the U.S. political system. That error led us to adopt strategies and tactics that isolated us from the constituencies we were so committed to root ourselves in, despite all our determination and effort. We had become radical at a time of intense, rapid change, and when masses of people in the U.S. were in an explosive mood. We weren’t so naïve as to think that would continue uninterruptedly. But we did think that after a relatively brief ebb, a broader upsurge was all but sure to occur, and that it would inevitably be toward the left. We also thought that because masses had rejected one or two presidents and taken to the streets, that millions of people were ready to abandon the U.S. political system, that is, electoral politics, altogether. So we prepared for offensive battles, regarded electoral involvement as at best a waste of time, and built narrow organizational forms unsuited for the time.

But the 1970s went in a completely different direction: the ruling class regrouped and retrenched, skillfully cultivated a racist, sexist and homophobic backlash against ’60s movements here and abroad. And once the Vietnam War was over and equality was proclaimed in law even if not anywhere near realized in reality, the more progressive masses in their millions understandably tried to resist using the most legitimate and ready-at-hand tool available, that is, fighting on electoral and policy terrain. We forgot Lenin’s admonition that what may be obsolete for revolutionaries is not obsolete for masses, that exhorting people to be more radical has minimal effect, that only going through the experience of trying to take what the system offers as far as it can go and then being stymied, will millions take harder and more risky roads.

The result of all this was that instead of the 1980s bringing us an even bigger 1968, it brought us Ronald Reagan. And by the time we realized what had occurred and threw ourselves into the Rainbow movement connected to Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns, we had suffered too many losses to regain momentum as a collective and dynamic force.

The point being, we needed a big dose of hard-headed realism to go along with our revolutionary passion. We need to keep in mind that forces far more powerful than ourselves are setting the agenda. As I explain in Revolution in the Air:

If, when and how masses swing into motion is generally not something under radicals’ control. But it is the activity and consciousness of popular constituencies that must shape radical efforts. Many of us once thought that becoming a revolutionary meant seeing the world through the filter of passages from Lenin. But we overlooked one of the things Lenin wrote that actually has a “universal” meaning – something not particularly “Leninist” at all but common to effective radical leaders of all persuasions: “politics begin where millions of men and women are; where there are not thousands, but millions.”

Radicals must strain every nerve to gain and keep a connection to these millions. We need a connection in life, sustained over time, though durable organizations and institutions – not merely in theory or in self-conception or during brief moments of high-tide protest. This places a premium on resisting all sectarianism and flexibly adapting to new and often unexpected conditions

2) To be able to account for the transformations in the historical context, critical and revolutionary theory should stay away from the “quest for orthodoxy.”

Second, I want to open up for discussion this movement’s complicated relationship with revolutionary theory. One of the things that gave the movement great dynamism in its early years was the proliferation of study groups, forums and debates. This extended beyond the student milieu and was a prominent feature in our workplace and community organizing efforts. For some years, the chasm that usually separates activism, that is either dismissive or even hostile to big picture theoretical exploration, from the radical academy, often divorced from and inaccessible to non-academics, was dramatically narrowed in this sector of the left.

Also, there was some creative theoretical and historical work done. Movement groups and circles produced a host of studies exploring the conditions of different communities of color in the U.S. and debating strategies for meshing the fight for equality with the working-class project of socialist revolution. At least two strands within the movement did pioneering work on the white-Black dynamic in U.S. history, the social construction of race, the development of unique U.S. racial categories, and the ways slavery and racism were foundational to U.S. capitalism. One of those strands was pioneered by Noel Ignatin and Ted Allen under the heading of “the invention of the white race” and the other, which shaped my thinking, came out of the circles in which Harry Chang was a central figure.

But it proved difficult for the movement overall to do the creative work of which it was capable, and even for its more theoretically-adept sectors to realize their potential. This was because we pretty much all had bought into what I called a “quest for orthodoxy”–interpretation of Marxism-Leninism where there was one true canon and everything had to be squared with and justified by reference to that canon’s founding fathers. New explorations were inhibited by suspicion of possible heresy, dubbed revisionism. We therefore had huge gaps in what we even paid attention to, missing for example absolutely crucial mattes like the growing environmental crisis and species-threatening character of a fossil-fuel based economy. And over time, especially as the movement declined, solutions to political problems were sought in ideological purification rather than rethinking our theories, assessments, and strategies

3) Any theory and political strategy for change has to be rooted in particular local histories. The U.S. is not an exception. 

Third, looking to the Black Freedom Movement as a reference point, anchor, and driving force of all progressive fights in the particular history of the U.S. was a strength of those who turned to Third World Marxism. Certainly there has been a great explosion of new theoretical and historical work illuminating the condition of African Americans, the dynamics of anti-Black racism, the centrality of slavery to the development not only of U.S. but of global capitalism since the 1970s and 1980s. And a welcome explosion of new and innovative forms of organization and communication as a new generation of activists moves center stage.

But the overarching point is that a strategy for change in this country has to be rooted in the particular history of the U.S.; and a key particularity of the U.S. is the way Black labor has built the country and Black movements have most often been the driving force not only in advancing the struggle of African Americans but in widening the scope of democracy for everyone. This was true in the Reconstruction era, which saw the most progressive state governments that ever existed in the U.S.; it was true in the 1950s and 1960s when it was the Black-led civil rights movement that broke the back of McCarthyism, defeated Jim Crow, and opened up space for all the new movements of the 1960s and after in what is aptly termed the “Second Reconstruction.” It is why the framework utilized by Rev. William J. Barber and others launching the new Poor People’s Campaign–the call for a “Third Reconstruction”–has such resonance and potential today. Rooted in the Black Prophetic tradition, and adding the issue of defending the natural environment to the three great evils Martin Luther King named in his “A Time to Break The Silence” speech–racism, militarism, and the extreme materialism that creates terrible poverty alongside ostentatious wealth–the Campaign’s vision is to bind together all our fights toward the Revolution of Values that Dr. King called for.

4) Today’s challenging task is to defeat authoritarianism in a way that will help institutionalize the strength of the emergent progressive sections of society and prepare them for more advanced stages of a struggle for systemic change.

Last, we cannot help but take note that we live in the era of Donald Trump. A white nationalist surge drove him to the presidency, and unfortunately, similar regimes based in racist and xenophobic authoritarianism are afflicting many other countries across the globe. At the People Get Ready conference in Berkeley right after Trump’s election, my longtime friend and comrade Linda Burnham, currently Research Director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, made this crucial point in her keynote speech:

We cannot let the harsh realities of the moment stifle our revolutionary imagination; at the same time, we cannot let our revolutionary imagination blind us to the harsh realities of the moment.

The challenge we face today is that the balance between these two is not as favorable as it was in 1968. At that time, the initiative was with those full of revolutionary imagination. Today it is those who are inflicting harsh realities on people all over the world who are setting the agenda and are putting in place mechanisms to stay in power and enrich themselves, whether it be voter suppression, mass incarceration, attacks on the media, freedom of expression and civil liberties, or outright war.

We need to be sober-minded about this. The trick is not to deny the challenge, but to identify and nurture the shoots of resistance which are the building blocks of the future and the source of our hope.

Today there is a massive anti-Trump front taking shape in this country. Its core lies in communities of color and among young people, but it stretches all the way from corporate power brokers in the Democratic Party through the millions who turned out for Bernie Sanders and a re-energized women’s upsurge to many Marxist revolutionaries. So of course it includes players with contradictory interests. But that is always the case in truly large mass movements. And we need to remember that no radical project has succeeded when it tried to fight all its enemies at once. Divisions in a ruling elite, and movements that can and do take advantage of them, have been a key factor in every successful movement for revolution or radical reform in history, in the U.S. and around the world.

And within this huge, complicated coalition against the far right there is a growing and dynamic progressive sector, showing itself in the women’s marches, in electoral insurgencies, in defense of immigrants, in demanding an end to police killings, in the movement for single-payer health care, in the recent teacher’s strikes. If that layer can coalesce–and if it can make efforts to end militarism and war as strong as its campaigns on other fronts–an agenda of peace, jobs, justice, and saving the planet can attain a measure of power.

Let me elaborate a little bit on this point. There have been three great leaps forward for popular movements in U.S. history: the surge that ran through abolitionism and the Civil War through Reconstruction; the organization of workers in mass production and the broader New Deal-era efforts of the 1930s; and the Civil Rights Movement-led Second Reconstruction of the 1960s that overthrew legal Jim Crow, won a number of other important democratic victories, and sparked a host of new social movements. All had a number of common ingredients: a period of substantial change in underlying political economy and the shape of global politics and power relations; militant and sustained mass direct action making a lot of trouble from below; these factors exacerbating fissures within the ruling class and turning those into a deep division; an extremely broad front uniting against the main enemy of the day; and the use of forms of struggle ranging from electoral action to disruptive protest and even in some cases resorting to armed self-defense or, in the Civil War, armed offensives. All of these elements were necessary to accomplish the main task of each period: abolition of slavery in the 19^th century; the end of complete despotism at the workplace and staving off a corporatist or fascist solution to the depression of the 1930s; the overthrow of Jim Crow, racist immigration quotas, and ending the Vietnam War in the 1960s.

It is crucial to recognize, though, that after the main enemy of each phase was defeated, the coalition that defeated that enemy splintered. And in each case the ruling-class sector was able, over time, to weaken or outright crush the progressive contingent and roll back many hard won gains: Klan terror and restriction of voting rights in the gutting of Reconstruction; McCarthyism to roll back the militant workers’ movement in the 1950s; and, after the Second Reconstruction, the backlash crusade that has unfolded for the last 40 years and has now reached a zenith with extreme perils to the country and the planet now that full-blown white nationalism has captured the GOP under Donald Trump.

So our challenge is two-fold. First, to use all the elements mentioned above, from disruptive action to truly massive street protests to electoral engagement, in building the broad coalition necessary to oust the GOP and Trump an all their hangers on from power. And second, to institutionalize the strength of the progressive wing of this coalition to the point that, if and when we do defeat the right, we will not be pushed to the sidelines. Rather, we will be able to fight for and win the initiative, grab and hold a measure of political power in cities, states, and at the federal level, and have a foundation on which to move on to more advanced stages of struggle for systemic change.

And this is where building not just a progressive realignment, but a revolutionary left force within it, comes in. A radical left with a transformative vision and effective strategy is needed to keep that broader progressive current on track; as the communist manifesto puts it:

The communists do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement.  The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

Fortunately, there are more and more young people today who, like the generation of 1968, are flocking toward a revolutionary vision and looking for illuminating theory and effective strategy and organization. The task of my generation is to get in behind the new radicals, support them, offer what we’ve learned from our experience in the spirit of “take whatever is useful and leave the rest.”  And let’s see if together we can move history along a little further this time around.

 

Max Elbaum is is an American historian, author, and social activist. He has written extensively about the New Left, Civil Rights Movement and anti-war movement. He is the author of “Revolution In The Air: Sixties Radicals turn to Lenin, Mao and Che“.

(Photo: CNN.com)

Timothy M. Gill

With the end of the Cold War, the U.S. remains the world’s sole global empire. Under the Trump administration, though, the direction of U.S. Empire remains uncertain. Indeed, comparative-historical sociologists might provide much help in making sense of U.S. Empire under Trump. Beyond Trump’s promise to “Make America Great Again,” where is U.S. Empire headed under his direction?

Many have recently entered into discussion of the rise, decline, and persistence of the American Empire. In some respects, it is clearly in decline. There is no doubt that China, Russia, and left-leaning countries throughout Latin America challenge U.S. global power. Chinese purchasing power parity, for instance, recently surpassed that of the U.S., and Chinese exports have long surpassed those of the U.S. as well. These dynamics certainly constrain U.S. power. But thinking about this problem counterfactually, it is clear that they do not determine Trump administration priorities. Neither a Clinton nor a Rubio administration would have pursued the same economic and political priorities as Trump has, such as a tariff war and warmth towards right-wing rulers in places like Hungary, the Philippines, and, of course, Russia.

The Trump administration has had a large influence in terms of steering American Empire in a new direction, at least in the short term. In what follows, I attempt to draw a balance sheet.

To do so, I will draw from Michael Mann’s “IEMP” model–which stands for ideological, economic, military, and political power. Focusing on all of these distinct varieties of power precludes one-sided emphasis of any one facet of power, such as economic power, as with many neo-Marxist theorists of globalization, for example.

I take each of these spheres of power in turn, providing some very brief remarks on the trajectory of each sphere under the Trump administration.

Ideological Power

Ideological power has to do with ability to harmonize with, and therefore draw support from, widely-held political beliefs. Insofar as a state wields ideological power effectively, it can persuade people and other states without resorting to the use of coercion. The ideological centerpiece of Trump’s foreign policy approach is the promotion of national sovereignty. In his UN General Assembly address in September 2017, for example, Trump mentioned the words “sovereign” or “sovereignty” 21 times. This ideological approach, though, seems to resonate very little with the rest of the world.

Since Trump entered office, the Pew Research Center has found that global confidence in the U.S. president has diminished from 64% to 22%. Most countries surveyed have even evidenced double-digit declines: Sweden has evidenced an 83-point reduction (93% to 10%), and both the Netherlands and Germany have each witnessed a reduction of 75 points. Throughout 37 countries surveyed, Pew has reported that citizens across the world have more confidence in Angela Merkel (42%), Xi Jinping (28%), and Vladimir Putin (27%) than Trump (22%).

And perhaps most striking, since Trump took office, a majority of the population in countries found all throughout the world now find the U.S. a threat, including Chile (57%), Japan (62%), Lebanon (50%), Mexico (61%), Spain (59%), and Turkey (72%), among others.

With Trump and U.S. ideological appeal in such disarray, the U.S.’s ability to persuade without resorting to force now remains increasingly restricted.

Economic Power

 Michael Mann characterizes economic power as involving control over “the extraction, transformation, distribution, and consumption of objects of nature” (The Sources of Social Power Vol. 1, pages 24-5, 1986). With his policies, Trump is threatening the vitality and interconnectedness of the U.S. economy, particularly with the implementation of tariffs, which indeed particularly threaten the global distribution of U.S. goods and the domestic consumption of products coming into the country.

Trump first signaled his intentions to engage in protectionist and isolationist policies when he condemned free trade agreements, like NAFTA, on the campaign trail. Following his inauguration, he quickly removed the U.S. from Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) discussions. In subsequent weeks, Trump imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, and has specifically targeted China with tariffs on $50 billion, and then additional round of $200 billion, worth of goods. The latter $200 billion comes after China retaliated with its own tariffs on U.S. goods, which, interestingly and cleverly, were largely placed on goods coming from parts of the U.S. in which Trump received most electoral support, such as soy, pork, and whiskey.

It is hard to understand who Trump wants to satiate with these protectionist maneuvers. Nearly all analyses predict that they will result in job losses. What is more, Trump’s measures bode to reduce U.S. global influence that emerges from intensified trade relations between countries. For instance, Jonathan Moyer and David Bohl (2018) use the Formal Bilateral Influence Capacity to measure the influence that countries might wield within other countries as a result of trade reliance.[1] As a result of reduced reliance over the next few years, they estimate that the U.S. is posed to lose global influence to China in some 27 countries, including Indonesia, Nigeria, and Thailand. In doing so, China is intensifying its economic relations with countries all throughout the world with its One Belt, One Road initiative, and establishing trade agreements with countries in the wake of TPP’s demise.

If Trump wants to crack down on Chinese economic influence and bolster U.S. economic vitality, it is hard to understand why he is pursuing these measures.

Military Power

If there is one area involving U.S. global power that Trump has deliberately sought to enhance, it is U.S. military power. Trump requested an historic $700 billion defense budget to update weapons and employ more military personnel. The U.S. already operates over 800 military bases, and enjoys preponderance in land, sea, and air.

At the outset of the Trump presidency, it was not altogether clear if/when Trump would utilize military force. At times, for example, he criticized the U.S. for behaving like “a bully” on the world stage, and he condemned the second Bush administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq. After coming to power, though, Trump has attacked the Syrian government with Tomahawk missiles, removed limitations on military sales to Saudi Arabia and fueled its war in Yemen, and threatened several countries with military force, including Venezuela and North Korea.

If there is any sphere of power in which we can be sure the U.S. will continue to maintain preponderance, it is the military sphere.

Political Power

There is much to say about U.S. political power at the global level. I will focus on with whom Trump has and has not pursued better relations since coming to power, and how Trump has approached global institutions.

Trump has criticized the European Union–even likening it to an enemy–and he has squabbled with traditional U.S. allies, such as Canada and Germany. And while straining these relations, he has exhibited an unusual warmth towards authoritarian leaders, including Rodrigo Duterte, Viktor Orbán, and Vladmir Putin, with whom Trump recently met in Finland and invited to the White House. There is much speculation concerning why Trump gravitates towards these leaders. A fuller analysis of these dynamics is beyond the scope of this piece. But suffice it to observe that Trump seemingly possesses similar authoritarian inclinations, exhibited when he responds to public criticism harshly, perhaps attributable to his professional life within the corporate sector where the boss is dictator (do not forget Trump’s most famous line: “You’re fired!”).

Trump also exhibits antipathy towards many of the multilateral institutions that were initially developed in the wake World War II in order, some argue, to safeguard the world against another authoritarian superpower like fascist Germany. Trump has criticized the UN and many of its recent initiatives such as the Paris Climate Accords; questioned U.S. involvement in NATO; and threatened the leave the World Trade Organization. As a result, Trump seemingly wants to return to the pre-World War II atmosphere of national sovereignty and all-out unilateralism.

Conclusion

In the short-term, the Trump administration’s behavior points to an overall reduction in U.S. global power. And it’s puzzling. In recent years, we have seen no other presidential candidate quite so vehemently champion nationalism much less champion turning the country from a set of “losers” into “winners.” But, if anything, this was Trump’s promise in his slogan of “Make America Great Again.”

It is well to take issue with the goal. But it is also important to assess the means Trump has for achieving it.

Trump ran for president on his business acumen, but his economic policies seem deliberately designed to damage the U.S. economy. Trump said he wanted to restore the stature of the U.S. abroad, but we have witnessed numerous allies take issue with the administration and openly criticize Trump. And while Trump has cozied up to authoritarian leaders such as Kim Jong-Un and Vladimir Putin, these efforts towards rapprochement have, at this point, borne little fruit. If anything, these efforts have delegitimated the government and provided optics in which the U.S. appears unable to successfully leverage global challengers. Indeed, at the global level, the Trump administration has few accomplishments to show for itself for over a year and a half in office.

In the short-term, of the four spheres of power discussed above, the Trump administration is only poised to enhance U.S. military power. Long-term predictions are beyond the scope of this piece, but should the U.S. become a country resting on military might alone, others will replace the U.S. in the ideological, economic, and political spheres of power. What is more, this may allow other powerful actors to eventually challenge U.S. military might, by, for example, leveraging economic power to get host countries to close U.S. military bases or limiting military exercises, or by challenging it even more directly than what we have recently witnessed from Russia in Eastern Europe.

There are surely facets of U.S. Empire that demand interrogation. Trump, however, insists on exploding many of those dimensions that remain least nefarious: ideological sway as a result of liberal democratic pursuits, leadership in multilateral institutions, and economic interconnectedness.

In the end, Trump seems to believe that the U.S. Empire can run on military force and tough posturing alone. Such military overreach may well spawn global resentments that emerge alongside these dynamics.

Timothy M. Gill is assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. His research focuses on the role of the U.S. empire in Latin America, particularly U.S. democracy promotion efforts in Socialist Venezuela.

Notes

[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/03/12/heres-how-protective-tariffs-trade-away-u-s-global-influence/

(Image: CNN.com)

Zophia Edwards

There is something uniquely comical about seeing politicians dance at diplomatic engagements. From George Bush to Boris Yeltzin to Hilary Clinton, the list of politicians’ painful-to-watch dance steps is longer than it should be. They may be unlucky victims of social pressure to become performers. I, however, happen to believe that very little is left to spontaneity on foreign diplomatic tours; that politicians are desperate to have the public perceive that they are cool, regular, down-to-earth people who can connect with average folks on the ground–that these dance moves are deceitful attempts to demonstrate cross-cultural openness and acceptance of “the other” as a way of securing their economic and political interests. The most recent spectacle of duplicitous dancing diplomacy is Theresa May, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Several weeks ago, May danced her way across Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa–if you can call what she did “dancing.” As Britain negotiates its withdrawal from the European Union, it is facing tremendous economic uncertainty. Desperate to ensure a stable a post-Brexit British economy, May is scrambling not just to hold on to, but to increase British economic ties to African countries. She promises a “fundamental shift” in the relationship between sub-Saharan African countries and the UK and a “new partnership” that will enable the UK and the African countries with which it engages to secure their “mutual interest.” But what exactly is so “new” about this proposed “partnership”? A comparison of the UK’s old economic strategy toward African countries and its post-Brexit aims reveal that very little has changed in the UK’s approach to African countries. Just as before, the new policies wreak of centuries-old patterns of economic exploitation through trade, aid, foreign direct investment, and debt-creating loans, and racism and racial exclusion. Leaving the dancing aside, the UK’s plan seeks to extend the historical methods of profiteering into the post-Brexit period.

First and foremost, May’s trip is more an act of desperation than a proactive, ambitious attempt to establish a “new” way of engaging with African nations. No British prime minister has visited any African country in five years. The last leader to do so, for the funeral of Nelson Mandela, was David Cameron. Meanwhile, China, France, Germany, Japan, and Turkey, scrambling as they are, have long-term strategies and have increased their efforts to deepen economic ties with the region. For May and the UK government, Africa was treated as an afterthought, only now increasing in relevance and urgency because the UK is in desperate need of guarding against the loss of trade partners when it withdraws from the EU. As such, May’s post-Brexit Africa plans reflect a determination to take the well-traveled road and build on its imperial history of domination. Even though, in her Cape Town speech, she congratulated the continent on being home to five of the world’s fastest growing economies, she visited none of these countries. According to the IMF’s real GDP growth rates in 2018, she should have visited Ethiopia, Cote d’Ivoire, and Rwanda, the three sub-Saharan African countries that have the highest growth rates in the world. But, these countries do not have a colonial connection to England, so that would require additional effort. To be fair, the countries she visited–Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa–are among the largest African economies by GDP, but the choice to have not even one of the fastest growing economies on her itinerary indicates no intention to be bold, creative, or novel. Rather, it indicates that the UK is bent on maintaining the same old approach of relying on former African colonies to be the bedrock of its economic security.

Trade

May spent much of her time in these African nations emphasizing greater opportunities to increase commerce and trade. But what exactly are these supposed “greater opportunities?”  The new Trade Bill promised by the May government will “replicate the effects of the ‘Economic Partnership Arrangements’–development focused trade deals with Africa, Caribbean and Pacific countries which will minimize disruption to current trading arrangements.” This offers nothing new to African economies. May already confirmed in her speeches that the EU’s agreements with the South African Customs Union (SACU) and Mozambique will be carried over to the post-Brexit UK trade agreements. Similarly, the Taxation (Cross-Border Trade) Bill lays out trade preference schemes for developing countries as the UK exits the EU. It is intended to allow the UK to establish standalone trade regimes with trading partners. However, the May government indicates that African economies will receive the same level of access as the current EU trade scheme for developing countries and tariff-free access for the world’s least developed countries. This is no different from what most African countries already receive in EU arrangements. Under the Everything But Arms agreement, a quarter of African countries already trade entirely tariff-free with the EU. On top of this, EU trade agreements with African states have been heavily criticized for their coercive and hegemonic neoliberal approach that restricts rather than fosters the development goals of African countries (Hurt 2003; Lagan and Price 2015). The post-Brexit UK-Africa plan is an old plan.

Aid

The UK’s Africa policy has always emphasized aid for trade, and the post-Brexit strategy still stresses this position. In her trip to these three African countries, May pledged to continue spending 0.7% of gross national income on aid (official development assistance) in order to support Britain’s private sector. To be clear, this is not an increase in aid spending; the UK has been spending this proportion of GNI on ODA since 2013. Furthermore, she did not specify whether and by how much the proportion of this ODA going to African economies will be increased. Despite her grand proclamations, most analysts expect that a weakened British currency in the post-Brexit economy will in fact reduce the amount of British aid that can even be made available to African countries.

On top of this, the post-Brexit aid plan is intended to benefit British interests more so than the interests of the citizens of African countries. The UK had a long history of “tied aid” or aid that obligates recipient countries to buy from donor countries. While the tied aid policy was formally banned in 2002 (although in practice it was a different story), May’s unabashed proclamation that British aid must benefit British interests seems to suggest a formal revival of the tied aid policy. May said, “I want to put our development budget and expertise at the center of our partnership as part of an ambitious new approach–and use this to support the private sector to take root and grow.” In her Cape Town speech, she explicitly said, “I am also unashamed about the need to ensure that our aid program works for the UK. So today I am committing that our development spending will not only combat extreme poverty, but at the same time tackle global challenges and support our own national interest. This will ensure that our investment in aid benefits us all, and is fully aligned with our wider national security priorities.” For May, this includes cracking down on illicit finance, opening new embassies in Niger and Chad to help battle terrorism and political instability, and of course, reducing the inflow of migrants to the UK. Decades of scholarship has shown that foreign aid retards economic development in recipient nations (Bornschier et al. 1978). British aid has never been about ameliorating the most pressing of issues within the African recipient nations, such as land concentration in South Africa. It has always been about securing British interests.

Foreign direct investment

Just as the post-Brexit trade and aid proposals signal no shift in the UK approach to relations with African countries, the foreign direct investment (FDI) plans echo more of the same. May declared that Britain is aiming to be the largest G7 investor (stock) in Africa by 2022. But in which countries will it invest? And in which industries? According to ONS statistics, South Africa is currently the largest recipient of UK FDI and more than half (54.4%) of UK FDI in South Africa goes to the mining and quarrying industry. Dependence on FDI results in a range of negative impacts: it results in profit expatriation rather than local re-investment (Bornschier 1980) and limits state autonomy to pursue development interests that may not align with foreign corporations’ interests (Amin 2001; Perelman 2003). For mining and quarrying specifically, these are extractive sectors that do not generate significant levels of employment, and resource-exporting countries in the periphery benefit comparatively less from their resources but bear greater costs of environmental degradation (Bunker 1984; Jorgenson et al. 2009). This is a long-standing colonial pattern that shows no indication of undergoing significant change in the post-Brexit period.

Furthermore, UK foreign investors have been involved in a range of scandals, which Theresa May has not attempted to address in her post-Brexit agenda. The CDC Group, a UK government-owned emerging markets private equity investor, sees Africa as the next private equity financial frontier. In fact, Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa are already among the top five countries with the largest proportions of CDC investments. But the CDC has been entangled in several nefarious acts across the continent, particularly in the countries visited by Theresa May. For instance, the CDC was implicated in the money laundering activities of Nigerian politician James Ibori. It has also invested heavily in luxury hotels in Nigeria, the Garden City shopping complex in Nairobi, Kenya, and elite boarding schools in Mauritius, which benefits local business elites and wealthy shoppers, but does little for the poor. The CDC justifies these projects claiming the construction jobs are open to the poor and semi-skilled; nevermind that they are short-term jobs with no benefits. This is a far cry from the aims of African governments. For example, Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya aims to improve food security, introduce universal healthcare and affordable housing, and increase manufacturing, not build more shopping malls. In May’s post-Brexit vision, FDI in Africa will follow old patterns of extracting natural resources and bolstering the local elites rather than enabling African countries to shift their position in the world system.

Loans and debt

In May’s speeches, there was little talk about new commercial and bilateral loans and even more silence on debt repayments in the post-Brexit plans. According to the IMF, Sub-Saharan African countries are slipping into a new debt crisis. Many African countries received debt cancellation of IMF/World Bank/Paris Club loans through the 1996 HIPC initiative and the 2005 G8 multilateral debt relief initiative. However, over the last 18 years, external debt stocks in African countries have crept back up to the pre-cancellation levels; this time involving accumulation of debt in the private sector of these countries as opposed to the public sector characteristic of the period of debt crises. The rising debt is being driven by a combination of factors: commercial lenders have sought high-yielding assets; a slump in commodity prices and exports, in large part dependent on China’s growth; governments and lenders have not adequately monitored the legitimacy and productivity of borrowers; U.S. interest rates have been rising; and so on. Mozambique, Ghana, and Zambia are among the countries suffering under the high interest loans to private lenders. While African countries are now taking on more and more loans from China, all the UK talk of “mutually beneficial relationships” has not touched on the opportunity to rid affected African countries of decades-long burdens of UK debt. Jubilee, a coalition of organizations lobbying for the debts of developing countries to be cancelled, for example, has called on the UK to pass legislation to promote transparency in lending and borrowing and to restructure, where necessary, debts contracted under English law. This never came up in May’s proposals about a “new partnership” with African nations.

Racial exclusion

In addition to the post-Brexit Africa agenda being an extension of colonial patterns of trade, aid, FDI, and debt, there is the enduring racism undergirding the entire Brexit agenda. Gurminder Bhambra has written extensively about the fact that the UK referendum for continued membership in the UK was a proxy for debating race, citizenship, and migration. According to Bhambra (2017), since its conception, “There has been no independent Britain, no ‘island nation’; . . . [but rather,] a racially stratified political formation that Britain led to its own advantage.” As such, the UK does not perceive or treat African people, or people of darker hues in general, as people deserving of the same rights and privileges as white British citizens. The UK has a long history of enacting anti-black racist immigration policies. As Bhambra notes, the Commonwealth Immigration Acts of 1962, 1968, and 1971 were designed to restrict the freedom of movement of darker peoples. From musicians to IT workers to laborers, it is very difficult for citizens of African countries to get visas to visit and/or do business in the UK.

Theresa May herself, during her tenure as Home Secretary, presided over a number of immigration policies designed, in her own words, “to create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal immigrants” (“illegal” murkily defined). This invariably meant the exclusion of black and brown immigrants. When Britain was an EU member, May refused to participate in refugee relocation and resettlement programs as well as naval rescue missions for those making the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean. Her UK-Africa partnership speeches emphasize the UK’s aim to prevent African migrants from entering the UK, not to facilitate it. President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya, as much as a year ago, was already pressing for the establishment of a visa processing center in Nairobi, but there was no mention of this in May’s 2018 “new partnership” plans. Of course, to ease the visa application process for black Africans seeking to visit/relocate to the UK would be the antithesis of the Brexit agenda. After all, the entire Brexit narrative was that “these people should not be here!”

Conclusion

Theresa May’s dancing should not only be viewed as comic relief; it is emblematic of the UK’s deceptive approach to its dealings with African nations: pretend to appreciate African people and culture in order to ensure that the UK maintains its position in the world system. This attempt to maintain unequal ties to African countries in the post-Brexit period may not necessarily spell doom for the latter. Brexit might provide new fortuitous opportunities for African countries that were not open to them in the past. Desperate to project a strong and united EU, EU negotiators have adopted a largely unwavering stance toward the UK’s efforts to retain the benefits of EU market access and agreements without actually maintaining membership. The UK might hope to simply roll over EU free trade agreements with African countries, but without leverage and with fewer economic allies, African nations may be able renegotiate agreements that are more tilted toward their favor. If they are unable to, the words of Walter Rodney, dependency theorist and author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1981: 22) will continue to resonate with those of us who are not fooled by Theresa May’s disturbing and delusive dancing:

Mistaken interpretations of the causes of underdevelopment usually stem either from prejudiced thinking or from the error of believing that one can learn the answers by looking inside the underdeveloped economy. The true explanation lies in seeking out the relationship between Africa and certain developed countries and in recognizing that it is a relationship of exploitation.

 

Zophia Edwards is an Assistant Professor at Providence College. Her research examines the impacts of colonialism and local labor movements on state formation and long-term development in the Global South, with a particular focus on resource-rich countries.

References

Bhambra, G. K. 2017. ‘Locating Brexit in the Pragmatics of Race, Citizenship and Empire.’ Pp. 91-100 in Brexit: Sociological Responses, edited by W. Outhwaite London: Anthem Press.

Bornschier, Volker , Christopher Chase-Dunn, and Richard Rubinson, R. 1978. “Cross-national Evidence of the Effects of Foreign Investment and Aid on Economic Growth and Inequality: A Survey of Findings and a Reanalysis.” American Journal of Sociology 84(3): 651-683.

Bunker, Stephen G. 1984. “Modes of Extraction, Unequal Exchange, and the Progressive Underdevelopment of an Extreme Periphery: The Brazilian Amazon, 1600–1980.” American Journal of Sociology 89(5): 1017–1064.

Hurt, Stephen R. 2003. “Co-operation and Coercion? The Cotonou Agreement between the European Union and ACP states and the End of the Lomé Convention.” Third World Quarterly 24(1): 161-176.

Jorgenson, Andrew K. 2007. “The Effects of Primary Sector Foreign Investment on Carbon Dioxide Emissions from Agriculture Production in Less-developed Countries, 1980–99.” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 48(1): 29–42.

Langan, Mark and Sophia Price. 2015. “Extraversion and the West African EPA Development Programme: realising the development dimension of ACP–EU trade?” Journal of Modern African Studies 53(3): 263-287.

Rodney, Walter. 1981. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, DC: Howard University Press

(Image: Jones 2017)

Dylan Riley, Rebecca Jean Emigh, and Patricia Ahmed

The 2020 census is likely to be the most politicized national count for decades. The focus of contemporary debate concerns the possible re-instatement of a citizenship question on the general census for the first time since 1950; previously, sample surveys had captured this information (Wines 2018). The Secretary of Commerce’s proposed change is in response to a justice department memorandum of 12 December 2017, which claimed that a citizenship question was necessary in order to “enable the Department [of Justice] to protect all American citizens’ voting rights under Section 2” (Gary 2017). The logic of the DOJ position, as well as an e-mail from the notorious Kansas Secretary of State, Kris Kobach, is that the U.S. census should primarily be about counting citizens for purposes of political apportionment. As Kobach notes in his e-mail, the lack of a citizenship question “leads to the problem that aliens who do not actually ‘reside’ in the United States are still countered for congressional apportionment purposes” (Kobach 2017). This argument has led left liberals, such as Robert Reich (2018) to refer to this plan as “an unconstitutional power grab.” We think it may be useful to place this current controversy in a broader historical context.

We begin by discussing some structural features of the U.S. census. We sketch out some of the features likely to lead to a very highly-politicized census in 2020. We then discuss a period of census debate similar to the current one, focusing on the four censuses from 1890–1920. We conclude by suggesting two key differences between that period and the contemporary one.

Structural Features of Census Taking in the U.S.

The census’s basic purpose is to apportion seats to the House of Representatives and votes to the Electoral College. Importantly, and contra the Trump DOJ and Kobach, representation is not based in the United States on the number of citizens who live in a particular area. It is somewhat paradoxical to find left-liberals pointing this out while self-described “conservatives” seem to have forgotten it. The reason for this peculiarity is that the slave holding states at the Constitutional Convention insisted on partially enumerating slaves in the infamous 3/5ths compromise. But slaves were not citizens, and accordingly, no language in the U.S. Constitution specifies that citizens alone should be counted. The charter stipulates only that an “actual enumeration of the population” should be undertaken.

With the expansion of the U.S. state’s functions since the mid-twentieth century, census information has also been used to distribute federal money. Indeed, as many commentators have pointed out, one of the obvious intended purposes of the administration’s citizenship question is to depress numbers in areas with large numbers of immigrants, thereby depriving them of funds.

These facts suggest why the census is so important, and why it is so potentially politicized. But there is a further peculiarity of the U.S. political system that, like jet fuel on an open flame, massively increases the political temperature of the decennial count.

Political representation in United States Congress is based on gerrymandered single member districts which have been established in a context of massive, although largely asymmetrical, political polarization. To grasp the significance of these features, it may be useful to contrast single member representation with proportional representation. In a single member district, the top vote getter is the only representative from the district, meaning that only the winning party achieves any representation in the district. Multi-member proportional systems, in contrast, distribute seats in proportion to the number of votes each party receives.

In a single member system, winning the majority of the votes in a district has huge political consequences. Districts shift entirely from one party to another often on the basis of a small number of votes. Indeed, in the U.S., political language registers this winner-takes-all system as pundits and the populace speak of “red” or “blue” districts or states: conceptually deleting the often very large groups of “blues” in “red” states and “reds” in “blue” states, as well as the substantial proportion of the population that is alienated from politics altogether.

When this feature is combined with the deep political importance of race and ethnicity in the U.S. context, it implies that determining the distribution of types of people across territories is a profoundly political act. The politicization of the census is thus intrinsic to the purpose of the census and the U.S. system of political representation regardless of any more specific historical conditions.

The Contemporary Politics of the U.S. Census

However, the structure of contemporary U.S. politics is likely to make the 2020 census (and future ones) especially politicized. The main element pushing in this direction is the shrinking demographic base of the Republican Party. The GOP is increasingly a party of elderly, less-educated whites; but the white population is shrinking. Meanwhile, the population as a whole is becoming more educated; but level of education correlates negatively with Republican party identification. These basic demographic trends give the party a powerful incentive to undercount certain parts of the U.S. population. The inclusion of a citizenship question on the census is a central part of this project. The incentives of Democrats are largely speaking the reverse. The Party has a strong political interest in a complete count, and particularly in a count that enumerates historically difficult-to-count populations.

A considerable amount of the demographic change that Republicans fear is driven by migration. There have been three broad phases in the history of mass migration to the United States: a phase stretching from 1850 to 1910, which saw rising percentages of the foreign born population; a second phase of long decline from about 1910 to about 1970 when the foreign population had declined to only 4.7% of the total population; and a last phase stretching from 1970 to today which has seen a steadily rising percentage of the foreign born population until it constituted about 13% of the total U.S. population in 2016 (American Community Survey 2016; Grieco et al. 2012: 19). The U.S.’s recent history of mass immigration is comparable to the period from 1850 to 1910. These immigrant populations have tended to concentrate in coastal “blue areas.” Given the reapportionment mechanisms of the U.S. Constitution, they are a cause of increased political representation for these states.

Thus, the U.S. faces a situation in which one of the two major political parties has an interest in undercounting the population while the other political party has an interest in an extensive count. Combined with the structural features of the U.S. census that lead to its politicization, these facets of the contemporary situation tend to politicize the count even further.

Immigration Worries in the Late Nineteenth Century

There is a clear parallel between this period and that at the turn of the last century when mass immigration created similar incentives for the parties. The years that run from 1890 to 1920 were decisive for much of the subsequent politics of the census in the twentieth century. Mass immigration from southern and eastern Europe, in addition to rising and potentially interracial rural radicalism, posed a profound threat to the WASP establishment that constituted the backbone of the Republican Party. The threat of “new immigrants” from southern and eastern Europe was so severe that in 1920 the Republican-controlled Congress refused to reapportion representation on the basis of the census (Emigh et al. 2016: 62). Under pressure from a powerful eugenics lobby organized as the Immigration Restriction League and connected to Congress through the Immigration Committee, the legislature passed a series of increasingly restrictive immigration laws culminating in the 1924 National Origins Act, which based immigration quotas on the 1890 census (Emigh et al. 2016: 62, 66). Many historians see the National Origins Act as a key moment in the consolidation of “whiteness” among European ethnic groups.

Results and Prospects

We are not the only persons to draw a parallel between contemporary census politics and those of the 1920s. In fact, the current Attorney General of the United States, Jefferson Sessions, has explicitly drawn such a connection. During a radio interview with Breitbart News in 2015, Sessions, stated,

Some people think we have always had these numbers [of immigrants], and it’s not so, it’s very unusual, it’s a radical change. When the numbers reached about this high in 1924, the president and congress changed the policy, and it slowed down immigration significantly, we then assimilated through the 1965 and created really the solid middle class of America, with assimilated immigrants, and it was good for America. We passed a law that went far beyond what anybody realized in 1965, and we’re [now] on a path to surge far past what the situation was in 1924. (Serwer 2017)

Sessions’s comments clearly imply that he sees the 1924 National Origins Act as a model for immigration policy. This well encapsulates the project of the Trump administration. It would like to return the country to a demographic profile reflecting the mid-twentieth century U.S. The census will be a key tool in achieving this.

However, the historical context of census politics in the contemporary period differs from that of the 1920s in two important respects. First, during the earlier period, input about the census was largely constrained to elite-based lobbying. The Immigration Restriction League was funded by prominent private foundations such as the Rockefeller and Kellogg Foundations, and supported by high-powered academics, such as Francis Walker; but since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, census lobbies with actual mass memberships have played a much more decisive role. We can, therefore, expect any attempt to use the census as a tool in a neo-eugenicist project of whitening the population to face far greater resistance now than similar projects in the 1920s.

The second difference concerns the legitimacy of eugenics as an ideology. In the 1920s, the academic and corporate elite strongly backed the notion of racial improvement, and scientific racism was a respectable intellectual position. Although genetic determinism is a hardy perennial on the border-line between the social sciences and biology (D. Reich 2018), and genetic testing as a way to establish identity seems to have a gained a strange popularity among the broader public, for now it seems unlikely that eugenic thinking will sweep elite opinion in a way analogous to the 1920s.

Conclusion

Controversy over the census is nothing new. Politicization is built into the central role that the census plays in determining political representation. Features of the contemporary political landscape, where the parties have sharply opposed interests in securing an accurate count, exacerbate the phenomenon. Indeed, the contemporary period of census politics closely resembles that of the period from 1890 to 1920, when the census was used to implement exclusionist immigration policies, in important ways; members of the Trump administration are aware of the parallel, and are deliberately seeking to recreate these policies. However, the transition from the politics of elite lobbying that marked the censuses of the earlier period, to the politics of mass lobbying and social movements that mark the censuses since 1965, combined with the fundamental loss of legitimacy of eugenic thinking, will constitute obstacles to any Trumpist attempt to re-play the census politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Dylan Riley is Professor of Sociology at University of California, Berkeley. His work uses comparative and historical methods to challenge a set of key conceptual oppositions in classical sociological theory: authoritarianism and democracy, revolution and counter-revolution, and state and society.

Rebecca Jean Emigh is Professor of Sociology at University of California, Los Angeles. Her research focuses on how cultural, economic, and demographic factors intersect to create long-term processes of social change.

Patricia Ahmed is Professor of Sociology at South Dakota State University. She specializes in structural adjustments and censuses.

References

American Community Survey. 2016. “Place of Birth for Foreign Born Population.” Accessible at: https://www.socialexplorer.com/tables/ACS2016_5yr/R11736787

Emigh, Rebecca Jean, Dylan Riley, and Patricia Ahmed. 2016. Changes in Censuses from Imperialist to Welfare States. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gary, Arthur E. 2017. Letter of 12 December 2017. Accessible at: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4500011/1-18-Cv-02921-Administrative-Record.pdf

Grieco, Elizabeth M., Edward Trevelyan, Luke Larsen, Yesenia D. Acosta, Christine Gambino, Patricia de la Cruz, Tom Gryn, and Nathan Walters. 2012. “The Size, Place of Birth, and Geographic Distribution of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States: 1960 to 2010.” Working paper. Accessible at: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/working-papers/2012/demo/POP-twps0096.pdf

Kobach, Kris. 2017. Electronic Mail Message of 14 July 2017. Accessible at: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4500011/1-18-Cv-02921-Administrative-Record.pdf

Jones, Malia. 2017. “The Changing Faces Of Wisconsin’s Foreign-Born Residents.” WisCONTEXT, 31 May. Available at: https://www.wiscontext.org/changing-faces-wisconsins-foreign-born-residents Graphics by Caitlin McKown and Casey Kalman.

Reich, David. 2018. “How Genetics is Changing Our Understanding of ‘Race’.” The New York Times, online edition, 23 March. Accessible at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/23/opinion/sunday/genetics-race.html

Reich, Robert. 2018. “The Unconstitutional Census Power Grab.” Robertreich.org, 6 June. Accessible at: http://robertreich.org

Serwer, Adam. 2017. Jeff Session’s Unqualified Praise for a 1924 Immigration Law. The Atlantic, online edition, 10 January. Accessible at: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/jeff-sessions-1924-immigration/512591/

Wines, Michael. 2018. “Lawsuit Says Citizenship Question on Census Targets Minorities for Political Gain.” New York Times, online edition, 31 May. Accessible at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/us/politics/2020-census-citizenship.html

The third wave disposes of the first wave – (Image: “Twin Peaks: the Return, Part Three” )

George Steinmetz

The very idea of an ASA section dedicated to “Comparative and Historical Sociology” may be puzzling to some sociologists. How do these two ideas, comparison and history, fit together, and how do they relate to sociology? It may seem to some like an unnecessary luxury to add this section to a discipline that already lacks a center and constantly generates new sub-specialties.

As American sociology retreats ever more resolutely into the present (to paraphrase Norbert Elias [1987]) and focuses ever more exclusively on the United States as its geospatial frame of reference, I want to pose some basic questions that I hope we can talk about at the mini-conference and the main conference in Philadelphia this August. Why should sociology be historical and comparative? What do comparison and history have to do with one another? Why is it important to have a separate section on comparative and historical sociology?

All sociology is historical and comparative

First, consider the problem of history in relation to sociology. On the one hand, sociology is always historical. Every analysis of the present becomes historical as soon as it is committed to thought, language, computer, paper. Every social object is historically constituted. To understand any social practice, phenomenon, object, or event we need to reconstruct its genesis and genealogy and its evolution and change over time. Even the most resolutely static and presentist approaches are unable to hide the historicity and mutability of their analytic objects. On the other hand, insisting on the historicity of sociology is a way of making sociology more critical, more self-reflexive, and more fruitful. Historical sociology is a way of “dispelling the illusions of false necessity” (Calhoun 2003: 384), and is in this respect an essential part of any critical social science. The history of sociology demonstrates how easily sociologists forget that (1) all social objects are shaped by their genesis and historical constitution and are in this respect arbitrary or contingent rather than universal and immutable; (2) historical processes do not take the form of uniform laws but are shaped by unique, contingent conjunctures of causes; (3) social objects are typically grasped using inherited and spontaneous categories that need to be reconstituted, criticized, and consciously reformulated; and (4) engaging in undistorted, dialogic, open-ended discussions with historians can actually make sociology more interesting and generate new concepts and theories (Steinmetz 2017).

Second, consider the problem of comparison. This is in some respects an even broader category than historicity. Thinking itself is impossible without comparison. Language itself is constituted through differences (among phonemes, letters, words, etc.). Such differences can only be perceived through comparative judgements. Categories, including scientific concepts, are constructed in language and are therefore grounded in comparisons. Mental comparisons are essential to all forms of scientific method, including retroduction, which is an essential part of all social science (Pawson and Tilley 1997). Comparative methods in social science cannot be replaced by transnational approaches, even if the latter serve as an essential complement to comparison (Steinmetz 2014).

The raisons d’être of the comparative and historical sociology section

If the arguments in the preceding section are correct, “historical and comparative” approaches would seem to encompass the entirety of sociology. One might therefore ask again: what need is there for a distinct ASA section on historical and comparative sociology?

There are still good reasons for maintaining a specific section. One is that the section’s work serves to continuously and emphatically remind the rest of the discipline that sociology is inherently historical and comparative. We need to maintain the CHS section alongside transnational and global sociology, since there were (and still are) societies without states (or “nation states”) and social processes that are neither transnational nor global. Sociology should not content itself with the small sliver of history since the rise of the modern state or since the rise of “globalization.”

Making these sorts of arguments as a “collective intellectual” (Bourdieu), that is, as an entire section of the discipline, within the disciplinary field, is more effective than arguing individually or as “specific intellectuals” (Foucault).

For evidence of the pervasive presentism of U.S. sociology, one only needs to look at recent issues of American Journal of Sociology (AJS) and American Sociological Review(ASR). Titles of articles about the present – the vast majority of them — usually do not indicate any era, period, or time frame, and are written in the sociological present tense.[1] This convention conveys an image of the social world as being governed by unchanging universal laws and logics of necessity, undercutting policymakers’ good intentions about “changing the world.” The message is that the present is the same as the past, or that the past is simply not interesting, and that social objects are eternal and do not need to be historically reconstructed or contextualized in order to be explained and transformed.

Turning to comparison we should consider the pervasiveness of the syndrome of Methodological Homelandism. This is not unrelated to a different syndrome in Anthropology that Trouillot (1991) called its “Savage Slot”—the idea that Anthropology involves the study of the “primitive” Other. Sociology, it follows, involves the study of the “Self.” This ontologically meaningless (but politically odious) scientific division of labor was rejected by social scientists from the colonized and colonizing countries during the middle decades of the 20^th century (e.g., Mercier 1951; Elias 1963). In the newly-created African and North African universities, “anthropology was demoted to a subdiscipline of sociology” or banned outright (Colonna 1972). But this disciplinary division of labor was never attacked with much vigor in the U.S. and it has returned with a vengeance almost everywhere since the 1970s.

The equation of sociology with the study of one’s own society undercuts efforts to dissolve the idea that the nation state is the default frame or unit of sociological analysis (Martins 1974; Bogusz 2018). For evidence of the robustness of methodological nationalism we can again peruse the titles of AJS and ASR articles.[2]Articles about the US usually do not contain any indication of location or place in their titles, while the titles of articles about other parts of the world usually name those places. This practice communicates two possible messages. The first is sometimes made explicit, as in modernization theory (Knöbl 2001): the United States serves as a model for rest of the world. The second reading is that the rest of world simply doesn’t matter much.[3] We should not assume that the U.S. is unique in this regard. Even in India, Morocco, and other countries that passed through a phase of European colonialism, sociology tends to be defined as the study of the modern, national Self, Anthropology as the study of the more “primitive” Other.[4] A section like ours can serve a bulwark against such rigorous presentism and self-centered parochialism.

Historical sociology and the History of sociology

The history of sociology is closely tied to historical sociology, as early American sociologists seemed to recognize.[5] How does the history of sociology serve historical sociology?

First, as part of the self-objectifying approach to scientific reflexivity (Bourdieu). We may wish to understand where our own scientific categories and concepts come from and the origins of the extant division of social scientific labor in order to do better research. This requires a historical sociology of our own science.

Second, the history of sociology is important even if our main focus is something other than social science. Modern social science shapes social, political, and economic events and processes. If we are interested in government policy, we can analyze the intentional production and deployment of expert social-scientific knowledge. Examples include cameralistics, counter-insurgency research, modernization theory, behavioral economics, much immigration research, much social policy research, and most of the field of law. Many other policies and practices are influenced unintentionally by social science. In other instances, policies and practices are shaped indirectly. The world’s first welfare state in Imperial Germany was profoundly shaped by proto-sociological discourses on society and the social question (Steinmetz 1993). The basic parameters of modern colonial policies (especially “native policy”) cannot be understood without reconstructing precolonial amateur and professional ethnography, Orientalism, and racial theory (Said 1978; Steinmetz 2002, 2004; Goh 2007).

Third, the history of sociology bolsters arguments for the value of historicist epistemologies in sociology more generally. Many sociologists regret the splintering of their discipline into myriad specializations. From this perspective, it is worth examining in detail one period in which sociology was flourishing, self-confident, and taken seriously by the rest of the intellectual field, namely, Weimar Germany. I discussed this first “wave” of genuinely historical sociology in my first memo as Chair of the CHS section (in Trajectories Vol. 29, no. 1, Fall 2017). Nowadays in Germany, where historical sociology was invented, there is not even a permanent committee on historical sociology in the national sociological society, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie. I am not suggesting that American historical sociologists will suffer the same fate as their Weimar counterparts, but simply that they should remain wary of the various forces that pounced on historical sociology once the opportunity arose in 1933.

Conclusion

What better venue could there be to discuss these and other urgent topics than the Comparative and Historical Sociology Section’s mini-conference on “The Crisis of History and the History of Crisis,” to be held August 10^th in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania?[6] I urge all section members and anyone else who believes that historical and comparative approaches need to remain alive and well in American sociology to attend the mini-conference and the special sessions sponsored by the section during the regular conference in the days that follow.

George Steinmetz is the Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and the Department of Germanic Language and Literatures at the University of Michigan and a Corresponding Member of the Centre de Sociologie Européenne, Paris. He is a social theorist and a historical sociologist of states, empires, and social science.

Notes

[1] The sociological present tense focuses ontologically on the moment of research and writing. Works written in sociological present tense either ignore everything anterior to the moment of analysis or relegate the past to “background” conditions. This epistemological stance became part of the positivist methodological unconscious in postwar US positivist sociology. It was so well codified that even a sociological study that drew on historical data could be divided into a present—the moment of the “dependent variable”—and historical “background.”

[2] The most recent volume of AJS, at the time of writing (Volume 123) demonstrates this pattern. In issue no. 6 (May 2018) there are six articles, only one of which lists a time and place in the title (“Gilded Age America”). None of the articles in issue 4 list place names, and all of them are set in the United States (although one lists the Postbellum South in the title—places and spaces that are not the present day US both break the spell of positivist universalism). In issues 2 and 5 the only article titles that include a place name are set in countries other than the US (the sole exception is an article on Arizona). Krippner’s article in issue 1 of volume 123 is the great exception to the rule, as it names both a time (the late twentieth century) and place—“America” (Krippner 2017). A non-systematic scan of the ASR, or of the AJS in earlier years reveals the same pattern: titles only situate their subject in time and space when it is not located the US or does not take place in the immediate present.

[3] See interviews with department chairs of sociology (and political science and economics) departments in major US research universities in Stevens, Miller-Idriss, and Shami (2018).

[4] Interview by the author with anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi about sociology and anthropology in post-Independence Morocco, on May 10, 2018, in Princeton, NJ. For India see Bandeh-Ahmadi 2018; Uberoi, Sundar, and Deshpane (2007).

[5] In 1926 a “Division on Historical Sociology” appeared on the annual program of the American Sociological Society, with presentations on sociology in England, Germany, Russia, and Argentina (American Sociological Society 1927: 26-71).

[6] See http://chs.asa-comparative-historical.org/the-crisis-of-history-and-the-history-of-crisis.

References

American Sociological Society. 1927.  Papers and Proceedings. Twenty-First Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Society Held at St. Louis December 28-31, 1926. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bandeh-Ahmadi, Nurolhoda. 2018. “Anthropological Generations: A Post-Independence Ethnography of Academic Anthropology and Sociology in India.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan.

Bogusz, Tanja. 2018. “Ende des methodologischen Nationalismus?” Soziologie. Forum der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie, 47(2): 143-156.

Calhoun, Craig. 2003. “Why Historical Sociology?” Pp. 383-393 in Gerard Delanty and Engin F. Isin, eds., Handbook of Historical Sociology. London: SAGE.

Colonna, Fanny. 1972. “Une fonction coloniale de l’ethnographie dans l’Algérie de l’entre deux-guerres: la programmation des élites moyennes.” Libyca 20: 259-267.

Elias, Norbert. 1963. “Sociology and Anthropology. A Paper Read at the Second Annual Conference of the Ghana Sociological Association, April 1963.” Elias papers, Marbach, File MISC – E XI = SOC-Anthrop.

Elias, Norbert. 1987. “The Retreat of Sociologists into the Present.” Theory, Culture and Society 4(2-3): 223–249.

Goh, Daniel P.S. 2007. “States of Ethnography: Colonialism, Resistance and Cultural Transcription in Malaya and the Philippines, 1890s-1930s.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49(1): 109-142.

Knöbl, Wolfgang. 2001. Spielräume der Modernisierung: das Ende der Eindeutigkeit. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft.

Krippner, Greta R. 2017. “Democracy of Credit: Ownership and the Politics of Credit Access in Late Twentieth-Century America.” American Journal of Sociology 123:1 (July): 1-47.

Martins, Herminio. 1974. “Time and Theory in Sociology.” Pp. 246-294 in John Rex (ed.), Approaches to Sociology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Mercier, Paul. 1951. Les tâches de la sociologie. Dakar: IFAN.

Pawson, Ray and Nick Tilley. 1997. Realistic Evaluation.  London: Sage.

Stevens, Mitchell L., Cynthia Miller-Idriss, and Seteney Khalid Shami. 2018. Seeing the World: How US Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Steinmetz, George. 1993. Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Steinmetz, George. 2002. “Precoloniality and Colonial Subjectivity: Ethnographic Discourse and Native Policy in German Overseas Imperialism, 1780s-1914.” Political Power and Social Theory, volume 15, pp. 135-228.

Steinmetz, George. 2004. “The Uncontrollable Afterlives of Ethnography: Lessons from German ‘Salvage Colonialism’ for a New Age of Empire.” Ethnography, Vol. 5, number 3, pp. 251-288

Steinmetz, George. 2014. “Comparative History and its Critics: A Genealogy and a Possible Solution.” Pp. 412-436 in Prasenjit Duara, Viren Murthy and Andrew Sartori, eds., A Companion to Global Historical Thought. Blackwell.

Steinmetz, George. 2017. “Field Theory and Interdisciplinary: Relations between History and Sociology in Germany and France during the Twentieth Century.” Comparative Studies in Society and History vol. 59, no. 2 (April 2017), pp. 477-514

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1991. “Anthropology and the Savage Slot. The Poetics and Politics of Otherness.” Pp. 18-44 in Richard Fox, ed., Recapturing Anthropology. Working in the Present Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

Uberoi, Patricia, Nandini Sundar, and Satish Deshpane, eds. 2007. Anthropology in the east. Founders of Indian sociology and anthropology. New Delhi: Permanent Black.

 

(Photo: Mill Children, South Carolina by Lewis Hine available at the Met Museum)

Tad Skotnicki

“The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails,” Marx writes, “appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’” ([1867] 1977: 125). With these words he began Das Kapital, his wide-ranging, never completed analysis of capitalism. And whether inspired by Marx’s analysis or not, many have inquired into the meanings of this “immense collection of commodities.” These are sometimes inquiries into the character of consumption, a phenomenon that Adam Smith, nearly a century earlier, had deemed the “sole end and purpose of all production” ([1776] 2003: 839). We might ask what people do with all of these commodities. Or we might ask how we come to desire these commodities and about the consequences of their proliferation for our selves, societies, and environments. Further, we might ask about the historical emergence of this proliferation of goods. In so doing, we try to figure out or decipher their appearance in our lives. Of course Marx, we are told, supplies us with few resources for understanding what consumption in capitalist societies means. The consumer is, apparently, the mechanical appendage to a process that begins in the guts of capitalist production. To cast consumption as a mere appearance or epiphenomenon of capitalist production expresses a “productivist bias”. This productivist bias refers to interpretations that treat consumption as a consequence of production and to a purported disregard for the lives, thoughts, and experiences of people as purchasers and users. Thus, critics encourage us to look beyond Marx to make sense of these goods – bought and used – that populate our worlds.

For instance, we are encouraged to focus on the social dynamics and cultural contexts of consumption, which can help us understand how these goods matter to us. At its simplest, consumption matters as a form of communication. We can cement our relationships with friends and loved ones through acts of shopping. In provisioning for another or giving gifts, we can enact our concern for others and establish debts that bind us to one another. Or we can distinguish ourselves within and across social strata via our tastes. Thus, consumption matters not merely as communication, but as a competitive strategy. In feudal Europe and throughout colonial empires, sumptuary laws attempted to regulate the ability of lower class, caste, and status people to dress in the manner of their social superiors. Such laws attest to the longstanding power of consumption both to communicate with as well as distinguish from others in social life. But consumption matters further as a means of establishing and elaborating a sense of self – as a member of social groups and as an individual. This has been noted, repeatedly and with varying degrees of disdain, since the late nineteenth century. We consume as a means of establishing and embodying who we are.

Each of these interpretations of consumption – communication, distinction, and self-identification – have been elaborated in critical and laudatory directions. Moreover, communication, distinction, and self-identification suggest that the meaning of consumption – and those immense collections of commodities – arise with reference to its social and cultural contexts. Thus, the meanings of consumption, it follows, will vary in essential ways with the specific social and cultural contexts within which consumption occurs. There appears to be a yawning chasm between Marx’s “reduction” of consumption to production and the myriad meanings of consumption.

But consider, now, three brief examples. In 1792, with the abolitionist movement beginning to blossom, an anonymous pamphlet began with a verse from the Apostle James, “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” It continued, “Now, if many thousands are made fatherless and widows, by the grievous oppression of our fellow creatures in the sugar colonies, and by the trade to Africa for negroes, to supply the place of those who are worn out, or destroyed by excessive labour and cruel treatment, is not the produce of such labour polluted with blood?” (1792: 2). The short pamphlet insisted that the rum and sugar produced by slaves were polluted, and that it was the duty of all Christians and those who sought the abolition of the slave trade to refrain from the “purchase and use” of slave-made goods (1792: 4). The author viewed the meaning of slave-made rum and sugar in terms of the goods’ origins and consumers’ responsibility for them: “it must be admitted that the consumers are supporters of those iniquitous proceedings; and without them the slave-trade, with its lamentable consequences, must soon cease” (1792: 4). As sugar and rum accumulated in the colonial metropole, some abolitionists understood their appearance, in part, as indelibly bound up with the labor behind those goods.

Just over a century later, in 1899, reform-minded women ushered in the “Progressive Era” by investigating working conditions in Chicago, New York, Massachusetts, and several other eastern U.S. states. They banded together to establish the National Consumers’ League (NCL). In their constitution, the NCL observed “that the responsibility for some of the worst evils from which producers suffer rests with the consumers who seek the cheapest markets regardless how cheapness is brought about” (1899: article II, sec. 2). On this basis, they concluded it is “the duty of consumers to find out under what conditions the articles they purchase are produced and distributed, and insist that these conditions shall be wholesome and consistent with a respectable existence on the part of the workers” (1899: article II, sec. 3). Once again, this group of reformers understood the meaning of these goods in terms of the labor that produced them. Furthermore, they also identified consumers as responsible for the inequities in the production process. The NCL went so far as to cast employers as “virtually helpless” to promote just labor conditions owing to the “stress of competition” (1899: article II). To organize people as ethical or thoughtful consumers, they thought, would spur changes in the production process. While differing in tone and style from the abolitionists, the members of the NCL were prepared to see the significance of consumer goods in relation to the workers and character of the labor that produced them.

Finally, over two centuries removed from the abolitionists, in 2015, a UK-based non-profit organization called Fashion Revolution staged a “social experiment.” In the heart of Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, they placed a vending machine that promised t-shirts for the bargain price of two Euros. When people inserted their money for the shirt, they were shown a video that traced the origins of this deal. “Meet Manisha,” the screen read, “one of millions making our cheap clothing for as little as 13 cents an hour each day for 16 hours.” The text was superimposed onto images of dignified, predominantly female workers in dingy factories. At the close of the video, people were given the option of buying the t-shirt or donating to the organization. Fashion Revolution promotes greater transparency in the fashion industry and spearheads social media savvy campaigns to ask brands #whomademyclothes. These campaigns draw attention to the laborers behind the goods and ask consumers to pressure manufacturers to reveal these working conditions. Like their abolitionist and NCL predecessors, Fashion Revolution invoke the labor behind commodities to evoke a sense of responsibility in consumers. The meaning of the cheap t-shirt and other products of fast fashion arises in relation to the labor that goes into it.

In these examples, spread out over three centuries, I submit that we may find crucial resources to understand the meanings of consumption in capitalist societies: consumers wonder, again and again, about their relationship to the workers who make the goods that they buy and use. There are obvious and relevant substantive differences in the manner through which abolitionists, progressive-era consumer activists, and contemporary consumer activists articulate the connection between consumers, commodities, and workers. There are also historically-specific strategies and practices for promoting this interpretation of consumption. Furthermore, the social and cultural contexts of consumption will surely inform who engages in and promotes this labor-oriented interpretation. No person needs to consider goods in terms of their origins, any more than a person needs to treat consumption as communication, distinction, or self-identification. What intrigues, though, is the almost uncanny repetition of this meaning across distinct periods in the development of capitalist societies (Sewell 2008). Confronted with growing collections of commodities, consumers have interpreted their appearance in terms of the labor that produced them. To make sense of this repetition, we can begin, following Marx, with the appearance of wealth in the accumulation of goods and seek the relations as well as principles that these goods embody. Rather than skip over the matter of production in relation to consumption, we must engage the relationship directly. This, after all, is what some consumers have been doing for centuries.

Tad Skotnicki is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He researches the history of humanitarian consumerism and capitalism, social movements, and social thought.

References

1792. “Considerations addressed to professors of Christianity of every denomination, on the impropriety of consuming West-India sugar and rum, as produced by the oppressive labour of slaves.” London: Ritchie and Sammels.

National Consumers’ League. 1899. “Constitution.” New York.

Marx, Karl. [1867] 1977. Capital: a critique of political economy, vol. I. Translated by B. Fowkes. New York: Vintage Books.

Sewell, William H. Jr. 2008. “The Temporalities of Capitalism”, Socio-Economic Review 6(3): 517-537.

Smith, Adam. [1776] 2003. The Wealth of Nations. New York: Bantham.